@Rubin Prophete This is such a great observation. I know from my own personal experiences, these obstacles and hurdles show up when I have the experience of being invalidated. Grief and then someone says, "Yeah, but it's not that bad." or "You'll be back to normal in no time." Why bother sharing what I'm really feeling if someone is going to try to talk me out of it, minimize my experience or "make me feel" bad for what I'm feeling. I absolutely agree with you that recognizing this is a huge key in moving forward. Thanks for sharing!

One obstacle that I have when it comes to blocking my emotions is when I'm overwhelmed. It's such a weird state to be in, for me. It's something that I'm sure happens progressively throughout the day or week or whatever, but when overwhelm hits me, it's like it hits me all at once. As if in the very second before it hit, I was totally on top of my game and then boom... OVERWHELM. When I'm in this overwhelmed state, I have no emotional expression. I feel completely disconnected from my emotions and my body. It's that stage just past fatigue and exhaustion that I ignored for too long. There were many warning signs that I either missed or chose to ignore. Regardless, when overwhelm hits and I have no resources, no energy.... I am in zombie mode and it usually creates friction between me and others, but I can't feel it in that moment. At that point, up is down, happy is sad, left is right. And this has held me back many times from being able to express what I'm feeling. Finding a way to be in contact with myself more regularly and checking in with how I'm feeling has been the hurdles I've had to jump over in order to stay connected. I still trip over them though, every now and then.

I'm posting a video later in the Emotional Toolkit section that you can find in the classroom. It's going to talk about "conflict". I encourage you to check it out.

For me, managing conflict, is more about managing myself. Lots of feelings arise when we are in conflict. Lots of feelings arise when we face conflictual people. And, lots of feelings arise when we feel conflicted. For me, making this distinction helps in how I manage "myself" in conflicts. For example, what do these feelings tell me about the situation, about me and about what I need. Sometimes in conflict, we need to feel validated. Being able to communicate this (with practice) can turn conflict into a disagreement and then into a discussion. Sometimes, it blows up in my face. We're all human ☺️. What is it like for you?

@Sarah Molli Thank you for sharing. I'd like to add something to your comment that I think is extremely pertinent, and it comes from our upbringing. I don't just mean in our homes, but also at school and in society as well, we often hear in many different contexts how important it is to be tough. We are very often shown how valuable a person is if they don't make a fuss. We get shown through rather innocent means that other people have it worse. All of this contributes to resistance. Why? Because if we can shove it all down, then it somehow proves our worth. Does it though? I'm pretty sure all of us know at least one person who wore their suffering like a badge of honor, like a symbol of pride. But we often never put that into question. We often don't reproach the usefulness of this because of either the role this person had in our lives or because we were too young to think about it differently. If I think of those who showed me that stuffing my feelings down was a point of value, I sadly have to also admit that those same people were actually worse off for it. I'm not trying to throw shade on anyone, but I do think it's important to start exploring where we learned what we believe, why we believe it and whether or not is exemplary of the kind of life we want to lead. More importantly, even if a certain tool or approach worked for someone else in our lives, this does not mean that it should necessarily work for us. I like the idea that you mentioned about "fight or flight" and "waiting too long." I know in my life, this translates into being out of touch with my emotions, not being able to set up healthy boundaries and not knowing how to assert my own worth. As I learn better tools, this gets much healthier, but if I stayed with what I learned growing up, I'd still be struggling to manage my feelings and my relationships. Accessing what is actually occurring inside you, what it means, and what you need helps in crossing the resistance boundary to a place of expression and safety. However, I must admit that the journey is a rather messy one. "You can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs..." well we can't get to emotional fluency without allowing ourselves to become a mess from time to time. If I don't ever really delve into it, how can I ever really process it?

@Michele McLaurin that's a great start. It's also a hard one to start from, but it does add another level of emotions. Some of these emotions can seem out of place or even a bit exaggerated, so I'm going to talk about my experiences with resistance a bit, and then let me know what you think. Resistance to not want to feel or tell someone what I was feeling ended up being that I was scared. I was scared to tell someone how I was feeling because of how they might respond to me, how I might be treated, how it might affect them. My fear was really present, but that fear wasn't alone. I was sad too. I was sad that I couldn't tell someone. I was sad that the person I wanted to say it to wouldn't have valued my feelings or would have rejected them. So being afraid and sad in this context actually built in a sense of disappointment in myself (which I turned into shame) and then just loneliness. I couldn't function, so I suppressed and resisted feeling anything until like @Sarah Molli mentioned, it was too much, too late and then... explosion. And somehow, even though I know this wasn't safe either, in the moment, it somehow felt safer because I was the danger then. There was no safety, but then there was no safety for anyone and I guess instead of feeling any of these emotions, I rationalized that that was better than nothing. How about you?