In This Together: Building Resilience When Caregiving for Your Partner

11. The Hidden Costs of Suppressing Emotions When Caregiving

• Marika • Season 1 • Episode 11

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Caregiving often resembles riding an emotional roller coaster. But how are you managing those emotions?

You might not give much thought to your emotions. Simply pushing through the day with positivity and strength may seem like the right approach. You'd think so, but ignoring your emotions actually comes with a slew of hidden costs. Ugh!

In this episode, I recount my journey of uncovering the significance of emotions, especially after grappling with grief. I discovered this was an area I needed to pay more attention to.

I pinpoint common methods people use to suppress their emotions: avoiding, judging, staying busy, rushing to positivity, and numbing. I also delve into why we're averse to feeling our emotions—primarily because it's just not enjoyable!

But above all, I aim to illuminate why it's crucial for us to acknowledge our emotions and discuss the various consequences of suppressing them, including emotional overwhelm, increased fatigue, physical side effects, and decreased resilience.

Lastly, I provide practical strategies for processing emotions, such as regular check-ins, thought downloads, and acknowledging emotions without judgment.

Top things you will learn:
1. The importance of understanding and acknowledging emotions.
2. Common ways people suppress their emotions.
3. The reasons behind suppressing emotions and the associated costs.
4. Practical strategies for processing emotions, including thought downloads and acknowledgment without judgment.
5. The difference between acknowledging emotions and indulging in them, and the importance of taking responsibility for emotional experiences.

As a Resiliency Coach for people who are caregiving for their partner, I'm here to support YOU, the caregiver. Learn more about my work at www.coachmarika.com.

Announcer:

Welcome to In this Together, a podcast for partners turned caregivers, where you'll discover invaluable insights and actionable advice to navigate the ups and downs of caregiving with resilience and strength. Here's your guide, Marika Humphreys and strength here's your guide.

Marika Humphreys:

Marika Humphreys. Hey, caregivers and care partners out there, I want to check in. How are you feeling today? When was the last time that you really checked in to see what was going on on the inside? What I'm feeling throughout the day is actually something I now have constant awareness of, but I didn't always In fact, most of my life, I would say I didn't.

Marika Humphreys:

But before I learned about emotions and how they impact us, I think I was just like most people. I just didn't think about it much. You know, some days I was fine, other days I was grumpy or irritable or sad or whatever, anxious, and I just took those states at face value. But now I will tell you that I think totally differently. And first of all, I will just say that part of me is always observing myself and where my mind and emotions are, and that is a skill that I have 100% learned through coaching, through being a coach and through getting the certification. And now I also know that when we don't have an awareness of our emotions, there can be and especially when we don't know how to feel and kind of open up to and acknowledge our emotions there can be some hidden costs to that. And so that is what I'm going to talk about today on this episode. Emotions are a really important part of our lives, and yet I think that a lot of us just sort of take them at face value. We don't think about emotions as being something that we have any control over or any say over, and we often don't even think about how we handle them as being an important part of our ability to be resilient. Today, I want to go a little deeper on the topic of emotions and I'm going to talk about what I mean by suppressing emotions and the typical ways that we do this, and then I'm going to talk about how that has an impact on us, what the costs of doing that are, and then, finally, I'm going to share with you just an easy way to check in with your emotional self and how you can do this Really. I think everybody should do this on a very regular basis.

Marika Humphreys:

