Emotional Pain Therapy

There are many different types of emotional pain and painful feelings. These range from feeling unworthy or disapproved of, to feeling unloved or uncared for, invalidated or rejected, embarrassed or humiliated, weak or helpless, or like ‘a loser’. 

While many people feel safe to express positive feelings, when they feel bad they don’t always want to admit or reveal how they feel. In fact, withdrawing, retreating, hiding, denial and isolation, are all common responses to deeply felt emotional pain. We do this for many reasons. Often, we don’t want to appear fragile or over-sensitive to others or admit our fragility to ourselves. People think that owning hurt or painful feelings makes them look weak or powerless to others. How we appear may also seem to be true to us; if we look weak and powerless, maybe we really are. 

Traditionally, men avoid revealing wounded feelings because they may feel less masculine or less capable. They may have been laughed at for revealing their feelings when they were children. Women may be worried that they will appear over-sensitive or needy or pathetic, or that they’ve ‘lost control’. There are cultural differences, with some cultures feeling that keeping a stiff-upper-lip is vital to social standing; other cultures believe it is fine to express strong positive feelings but that negative ones are shameful or wrong. 

It becomes more complicated when we take into account other people’s real or conjectured reactions. Since the people around us aren’t usually well-versed in accessing and expressing their feelings appropriately, we may assume that our own feelings are wrong, inappropriate, or abnormal. 

In addition, our friends, loved ones or colleagues may not like hearing about our feelings. They may react by feelling guilty, or criticised, or uncomfortable, or upset. They may not want to listen to us or not listen properly and instead try to ‘solve’ our feelings. Their reactions can then make us feel inadequate or bad in turn. With a partner this can lead on to a whole chain reaction of feelings and emotions back and forth. 

 

 

Suppressed emotions may become warped or twisted into other emotions such as blame or anger.