Bottling Up to Keep the Peace Kills

According to a NY Times article and a study on PubMed, women who “self-silence” during arguments significantly increase their risk for heart disease. Men don’t. They can suppress feelings and not suffer health effects at all.

Maybe it’s because men “fight and fly” when stressed. We women “tend and befriend.” We need to talk and bond. When we women feel cut off, we stress out.

Another, more general, explanation may be that closed systems fail to thrive. When living systems are cut off from the free flow of information, matter, and/or energy with their environments, they can’t get the proper feedback to regulate themselves.

The NY Times’ Well blog gives the four signs of bottling up from Dr. Dana Jack’s book Silencing the Self: Women and Depression:
1. I don’t speak my feelings in an intimate relationship when I know they will cause disagreement.
2. Caring means putting the other’s person’s needs in front of my own.
3. Often I look happy enough on the outside, but inwardly I feel angry and rebellious.
4. I often feel responsible for other people’s feelings.

Men simply don’t have these issues. Men are emotionally wired differently. They can’t mix information and information very well. They aren’t quite so sensitive and tuned in. Just read some of the literature on babies and mothers and their intense interactions. Brain development happens in both the mother and infant. Women teach babies how to soothe themselves, to self-soothe. The infant’s social brain develops in interaction with the mother via the more primitive emotional brain. We are all about making peace and putting their needs first.
What do you do when you realize that bottling your feelings up will make you sick but when also know that saying what you feel will make the whole thing worse?

Practice opening up in the face of threat. Note the anger and then get curious. Treat it like martial arts or like walking meditation. Take very good care of yourself first so that you can do this–It’s difficult to get on top of anything when you’re tired and hungry.

My husband and I will get into spats. And I wrote the book. Then, of course, he’ll remind me. It’s infuriating. But behind it all we know we know that we’re okay.

Bottled up feelings are not good. A closed system is always self-destructive. Always. The secret is to learn to open yourself in the face of threat. To see the whole process for what it is–a momentary insanity. If you can’t do it yourself, then do it with a very good therapist. When you get this down, life with men at home and at work is so much easier.