We form an emotional blockage when we don’t express our emotions in a healthy way. Could you be blocking your emotions to an extent that it makes you unhappy?
Healthy emotions, expressed freely and without barriers, are the key to a healthy body and mind. What this means is that when we feel an emotion, such as fear, grief, love, passion, anger, or hatred, we deal with it then and there and move on.
When we block emotions, we force them down into our subconscious and there they fester and prevent us from moving forward. This is where the concept of emotional blockage comes in.
Emotional blockages are those hidden barriers and can consist of any kind of emotion. They are the emotions that we suppress, repress, and are unable to express.
If we do not attend to these emotional blockages, we may never be able to fulfill our potential in life. As they are rooted in our subconscious, what are the signs we should be looking out for?
1. Constant fatigue and depression
It takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep emotions buried deep in your subconscious. You might not be aware you are doing it, but your body certainly does.
If you have no reason why you feel so tired all the time, think about when you first started experiencing fatigue or depression to see if it can point you in the direction of an emotional blockage.
2. Pretending an issue doesn’t matter (when it does)
This is a huge clue that your mind is sending you that you have an emotional blockage. Dismissing an issue that bothers you and pretending it doesn’t matter is a clear indication of an emotional block.
Look at the issue in hand and try and find out the correlation in an emotional sense.
3. You are a constant people-pleaser
It is in our nature to help others, but when it is detrimental to our own health, we have to ask why we keep doing it. Saying yes to everyone is also a big indicator of emotional blocks.
If you find you are constantly saying yes to requests, you need to take a step back and stop promising your services. Particularly, if you now start letting people down.
4. Your expectations are unrealistically high
Having good moral codes are all well and good, but if they are impossible for your friends or family to attain, you have to ask yourself why you set them so high. Are you trying to distance yourself on purpose? Did your parents set impossibly high goals and you always wanted to please them?
5. You can’t stop thinking about a past relationship
Getting over an ex and moving on is all part of life. But if you are fixated on a past lover or partner and constantly stalk them on social media, have to know what they are up to and cannot stop thinking about them, then you have a problem.
It might be that the relationship ended suddenly and without explanation and you feel you need closure.
6. You constantly procrastinate
Do you have several uncompleted projects? Do you need clear deadlines before you can finish a task? Is tomorrow always the best time to start something?
Take a look at the type of things you procrastinate about and see if there’s a theme. Are you always putting off the housework, the gardening, a type of work project? See what the common denominator is and work out a strategy where you can be more motivated.
7. You are eating and drinking more
In order to ignore an emotional blockage, some people try and dismiss it by eating or drinking more. This can lead to the lethargy we mentioned at the start, and also contribute to depression.
By substituting food or drink, we are pushing the emotions we don’t want to feel aside and repressing them even more. Exercising more is another sign that you’re trying to suppress emotional blockages.
Why it is important to release blocked emotions
Repressing emotions for a long time can lead to serious problems in not only your mental health but physically as well. The body suffers when we suppress our emotions and long-term suppression can lead to illnesses such as chronic fatigue, arthritis, even cancer.
They also affect us in a mental sense, as our lives cannot progress as we are stuck in the past, constantly reliving, on a subconscious level, traumas from our earlier lives.
These emotions have been deeply buried because at the time we felt they were too painful to deal with. But they have not gone away, and are affecting our lives now. When we bury emotions, we take all our energy to keep them suppressed, leaving very little for our everyday lives.
By releasing these emotional blockages, we can live our lives to the full in the present, free of any emotional ties that hold us back in the past.
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hi I was diagnosed with autism and lately I feel very blocked emotions I’m getting married soon and I would like to see ways to be more open emotions
Hi Akiva, I think you’d probably benefit from therapy. It’s not a question I feel qualified to answer I’m afraid.
Best wishes, Janey