Modern life is challenging, fraught with unrelenting pressures and volatility. Our culture, and often our upbringing, teaches us that emotional strength equals control; rather than working through or processing difficult emotions, like anger, grief, shame, and fear, we learn to push feelings aside and ‘get over it’. Don’t dwell. Don’t fall apart. Be positive. Get a grip. We learn to project an image of unrealistic stability and strength, while ignoring our actual mental state. When these directives are internalized, we must manage ourselves in ways that can negatively affect health, both physical and mental. Avoiding, intellectualizing, suppressing, and repressing feelings may get us through the day, but unexpressed emotions do not spontaneously dissipate.
When emotions are chronically ignored or inhibited, the unprocessed feelings can remain stuck, buried outside a person’s awareness, affecting the body and the mind. When suppression is used as a primary, habitual response, the body is more stressed state and reactive (Tyra, Fergus, and Ginty, 2023). The nervous system holds those things that have never been fully processed. In daily life, this can translate into physiological and psychological distress, including irritability, hyper-vigilance, rumination, depression, emptiness, somatic distress, exhaustion, difficulty identifying emotions, compulsive productivity, substance use, and relationship problems (Patel and Patel, 2019). Interestingly, somatic symptoms are often misread as being purely physical problems. Research suggests that people with unprocessed emotions, especially related to childhood trauma, face a higher risk of chronic tension, pain, headaches, digestive issues, and cardiovascular disease (Kroenke and Mangelsdorff, 1989; Van der Kolk, 2014).
Traditional gender norms influence how emotions are recognized, interpreted, and managed, often shaping which emotions are allowed. Boys are more likely to receive negative feedback for expressing sadness, fear, and vulnerability, while girls are discouraged from expressing overt anger, displeasure, contempt, and frustration (Chaplin, 2015; Levant and Wong, 2017). Over time, this is one of the primary pathways through which emotions become suppressed and are later experienced as stuck, confusing, or somatized. Gender norms also shape how people interpret and validate their own internal experiences. Sadness in men is equated with weakness. Anger in women is equated with being difficult. Thus, individuals can be more likely to invalidate their own emotions before anyone else. This intensifies the emotional stuckness as the person not only experiences the emotion, but also judges it as wrong or dangerous. These secondary emotions, of shame, anxiety, and self-criticism, are often more distressing than the original feeling, reinforcing avoidance and suppression.
How to Release Unexpressed Emotion
Awareness is the first step to making positive change. It is impossible to transform a problem without first noticing it. However, people with repressed emotions often have difficulty naming and understanding their emotional experiences. Unexpressed emotions may feel threatening or unacceptable. When emotion is not consciously named, it is more likely to be experienced as diffuse arousal and stress. This emotional awareness deficit is known as alexithymia. Without clarity about one’s own emotions, it is difficult to know how to address a problem (Van Bael and colleagues, 2024). Furthermore, many people who experience emotions as being stuck describe their internal world as being noisy and confusing, or muted and disconnected. In both cases, the person is unable to take advantage of the enormous value that emotional feedback provides; the nervous system defaults to threat-based regulation.
A useful starting point is to think about emotions as information to be curious about rather than as problems. Emotions are feedback that can help you understand situations, relational dynamics, and behavior. Next, put your feelings into words. Naming what you are feeling reduces emotional reactivity and supports reflection and more deliberate psychological processing (Lieberman and colleagues, 2007). Naming an emotion helps the nervous system settle.
Next, consider how your unexpressed emotion might show up physically—tension, teeth grinding, pain, and digestive issues may be a manifestation of unexpressed feelings. Also consider the psychological experience associated with particular feelings. For example, instead of denying you are sad or compartmentalizing and rejecting anger, make space for those feelings and honor them as valid.
When you first identify what you are feeling and then explore new ways of understanding it, the brain shows less emotional overload and greater balance. Slow down and name what you are feeling as accurately as possible. Make space to feel it without pressuring yourself to fix it. Once the feeling has been recognized and validated, you are more able to explore what it might mean. Only then can you release the emotion.
Recognizing and validating an emotion does not mean ridding yourself of anger, pain, or fear. Releasing stuck emotions is about integration; allowing yourself to experience the emotion a little bit at a time, without suppressing, escalating, or dissociating. Processing may involve grieving, setting better boundaries, becoming more flexible, and seeking therapeutic help. When release is framed only as getting it out, it’s easy to chase catharsis, only to feel worse. When release is framed as integration, you move toward resolution. The emotion becomes informative feedback, without judgment.
A final note: Emotions get stuck not only because individuals resist them, but because environments punish them. Families, workplaces, and cultures may reward stoicism, productivity, and pleasantness while penalizing anger, fear, and grief. Not every feeling should be expressed everywhere.
When people learn they can feel anger without becoming destructive, fear without collapsing, and grief without disappearing, emotions stop behaving like trapped energy and start behaving like what they are: adaptive signals that can guide choice, intimacy, and repair. Your mind and body can open to healing and growth (Hoyt and colleagues, 2024). This is what it means to be resilient. This is what it means to be emotionally strong.
