Hide emotions.

Have you ever met someone who is always the same? Or that you can never truly know what is happening to you?

These people, for one reason or another, are fully identified with a mask that is rigid and inflexible and always shows the same thing. Through it, they protect themselves and, in turn, do not let others access their true world.

Emotions are, in addition to unavoidable and involuntary affections, a form of communication. Through good emotional communication, we can transmit to others what we feel, and based on this, others will have valuable information to respond and facilitate the exchange.

Sometimes emotions get in the way. When they explode abruptly and get out of our control. For this reason, we have been socially transmitted that emotions can be dangerous. For a long time, upbringing and education were aimed at emotional repression. Good manners and etiquette rules seek to equalize us and prevent some outbursts from emerging inappropriately.

Free emotion is associated with the primitive, and humanity long believed that keeping them at bay was a symbol of civilization. However, today we know that emotions must be accepted and known. Strict emotional repression only enhances, sooner or later, these explosions. We do not know them and therefore, they expand in strange lands. They become agents of ourselves that we cannot recognize as our own.

Product of this strict emotional repression and impostures arises in many people a distance from their own emotional world, putting in social situations and sometimes permanently, a mask that always shows the same thing. For the environment, that individual becomes indecipherable and is presented as inaccessible in terms of slightly deeper or more intimate aspects.

We could think that it works under the parameters of the phrase: «as they see you they treat you» transforming consciously or unconsciously into a banner of the social image. Some adopt a correct and compliant image, showing what is socially expected. Others exercise the famous Poker Face, that is, neutral gestures, which become unknown to the interlocutor.

In one way or another in these cases, the mask, whatever it may be, remains inflexibly installed and is confused with the true identity of the subject. 

For Carl Jung, everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, puts on a mask to move in society. The mask allows us to perform in a job, for example, with the characteristics that are required in that area, leaving out those that correspond to a more intimate space. The problem would be whether we identify with this mask, convincing ourselves that this is all we are. This happens in many cases with people who are fully identified with their professional role or with any role they play in their lives.

The mask we are talking about here is the one that becomes inflexible, that cannot be separated from the subject and that is invariably exercised over time, avoiding a true connection with their emotions and deeper aspects.

Hiding emotions in this way prevents us from being able to genuinely bond. It becomes a defense against the world that ends up distancing the person from her emotionality, ignoring it, and denying it.

 

Thank You