Suppression starts quite early. If you have an angry father or an emotionally checked-out mother, you will learn to suppress your own emotions. These family dynamics can vary, which suggests that they never learned the skill to process their emotions and become emotionally mature. 

Emotional maturity means successfully labeling your feelings, which are not just happiness and sadness. It is a range of emotions, pleasant and unpleasant, that show up in our lives, sometimes uninvited, asking for our attention. Once we see them without judging them, we successfully process them. Many people aren’t even aware they have emotions; they are conditioned not to feel them or consider them as weakness.

When people avoid feeling their emotions, they project them outward, making someone else responsible for their feelings.

When you suppress anger, you blame someone else and project it further by saying, “ I wouldn’t be so irritated if you weren’t so careless.” The anger inside never gets owned, so it looks for a culprit. It’s the same with other emotions as well. When fear is suppressed, you start controlling others around you to manage this unacknowledged fear. When you don’t feel good enough inside yourself or see your own flaws, it’s easy to criticize others for their achievements.

When sadness is suppressed, an emotional distance is created from others. When shame is suppressed, it creates a sense of moral superiority, i.e., judging others for the very thing that feels unbearable inside.

Emotions do not disappear magically. They stay inside the body and live like unprocessed knots. The body eventually becomes heavy and disease-laden. These diseases are typically the unprocessed emotions that the body carries. These emotions further affects money decisions, relationships, self-worth, headaches, overthinking, exhaustion, impulsive spending, avoidance etc.

Money might be logical, but decisions about money are deeply emotional. When emotions aren’t felt, money becomes the outlet.

Suppressed Shame leads to bad spending choices. If deep down you don’t feel good enough, and you haven’t been able to feel that. Then it shows up as spending to appear successful, buying status instead of value, feeling anxious after spending, but unable to spend. Money turns into performance.

Supressed Anger leads to impulsive choices, and suppressed anxiety may lead to overthinking and decision paralysis. When this and other emotions remain unfelt, their children pay a heavy price for this, as they inherit patterns they haven’t experienced. Children can experience:

• Fear-based Financial Habits.

• Confusion between wealth and worth.

• Money rules without emotional context.