When You Neglect Your Feelings
Many people disconnect their emotions as a defense mechanism. They choose not to feel to avoid suffering, which means they neglect their feelings. They “freeze” their hearts to protect the soul from failure, disappointment and wounds that do not heal. But this strategy only prevents them from participating in life in a healthy way.
Let us analyze the purpose of our emotions for a moment. Every time a feeling is activated in the brain, it causes a reaction throughout the body. Disgust, for example, creates distance between us and someone or something. Affection, hope and passion connect us with each other and foster a dynamic where we can be more energetic and creative.
But people are wrong when they think that negative emotions have no purpose or that their sole purpose is to make us unhappy. In reality, they allow us to adapt, learn and advance through life. Fear and anxiety are survival mechanisms, warning signs we need to know how to interpret to use them as adaptable responses that guarantee our survival.
Modern man experiences a lot of fear. Despite the lack of predators and immediate physical danger, the fear in this advanced world is much deeper and more complicated.
We are talking about the inner fears and personal demons that paralyze, suffocate and have multiple sources. When we are not able to handle them, we often choose to quietly disconnect emotionally, which leads us to neglect our emotions.
Let us for a moment imagine a fictional person named Mikael. This young man has an emotional past and has experienced many defeats. His level of disappointment is so deep that he has begun a new stage in life where he reduces his level of emotional involvement to a minimum. He does not want to suffer or be disappointed anymore.
He is in good harmony with the defense mechanisms he uses to achieve this goal. He has begun a complex distinction between his thoughts and his feelings, so much so that he now “intellectualizes” everything that happens. That way, he can justify his emotional isolation by saying things like “ I’m happy when I’m alone. I think that love is a waste of time and I think it would get in the way of my professional future ” .
Mikael has developed an emotional disconnect to ward off the disappointments of his past, in an attempt to prevent them from happening again. But here lies the most revealing point: in addition to putting up walls against healthy participation in life, he has also sunk into the same emotional emptiness that he wanted to protect himself against.
If love is suffering for Mikael, closing the door to love will often involve transferring his suffering to other parts of life. Emotional disconnection is an inexorable virus that slowly advances through and conquers several areas of life. People who experience it stop registering affection as something significant.
Soon he will be haunted by unexplained frustration, sharp bitterness, bad mood and emotional anxiety that sooner or later turns into physical pain, insomnia, illness and depression.
At the beginning of this article, we talked about the importance of negative emotions in our lives. We defined them as survival mechanisms, but as we see in the example above, many of us cast anchor to push these emotions into the abyss of indifference – of oblivion.
Choosing not to feel like not suffering is not logical, because no matter what we say to ourselves, humans are not rational beings or robots. We are a collection of amazing emotions that guide and give us life to form bonds with each other, learn after we have fallen, cry away our sorrows, laugh with happiness and keep our heads high after we have overcome and learned something from fear.
Neuroscientists remind us that when you disconnect and neglect your emotions in this way, the results of negative emotions will be neither useful nor healthy. Negative emotions such as fear and disgust have a purpose, but they can also give rise to what researchers refer to as “homeostatic impulses” – a flimsy word for comfort zone. People are designed to act, not remain isolated on their islands of discontent.
When you neglect your emotions and your inner balance is disturbed, it is good to gather energy, be creative and take courage to regain your inner homeostasis. In this way you will find emotional fulfillment – the perfect point where nothing hurts and nothing is lacking. You will be able to recognize yourself so that you can first reconnect with yourself and then establish contact with the people around you.
The brain is a fantastic social and emotional organ that needs connection to be in good shape, peace and balance. Therefore, people should take care of their minds and avoid neglecting their emotions.