I have always been a person that is most comfortable in my head. I literally spent my early career as an analyst, and so how I thought and my ability to break down a problem and analyze it critically was my strength, and what I literally did in my job was my strength, and what I literally did in my job. So if you're listening, a lot of you may be similar to me in that you're comfortable in your head. You're comfortable kind of thinking through problems. When I was first introduced to thought work or sometimes people refer to it as mindset work I really really liked it and was drawn to it because it's about how you think and learning to take control of your own thoughts and manage your mind for your own benefit, and I still love that part of thought work. It's still the basis of how I coach. However, I have also come to realize that our emotional world is equally important as our mental world and the two are very much linked. But I think the appreciation I've had for my emotional side I really gained after my husband passed away and I was just confronted with an intensity of emotion that I don't think I'd ever experienced before and I had learned at that point. I had learned about emotions and how to even process them from my coaching, certification and practicing. But it really wasn't until I went through grief, until I felt grief and I actually joined another coaching program and a grief recovery group. Then I felt like I really took my own understanding of emotions and what it means to process them emotions and what it means to process them to the next level. So now, with my coaching clients, we really work on both skills. We work on learning how to manage your mind and understand your thoughts, as well as also learning how to understand and process your emotions, because I really firmly believe for caregivers, you need both. And there's other things you need as well. There's other things we work on, but those are really two fundamental skills that I think all caregivers can benefit from. I wanted to share my journey on this topic because it's been an evolution for me and it's one that I continue to evolve in, and I will endeavor to share that journey with you throughout this podcast. I'm sure there will be more aha moments and more things that I learn. I'm sure some of you can relate as well.

Marika Humphreys:

So let's start by talking about how we tend to hold back or suppress our emotions. Now, first of all, when I'm talking about suppressing emotions, I am not talking about the moments of time where we stop ourselves from crying or try to hold in whatever we're feeling because it feels inappropriate to let it out in that moment. Sometimes that can be like a work situation, or maybe with certain people we just don't feel comfortable showing our emotions. We all do that, and I think that makes sense a lot of times, and so doing that from time to time is generally not a problem. However, consistently stuffing our emotions down or suppressing them or avoiding them in some way can have consequences, and that's what this podcast is going to be about. Right, the hidden cost to doing that, to not ever giving yourself a place to notice what you're feeling, a place to notice what you're feeling sometimes, a place to allow these feelings, acknowledge them. That does have consequences, because emotions, they need to move through us. So when we stuff them down consistently and really don't have a way to process through them, there's some costs to that, and that's what we're going to get into.

Marika Humphreys:

So a couple of the common ways that we tend to suppress our emotions simply trying to avoid our emotions. If you've ever felt fear about the future or perhaps sadness over your partner's declining health, but you don't really want to feel those things, so you just sort of push it down or push it to the back of your mind, that is an example of avoiding or suppressing emotion, and I think a lot of us caregivers do that. It just feels too big or scary, so we just try to push it down and hope it'll go away. Judging ourselves Another example that is different from what I just talked about but also super common, and I'll give you an example. Perhaps you are feeling just really tired and worn out because you just want some time to yourself, but then immediately you feel guilty or selfish for even feeling that way. Or maybe you've been just irritable and sort of short-tempered with your partner and it's not really their fault. So we just immediately feel bad for our behavior. Judging ourself for how we're feeling is another way that we don't actually feel our emotions. We judge them and therefore don't actually bring them to light, right? So it's not exactly suppressing them, it's more like avoiding them through judgment A big one that a lot of people do and it seems super innocent.

Marika Humphreys:

It's staying busy, it seems harmless, I just keep myself busy, but it is actually a way to avoid what we're feeling. A lot of us use this. We like to be productive. I'm one of those people. I like to feel productive, but when we're doing it as a way to avoid an emotion, it's just something to be aware of really, and we do it. We stay busy because it's a way of occupying our mind so that we don't notice or pay attention to what we're feeling. Right, what's happening on the inside. As long as we stay busy, we don't have to feel it.

Marika Humphreys:

Another way that we tend to avoid or suppress emotions is by rushing to positivity or gratitude, and I'll explain what I mean by that. When we diminish the feeling we're having by glossing over it with a positive emotion or by saying you know, oh, I should be grateful that I at least have this Again, that seems like a good thing to do. However, when we skip over the part of acknowledging our emotion, it doesn't actually give us a chance to process it. And my favorite on the list numbing. This is my go-to, and it generally involves doing something to distract or numb ourselves from the emotion we're feeling. So often that comes in the form of drinking alcohol, eating food too much right or food that we just want for comfort, shopping, like just wanting to go buy something. Online shopping oh my gosh has never been easier. Sometimes it can be just scrolling social media.

