don't bottle it up; communication is key!

[svnsettia]

this is transcribed from an excerpt from a letter i send my pen pal:

 

❝ i feel like as a kid, i took a lot of things very seriously and literally. things like "communication is key" really affected me, probably in a bad way--when i'm anxiously attached, i feel the need to tell the other person everything and to communicate all my feelings, no matter how trivial. this means i'll confront people on even the tiniest offenses. at some point, it loses its merit, because instead of letting things go, i make a big show of communicating my feelings about it. [...] i gain nothing by confronting people about things that happened only once and probably won't happen again. then i was reading about dbt and it said the same thing [another one of my friends] told me: i should only communicate my feelings (or do any action at all) if doing so will help me. it needs to align with my values and my goals. getting mad over small things, and being confrontational about them, doesn't help my goal of being a good friend, and of strengthening a healthy relationship w/ my friends. ❞
 

when coupled with "don't bottle up your emotions," "communication is key" became pretty detrimental to my relationships. i thought that these slogans were related to each other--something like "you shouldn't bottle your emotions; you should communicate them to others!" i very recently learned that something as simple as journaling or meditating counts as not bottling up your emotions. you don't need to tell them to anybody except yourself. 

i think that my misinterpretation of these two very popular slogans has enabled me to form anxious attachments and a compulsion to ask, tell, and confess. this, in turn, causes me to stay reliant on external validation for my emotions. i find it difficult to remind myself that my emotions are justified, that they make sense, and that i have the right to feel them, so i turn to others. i constantly want to tell my friends every thought and emotion that i have, so they can reassure me that it's okay to think and feel the way i do. i'm working on this now by using dialectical behavioural therapy and exposure and response prevention. 

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

A problem with catchphrases is that they're incomplete. They're quick and easy to repeat, but also to misapply.

"Don't bottle your emotions" is important because bottling them causes problems.

However, there are MANY ways to express them, or even to process them in other ways. If this is new to you, then you could have many interesting adventures exploring different techniques and listing which ones work for you. Some are pretty far out. Sometimes when I'm so furious that I want to destroy things, I go out and pull weeds. They need to be destroyed, after all, might as well make productive use of that rage.

It might also be useful to study what emotions are and how they work, if you enjoy thinking about that sort of thing. Once you understand what they're for, emotions are less likely to run away with you.


"Communication is key" is meant to reduce the frequency of people keeping secrets that can wreck relationships, and to promote intimacy. The missing part there, as you discovered, is that it has to do with significant and meaningful information or feelings. Figuring out what that threshold is can be challenging if you're not used to it.

An interesting exercise to ask is will you still care about this thing in ....
10 minutes?
10 hours?
10 days?
10 weeks?
10 months?
10 years?