Emotional Repression Quotes

I could never, ever talk to my father. I really loved him, but we couldn't talk about anything together. There was this really British thing that being even remotely emotional was absolutely verboten.

When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know.

Fear. People are afraid of talking about their fears and insecurities. They're afraid of expressing emotion beyond anger, dominance, or power, and they're afraid of getting in touch with their feminine side.

It's been so long since I've let myself feel anger that I don't just feel it. It covers my mouth and I swallow it down, the taste sharp and metal as though I'm gnawing through foilware.

A lot of times, men like to keep stuff in and that's the worst thing that you can do.

I grew up in a household where we didn't really talk about our feelings, and where the only reason you went to a doctor was because you'd accidentally cut off a limb with a chain saw.

The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.

With my feelings, I hold a lot in, because I didn't always have boundaries and people would take advantage of situations because I'm a nice guy.

I am convinced that the majority of people to-day have good, generous feelings which they can never know, never experience, because of some fear, some repression. I do not believe that people would be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us.

The mealy look of men today is the result of momism and so is the pinched and baffled fury in the eyes of womankind.

I had always held everything in before.

I'm not an emotional person; I keep it in, and I wouldn't know how to get it out if it weren't for acting and writing.

Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again… I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O’Neill were laughing.

I realised one day that men are emotional cripples. We can't express ourselves emotionally, we can only do it with anger and humour. Emotional stability and expression comes from women.

I think a lot of people don't actually know me. They think, 'She's like this,' or, 'She's like that.' They say I have no emotions - I do, but you couldn't see them then. I had to keep them inside.

When I was growing up, I wasn't taught how to feel or communicate feelings.

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.

When you lock everything down tight so that the pain can't get out, you also keep good stuff from getting in.

Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

There's a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.

All through life I've harbored anger rather than expressed it at the moment.

To be silent. In hopes of not offending, in hopes of being accepted. But what happened to people who never spoke, never raised their voices? Kept everything inside? Gamache knew what happened. Everything they swallowed, every word, thought, feeling rattled around inside, hollowing the person out. And into that chasm they stuffed their words, their rage.

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.