Why are we afraid to be afraid? Why do we feel ashamed of being depressed? Why do we feel guilty to be happy?…. And why do we keep controlling our emotions all the time?
Nowadays we need to make good impression all the time, we avoid losing our temper with others, and we end up burying our feelings quite deeply… And one day it comes back in an unexpected and surprisingly violent manner: we may overreact to a remark, drink to drown our sorrow, or binge to compensate for the huge feeling of emptiness that overwhelms us.
This is not a sustainable behavior… We need to find the right balance between expressing our feelings with confidence without hurting others, and take it upon ourselves.
Last year, I was consistently sad after coming back from holidays, and I didn’t want to recognize it as I kept telling myself “come on, you just came back from holidays, you should be happy…what else do you want”? But this thought was actually worsening how I felt. And each time I was prone to quite a lot of food binges during the week of my return… until I started to allow myself to feel “sad”. Indeed, I was coming back from holidays, but I was depressed to go back to work and to be back in a cold weather again.
And it was the same when somebody was being ironic and mean to me… I kept telling myself to behave like an adult and not to respond to them (whether it was at work or at home). But my anger became frustration, and it came back unconsciously through those night binges… A real nightmare… I couldn’t control anything anymore… I knew something was wrong when I began to empty my fridge regularly at 3am…
But I didn’t know where to start to solve this.
So I started to write down all my feelings during the day: happy, proud, sad, angry, impatient, jealous, scared…and I couldn’t believe everything I was going through in just a day! I had never noticed all these reactions before.
Allowing myself to feel all these feelings was a significant step to finding inner peace!
So if I could give you one piece of advice: don’t be afraid of your feelings and reactions…they are an essential part of who you are! And noticing them will give you signs, and will teach you how to listen to your body.
Those existential thoughts 