Nothing happened this month. No crisis, no bad news, nothing you could point at. So why does every day feel so heavy?
Someone asks about a hard time you went through a while back, and you hear yourself say it’s fine. The strange part is that you mean it. When you actually think back on it, you feel almost nothing. Yet you can’t get moving. Coffee doesn’t help. A weekend of rest doesn’t bring your energy back. And none of this seems to have anything to do with what happened back then, which you barely think about anymore.
Forgetting what happened pushes down the feeling too
Something hard happens, and a feeling comes with it. The feeling hurts more than you can hold right then. So you try to forget the event itself. You steer your mind elsewhere every time it drifts back. The subject comes up and you change it, and you get good at changing it. Someone brings it up at dinner and you reach for the bread and ask about their kids. Time passes, the trick keeps working, and after a while the event hardly crosses your mind.
Forgetting does more than make the memory fade. It also pushes down the feeling you had at the time. Each time the subject comes up and you change it, busy yourself, or go numb, you also cut off the sadness, fear, or anger before you can really feel it. So the event gets harder to remember, but the feeling never gets to run its course. It is still there, and it goes on affecting your energy, your attention, and the way you react.
No feeling is a bad feeling
I don’t think any emotion is bad on its own. Sadness, joy, fear — each one is part of the energy that makes a person feel alive instead of merely awake.
Even the feelings you’d happily do without have a job. Fear and worry are your gut telling you: protect yourself. Some feelings have to be felt, or you’d walk straight into the thing that hurts you.
We sort them into good ones and bad ones anyway. That’s where the trouble starts. You end up with a list of feelings you are not allowed to have. Then, whenever one of them shows up, it becomes a problem you have to get rid of.
The prescription you write for yourself
The painful feelings really do hurt, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. So you do something about it. You wipe the event from your mind, or you clamp down hard on whatever starts rising inside. For a while it goes quiet again. You’re reaching for a little peace with the only tools in your hand.
Handling pain your own way like this is what I call a self-prescription. Nobody taught it to you. No doctor signed it, and no pharmacy filled it. You worked out the dose on your own: stay busy, laugh it off, keep the conversation moving, be the one who’s doing fine. It was the only medicine in the cabinet then. You took it the way anyone takes the only thing they have.
And it works. Not a little, either — in the moment you honestly do not hurt. So you take another dose when the subject comes up in a meeting. You take one more at the family gathering, when someone asks, as someone always does, how you’re holding up. The refill is automatic by now.
Why keeping a feeling down wears you out
The trouble comes later. A feeling you push down doesn’t leave, and keeping it down takes work, over and over: steering around certain memories, watching where conversations are heading, staying busy, and shutting down any reaction that starts to rise.
Over time, that work uses up the energy you need for ordinary life. You tire early, put off simple tasks, lose interest in things you used to enjoy, and cannot explain why. You may not feel sad at all. You may simply be awake and getting through the day without feeling fully alive.
Not knowing why is its own small misery. As far as you can tell, nothing is wrong, so there’s nothing to fix. But something is happening inside you, quietly.
Feelings don’t disappear. They come out somewhere else.
A feeling you refuse to feel doesn’t quietly go away. It changes shape and comes out somewhere else, usually in a moment that seems to have nothing to do with what caused it.
You snap at a coworker over a jammed printer. You go cold on a friend who did nothing at all. Your eyes sting at a commercial about a dog, in a room full of people, with no warning. Afterward you think: no idea where that came from. None of it is about the printer, the friend, or the dog.
The original feeling never went away. You didn’t let yourself feel it when it first came, so it comes out later, when something smaller and safer gives it an opening. The printer, the friend, or the commercial sets it off, but the size of your reaction comes from the older feeling, one you have never put a name to. So you end up going through the pain you tried to avoid anyway — only later, and worse.
Going back to the feeling you pushed down
The way through is exactly what the prescription was meant to stop you from doing: going back and feeling what you pushed down. Nothing in you wants to do that, and that reluctance is the prescription doing its job. You return to what you have been stepping around, and you let the feeling be there. It is the least comfortable thing this piece asks of you.
Letting the feeling be there means saying plainly what it was: “That hurt me.” “I was frightened.” “I was furious, and I never said a word about it.” No editing. No ranking it against what other people have survived. No hurrying to the part where you’re over it.
Be clear about what’s being asked, too. You don’t have to dig the whole thing up. You don’t have to replay the worst day at full volume. You only have to stop arguing with yourself about it. You’ve been building a case against yourself: you shouldn’t have felt that, it wasn’t that bad, other people had it worse. Drop the case.
As long as you hold a feeling down, you can’t deal with it. It becomes easier to handle once you stop spending energy denying that it exists. Naming it — “I was frightened,” “I was furious” — connects the feeling to what caused it. Once you can see what you felt and why, the feeling no longer hangs over you as a heaviness you can’t explain, or spills out at people and moments that had nothing to do with it. You can grieve what happened and let it go, instead of fighting yourself for reacting to it.
The prescription you wrote yourself today
You wrote yourself a prescription today. Everybody does. It might read like one of these: “Kept busy all day.” “Said I was fine and changed the subject.” “It came up and I laughed and asked about the weather.” “Left the TV on until it was late enough to fall asleep without thinking.” Small doses, taken on schedule, so routine that you barely notice them.
A pharmacist reads the label out before handing over the bottle. What’s in it. How much of it. What it does to you if you keep taking it. Nobody has ever done that for the prescription you give yourself every day.
So write down one line: what you gave yourself today, and nothing more. That one line is the whole label. You don’t have to change the prescription; so far, it has been the best way you knew to get by. Just read the line out loud.
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