Holding in your real feelings to protect your partner? Here’s why it hurts you BOTH
By Orit Krug | May 1st, 2019
Imagine if you felt confident and proud of yourself for speaking up instead of holding in your real feelings and worrying so much about how it’s going to affect your partner.
By holding in your real feelings, you might feel like you’re protecting them from feeling the “burden” of your feelings or maybe it’s just easier for you not to deal with how they might react.
It creates a huge wall in your relationship.
This is a BIG reason why a lot of couples feel so disconnected after years of being together. They hardly know each other and it feels so awkward and hard to come back into each other’s lives again.
It’s NOT your fault. Holding in your real feelings is actually a habit that is embedded in your body.
Allow me to paint a picture of how this happens:
I was recently working with a client who had a repressed memory pop up as we moved together in session.
It was a situation she wouldn’t have remembered through talking, even if I dug around with a bunch of questions. Because this was a specific traumatic memory that she subconsciously stored in her body, when she stopped her parents from attacking each other.
She was the one who took responsibility to make sure that they didn’t hurt each other while no one else in her family did. So she learned from a very young age in her body and in her nervous system, that if she didn’t take responsibility – if she didn’t hold it all everything would fall apart and someone would seriously get hurt.
Her body doesn’t believe it’s SAFE to let go of control.
She believes she has no choice but to hold it together every moment, every single day.
When your body holds deeply stored trauma memories, your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between the fear of telling your partner you’re upset and the fear of your parents attacking each other (or whatever YOUR story is).
That’s why it feels so hard today. That’s why you freeze up and don’t say anything instead.
Or you avoid it, walk away, and push it down further until you explode.
Again, it’s NOT your fault. It’s actually what you’ve learned from a really young age.
Your body thinks it’s protecting you from pain and hurt, but that same protective mechanism keeps your partner at a distance and creates a huge divide in your relationship.
If you want to feel good about speaking up, you have to access and release those traumatic memories from your body.
Talking about it doesn’t access what’s deeply lodged in your body.
Telling your mind to speak up in the moment doesn’t change anything when your body reacts first.
Your body HAS to believe that it’s safe to let go of that responsibility. Your body has to believe that things aren’t going to be so horrible and dangerous and life threatening.
I’m not being dramatic! This is what your nervous system and primal body think.
According to your primal body, it IS a matter of survival. Bessel Van der Kolk says in The Body Keeps the Score that your body MUST believe that the danger of the past is actually IN the past.
Until you have a physical experience that proves that what happened isn’t happening in your current reality, then you’re going to keep repeating the patterns of your trauma today.
Your body has to physically learn how to let go of fear and confidently speak up without worrying about getting hurt.
It’s going to feel uncomfortable for your partner at first because they’re used to you taking responsibility all the time.
Their nervous system will also have to adapt to that new you.
That’s okay, that’s a great shift for you both. They’ll actually come to really love it and and be really RELIEVED by it because you’ll take down your wall and create a much deeper connection. You’re no longer going to be holding in your real feelings.
Another amazing benefit is that they get to take care of YOU. Once you let your guard down, you’ll feel a deep sense of love by letting someone else deeply hold you.
You’ll also have to adapt to this because you’ve been taking care of everyone else and your nervous system will have to expand its tolerance to letting go of responsibility.
You have to physically learn how to step back and RECEIVE more.
It’s a beautiful thing for your relationship because your partner inherently WANTS to take care of you. They can feel useful and purposeful in your relationship without begging to be an important part of your life. Without begging to see those real feelings you’re holding in.
I work with many clients who tell me that their relationship is on its last thread when we start working together. For example, a client recently told me, “I need to quit my job and start my business. I know he’s gonna freak out and we might just have to go our separate ways.”
We worked on training her nervous system to feel safe to speak up without fearing abandonment and once she told him, she said “wow, that was easy. It wasn’t as big of a deal as I thought it would be!”
Instead, she was calm enough to be assertive by no longer holding in those real feelings and and letting him in at the same time.
This is the power of releasing your trauma through your body and becoming a new confident you who’s proud about speaking up for herself.
I know that can seem SO far off from where you’re at now, but unfortunately that’s the effect of talking so much about it and not actually releasing your trauma from your nonverbal subconscious.
When you tell the same story over and over, you’re just reinforcing the same old story in your head and not moving on with new experiences in your body.
One of my clients recently said to me that the best revenge that she could get on her abusers was to finally feel that joy and pleasure in her body.
How amazing is that?!
If you’re scared of doing this work, let that sweet revenge be your motivation.
Like, I’m going to be HAPPY! Take that, m***f***er!
This is deep, profound work, and JOYOUS work.
You do have to grieve a little bit once you access and release that trauma because it creates this whole big space in you. It feels a bit empty for a short period of time because you’ve been carrying it for so long and it was a huge part of your identity.
The grief is an awesome sign because you’re letting go a part of you that no longer serves you, you’re no longer holding in your real feelings, and you get to make space now to be this new confident and happy you.
Get on the right path to healing trauma from your body and nervous system.
Many people spend decades and thousands of dollars in traditional therapies trying to heal their trauma. Unfortunately, even the most popular therapies are scientifically shown to be limited in accessing trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body.
Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal from the physical body or the nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for so many people. They often blame themselves for being “un-healable” and decide that they’re broken.
This is NOT true!
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing from the past, because we all have wiring and neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection, to love and openness.
My unique, scientific-backed process via Dance Therapy has helped hundreds of clients finally heal from past trauma and transform their relationship (even after decades of trying in other therapies).
You can heal too, but you need the right methodology.
Sign up for my online course (ranges from free to $20 USD) to begin a unique, body-based learning experience that will teach you:
- Science-backed education about how trauma is stored in your body and nervous system. You’ll gain an understanding why it has NOT been your fault you haven’t healed yet from past trauma.
- Gentle, guided body-based movement that is necessary for integrated healing. This is crucial if you want your mind’s intentions to match your body’s behaviors in relationships.
- An embodied approach to healing that has helped hundreds of clients break unhealthy relationship patterns and let in healthy, lasting love.
