Let me ask you something. Is it easier to avoid an uncomfortable feeling, or to meet it head on and feel it?

Most people would say avoid. And yeah — that makes sense. It feels safer in the moment. You stay in control. You don’t rock the boat. You keep the peace.

But at what cost?

I see it all the time — and I’ve lived it myself. You keep it together without even knowing you’re doing it.

Your mind loops. Your shoulders tense. Your sleep is off. Your body won’t settle.

You try to convince yourself that it’s all good, normal, just something you have to live with.

But what if the thing you’ve been avoiding is actually the doorway to your power?

Today’s episode might name something you’ve been carrying for a long, long time.

The Real Cost of Emotional Suppression

Last week, I hosted a breathwork class. And after the circle was closed, one of the participants said something that really stuck with me.

She said something like:

“At my age, I’ve been suppressing emotions for so long, it’s just easier to keep them in.”

It made me think about this question:

Is it easier to suppress a feeling — or to finally feel it?

Because I really get that comment. I do.

Suppression becomes the default. It’s what we know. It’s familiar. It’s not easier in the long run — but it feels safer in the moment.

I know this because there was a time when I didn’t know how to feel.

I had anxiety almost daily. And when I moved away from home, the anxiety got worse — especially on weekends, or when I had no plans.

The silence and the stillness of an unplanned day would trigger fear, loneliness, and make me feel like I was floating in a void, separate from the rest of the world.

Being busy felt safe. It distracted me and gave me something to do so that I could cling to my worthiness.

I was very disconnected and to be honest, rarely really fully there to enjoy the present moment. Because I was numbing.

Things I absolutely love and need today, I didn’t know how to be with back then.

Like nature. I remember going hiking with friends and everyone were in awe over the beautiful view and I just stood there unable to take it in. Rationally I could understand that it was a pretty view, but little happened in me.

Another example is my relationship with food.

Food was a way for me to fill the emptiness I had inside.

When eating, I felt a short moment of relief and connection. This lasted for the first bites, before I’d start to worry about the meal ending and already deciding I want more.

This made me worried, anxious and controlling with food, because I never knew if I’d be able to stop. I was planning all meals in my head, but rarely really being there when I ate.

This is the thing with avoiding your feelings — you do it to avoid pain, but you have to pay with joy. That’s the real cost of suppression.

When you suppress pain, you suppress pleasure. You become numb.

Distraction Culture and Emotional Escape

As you can see, this was exhausting. And quite common.

In today’s world, the average human life is spent trying to run away from ourselves. We do anything we can to avoid looking within.

The average life today is structured around distraction. We live for the high points: Friday drinks, Saturday brunch, the next vacation or life milestone.

We live for these moments, because they give us a momentary escape from our inner fears. Few of us have mastered the skill of being where we are. We are always planning for the next exciting thing to look forward to.

The suppressed emotions continue to accumulate — so much so that some secretly begin looking forward to death to bring an end to all the pain.

This might sound morbid, but it’s more common than you think. I’m not saying they are suicidal.

If you think about it — if you can’t enjoy the majority of your time here, if you can’t be here, doing something with love with people that you love — then consciously or unconsciously it makes sense that you start longing for something else.

And the only “something else” you know is death.

To go back to the question I asked in the beginning — is it easier to suppress or feel?

The answer is that yes, in the short term it’s easier to push it away. You avoid meeting something that’s not nice. It’s also easier because it feels familiar.

But here is the caveat. Eventually, you will pay a price — because your body holds what you suppress.

You think you’re pushing it away, but you’re actually pushing it in.

And that’s why, in the long run, it’s much more exhausting to suppress than to feel.

Because you can’t run away from yourself.

When you suppress your feelings, you do feel safer in the moment — but they show up later as irritability, mood swings, depression, anxiety, tension in the muscles, pain in the body, digestive problems, insomnia, hormonal imbalances, and even disease.

Why Women Suppress Anger

I want to talk about  one emotion in particular — one that often hides in plain sight, especially for women.

Anger.

Of all the feelings we learn to push down, anger is one of the most feared, misunderstood, and socially unacceptable. But it’s also one of the most essential.

Anger is a powerful and strong emotion that is necessary for our protection. Rage, the anger that arises when our boundaries are being trespassed, is wired into our system. The healthy response is anger — no, stay away, don’t come closer. Healthy anger is in the moment, it protects your boundaries, and then it’s gone.

But if you were a child whose boundaries weren’t respected — and you weren’t allowed to express it — you probably learned to suppress it to stay safe. Maybe you were punished, told to be quiet. Maybe you were sent to your room or told to go on a timeout.

If a parent isn’t emotionally present themselves, it’s very difficult—sometimes impossible—for them to deal effectively with a child’s anger.

• Emotional presence is foundational: To hold space for a child’s big emotions, especially anger, a parent needs to be regulated themselves. If they are disconnected from their own emotions, overwhelmed, or dissociated, they likely lack the internal capacity to stay calm and attuned when their child expresses anger.
  
