Emotions — tricky little buggers indeed. Historically, our culture hasn’t made it easy for us to express them. We’ve all heard messages like “Don’t be so emotional”, “Suck it up”, “Big boys/girls don’t cry”, or my personal favorite “Fake it till you make it”. Yet, after years of personal struggle with my mental health, I discovered that repressing emotions is exactly what doesn’t lead to healing. Rather the opposite.

As the father of psychology Sigmund Freud put it: “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways”. From my experience, what he’s saying holds a profound truth in its essence: pushing our emotions away doesn’t erase them — it only amplifies their power to return even more intensely.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways — Sigmund Freud

So what is my reason for writing this article? It’s really to invite you to start having a new relationship with your emotions. Rather than dividing your emotions into “bad” and “good” ones, start seeing them as a source of information to be curious and acceptant about.

Looking at things in the eye of evolution 🧬

From an evolutionary standpoint, the limbic system — our emotional center — predates the rational neocortex. Emotions like fear and anger were crucial survival signals: fear kept us safe from perceived danger, while anger helped us defend our boundaries.

As humans formed larger social groups, other feelings like shame and guilt developed to ensure we’d adhere to community norms and avoid being expelled from the tribe. Even though modern life is drastically different, our biology hasn’t changed much — our emotional systems still react as if social rejection could be life-threatening.

Living in the 21st century, doing something socially “wrong” and being excluded from a tribe is not leading to a certain death to the same degree as it did 10 000 years ago, but our biology remains the same and so do our emotional reactions.

Acceptance through understanding 🧠

Learning to view all my emotions as functional — each one designed to help me — drastically changed how I live. I no longer divide emotions into “good” or “bad,” which means I stop trying to bury the ones that feel uncomfortable. Instead, I invite curiosity and compassion toward whatever arises.

This shift can be powerful: when we stop pushing away negative feelings and start observing them, we unlock insights into our behavior and needs. We all know anyway what happens when we try to suppress something, and how it’s not possible to try to not visualize the white elephant in the room.

I would say, not being true to ourselves and our inner landscape, is the root of not having optimal mental health, while being a contributing factor to the pandemic of mental health disorders that are on the rise.

Upgrading our software 💿

We need to collectively upgrade our mental software, while creating a new relationship to it. Being radically honest and true to ourselves and others while doing a daily inventory of what we actually feel is crucial in order to form a new directions for ourselves and our society. Being vulnerable as the professor and writer Brenee Brown puts it, it’s the essential ingredient for meaningful and deep connections — both with ourselves and others.

We can’t keep “faking it till we make it”. We’re not built for that. Continuing down the path of older generations where we were seeing expressing emotions as weakness is what keeps us getting more numb, forcing many of us to do more dopamine generating activities such as endless scrolling, Netflix, porn, fast food and snacks — just to make us feel something in the spaces between moments.