<aside>
Suppressing or denying emotions doesn’t make them disappear—it drives them underground, where they continue to shape our nervous system, behavior, and health. Research in psychology, neuroscience, and somatic therapy confirms that emotional avoidance and numbing strategies lead to increased anxiety, stress-related illness, and long-term psychological harm. In contrast, allowing emotions to be felt and processed supports healing and resilience.
</aside>
In The Language of Emotions, Karla McLaren explains how each emotion carries a message and purpose. When we ignore or suppress those messages, we disconnect from vital sources of inner guidance and emotional health.
McLaren, K. (2010). The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You. Sounds True.
In Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach explores how resisting emotional pain creates suffering. She offers mindfulness-based tools to gently turn toward emotions with compassion, leading to profound freedom and healing.
Brach, T. (2003). Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha. Bantam Books.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner’s research on ironic process theory shows that trying to suppress thoughts and emotions actually makes them more persistent—what we push away tends to rebound stronger.
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34–52. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.101.1.34
In The Wisdom of Your Body, Hillary McBride emphasizes that our emotions are not problems to be solved but experiences to be honored. Suppression, she notes, leads to disconnection and distress, while embodiment leads to healing.
McBride, H. (2021). The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living. Brazos Press.
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explains in The Body Keeps the Score that trauma often persists because the emotional energy has been suppressed and not allowed to complete its natural cycle. Unfelt emotions linger in the body as tension, dysregulation, and illness.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
Dr. Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts explores how addiction is often an attempt to numb emotional pain. He argues that emotional suppression fuels self-destructive behaviors unless we address the root feelings with compassion.
Maté, G. (2008). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. North Atlantic Books.
Somatic psychologist Peter Levine describes in Waking the Tiger how resisting natural emotional expression (like shaking, crying, or trembling) blocks the nervous system from completing its healing response, leading to stuck trauma and long-term distress.
Levine, P. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.
<aside>
When we avoid feeling our emotions, we don’t escape them—we store them. And what we store in the dark can quietly shape our lives until we’re ready to feel and free it.
</aside>