The shape of locked up disappointment

“He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore”—Freud

Last post, Haritha asked me to clarify what the impact is on overall well-being when disappointment—or suchlike emotions—are pushed away time after time. Does it work its own not so healthy magic from deep down inside the body? 


Since I suspect that in asking this, Haritha already knows, in some way, her own  answer, I'll take the opportunity to elaborate on what locked up disappointment locks like, rather than simply say yes or no.  In previous posts I’ve been pretty emphatic that disappointment ought to be integrated, that our pain makes us whole as much as our joy does.  But, aside from not having the full picture, is there a price to pay for not acknowledging our disappointment? 

Unacknowledged disappointment has a voice: it speaks.  Buried disappointment can certainly unfold from inside out in the language of symptoms.  The pathways from the disappointment to the symptoms are typically not linear.  The exiled emotion may speak through the body or  the personality in the form of overeating, under-eating, obsessive thoughts, righteous indignation upon discussion of vulnerable subjects--the list of pathologies is endless and varies drastically from person to person.  


Rather than thinking of the symptoms associated with unacknowledged emotions as a price, I think of them as a communication.  Disappointment is never really successfully exiled.  As Freud sums it up in the quote above, disowned emotions have a way of making their presence felt: they leak.  And perhaps we are lucky they leak, because in doing so they draw our awareness back to them rather then allowing themselves to be buried completely.  Leaks are interesting because they speak of our inner world.  When I see clients in psychotherapy, rather than assume that someone has not been disappointed, I generally assume that they have. I wonder what they have done with their disappointments, where and how they have reconciled or shut out their unfulfilled dreams. I look at these places in their body-psyche-soul not with pity but with interest and sometimes with fascination.  Part of the work of psychotherapy is to uncover hard exiled places in the geography of our being, to understand the texture of their hardness—why could this person not acknowledge this then when it happened, why are they ready (or not) to see it now?  


Eventually a good therapy will soften and bring breath to exiled places, enliven them with two pairs of eyes, and hopefully at least one pair that is kind and curious.  But before this, the hardness, the exile itself, is not judged but kindly comprehended: it is important to recall that sometimes we humans have no choice but to bottle up rather than acknowledge our disappointment. Each of us has a threshold for emotion beyond which we must warehouse the balance, hopefully to be examined and understood at a later date.  The "not-so-healthy magic" that Haritha refers to, the possible symptoms that I describe above, are not simply signs of illness, but a call to a door in the inner world that was once closed but will not remain so forever.


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