So recently I have been thinking about how stress, anxiety, and other mood disorders are on the rise. With about 10 % of Americans diagnosed with anxiety disorders and about 7% of the population with depression I figured now was as good a time as any to explain a dynamic I’ve noticed in myself and in some people I have talked to about anxiety.
This dynamic is what I have dubbed the stifling triad. The idea of the stifling triad is that there are 3 main ways that we censor ourselves, and judge ourselves for our feelings. By doing this we end up feeling disconnected and we end up losing self esteem. When you disown and judge an emotion it is a way of subconsciously saying “I am not good enough as I am.” In the words of author and psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden
As a psychotherapist I see nothing does as much for an individual’s self-esteem as becoming aware of and accepting disowned parts of the self. The first steps of healing and growth are awareness and acceptance— consciousness and integration.
Learning how to overcome our habit of stifling and judging our emotions and replace it with an attitude of expression and acceptance is a massive step toward becoming more as we were as children. Uncensored, confident, rude, happy, spontaneous.
The triad is composed of three parts, “muscular armoring”, masking of verbal and facial expression, and beliefs and moralizing that places judgment on our uncontrollable physical and emotional responses.
As you can see from the arrows, each part of the triad reinforces and is reinforced by each other part. This means that an issue expressing yourself on one level will also be present on the others and it also means that this is a self strengthening emotional loop. If repression is left unchecked it will only become more intense and restrictive over time.
We will be looking deeper into how this dynamic shows up in your life in other future blog posts but for now lets just get a mile high look at how this looks in the abstract.
There are two main ways that we get repressed in the first place and those are deeply ingrained beliefs over time, and sudden traumatic events where you learn to tense up to numb any negative emotions.
The first section of the triad is beliefs and moralizing
This section is all about how some of the beliefs we adopt (usually when we are young) lead to us repressing certain feelings or urges. If you are a young guy growing up in a very traditionally masculine family then one belief that you may internalize is that big boys don’t cry. Through enough repetition you might learn that this is true and that when you cry you get told off or teased by some of your family members. Even though you have learned that it is not acceptable to cry, you still have the urge to cry sometimes. So you…
Create physical armoring
As foreign as it sounds to many of us in the west, the body is actually an integral part of how we feel. And not just that, the way we use our bodies actually can change our ability to feel emotions.
One interesting idea that has been a central tennant in the science of bioenergetics is something known as physical armoring. This is a phenomena where you actually learn to hold tension in certain parts of your body in order to numb the feeling in those parts of the body. This tension limits our ability to feel and transforms life from a technicolor and emotionally rich experience to a black and white, dull existence.
In the example above, a young guy who feels the urge to cry bubbling up might feel his throat tense up to stifle a sob and he might learn to keep his lips tight together so that no one can see his chin trembling. Ever wonder where the phrase “Keep a stiff upper lip” came from? To keep a stiff upper lip is literally to hold in a cry.
As we accumulate psychological and physical armoring we also begin to alter our behavior and the way that we show up in the world more and more. What begins to happen is that we start to…
Mask our faces and bite our tongues
When we have a piece of physical armoring that numbs our feelings and we have a belief that we shouldn’t feel the feelings that are under the armor then we begin to hide our true selves under a mask. This emotional mask is an expression that we wear in order to hide what we really feel and it is almost always paired with not saying what we really mean.
This duo of behaviors serves to reinforce our beliefs about our emotions and our muscular armoring. When we act a certain way our mind tends to backward rationalize that the reason for us acting this way is that it is how we truly want to act. Masking your emotions in this way has been connected to feeling increased amounts of stress, depression, anxiety and loss of sense of self
What is the cost of denying our true selves?
By this point you might be thinking that this is an unfortunate but necessary part of being human and that denying your emotions through your beliefs, tensing up and ‘keeping a stiff upper lip’, and putting on a tough guy or good girl mask are just part of getting along with other people.
But denying our emotions doesn’t just hurt us, it makes other people not trust us!
When we listen to someone, two things are happening at the same time, we are listening to the content of the message, and we are noticing the nonverbal communication. It has been said that 93% of communication is nonverbal. Even though the actual number is most likely lower, nonverbal communication still makes up the majority of the messages being sent and received.
What is the big deal?
Well what happens when you create a mask or lie verbally is that the other person is reading messages that are incongruent. when you send contradictory messages, the person listening will believe the nonverbal one, and they will also think of you as a liar.
When we put on a facade we are telling ourselves:
“Your (Insert feeling here) is wrong, you should hide it and be ashamed of it”
And on a subconscious level we are telling other people:
“I am saying one thing but my body says another, you should listen to the body language and not trust or like me.”
So how do we fix it?
None of us wants to walk around stifled. No one wants to walk around and act in a way that makes them have low self esteem and makes others not trust them, but many of us are doing just that by putting on a masking smile, lying though our teeth, and adopting unresourceful beliefs. What can we do about it?
I will be writing about this in depth in a later blog post but for now, here is what you need to know:
Keep an eye out for any time you place a moral judgment on an impulse or an emotion. Because we have no control over our initial impulses (Lust, anger, sadness, joy, etc…) Placing a judgement on them leads to muscular armoring. Practice some stretching and deep breathing. In a later blog post I will talk about how to pinpoint your muscular armoring and break it up but for now just focus on breathing deeply and stretching the muscles on the front of the body. Try this exercise out The third thing to keep in mind is that you are going to need to change the way you show up in the world. One of my favorite ways to do this is by practicing what is known as radical honesty. As the name implies this idea is pretty much saying how you feel and what you think at all times.
What is your biggest hang up? What emotions do you have a hard time expressing? Put them in the comments section below and I will respond to every one.
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