I’d Like To Howl Like The Wolves And Vent Everything I’ve Been Silent
Sometimes I would like to run like the wolves and face the highest mountain to let off steam and tell the Moon everything I’ve kept quiet, everything I’ve hidden and never said out loud. Maybe one day I can do it, when indecision, appearances and fear of “what others will say” are no more than an annoying fog.
We live in a culture that hides its emotions. So much so that when a child turns five, he starts to develop some repression mechanisms such as holding back tears, not saying certain words, lowering his face, thus fulfilling those orders that are so common in the world of adults: don’t cry, don’t speak, don’t demonstrate.
Repressing emotions from an early age has many consequences: a person can reach maturity by being a slave to silences and swallowed truths. Children often do not learn how to deal with this repressed emotion and they end up expressing themselves in other ways, such as aggression, anger or constant defiance.
Sigmund Freud said that the mind is like an iceberg. Only the seventh part of it emerges from the water, the rest is buried, submerged in an icy universe where everything we silence and repress for fear of the consequences of the environment in which we live is stored.
Let’s think about it?
We are our tightrope walkers
Surely this has happened to you several times, when an acquaintance asked you: “Are you okay? There is something wrong? and you quickly replied that everything was fine. With this phrase we use a strategy that everyone uses: false appearances. We believe that our problems are of no interest to anyone and our emotional pain should be kept private and hidden even from ourselves.
In fact, the real problem arises from our inability to vent to each other and say what’s really important to us. We don’t act that way because we believe that showing pain, discomfort, or worry is losing our personal power.
Somehow, when we reveal to our partner or our family that we are not happy because of a certain circumstance or concrete facts, we create a certain dependency; that is, we care more about how others react to this particular fact than about our own reaction.
When we place more value on the possible reaction of others, we choose to leave things as they are. We’ve been silent for so long that we can hold on a little longer; in our opinion, venting is not important. We see suffering as something normal, like someone taking a simple painkiller to cure a traumatic injury or offering water to a drowning man.
It is not convenient to act like that. Nobody is an eternal tightrope walker of their own, because sooner or later, that rope will snap and we’ll end up falling. Logically, the higher we are, the worse the fall and its consequences will be.
You’re all I’ve been keeping quiet about, but you deserve to be set free
This fact is curious and worth remembering: when something displeases, hurts or bothers us, like a word of contempt, the brain takes only 100 milliseconds to react emotionally. Later, in just 600 milliseconds, it will record this emotion in our cerebral cortex.
When we tell ourselves that “what I heard doesn’t affect me, I’m going to act like I don’t care,” it’s too late, because our brain mechanisms have already encoded this emotional impact. Trying to register the fact otherwise is like deceiving ourselves, it is a waste of energy and resources that we should invest in other strategies.
We were taught that showing our true emotions is a bad thing, that someone who tells the truth attacks and that it is always better to use a subtle lie rather than saying a bitter truth out loud. This is not correct: we can be assertive without being aggressive. Also, it would be good if we started to change that classic idea that emotion is the opposite of reason, because it’s not true.
When we allow ourselves to experience feelings fully, we are helping ourselves to understand our needs, illuminating many thought voids that we often fill with false ideas: “If I hold on a little longer, things can get better”, “He certainly wasn’t feeling what you said, it’s better to pretend that nothing happened”. Understanding, listening and feeling our emotions fully are vital needs that we need to practice every day.
We must learn the art of assertiveness through the healthy exercise of “I feel-I deserve it”. We need to howl at the Moon night and day and vent all that we are, what we need and what we’re worth. Enough of prioritizing other people’s emotions at all times. Prioritize your own emotions, the time has come to live without fear.
