Do you feel emotionally stuck?
Like you’re not feeling the emotions that should be having?
The picture of life suddenly feels gray and lost its meaning?
I don’t know what kind of life events have brought you to this place,
but you might be feeling an emotional wall.
What is an emotional wall?
An emotional wall is basically an invisible wall where it keeps our emotions in. For whatever reason, we are subconsciously suppressing ourselves from expressing our own emotions.
The primary reason for suppressing emotions is to keep us safe. It’s our body’s natural defense mechanism for self-preservation. When we get hurt, we automatically withdraw into a defensive state. It's to buy us some time for us to recover.
I don’t think any of us enjoys not being able to feel our emotions again, especially happiness. That is usually the emotion that vanishes rather quickly.
I’ll say this. It definitely feels safe to be behind an emotional wall, but it also has long-term consequences. We’re going to look at ten of these long-term damages.
1) We Suppress Our Emotions.
We are afraid of showing our emotions. Why? Because showing emotions makes us vulnerable. We don’t like to feel vulnerable, especially not after we got hurt really badly.
The purpose of our walls is always to protect ourselves. We create this wall to stop the flow of emotions by not letting anything out or in. We don’t want to let other people influence the way we feel. We have been hurt by other people by putting in so much trust in them in the past. We’re not going to let that happen again! We are going to control and protect ourselves.
If we feel any emotions, we suppress it.
If we feel want something, we ignore it.
If we are happy, we discard it.
If we are angry, we don’t show it.
If we are anxious, we spin out of control.
However, to other people, it’s like trying to talk to someone who only responds in one-word answers. With no emotions, other people don't feel connected to us.
On the other hand, we can’t get a conversation going, because we are trying to talk and afraid to talk at the same time.
This defense mechanism is meant to be temporary. The wall is supposed to be up long enough for us to recover then open up again. It’s not supposed to be that locks our emotions up in forever.
2) We Suffocate Our Emotional Needs.
When the emotional wall is up, it means nothing going in and nothing going out, which means we are suffocating our emotional needs.
Think of it like a castle. In order for the people in the castle to be healthy and happy, they need food, medicine, and daily supplies. However, if we lock the gates up, the people can’t get any of their daily necessities.
If it’s for a week, that’s probably fine. But how about a year or 5 years?… Everyone inside the castle would literally be beyond starving.
Our emotional wall is the emotional gate of our castle. We are closing this castle because we sense danger! However, now even when all the danger is gone, our castle is constantly under siege. You have needs and a locked up castle doesn't help.
3) We Don’t Know How to Manage Our Emotions.
When we suppress your emotions, we lose the experience of coming in contact with our emotions. Our experiences with our emotions feel more and more foreign, especially the negative emotions.
As the feelings come up inside us, it feels untamed and wild. We will try to avoid it, suppress it even more, and do anything to not experience the negative emotions
Instead of learning how to accept the emotions and working together with it, we become ruled by it and even oppose it. This makes the flow of our emotions abrupt, impulsive, and reactive.
When we feel depressed or angry, the intensity of the emotions blows out of proportion.
Our willingness to allow our emotions out will help us get used to our emotions in the long-run.
4) We Become Self-Blaming And Self-Critical
If we are isolated from the world, it’s very likely that we will start to be self-critical. Because we have no idea what other people are thinking about. We can only guess, and people in general usually assume the worst. If a person makes the slightest glance at us, we might think the person is critiquing our appearance.
Over time, there becomes this chasm between us and the world. We on one side & them on the other. Now the thought evolves into something worse.
If we were better, then they would have accepted us right? There must be something wrong with us.
Being self-critical is almost like a natural voice inside us. We hear it the most not because we want to, but because it’s like a belief. Being self-critical allows us to believe that we are on the path to becoming better as people. Being self-critical promises us to become people that are able to be loved and accepted.
This is what we tell ourselves, but the truth is we can be loved just as we are. However, it’s one thing to understand it, but another to believe it by heart.
5) We Are Trapped in the Past
Another side effect of a wall is that we can’t see beyond it. We can only see what is on the inside and has already happened.
The past.
