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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THE MOUNTAIN IS YOU
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BRIANNA WIEST
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 sup-
pressing 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 
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 con-
trolling 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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THE MOUNTAIN IS YOU
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BRIANNA WIEST
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 it-
self, 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 chal-
lenge with enough fluidity and reason that we aren’t sti-
fled 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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BRIANNA WIEST
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