Suppression Leads To A loss Of Identity

Welcome to Expand Your Life Podcast. This is Jc Jones and you’re listening to Episode 24.

Welcome back. I hope you had a great week.

Today, we’re going to talk about suppression. What have you been suppressing in your life, and why have you been suppressing it? Those are some of the things that we’re going to talk about. And we’re going to also discuss what suppression can cause in your life. The results of suppressing.

Some of the things that we suppress almost on a daily basis are:

our emotions, our thoughts and feelings, the dreams we have, our opinions, our beliefs, our values.

Many of us suppress these things all day long. And one thing that you may not have thought about is how we suppress our problems.

I think suppressing our problems and our dissatisfaction with our lives is probably one of the most common things we suppress.

We don’t want to deal with the fact that our lives have become something that we not only dislike, but we either don’t have the energy, the knowledge, the time, the motivation or the self-esteem to change.

Instead of taking some action to change what we’re unhappy or dissatisfied about, we bury it deep down inside of us, so we don’t have to think about it. We don’t have to deal with it. We don’t have to face the fears that we have around it.

We slowly lose who we are in that process. We become depressed. We become anxious. All of these things stem from suppressing these things in our lives. Stuffing them. Not dealing with them.

And the longer that we do this, the more callused we get. Think of a sliver that you don’t take out of your finger Over time it becomes more and more calloused. And then when you do get around to trying to get that sliver out, you’ve got to go down deep into the skin. You’ve got to really dig it out. It’s more painful.

That’s kind of the same thing that happens with suppression. It gets to the point that is so calloused over, we don’t even see it. We don’t even recognize it.

All we feel is the depression, the sadness, the numbness, the dissatisfaction with our lives.

But this becomes comfortable. The callous, the numbness, that not thinking, is comfortable. Or so we think. We think it’s more comfortable than dealing with the problem. If you’re in this place, it’s very difficult to see a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s very difficult to see that there is a solution. It’s overwhelming. You don’t know where to start even.

Dealing with the things that you have suppressed for long periods of time takes time, takes patience, takes understanding, takes compassion. Compassion for yourself, compassion for where you’ve been, compassion for what you’re going through.

It’s real easy to become cynical about whether your life could ever be any different than what it is now. It’s very easy to become cynical that change is possible. That’s why the work we’ve been doing lately on identity is so important, and the work we did before that on self-awareness.

Self-awareness is the first step that helps you recognize where you’re stuck, where you’ve become stuck, what’s created that need to escape. That need to become someone other than who you really are in order to survive. Sometimes it seems to be easier to just numb out than to feel the pain.

But I want to encourage you to try to picture something new, something different, something better, something whole. Not pieces of you strewn about all over the place. Or numbed out. Or scarred over. All it takes is just taking one little baby step forward each day. Taking one step more. That’s it. That’s all it takes.

I could talk for probably another 20 minutes about all the reasons why we suppress our emotions and our thoughts and our feelings and our unhappiness with our lives. But everyone is different.

Everyone’s cause for suppression is different.  Whether it was what was expected from you as a child. To act a certain way. To express yourself a certain way. Clear up to a relationship. Where you didn’t feel like you had the ability to be yourself or speak up for yourself or to stand up for yourself.

Regardless of why you have suppressed these things in the past, first recognize that you have been suppressing them. Become aware that you’ve numbed out. Become aware of the things that you use in your life to continue to stay numb.

The more awareness you have around the things that you suppress, the more truth will come to you. The more you’ll see. The more aware you’ll become.

Start taking baby steps in gaining a clear picture of who you are and who you want to be. Start rediscovering who you used to be. Start noticing your thoughts. Start noticing your feelings. Write them down if you need to. See what kind of pattern there is in the thoughts that you have. See if there’s some kind of pattern in the way you’re feeling.

It’s not about changing all your negative thoughts into positive thoughts and changing your life from all of this suppression to coming out into the open and being free. (Although that does sound really good) But your mind is just going to think it’s all bullshit.

It has spent a lot of time protecting you from the pain. Protecting you from the discomfort of your life. So make sure you have some patience and compassion for yourself in this process.

You will start seeing progress. You will start feeling better.

If you have the chance to, and the ability to find yourself a good therapist, I would really highly recommend it. There’s nothing better than to be able to talk to someone that you can just spew all the crap out to and that can help you direct all of that towards something positive.

And talking about it opens up your mind much quicker to realizing some of the things that have been holding you back. So, yeah, if you have the opportunity and the ability to find yourself a good therapist, I highly recommend it.

If you don’t, there are some things that you can do. Writing, I think, is the biggest, easiest and healthiest way to go about this. Just start writing. It doesn’t matter what you write about. Once you start writing, your subconscious will take over and you’ll just start writing about all the crap that is stuffed in your mind.

Just carve out a few minutes every morning and just start writing. See what happens for you.

One thing about doing this on your own is just make sure that you don’t go any further than you comfortably can. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Take your time. Enjoy each thing that you discover about yourself. This is about self discovery. It’s not about making yourself feel worse or putting yourself down. It’s about getting unstuck one day at a time. One discovery at a time.

Celebrate your wins. Feel the control of your life coming back to you. You ultimately are the only one who should have the power over who you are and who you want to be. It’s time to stop giving that power and control away to others and to circumstances of your life.

So do something today to take back that control. Start your journey to becoming aware of when, how and why you suppress who you really are.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave me a message. If you go to expandyourlifepodcast.com. At the bottom of the Web page there you can leave a message. Or if you’d rather just send me an email you can send it to jc@expandyourlifepodcast.com, and I’ll be sure to get back to you.

Our topic next week will be on beliefs.

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Have a great week. Bye for now,