Marika Humphreys:

Those are just a few of the common ways, but a lot of times it's just a way to sort of numb ourselves to the pain of the feeling. Like I said, this is my go-to, and one example that I really struggle with, or have at least struggled with in the past, was just the experience of loneliness After my husband died and really kind of coming to terms with being on my own. I often turned to food, because if I was eating something I wasn't thinking about being lonely. So that's just an example. Another one that's pretty common for people is coming home after a busy, long day of work and going for you know, beer in the fridge or three glasses of wine when you only really intended to have one. And again, we just do these things as a way to avoid the discomfort of the fatigue and maybe stress from a busy day, and it works. We numb ourselves to that feeling with a substance or with a distraction. Okay, so no judgment here. Remember we all do this, so there is no need to blame or judge ourselves. But the point of talking about this is to bring awareness to it, so that you can start noticing your own patterns. And again, if you want to change them, you have to be aware of them. I am very aware of my numbing patterns. Now Doesn't mean I still don't do them sometimes, but I'm much more onto myself when I do, and my recovery time is a little quicker because I have such awareness around it. Again, this is just about awareness, not judgment.

Marika Humphreys:

Why do we try to suppress our emotions or numb ourselves to them? I think the biggest reason is negative emotions don't feel good, they feel uncomfortable in our body, and so naturally we want to avoid that discomfort by any means possible. Often Our human brain wants to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and emotions can sometimes feel painful, so it makes sense that we would try to avoid them. I think another reason is that we're taught that there's something wrong with us if we don't feel good, and I think we kind of get that messaging early on that negative emotions mean there's a problem, and as parents it's really hard to see our children in emotional pain. It's instinctual to want to soothe it or somehow fix it. So we get this idea that emotions negative emotions or feeling bad is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Marika Humphreys:

But negative emotions and positive emotions are both just part of life. We can't have one without having the other. So you can't have joy without also being willing to feel sadness, and you can't have love without also being willing to feel vulnerability. You know emotions are feel vulnerability. You know emotions are often two sides of the same coin, and I think another big reason is that sometimes it can feel like we're being controlled by our emotions or they feel so overwhelming and we're sort of powerless against them. So in order to stay in control, we have to stuff our emotions down, and I think that's the logic we use, but unfortunately it doesn't work. In fact, I would argue that the more you stuff down your emotions, the less control you actually have. So those are some of the big reasons I think that we try to avoid or suppress or numb ourselves to the emotions. So let's now talk about the costs of doing this, because there are some hidden costs that you may not realize.

Marika Humphreys:

One of the biggest costs to not understanding and allowing our emotions is emotional overwhelm. I think most of us have experienced that becoming overwhelmed with our emotions and I see it a lot in caregiving and in grief. When you suppress your emotions or try to hold them back, especially feelings like anger or sadness or fear, they don't disappear and instead they often just build up, especially over time, and the more intense the emotion, the more likely you are going to become overwhelmed with it. When that happens, it's often at a very inconvenient time, like when you're at work or having a conversation with someone that you don't necessarily want to break down in front of, but we get overwhelmed and the emotion takes over. If you think of emotion as energy, and energy always needs a place to go, so when we don't give it an outlet right, it gets trapped and eventually the pressure builds and builds and then it just overflows. And that's when we break down or become overwhelmed with that feeling. And the challenge here is that the more this happens, the more we want to get rid of the feeling, because it's so scary and intense, so we almost become afraid of our emotions. I've seen that quite a bit in caregiving, especially around fear and sadness. A lot of times people feel like if they open up to this emotion, they will be swallowed by it, like it will never end, it will take over and they won't be able to come out. It feels very scary, but it's also a result of not opening up and allowing that emotion as it comes up. So it's kind of that buildup I'm talking about emotional overwhelm.

Marika Humphreys:

Another cost is increased fatigue when we suppress our emotions or try to control them or stuff them down. It requires a lot of energy, especially for big feelings like fear or sadness or loss, grief. It takes a lot of energy to try to not feel them and that will exhaust you. If you think of an emotion like a wave the bigger the emotion, the bigger the wave. Now imagine standing in an ocean trying to hold back a big wave with like a shield or something. It's going to take a lot of energy to hold back that wave and that is what drains your energy. So part of the reason a lot of caregivers are so fatigued is the fatigue from not allowing their emotions in a constructive way, and I am going to talk about what that looks like in a bit here. But holding back emotions will exhaust you. Another cost is physical side effects.

