Trying my best to supress or ignore negative emotions. 
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Hi Ruth,
This is actually a common thing that a lot of people do. And why not, right? The logic is that negative emotions makes you feel bad, you don’t want to feel bad, so you ignore it instead. However, this can lead to more problems down the line. If you’ve ever seen someone explode or breakdown because of a minor inconvenience, that is likely the result of not acknowledging your feelings. By ignoring your emotions, it builds up in the background until it finds a way to just release all that pent up emotion.
It is important to understand that feelings are a reflection of what’s happening in our lives. If you get good news, you feel happy. If you’re looking forward to something, you feel excited. If someone does something nice for you, you feel grateful. But in the same way, if someone wrongs you, you get angry. If you lose someone you care for, you feel sad. If you’ve been working on the same problem for a while now but cannot seem to solve it, you feel frustrated. We need to understand that emotions are normal; even the bad ones. We feel them because we are human and we are alive. Sure, the negative emotions make us feel bad, but it’s supposed to. That’s how you know you’re still in a healthy mental state. Feeling nothing or numb can actually be a bad sign in most cases.
The mistake that a lot of people make is to think that negative emotions are bad and therefore should not be felt. But in reality, the problem is not the negative emotion, but how we deal with it. If someone insults me deeply and I get angry, that’s okay, that’s supposed to happen; but if someone insults me deeply, I get angry, and I attack them, that’s wrong. If I lose someone I love and I get sad, that’s okay, that’s supposed to happen; if I lose someone, I get sad, and I drink everyday to forget the pain, that’s wrong. So it’s not about getting rid of the bad emotions; it’s about finding better ways to manage it and cope with it. Because that’s life.
If you have been holding your emotions back for a long time, I would really suggest potentially talking to a professional about this to find better coping mechanisms to deal with it. Unraveling all that pent up emotion can be scary and maybe even unmanageable for some people.
I hope you are doing okay and have found this helpful.
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