Feelings: Can Developmental Trauma Cause Someone To Hide Their Feelings?

What can be normal is for someone to hide how they really feel. As a result of this, the people in their life are unlikely to be aware of what is truly going on for them.

However, due to how good they are at hiding how they feel, there can be no reason for these people to realise this. There is then going to be how they believe one is doing and how they are actually doing.

One Experience

This could mean that one will typically come across as though nothing bothers them and they are doing fine. There is a chance that some of the people in their life are also in the same position and seldom reveal how they feel.

When one is by themselves, they might often allow themselves to embrace how they really feel. Or, they could have the inclination to do what they can to avoid how they feel.

Isolated

As their feelings will play a key role in what will allow them to form deeper connections with others, generally keeping them to themselves is going to make it hard for them to do this. Furthermore, if another person doesn’t know what is really going on for them, they won’t be able to provide them with the support that they may need.

For example, if they are going through a challenging time and they don’t make this clear to a friend, for instance, they won’t be able to lend a hand, so to speak. They can then end up suffering in silence.

A Way of life

They might not just have moments when they suffer in silence, though, as this could be a normal part of their life. Nevertheless, if they have the tendency to hide how they feel and are deprived of the support and care that they need, this is to be expected.

They are then going to act more like an independent as opposed to an interdependent human being. The truth is that they are not their own island and need to be supported by others.

An Automatic Process

This doesn’t mean that they will consciously choose to hide how they feel as this is likely to be something that could just happen. If so, their true self will be hidden and they will end up expressing a false self.

After they have been around a friend or a number of friends, they could often end up wondering why they have behaved in this way. Still, before long, they could forget about this and carry on with their life.

What’s going on?

If they were to think about how they behave and how long this has been going on, they may find that they have been this way for most of their life. What could soon enter their mind is that they were simply born this way.

Consequently, they could come to the conclusion that there is nothing that they can do and they will always be this way. Nonetheless, even if they do come to this conclusion, it doesn’t mean that it is the truth.

An Activity

One way for them to attain a deeper understating of why they are this way is for them to imagine that they are with a friend and are expressing how they feel. At first, this might be something that feels good and is a massive relief.

But, after a little while, this might be something that causes them to experience a fair amount of anxiety. Thanks to this, they could feel the need to hide how they feel and to go back to how they were before.

Confusion

If this is what takes place, they could struggle to understand why they feel so uncomfortable when it comes to expressing how they feel and being real. What this may show is that they were not provided with the care that they needed during their formative years.

This may have been a time when they were often left, which would have deeply wounded them. Additionally, they would have come to associate expressing their feelings and needs as something that would cause them to be left and then die.

A Helpless Place

Ultimately, they were deprived of the care that they needed because of what was going on for their parent or parents’, not because there was anything wrong with their feelings and needs. The trouble is that during this stage of their life, they wouldn’t have had the level of development required to realise this and as they were powerless and totally dependent, they wouldn’t have been able to find another family either.

To handle the pain they were in, they would have automatically gone into a shut down state and lost touch with their feelings and a number of their needs. Thus, as changing what was going on wasn’t an option; they had to lose touch with themselves.

A Process

To go from someone who often hides their feelings and needs from others and even themselves will take courage and patience and persistence. This is likely to be a time when they will be working through pain and expressing unmet developmental needs.

Awareness

If someone can relate to this and they are ready to change their life, they may need to reach out for exte
al support. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.