Marika Humphreys:

When we don't allow our emotions or we don't acknowledge them, it can often result in physical side effects. So think about aches and pains that you can't really identify a cause, for old injuries that might flare up from time to time and you're not really sure what triggers it. Stomach issues, insomnia these are all physical issues that often have an emotional component. I think most people have heard of stress, headaches or storing tension in your shoulders. That's another example too. Those are just more common examples, but all emotions can have physical outlets if they get trapped right or kind of a way to think of I think about it as being trapped. So if you have aches or pains that you can't really figure out, it could be related to some unfelt feelings that you might have going on.

Marika Humphreys:

I will say this is something I never knew until I experienced it myself. There was a period of time that was just incredibly stressful with my husband and I was experiencing chronic upper back pain. I would roll my back on one of those foam rollers, which actually really helped and felt great, but the pain would just come back and it wasn't debilitating. I could still work and live my life, but it was just really annoying and I couldn't figure it out either. I couldn't figure out what was causing this and it was actually much later that I learned about emotion having a physical outlet and I now know that that type of pain that I feel when I experience upper back, sort of strain or ache it's often pain when I'm under stress, specifically stress like kind of I feel stressed out in some way I will have that same physical sensation and it's just basically, it's my body telling me hey, you're stressed out and you need to pay attention, you need to take care of yourself in some way. So you might have something like that. Often, our body signals us that something's wrong, and that can be emotions that we don't even realize, that we're holding back.

Marika Humphreys:

The last two costs that I want to talk about are a little more subtle, but also really important, I think, and the first one is that I think the less aware we are of our inner life and what I mean by that is the emotions we're feeling, the thoughts we're having the more disconnected we are from our full selves. We are all so busy living our outer lives, engaging with others, going about our daily tasks, but emotions are just a reflection of what's happening on the inside, and so it is an important part of getting to know your full self, and when we don't pay attention to our emotions or we don't give them any time and attention, it does disconnect us from ourselves a little bit. We don't fully understand ourselves, we're not paying attention to what's going on. I personally love to think about emotions as messengers, and they're just here to tell us that there's something we need to pay attention to. And if you start thinking about all of your emotions in that way, it might even change how you view emotions. You know what if fear is just a messenger, that there's some thoughts you're having that need attention, or sadness, or anxiety?

Marika Humphreys:

I personally felt very disconnected from my emotional life until my husband's battle with cancer and ultimately his passing away, and again, the intensity of emotion I felt during those times really made me pay attention to emotions at a whole different level, because I felt like I had to. Honestly, it was like a survival technique, and since then I have really learned to pay attention to my emotions. It's still something I work on to this day and probably will for the rest of my life. And then the last cost that I want to bring up here is that not acknowledging and processing emotions actually makes us less resilient. We often think that pushing our emotions down and not feeling them is how to be strong, but holding our emotions back has all these hidden costs that I've just talked about. So instead, we become more resilient when we're able to open up to our emotions and acknowledge what we're feeling and then let that emotion pass through us. This is a skill, and it is easier to talk about than it is to do. But when you learn this skill, it allows you to be in charge of your emotions and your emotional life, instead of the other way around.

Marika Humphreys:

When we suppress our emotions, it actually prevents us from processing and addressing the underlying cause or the underlying issue causing it, so we're not able to move forward and learn from it, and then, over time, our emotional resilience becomes decreased, because it's harder to adapt to the challenges and learn from our experiences when we're continually just pushing those feelings aside, so we kind of stay stuck in that. So again, emotions are just signals, messengers. They help us navigate life and tell us that there's something maybe that needs our attention, and suppressing them can make us less resilient. So what do we do instead? I want to encourage you to take down the barrier. You need to connect and acknowledge your emotions, open up to them. Okay, like a wave, right, they will ebb and flow, but if you try to hold back that wave, it's going to knock you over eventually or exhaust you.

