We’ve all been there plenty of times: something happens, someone annoys us, we feel it inside of us – perhaps it’s a sense of injustice, perhaps it’s outrage at someone’s cheek, or maybe it’s emotional pain at someone’s choice of words –, we feel it and we choose to do nothing. We don’t say anything, we quite literally “absorb the blow” and leave it at that, assuming it will go away if we ignore it. But is that ever true? Has it ever worked?
When someone hurts our feelings, intentionally or not, and we choose not to address it for whatever reason, two things happen:
- You did not stand up for your best interest.
This is the first thing your emotional self will register: you allowed someone to step over a boundary and you let them get away with it. You effectively abandoned yourself. This is one of the most damaging things you can do, because you have demonstrated (yet again) to your emotional self, that you can’t be trusted to act in your own best interests. This can eventually spiral into a full case of self-distrust: your emotions will begin to show up in new and intense ways because you have ignored the more ‘subtle’ messages that it was sending you. So, if we look at the physical body as an extension of our consciousness (which includes our subconscious and our emotions), you could imagine self-hate, internalised anger/frustration/rage, low self-worth/self-esteem, begin manifesting physically as intestinal problems, new or aggravated skin concerns, auto-immune conditions, and more. In essence, any condition that implies you’re eating yourself from the inside out, feel uncomfortable in your own skin, because those matters often begin on an emotional level before they manifest physically.
- Your relationships will suffer.
This may seem straightforward, but it can also be insidious: if you don’t communicate to the people in your life who have the ‘power’ to affect you, the resentment you build up can bleed into other relationships (this includes family, colleagues, partnerships, etc.).
You have to have the ability and/or freedom to discuss things that hurt you. You can’t expect to have successful relationships (of any kind) if you cannot communicate with the other person.
The communication channel must be open for you to grow together and understand each other better.
I know this can be difficult (or downright scary), but the truth is that most things you do for your self can feel that way at first. The important part is to be able to have that conversation. If you don’t know where to start, plan it out. Work out your emotions first, discover what your relationship to that emotion is, then bring it to the other party involved.
And do it when things are small, not when they’ve built up to the point that you have a huge ‘showdown’!
You’ll feel much better and your relationships will reflect the work you’ve put into this 😊