Katie found herself overwhelmed with news of her husband’s affair. Just hearing about the affair triggered many reactions inside of her. She found herself feeling many emotions that she did not want to feel.
Being a survivor, when the emotions flooded her, she considered her options. Katie often found dealing with emotions is messy. Rather than deal with the emotions, she chose to stuff them. She had to continue with daily life. Emotions take time and she did not want to take the time to face her emotions.
Her plan to stuff emotions worked for a little while. It seemed the harder she tried stuffing her emotions, the more they kept showing up at inconvenient times and inconvenient places. First she found herself crying the bathroom more times than she wanted. She managed covering that up with stories that excused her absences. She realized that she could not turn off all the emotions and that she was not in control.
The emotions often came on like a flood. All it took was a few words or a song and WHAM! they hit her like a flood, literally. Katie then decided on avoiding those words and songs. She tried shutting down any emotional triggers. She even tried imagining rewiring the keyboard of her mind. If you asked her about it, she would have told you “Don’t laugh! The rewiring keeps my mind busy and helps me cope”.
She also tried keeping herself busy in other ways. There was a nagging empty feeling that followed her around like a shadow. The only way she found to numb herself from those feelings was to either drink or eat. Drinking scared her since it made her feel like she was loosing control even more. There was enough stuff out of control without a drinking problem on top of everything else going on.
Soon, Katie discovered another truth about stuffing emotions. The latest discovery was that when you stuff emotions, they start coming out sideways. She found herself gaining weight. At first, she dismissed it as water weight, then she blamed it on stress. Although she blamed her weight gain on stress, she knew deep down that her emotions were a big part of it.
Are you running from your emotions like Katie? The answer is not in running from them, but instead, running towards them. Your emotions are telling you something that you need to hear. Facing them is not fun, but it is necessary. Facing your emotions often means you have to deal with unfinished business and issues from your past. You have to change how you cope with things if you have been making unhealthy choices. Running away, stuffing, denying, drinking and acting out each fall into the category of ‘unhealthy choices’.
Katie struggled with the whole idea that she was having to deal with all these unpleasant emotions inside her and her ways of coping with them when it as her husband who had the affair. She did not consider the whole thing ‘fair’. Fortunately, Katie wanted to get healthy. Instead of getting caught up in quibbling about things not being fair, she decided to instead do what is healthy, starting with facing her emotions.
You can learn from Katie or follow her example.
Best Regards,
Jeff Murrah