Marika Humphreys:

So one of the things I recommend is you just do regular check-ins with yourself, and one of the easiest ways to do that is with thought downloads, kind of a way of journaling, and you simply ask yourself a question what am I feeling and why? And then you write down everything that comes up. You're just downloading all the thoughts in your head, and the importance here is that you don't judge yourself for any of the feelings that come up Guilt, shame, selfishness they are all just emotions caused by our thinking and not reflections of who we are as humans. Right, because all humans feel those emotions at some point or another. And so when we seek to understand ourselves instead of judging ourselves, the more we learn and we can allow those emotions to move through us instead of getting stuck in them or stuck in judgment of ourselves for having them. And then I always like to encourage you to acknowledge your emotions to yourself.

Marika Humphreys:

Again, we often look to others to acknowledge our emotions, but this is best done as an inside job. You need to acknowledge your own emotions for yourself, and the way to do that is really simple I notice I'm feeling guilty, and it's okay to allow this emotion. Or I notice I'm feeling sadness and it's okay to allow this feeling. Or it's okay to feel this and what this does. When you tell yourself this, it just gives you a moment of attention and understanding, and often that's enough. I like to think of emotions sometimes as like a toddler tugging on your pant leg they just want a moment of your loving attention and then they're fine, right. So that's kind of how an emotion is Just a moment of your loving attention, and then often that will be enough.

Marika Humphreys:

Now, the bigger the emotion, the more you need to do this, and the more you've held an emotion back, the more you will need to do this at first. So if there's a buildup, you may have to do this frequently or you can give yourself a time limit. But those are just a couple easy ways to process emotions. There are lots of ways to process emotions. I also like EFT emotional freedom technique and that is something I teach my clients and you can Google that. There's lots of free resources to do that. But just writing them down and acknowledging your feelings to yourself is a really simple way to do this.

Marika Humphreys:

And then the last thing I want to talk about and then we'll close it out for this episode is the difference between acknowledging an emotion and indulging in it, because I think we might get easily confused, and it can be confusing to think why would I acknowledge a feeling like guilt or selfishness or pity Like those don't feel like good emotions to acknowledge. So what's the difference? Indulging in an emotion is when we let ourselves stay stuck in that unhappy state kind of, without trying to get out and without taking responsibility for it. Now, we have all done this because we're all humans, so don't judge yourself again, we all do this. But it's good to have awareness of it because it's a super disempowering place and we can sometimes get stuck there.

Marika Humphreys:

I don't think we always realize when we've been indulging ourselves in an emotion like self-pity or anger, we're essentially letting that emotion push us around and not taking any responsibility for it. Those are really the two keys. We kind of become a victim to that emotion and we don't take any responsibility for it. Now, that is very different than acknowledging an emotion and even giving yourself permission to feel it. And part of that difference, I think, comes in the awareness of what you're feeling. This is what I'm feeling. And then, by giving yourself permission, you validate that emotion but you also take responsibility for it.

Marika Humphreys:

We are the cause of all of our emotions because they just come from our thoughts. The cause of all of our emotions because they just come from our thoughts and again doesn't mean we don't want to feel certain things or we need to change how we think Sometimes. We just need to acknowledge that that's true and that's where we are right. It's kind of meeting yourself where you are. I hope that clears up any confusion there is around indulging an emotion versus acknowledging it.

Marika Humphreys:

All right, this has been quite a deep dive into emotions and I hope you've learned something or gotten a different perspective. This is such a big topic and it is one of my favorites because it's such a big area of growth and learning for me in my own journey, and I do still like to be very much in my head. I will always be kind of an analyst at heart, but I have just realized that emotions are important and the more I learn and understand my own emotions and the ones I tend to feel or tend to want to avoid, the more equipped I am in life just to handle all of life's challenges. So go out there, try some of these strategies acknowledging your emotions or writing, doing some regular check-ins and let me know what you think and I will see you next week. And let me know what you think and I will see you next week.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to this episode of In this Together. If you would like to learn more about Marika's work, go to www. coachmarika. com.