Just Feel It

What a children’s book revealed about the emotions we bury

Photo by Brock Wegner on Unsplash

Years ago, in my Psychiatric Nursing class, I remember learning how our bodies were never intended to indefinitely carry emotions such as stress, grief, or anxiety, without it affecting us.

But knowing this from studying didn’t mean I magically learned how to apply this knowledge to managing my own complex emotions.

Today, as I finished reading Bridge to Terabithia (for the first time), I started to tear up. I wiped the first tear away and was determined to finish the book without turning into a hot mess.

“But why?” I asked myself. “If you’re feeling it, just let yourself feel.”

And so I slowed down my reading and let the tears roll. The emotions were out, and I spent the rest of the day sifting through them. Because it wasn’t just about the characters in the story.

Mother’s Day is complex. The emotions this children’s book triggered reminded me of what I had tucked away over the weekend. And reading many of your works here¹ on Substack let me know I’m not the only one who experiences a variety of emotions around the holiday.

So, in honor of all the incredible women out there navigating the full spectrum of the bleak and the beautiful, the perfectly imperfect, and the highs and lows of motherhood and all its margins, I wanted to take time this week to talk about how we can sometimes bottle up and discard emotions without fully feeling them.

My Bottle Closet

For years, I used to bottle up my emotions. After corking the bottle, I would store them in the cellar like a fine wine that gets better with time. Only I knew they wouldn’t get better. I just hoped they would somehow disappear if left there long enough.

There were moments and seasons over the years when this coping mechanism served me well. As a former labor and delivery nurse, it allowed me to do my job even in the face of grief and loss — enabling me to show empathy and care, without my emotions hindering my work.

But while this approach works to temporarily cope with a situation, keeping these emotions tucked away in long-term storage didn’t make them disappear. It only postponed the inevitable.

Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

The Bottles Only Hold for So Long

Over the years, motherhood has taught me to listen to my body and recognize the subtle cues it gives me when something is off – when worry, fear, or stress is not only trapped in my mind but also beginning to affect me physically.

Through this process, I’ve realized how the emotions I tend to bottle up don’t stay in the bottle. The longer they sit, they sour, and the pressure builds internally – leaving a short fuse ready to blow.

For our first international move, we had three months’ notice. My husband received a job offer in March, and we needed to be out of our townhouse in June. Those three months were such a flurry of activity – Goodwill donation drop-offs, passports for the kids, visas, researching life in Bangkok, selling things on Facebook marketplace, goodbye parties, selling our cars – time to emotionally process the move and all that it entailed was a luxury I didn’t have.

Those emotions waited to haunt me until we settled in Thailand, where transitioning to being a full-time stay-at-home mother of a 3-year-old and 1-year-old, while also learning to navigate life in a new country, quickly burned me out.

At first, I didn’t understand why I was so stressed when my new daily life was nothing compared to the stress of being the Charge Nurse on a high-risk Labor and Delivery unit. But as I began to create space to care for myself, I saw how the emotions I had ignored during our move were taking a toll on me.

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Not Letting Myself Feel the Positive

Bottling up these emotions is not limited to the negative. I learned this a few years ago when I found myself refusing to feel excited, hopeful, or happy.

The two parallel pink lines were there, as plain as day, staring back at me.

But daring to hope felt more daunting than doubting what was confirmed.

Twice already that year, I had been in the same position. Each time met with grief and loss in the weeks and months that followed. Not allowing myself to get my hopes up that this time might be different felt safer.

I took more pregnancy tests than I could count during those weeks. Even though each one was positive, I was never convinced.

Something felt off.

It wasn’t just that I had already miscarried twice before, but that I didn’t “feel” pregnant. With my daughter and son, I started experiencing morning sickness and other pregnancy symptoms before I was even late for a period. So either I was experiencing the best first trimester ever with almost zero symptoms, or something wasn’t right.

When I went for my first appointment at 10 weeks, the ultrasound confirmed my intuition was correct. The baby measured to 8 weeks, and there was no heartbeat. But even though I hadn’t let myself “get my hopes up,” I felt this third loss the most.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

The Science Behind It

In nursing school, I read some of the studies completed by James Gross and other researchers who studied how unprocessed emotions impact people.² I remember resonating with the research I read. But clearly, I’ve had years of work to do to learn how to minimize this habit.

In his research, Gross shows how emotional suppression can increase activation in the body’s stress-response system, elevating heart rate, blood pressure, and overall physiological stress. When we ignore an emotion, it doesn’t necessarily make it go away. Sometimes it transfers, and our body carries it instead.

Researchers have also found links between chronic emotional stress and physical symptoms like inflammation, poor sleep, digestive issues, anxiety, and fatigue.³ While it does not show that every hard emotion will make us sick. It suggests that our emotional and physical health are intricately connected.

This is why, I believe, stored emotions eventually demand our attention. Sometimes all it takes is a simple children’s book to crack the bottle. Other times, irritability, overwhelm, or numbness can boil over with the slightest trigger.

Steps You Can Take

Over the years, I’ve slowly been learning that processing emotions doesn’t have to look dramatic. Simply slowing down enough to let the emotion register instead of pushing it away makes a huge difference.

Here are some things that have helped me as I have worked through this:

Name what you’re feeling

Not just “I’m upset,” but asking why?
Am I disappointed? Afraid? Grieving? Embarrassed? Overwhelmed?

Verbalizing an emotion takes away some of its power and helps us better comprehend what’s going on beneath the surface.

Pay attention to your body

Your body can recognize stress before your mind registers what is going on. Tight shoulders, a clenched jaw, headaches, stomach issues, or that lump in your throat can signal that something deeper is asking for attention.

When you catch this, pause and try to notice what your body might be trying to tell you.

Give yourself space to express it

Some emotions need space to breathe more than they need to be solved.

For me, this often looks like journaling, praying, going for a walk, or talking with my husband or a close friend. The counseling sessions I’ve had have also created a good space to process emotions I had left untouched.

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Just Feel It

Today, it felt strangely therapeutic to allow myself to be fully and emotionally immersed in a story to the point of tears. It reminded me of the grief I still carry from the pregnancy losses I experienced two years ago.

While Mother’s Day had stirred this up briefly, our day was busy, and I was so grateful for the time we had with our son and daughter, I didn’t take time to feel the grief over the ones I was never able to hold in my arms.

Reading today’s book gave me the bottle opener I needed to let those feelings breathe.

While my emotions felt raw for the rest of the day, it was good not to still carry the weight I had been unknowingly holding onto for the last few days.

As I close out this week’s article, I hope that if any of this resonated, you feel encouraged in knowing you aren’t alone.

We all have developed different ways to cope with challenges in life. But just because we have always done something one way doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Especially if it is weighing you down and the bottles are about to crack.

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This Week’s Book Recommendation:

Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson

I can’t mention this book in the article and not recommend it as a read. If you haven’t read it before, it is worth your time, even as an adult. If you have kids, I would say it would probably be around the 4th/5th grade age level. Absolutely beautiful story, but be prepared for some possible tears.

1. What Mothers Actually Need This Mother’s Day

A Stepmom's Struggle with Mother's Day

Anti-Mother's Day Poem

2. Gross JJ, Levenson RW. Emotional suppression: physiology, self-report, and expressive behavior. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1993 Jun;64(6):970-86. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.64.6.970. PMID: 8326473.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8326473/

3. Feldman, P.J., Cohen, S., Lepore, S.J. et al. Negative emotions and acute physiological responses to stress. ann. behav. med. 21, 216–222 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02884836

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf02884836?utm_source=chatgpt.com