• Unprocessed emotions get projected: A parent who hasn’t processed their own anger or emotional wounds may feel triggered by their child’s expression of anger. Instead of responding with empathy and boundaries, they might react with suppression, fear, guilt, or even punishment.
  
• Safety and co-regulation are missing: Children need to feel safe to express anger. An emotionally absent parent can’t co-regulate—meaning they can’t help the child return to a calm state through presence, tone, and energy—which teaches the child that their emotions are too much or wrong.
  
• It perpetuates generational cycles: The child learns to suppress or misdirect their anger, repeating patterns the parent may have gone through. Emotional absence often stems from trauma or emotional neglect in the parent’s own upbringing.
  

In short, emotional presence isn’t a luxury — it’s a requirement for supporting a child’s healthy emotional development.

When it’s missing, a child’s anger often becomes misunderstood, invalidated, or punished, which can lead to shame, anxiety, or explosive outburst

Something I learned from studying Gabor Maté’s work is that children will always choose attachment over authenticity.

To stay connected and reduce the risk of abandonment, the child learns to suppress what’s true, and disconnect from the anger.

I want to distinguish between suppression and repression.

Both are ways of pushing a feeling down. Suppression is conscious; repression is unconscious.

In repression, we have so much guilt and fear over the feeling that we can’t consciously feel it at all.

This happens when we consistently have to suppress our feelings to feel safe, so our nervous system learns that it’s best to not feel it at all. The brain pushes the emotion out of conscious awareness entirely.

The feeling still exists in the body, but we cannot register it.

As women, we are more deeply trained to suppress our anger. We’re told to smile. To be nice. To not rock the boat. To be good. Friendly. Helpful. Easy to be around.

Men carry pushed down anger too, but the difference is that the guilt and shame of anger is more widely imposed on women. 

Men express their anger, it’s just in very unhealthy and extremely dangerous ways (after all they are the ones doing most of the killing in this world, starting basically all wars).

This is why women suffer chronic illness of the body far more often than men and are much more likely to be diagnosed with mental health conditions.

The so-called normal way of doing things in our patriarchal culture is shaped by hidden male priorities and open power dynamics. 

• Workplaces reward competitiveness and emotional detachment, while empathy, sensitivity and vulnerability is seen as weak and unproductive. 
• Power is defined by dominance, not collaboration. Leadership is modeled on control and authority, and relational, cooperative or community based approaches are seen as too soft. 
• Rationality is valued over intuition. Decision making is expected to be logical and data driven and linear while intuitive and emotionally informed knowing is dismissed as unscientific or unreliable. 
• Medical research is male oriented, leading to misdiagnosis and undertreatment of conditions that impact women. I recently spoke to a nurse who told me that in Sweden doctors as late as into early 2000s used an informal diagnosis they called SVBK — short for sveda, värk och brännkärring, which directly translates to pain, aching and burning witch. So actual doctors used this to have a name for all these mystery symptoms women showed up with. 

The list goes on. Across the board, feminine values and characteristics aren’t valued. 

This causes women to suppress to fit in, to preserve social acceptability and to maintain safe relationships at home, in the community and in the workplace 

Women also have the role of caregivers in society, and are taught to compulsively self-sacrifice doing for others, which eventually leads to more anger that needs to be suppressed. 

On top of all of this, we carry generations of suppressed anger in our bodies. 

Women have been murdered, slaughtered, raped, silenced, punished, burned, ridiculed, for centuries for expressing themselves and their power. 

And that fear is still in all of us, in our nervous systems, in our cells. 

In simple terms, anger is not feminine, is not ladylike and it does not keep women where patriarchy wants us: conformed. 

Women hold in their rage, to the extent that we don’t even know it’s there. 

So what does this suppression actually look like?

• Laughing when you say something that might upset someone
• Taking on more work and feeling proud of it at first — but then getting bitter when you don’t get recognition
• Apologizing left and right — starting every other sentence with “sorry but…”
• Asking a question instead of expressing a need, like: “Does anyone need to stop for a bathroom break?” instead of saying “We need to stop — I have to go to the bathroom.”
• Smiling when being disrespected — maybe brushing off an offensive comment because it feels safer to stay likeable
• And the all-time favourite: the difficulty — or even the impossibility — of saying no.

I’ve done all of these.

It’s ok. It’s not your fault.

We’ve inherited centuries of silencing. Of keeping the peace at our own expense. It’s not your fault — but it is your responsibility to work through it.

Anger Is Not Feminine or Masculine – It’s Human

Because here’s the thing: anger is not bad. Anger is not violence. It’s not masculine or feminine. It’s human.

Anger is a biological, primal, intelligent emotion. It’s there to protect you. To alert you to injustice. To help you set boundaries.

But when you suppress it, you don’t just lose your fire. You lose your clarity. Your power. Your boundaries. And your energy.

