Emotions Don't Go Away, They Go Sideways| Music Therapy Vancouver, WA

She’s ten, curled up on the couch next to her dad, watching Brave.

It is near the end, when the fate of the mother is still up in the air and everything hangs in the balance and my daughter is sobbing. Full, real, from-the-gut tears.

My husband, completely caught off guard, says: “It’s a Disney movie. You know what always happens.”

And then he says it.

“You’re overreacting. Why are you being so emotional? It seems like a lot to cry that hard.”

I glared at him.

Then I sat down, pulled her into my shoulder and rubbed her back.

“It’s going to be okay,” I told her quietly. I explained what was about to happen in the scene. Then I just let her cry until it resolved.

But sitting there, I wasn’t just with my daughter.

I was with every version of me that had been handed those exact same words.

“Why are your crying? or Yep, she’s crying again.”

The words were usually accompanied by a look that I knew too well. It was just a comment said, casually, like I was doing something wrong, like it was a flaw I kept repeating.

I don’t remember the exact moment I started feeling ashamed of big feelings. But I remember what I learned to do about it, hide them.

I got really, really good at silent crying.

Shoulders still. Face neutral. Breathing slow. If I was going to cry, I’d make it invisible. I cried through movies and tv shows. I cried in my room and in bathrooms. Quietly, efficiently, alone, so no one would have to deal with it, and always saying “Oh, I’m fine.”

I got so good at making my feelings disappear from view and masking them with humor that I started to believe that’s what “handling it” meant.

What I didn’t understand is that disappearing from view isn’t the same as going away.

Here’s the thing nobody actually told us about emotions.

We were taught they’re either good or bad. Happy, excited, proud — those are fine. Express those all day. But sadness, anger, resentment, grief? Those make people uncomfortable. So we learn to label them “bad” and push them down.

And the whole framework is wrong.

Because here’s the truth:

"You don’t control your emotions. You never did. Emotions just exist. They’re a response to what’s happening around you and inside you. Your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do."

The only thing you actually choose is what you do with a feeling once you know it’s there.

If you pull up an emotions wheel, there are at least 120 named human emotions, all of them tracing back to six core feelings: happy, surprised, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted.

Now honestly ask yourself: how many of those six are you actually allowed to show in public?

One. Maybe two on a good day.

So what happens to the rest? We shut them down. Push them under. Let them build in the body until we either explode, or we go completely numb. We carry it in our jaws. Our shoulders. Our gut. We become people who can’t access our own feelings anymore because we’ve been locking the door for so long.

And if you ever were brave enough to let something out, and got met with “you’re overreacting” or dismissal or an eye roll, you learned something that runs even deeper: it isn’t safe to share, so you stopped.

There are no bad emotions. Only unexpressed ones.

I don’t work from a “good emotions vs. bad emotions” framework. I work from expressed and held.

The way you feel is real. It is valid, and there is a reason for it. Holding it in, white-knuckling your way through the grief or the rage or the longing, doesn’t make it go away. It makes it go sideways, into your body, into your relationships, into the low hum of anxiety you’ve started to mistake for just who you are.

That feeling of barely keeping your head above water and not knowing what’s going to drown you. The numbing that that takes over your body so that you can make it through the day is not the only way to live. That’s not who you are. That’s your nervous system, overloaded.

Expressing yourself isn’t weakness. It isn’t “too much.” It isn’t something that needs to happen more quietly, more privately, or only after you’ve checked whether everyone around you is comfortable first.

It’s brave. It’s healthy. And it might be one of the most basic human needs we keep talking each other out of.

So what do we actually do with all of this?

This is where music comes in as a tool.

Think about it for a second. People get paid millions of dollars to make music because they figured out how to take something they were feeling and put it into sound, and then we get to receive it, recognize ourselves in it, and release something we’ve been carrying. That’s not an accident. That’s exactly what music is designed to do, make us feel.

Have you ever gotten goosebumps when a song came on? Cried in the car to a song that your felt every word? Wanted to scream along to something? Felt this sudden, overwhelming urge to just move?

That’s your body recognizing something it needs to express.

In music therapy, we use that on purpose. Instrument playing, because there is something about hitting a drum when you’re angry that reaches somewhere words just can’t get to. Songwriting and lyric work to give space to express with a purpose through creating. Listening to existing songs to validate what’s happening in your body when you don’t have your own words for it yet, because I promise you, someone already wrote the song for what you’re going through.

Music is the first step. The first permission. The first place where the feeling gets to come out without anyone telling you you’re overreacting.

This week’s invitation.

What if, instead of ignoring and stuffing down your feelings you got curious about what they’re trying to tell you?

This week, when something big comes up, don’t push it down. Don’t manage it. Just put on the song that most closely matches what’s in your body right now. Let it play. Let yourself feel it, without explaining it to anyone.

That’s it. The whole thing. Just feel it and don’t hold it in.

How to continue the journey.

If you are exhausted from trying to hold everything together, and can’t imagine being able to continue living that way. Pushing down your emotions is not sustainable, and it can slowly destroys you from the inside out.

If you need change, need a space to be seen and heard, if you want to feel again, this space is for you. Subscribe to Found. Unfiltered. Free, get more hints and information about how you can Express, Reclaim, and Celebrate yourself.

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