When You Learn to Cope Before You Learn to Feel

by Rebecca Bloom

Some children learn early that feelings are dangerous.

They learn that tears make adults uncomfortable.

That anger brings criticism.

That sadness is ignored.

That joy is too loud.

So they learn to cope instead of feel.

I was one of those children.

I learned to think instead of cry.

To solve instead of express.

To adapt instead of object.

To be understanding instead of being understood.

It looked mature from the outside.

Inside it was simply survival.

Feeling was not something I avoided because I wanted to.

It was something that had nowhere to go.

No one met my emotions with comfort, so my body learned to tuck them away.

To hide them in quiet places.

To carry pain alone because sharing it never made anything better.

By the time I reached adulthood, coping was all I knew.

It became automatic.

Stay calm.

Stay useful.

Stay agreeable.

Stay small enough not to be a burden.

Stay quiet enough not to make anyone uncomfortable.

But coping without feeling has a cost.

It disconnects you from yourself.

You stop knowing what you want.

You stop recognising your own needs.

You stop hearing the child inside who is still waiting for someone to listen.

Illness changed everything.

My body held decades of swallowed emotions and it finally stopped cooperating.

Pain made coping impossible.

Fatigue made pretending too heavy.

My nervous system demanded honesty.

My body asked for a softness I had never learned.

So now I feel things I avoided for years.

I feel sadness without hiding it.

I feel anger without turning it inward.

I feel fear without shaming myself for being afraid.

And it is uncomfortable.

It is unfamiliar.

But it is real.

Coping kept me alive.

Feeling is helping me become alive.

They are not the same.

This work is slow.

Sometimes messy.

Sometimes overwhelming.

But every time I choose to feel instead of cope, a small part of me learns that emotions do not ruin anything.

They simply reveal what has been waiting to be seen.

Rebecca Bloom