We don’t think about anything new. We try to not think about the past, but that is all we have. When we do think about it, we get depressed. We replay the endless painful memory like a broken record. Then we become more depressed and our self-esteem sinks.
Because the past is all we see, we don’t see the present or the future. Our time stops at the moment we cut ourselves off from the world. The world moves on, and we stay right where our memories have left us.
One of the things that often comes up with people in isolation is the feeling of regret. That feeling of being left behind by the world and losing so many experiences while they are trapped. When we don’t remove our emotional wall, our maturity, our time, our growth all stops with it.
6) Can’t Have Deep Relationships with Other People
This is definitely one of the key things that people notice right away. Emotional walls prevent our ability to open up. How do we build relationships with people when we are scared to open up and be vulnerable with other people? You can’t!
Do we want relationships? Of course!
Yet that wall is so high and so thick that we can’t hear anything on the outside. No one can talk over it. Nothing can break through it.
If we’re trying to create a bunker, this is perfect.
But we are trying to connect with other people!
When the person is scared to show their emotions, it prevents them from sharing anything personal. Therefore, they only talk about the more surface topics and never get into the more intimate topics. No real depth of friendships can be cultivated over it.
7) There Is No Hope.
When we are behind a wall for a long time and we see no way out, we start to lose hope for anything and everything. It’s like running in an endless tunnel. It’s an endurance race but endure to what end? We can’t even see the end.
We feel starved, but no one is coming to help.
Nothing is changing.
Then we start to believe that nothing can ever change.
Hope is more important than you think. It gives us motivation and the drive to change because we believe it is possible. No hope means that we will give up before we even start.
8) We Become Emotionally Indifferent.
When we make a habit of not showing our emotions…
When we don’t think there is hope…
When we don’t think anyone else understands how we’re feeling…
When it’s hard to take a step to reach out to anyone…
When we struggle with not liking ourselves as a person…
When we neglect our own needs…
It’s hard not to be emotionally indifferent. However, this doesn’t mean someone will come along and save us, because no one is capable of saving us. Only we are capable of taking down the walls we had put up.
There are a lot of different reasons for feeling indifferent, but all the possible changes that can possibly happen is in our inside mentality.
9) Emotionally Tired from Putting Up Walls All the Time.
Putting up a wall takes energy.
It takes so much energy trying to be strong all the time.
So not only are we starving inside, we are also expending energy to keep up our wall.
This is really a lose-lose situation.
To be honest, the people around us want to see us get better. They might ask us a few times about how we are doing, but they don’t understand how the struggle is a process. We don’t instantly improve in a day or a month. They check on us a little bit and expects us to improve. On the other hand, we are trying to look strong while not improving on the inside at all.
As a result, we put up a front to be strong for our friends, for our family, and that is tiring. I mean we don’t want to be a burden and a bother them all the time, right? So we just keep the walls up.
10) We Believe the World Hates Us.
For people feeling isolated, there is this sense of disconnectedness from the society, because there is pretty much two societies. Them as a big group and us as the group of one. It’s the "us vs them" mentality.
The bigger the division between us and them, the easier it is to feel like they are more critical of us. They might think we’re odd, weird, and unlovable. This happens very simply because it feels like we are not on the same team.
If you are not with me, you’re against me.
Because if you like me, then we would be on the same team.
That’s the false belief.
The truth is most of the time, do people actually dislike us? Probably not.
Some people probably don’t even realize we existed.
Not because they are selfish.
Not because they don’t care about us.
Not because they are trying to exclude us.
They are just trying to make sure their lives doesn’t collapse on them. Most people actually have more problems to deal with then it seems.
No one is perfect, but rarely is there anyone out there that is specifically out there just to hate and exclude us. A lot of times, it’s more about the emotional wall that we put up that made us exclude ourselves. We have made ourselves unavailable and stand-offish to other people, which drove them back.
We want those relationships, but these emotional walls are truly damaging.
First Step -
Which point stuck with you the most?
- Augustus
Losing Interests, Losing Relationships [Free PDF]
- Understanding the 5 CAUSES for an emotional wall between you and everyone else.