Feelings you won't let yourself have

What this means

Of the three parts this test scores, feelings is the one that stands out in your answers. You can live with most of your flaws and most of your history well enough. What you will not make peace with is certain feelings. Jealousy makes you harder on yourself than anything you actually did. Being upset gets hidden from the people close to you, because you have ruled the feeling unreasonable. A bad mood is not allowed to just be a mood; it has to be explained, and the explanation usually ends with something wrong with you. And still being affected by something you think you should be over annoys you too.

The mechanism is exile. The feeling is not just unwelcome. It is cast as not really you, something to be hidden, managed or argued out of existence. That has a predictable cost. Exiled feelings do not leave. They get louder, because every attempt to push them out reminds you they are there. The person who cannot accept their jealousy ends up thinking about jealousy all the time. The person who will not allow sadness often stays sad longer, with a layer of self-criticism on top.

Often the forbidden feeling is one that was not welcome early on: anger in a home where only one person was allowed to be angry, need where needing things was seen as weakness, tears that got you teased. The rule made sense then. It is worth asking whether it still does.

In a relationship, an exiled feeling tends to come out sideways. The hurt you decided was unreasonable shows up a week later as irritation about something else, and your partner ends up arguing about the wrong subject.

How this differs from alexithymia and avoidance

The alexithymia test is about finding words for feelings. Here you can usually name them perfectly well; you just will not allow some of them. The experiential avoidance test looks at the ways people steer around unwanted inner states in general. This result is about the verdict you pass on yourself once the feeling is already here.

What to do next

Name the feeling in one plain sentence, as a description rather than a charge: "I get jealous more easily than most people." "I am still hurt about the wedding." Saying it plainly is the first step out of exile.

Let one feeling run for ten minutes without judging yourself for having it. Feelings that are allowed usually pass faster than feelings that are fought.

Then tell one person you trust about a feeling you would normally hide, without the apology attached. Feelings like this tend to lose much of their charge once said out loud.

If you want a place to say that sentence for the first time, Lovon is there for that.