The Mountain Is You

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU’RE SUPPRESSING YOUR
EMOTIONS OR CONTROLLING THEM?
Emotional suppression is a regulation strategy that people use when they do
not have adequate coping mechanisms for their feelings.
The pattern is often this: The person denies or ignores their true reaction to
a situation or experience, believes it will simply go away if they continue to
disregard it, finds that their day-to-day lives are disrupted by a sense of un-
ease, and one day, it all comes to a breaking point and they have an
emotional outburst that they cannot control.
Therapy generally aims to help patients no longer suppress how they feel.
Instead, they are encouraged to recognize those emotions but choose how
they respond to them.
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In the healing process, suppressing and controlling can seem like a fine line.
When someone cuts you off in traffic and you choose not to yell out your
window, are you suppressing how you feel or controlling it? If your partner
says yet another idiotic thing and you choose not to respond to it, are you
suppressing how you feel or controlling it? If your coworker aggravates you
consistently about a project and you choose not to say anything, are you
suppressing how you feel or controlling it?
SUPPRESSING IS UNCONSCIOUS; CONTROLLING IS

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CONSCIOUS.
Suppressed emotions function similarly to unconscious biases. One such
type of bias is confirmation bias, wherein your brain sorts through stimuli to
bring your attention to facts or experiences that support what you already
believe. Though you’re not aware of the bias, it’s still affecting you.
On the other hand, controlling your emotions involves becoming more
conscious of how you feel. You are aware that you are angry, sad, or
aggrieved, but you are choosing what you do about it. It is not really that
you are controlling your emotions, but your behavior.
When you are suppressing your emotions, you don’t know how you feel
and your behavior seems out of control.
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When you’re controlling your emotions, you do know how you feel, and
your behavior seems within your control.
The answer is that when you’re in traffic, or in an argument, or dealing with
a difficult coworker, you should be aware of how you feel but still in
control of how you respond.
Emotions are temporary, but behaviors are permanent.
You are always responsible for how you choose to act.
We often think that the measure of physical strength is how much weight
we can bear, how long we can run, or how pronounced our muscles are. In
reality, physical strength is a measure of how efficiently the body runs

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itself, how capable it is of effectively performing day-to-day tasks and
occasional challenges when they arise.
Mental health is the exact same way. It is not a measure of how happy we
seem, how perfect things are, or how unconditionally “positive” we can be,
but that we are able to move through day-to-day life and the occasional
challenge with enough fluidity and reason that we aren’t stifled or held back
by ourselves.
Amy Morin very famously disclosed some of the things that mentally
strong people don’t do. Identifying their habits and behaviors is essential,
but what if you just aren’t there yet? If you want to become a mentally
strong person, this is where you begin.
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L E A R N I N G T O T R U S T Y O U R S E L F A G A I N
Inner peace is the state of being connected to the deep internal knowing that
everything is okay and always will be. The concept of finding one’s “inner
peace” has been part of spiritual and metaphysical practices for centuries
and has just recently become more mainstream with the development of
popular psychology.
Albert Camus once said: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within
me, an invincible summer.”
That sums up the entirety of what inner peace really is: the understanding
that no matter what is happening around you, there is a place of total
knowing and calmness within you. Not only are you capable of returning to
that place when you need to, but it’s possible to live your entire life from
there. The challenge is learning how to connect with it in the first place and

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rewire how you respond to your mind, which is always jumping from one
worst-case scenario to the next.
You know when people reference knowing something
“deep down?” They say things like: “I’m worried, but deep down, I know
it’s going to be okay.” Or, “I’m angry at him, but deep down, I know he
loves me.” What do you think they are referencing? Where is deep down?
They’re talking about the place within them that has an infinite wisdom, a
better understanding, and a more insightful perspective of what’s going on.
It isn’t shaken by the stressors or fears that the mind wants to offer.
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So much of the process of finding inner peace is being able to get to that
“deep down” place where you know and feel that ultimately everything will
be okay.
There’s another metaphor in meditation in which calmness is compared to
steadying a lake or a large body of water. Your thoughts and actions are like
stones in the water: They create a ripple effect. The point of meditation is to
make yourself quiet enough so that the water comes back to its natural
stillness. You don’t have to force the water to be still. It does it on its own
when you stop interrupting it.
The same goes for finding inner peace. It’s not so much something you
have to create as it is something you have to return to.
C R E AT I N G A L I G N E D G O A L S
One of the most important parts of discovering your inner peace is that you
trade in your desire for “happiness.”

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Unfortunately, happiness is fickle. It can lead you to being attached to
certain achievements, belongings, or specific circumstances. It can lead you
to become dependent on other people’s opinions or life unfolding in a