Someone upsets you and you swear at them: “Dammit!” You could call that self-expression. Or you say, “I’m a little angry.” You could call that self-expression too. Letting out what you feel, instead of pushing it down, is one of the ways you come to love yourself. And both sentences do let it out: they take something that was inside you and put it outside. So far they are the same. The difference is in what happens next, and that is the part to pay attention to.
“Dammit” is an attack, and it comes back
Swear at someone like that and they will not look kindly on you. Because you attacked. And so they may attack you back. The feeling did get out — that part worked — but what you get back is a fight.
So if your feelings come out like this, you end up in an odd position. You got out what was inside you, yet you feel no lighter, and the relationship is a notch worse than before you spoke. And because you were attacked back for letting it out, next time you either say it more harshly or keep your mouth shut altogether. Neither gets you anywhere.
I’m sad. I’m angry. That upset me.
The other kind of sentence looks like this. What you said made me sad. I’m angry. It feels like I’m being dismissed. That upset me. You have told the other person honestly what is going on inside you. And because you did not attack them, what came out was the real you: the sadness and anger you actually feel.
The difference is whether the sentence attacks the other person or reports your own experience. Saying You never care about anyone hands the listener an accusation to defend against. Saying When you left without answering, I felt dismissed and angry names what happened and what you felt. Both sentences come from anger, but only the second lets the other person understand what happened inside you without first having to fight off the accusation.
Some people have never once expressed a feeling of their own
A person who can say “I’m a little angry” has put a feeling into words before. But some people cannot get that sentence out at all. Look closely at these people and you find one thing: they have never once expressed a feeling of their own. Having never done it, not even once, they cannot suddenly do it now.
Why have they never done it? Because where a feeling should be, a rule has taken its place, and the rule always gets there first. Whenever anger or hurt rises up in them, or some strange or violent fantasy crosses their mind, the rule answers: “None of that matters. I have to be a good son. I have to be a good person. I must never think a thing like that. I must never have fantasies like that.” So every feeling is checked against the rule first, and whatever fails the check gets pushed down.
What does it mean when feelings pile up inside you?
Push a feeling down again and again and it does not disappear. It stays where it is, and each new insult, disappointment, or fear piles onto everything that was never said before. Eventually a small event carries the weight of years. That is what it means for feelings to pile up. They pile up like that because they were never given any love. You kept pushing them away in order to be good, and that is indifference: a feeling is right there inside you, and you will not admit it is there.
“Indifference” is a strong word, and here it may sound unfair. You did not push the feeling down because you did not care about yourself; you pushed it down because you wanted to turn out well. But whatever your reason, the feeling itself got no attention and no love. And that feeling is part of you. You set out to become a good person and ended up indifferent to yourself.
What stays pushed down turns cruel, malevolent, destructive
Pushed down again and again and again, the feeling starts to turn aggressive. And “aggressive” is the kind word for it. Once it has nowhere left to go, what is actually in there is cruel, malevolent, destructive. Thoughts like these start circling inside: “Just let someone cross me. Just wait until my moment comes.” It can go as far as wanting to blow up the whole world. All of that had been hiding inside people who spent years telling themselves, “I have to be a good person.”
Push down a great deal of what you feel, and it gets packed tighter and tighter until one day it can burst. And if none of it is ever put into words, then after a year, after two years, at some point it comes out in what you do rather than in what you say. Dismissing your own feelings like this, year after year, is what ends up making a person genuinely malevolent.
As a therapist, I have worked with people who carry this kind of cruelty inside them. Fortunately, they came for help, opened up, and have been working on it. I have described the extreme end of it here — the wish to blow up the whole world — because the pattern is easiest to see there. But it is not only them. Please don’t read this and think, well, not me. Everyone has some of this in them.
Behind a lot of anger is the feeling of being dismissed
When people are not loved, they turn aggressive. Look at people who get angry a great deal, people who turn to violence, and every one of them carries an enormous feeling of having been dismissed. Feeling dismissed is another way of saying, “Why won’t you love me?” And underneath that lies another question: Am I someone not worth loving? Go for years without giving any love to the part of you that is asking this, without ever looking at that hurt and admitting it is there, and it turns into the kind of anger and cruelty described above.
And when looking at what is inside you is frightening, you keep reaching outside for something to take your mind off it instead — a drink, drugs, one show after another. Keep looking away like that, and in the end you lose touch with the very thing you needed to love: your own heart.
Express it, but within limits
So as soon as you feel something starting to build up inside, put it into words, before it has to come out as an outburst or an action. Expressing your feelings is self-love, but it is not permission to do whatever you please. Say what happened, name what you felt, and do it without cornering or condemning the other person. That is what self-love looks like in a relationship.
Wives especially need to say these things honestly to their husbands, because many of them turn it into an attack instead. The honest version goes like this: I wanted to be loved by you, and you stayed away, and it made me very sad. That is the whole sentence. What often comes out instead is: “Are you even a man? Is that something a husband does?” And then, of course, the wife gets no love from her husband. That is a form of self-abuse: the words are aimed at him, but she is the one left without the love she wanted. Say you were sad, and you leave the way open for the other person to give you what you wanted. Corner them, and you close that way with your own hand.
So expressing your feelings is a way into loving yourself. What decides whether you are heard or attacked back is which sentence you choose. All those years you spent pushing your feelings down, you thought you were being good. You were being indifferent to yourself — and the first step in ending that indifference is to say it out loud: I’m sad. I’m angry. That upset me.
Related
- The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head
- The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
- As Long as I Hate Them, I Don’t Have to Be Sad
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board