Repressed anger also leads to projection. You might not express it directly — but you act it out. Or you hate the world for being unfair, when what you’re really carrying is rage you haven’t allowed yourself to feel.

I know, because I’ve been there. I used to feel so angry at the world — capitalism, patriarchy, injustice. And some of that was righteous. But a lot of it was displaced. Underneath, I had anger I hadn’t met in myself.

When I started working more deeply with myself, and worked through the anger, the hatred towards society dropped.

Don’t get me wrong — I still get frustrated about the state of the world. But it has a different tone today. I don’t take it personally to the same extent, and whenever I can, I channel it into something productive.

Once again, let’s go back to the original question: is it easier to feel, or to suppress?

Given the fact that the world is not made for women to authentically express themselves, it makes sense that we conform. We are conditioned for it — and have been for generations.

I’m sharing this because the societal context has helped me get in touch with my emotions. It’s also helped me understand that I’m not the crazy one — feeling like I don’t fit in, getting sick from overworking, and wishing for a different and more authentic way of living.

If you get triggered by things outside of you, it can be a helpful tool to turn within.

But here’s the paradox: you still have responsibility for your emotions. If you want to feel joy, you have to work through the lower emotions. Numbing them won’t work — and getting stuck in them isn’t very nice either.

And know this: what you fear — the emotions and what might happen if you meet them — is not as bad as what happens when you suppress them. The effort it takes to suppress is much more energy-consuming than feeling.

Expressing Healthy Anger

The work is to teach your nervous system to feel healthy anger in a safe and controlled way. That might feel uncomfortable — but it’s not dangerous. And trust me, it will give you access to a force and potential you didn’t know you had.

It’s not about opening a firehose at full speed. It’s not even about going to the forest and exploding in screams or punching a pillow. That might actually reinforce the pattern — making the anger loop stronger.

To work with anger in a healthy way is not dramatic.

You process the rage by sitting with it and fully experiencing it in the body. What happens to your breathing? Your muscles? Your expression? It can help to push your hands onto a wall or pull apart something like a tea towel. Maybe making sounds. This is part of the allowing — of being with it. And when you do that in the moment, you move through it.

You experience it now — instead of acting it out later.

After that, you can be with the little one inside you — your inner child — and hear what they have to say. To understand why whatever happened triggered you.

This is something I teach in breathwork — and obviously in my 1:1 coaching. We don’t dive in headfirst. We don’t force anything. We move slowly, gently — with full permission to stop, breathe, and choose. Slowly, we’re building connection and capacity.

Ok, but what if you have repressed anger — and you don’t even know you’re angry? You might walk around saying “I’m not a very angry person.”

That can be true. And if it is — good for you. Keep doing what you’re doing. But if you’re people-pleasing, feeling anxious, numb, or scared of rejection — there might be some anger that’s not felt.

For me, it started with feeling whatever was present.

I had no idea anger would show up later. It started with bodywork — getting closer to myself and my body — and starting to feel whatever sensations were there. Over time, I felt grief, sadness, fear… and only later did I touch my anger. It wasn’t an overnight thing. It was a slow uncovering.

The good thing about anger is that it vibrates at a much higher frequency than shame, guilt, sadness, or fear — which means it’s easier to turn into something productive.

I used my anger to fire up my ambition, get out of a situation that wasn’t serving me, and start exploring what I wanted to do in this world.

So if you feel a lot of anger — congratulations — it might mean you are close to a breakthrough. Keep working through it. Don’t get stuck in it.

So if you’re wondering why any of this matters — why go through the discomfort of feeling at all — I hope this episode has helped you clarify a bit.

Suppressing your emotions doesn’t keep you safe — it keeps you stuck.

When you carry suppressed emotions, not only is your baseline energy lower, but you also get triggered more easily. It doesn’t take much to push you into fight, flight, or freeze.

And when you’re in survival, you’re not in creation. You’re fighting, fleeing, or freezing — not building, dreaming, or expanding. No new ideas, no true breakthroughs can come from that state.

But when you surrender — which means being with what is — and work through it, you get closer to your True Self and to real freedom.

Feeling my anger gave me back my voice. My energy. My creativity. I stopped waiting for permission. I started creating a life that felt true.

If you’re in a place where you want support moving through this, I’ve created something special. It’s called Spring Renewal — 30 days of deep, laser-focused 1:1 private coaching for the woman who’s ready to reconnect with her truth, feel grounded again, and start moving forward — not from pressure, but from clarity and ease.

This isn’t part of my regular offering. It’s a special spring offer to support those of you who want to end the first half of 2025 with energy and momentum — and step into summer feeling alive and ready for the second half of the year.

If you’ve been floating through the first half of 2025 without a plan or direction, this is guaranteed to move the needle.

Who knows — it could be the thing that changes everything. I’ve seen it happen before.

Like I said: 30 days. Deep. Laser-focused. Private coaching.

If that’s something you’re curious about, check the show notes for details — or email me at monika@nulltheselflovepath.com or book a Discovery call and we’ll talk it through, no pressure.