In my family I was the black sheep, the weird one and they didn’t understand me, I wondered why they thought like that. They said it was too sensitive. I was too vulnerable. He used to talk to himself, but somehow he knew that this behavior was not acceptable to others, so he would stop talking as soon as someone walked into the room. I developed the art of hiding my thoughts and feelings as a child. In my head there were thousands of people who would listen, but with my family I just hoped they would dismiss any expression of emotion as unimportant, annoying, or too much trouble.
In my relationships as an adult, I have realized how much I keep my emotions to myself. As a child and young man, it hurt so much that not sharing my feelings became a survival technique, which ended up hurting me more than anyone else. It was seeing how much I was drowning in my own pain that motivated me to change my behavior. Not speaking is as much a habit as it is a character tendency. Some of us may be born with a tendency to keep things close to our chests, but we also learn to keep things close to ourselves because someone else responded very poorly to our early experiences of expressing our feelings.
Can you remember a time when you expressed how hurt you were and someone just talked about themselves without saying a word about you? Do you remember a time when you told someone how you felt and they didn’t know what to do and just ignored what you said? You may remember a time when you shared your feelings with someone and they got angry or rejected you.
All the weird and uncomfortable experiences we have when we express our emotions can create crazy judgments in our minds about how, when and why we should tell someone how we feel.
Just this week, I had shared a feeling of sadness and received two different reactions from friends. One of my friends was saying sorry. And he was thinking, why are you sorry? You did nothing to create the sadness. But that’s what they came up with. Another friend said that he was teaching them to be okay with saying you feel sad instead of trying to hide it. We are programmed to feel that we need to have a reaction to another person’s emotion, instead of just feeling it without doing anything except listening to what the person is feeling. Almost no one listens to our emotions, so the first thing we want when we express our feelings is for someone to listen to us.
If you notice that your partner reacts as if they have to do or say something when you express your feelings, it is due to their conditioning around expressing emotions. If your partner can’t just be with you without feeling that they have to do something – then there is a part of them that is provoking and bringing their consciousness to. This part of them is the part that is uncomfortable with feelings or the part of them that feels unable to support others. They may not realize that’s what you’re doing. They can get angry. But every time your partner is upset, there is something that needs their attention about how they feel.
Your partner is more than capable of supporting you, but because they may have had a bad experience in the past with another person expressing emotions, they may not think they are good. Anytime your partner grew up unable to deal with strong emotions, they are likely to react negatively to listening to your emotions, withdrawing, deflecting, avoiding, suppressing, or lashing out.
Sometimes your partner misinterprets your emotions because of your tone of voice. We are raised through our culture to hear certain tones and expressions and associate them with different emotions. So a family in China will express anger or fear in their voice with a different tone than a family in the US Even within certain ethnic regions you will have a difference in expression of emotions. The way you can get angry in the Bronx will have subtle differences from someone in San Diego. It all depends on what shades you are used to growing up in your environment.
We all grow to express our emotions differently. And we all grow up with very different reactions to our expressed emotions.
The first thing to think about when your partner can’t hear your emotions is: What do you feel? Spend as much time as you can really sit down with this. In the moment, it can be hard to drop everything and just sit with yourself. But if that means not reacting with anger or saying hurtful words to your partner, then it’s much more productive to sit with what you’re feeling. I have even found myself watching a movie or playing music that will help me connect with the feeling.
I’m not the type of person who knows instantly what I feel. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Feelings are like a wash of color on a theater stage. One moment it might be a sunny day at the beach, the next moment it’s a dark corner of a nightclub. Emotions are like filters that color our lives and are not easily expressed in concepts or words. Emotions take time to emerge. So give yourself time to allow them to come to clarity and awareness. Sometimes a conversation with a friend will shed some light, and sometimes just doing nothing and sitting with yourself will be more effective.
Throughout your life, when have you noticed that you have gained more clarity around your emotions?
After you’ve connected with what you’re feeling, imagine what your partner is feeling. This is where you can activate your empathy buttons and understand that we are all the same. Either we want to be loved or to love. If you’re feeling an emotion and your partner isn’t ready to hear it, what might be making it hard for them to hear you? Try not to intellectualize here, listen to their most immediate first response. Your first response is the closest to your intuition and is not likely to come from days of pondering why your partner isn’t available to you. The less you judge your partner, the less anger and unresolved feelings you will create. It’s best to focus 90% of your energy on what you’re feeling and around 10% on conditions that might influence your partner’s ability to hear you.
To be heard, really heard, you first have to listen to yourself. So you get more clarity about your insecurities, fears, what you need and want and what the real emotion is. Your partner will be able to do much more for you when you have a greater sense of what you are feeling and are not projecting your fear onto them that they may not be available to you.
It’s all too easy to blame your partner for not being there for you because you haven’t taken the time to really listen to what’s going on inside of you. Over time, the more you listen to yourself, the more adept you will be at sensing when the time is right to share your feelings and when it is time to sit with your feelings and listen, really listen to yourself. The words to express your feelings will come from a more authentic, pure and beautiful space when you have truly felt what is inside of you.