What Am I Really Bottling Up?

On uncommunicative love, and the weight that quietly builds between two people over years of what's gone unsaid.

Think about a significant relationship, a friend, a family member, a spouse, a parent, a child, a coworker, a neighbour.

Have you been able to talk about things with this person?

Have you been able to express it if you didn’t like how something went?

Or, on the other hand, have you been able to express some of the warm feelings you might have for them? Appreciation and respect, affection, even love. It’s not just negative reactions to other people that get bottled up.

For myself, one of the big lessons for me in my early 20s, when I started getting some very deep tissue bodywork, was that what I had bottled up mainly inside wasn’t so much anger or hurt as I suspected, but in fact, uncommunicative love, which had gotten kind of stagnant inside as a result of my struggles with my parents and what I was withholding from them.

Ask yourself, with this significant person, have you been able to admit fault, maybe express remorse and try to make amends? If we don’t say what we felt bad about, or what we feel good about, or what we wish were different, the weight of what’s unsaid starts to pile up as the days turn into years. I think of two people a little bit like two boats side by side. And the weight of what’s unsaid keeps falling stone by stone, like heavy stones between them, and the weight of its falling starts pushing them bit by bit by bit, farther and farther apart.

In addition to what’s been unsaid, there’s also what’s unresolved, unworked through. Things that bother you, agreements that haven’t been kept, things you wish would be different going forward, maybe in terms of what the other person does or doesn’t do, or how they talk with you. Sometimes it makes sense, on any given day, not to get into it. But as the days turn into years, the impact of what’s been unresolved can really add up for people.

Now, of course, sometimes it’s just not possible to talk about it. The other person may not be alive anymore, or they might be unreachable or unwilling to communicate with you. Or you might think to yourself that it’s just inappropriate, or dangerous, that it could lead to some kind of blowback that would be really problematic. Or maybe you could talk about it with the other person, but it’s really scary, understandably, because if you start talking at all, you’re afraid you’ll take the lid off a whole bunch of stuff that’s going to come out.

With regard to those concerns, very understandable and common ones, it helps to have inner resources first. Things like getting on your own side, being able to calm and center yourself, having compassion for yourself, being able to forgive yourself. Those inner resources matter before the outer skills of how to actually say the words.

That stagnant love, and the weight of what’s unresolved, don’t just sit there neutrally. They shape how you react to people now, sometimes decades later, even when you can’t quite trace the reaction back to where it started. That’s really the piece I keep coming back to in my own work these days: you can understand exactly where something came from and still feel it running the show. What actually reaches it is something more specific than insight, it’s called Linking, and it’s the center of a six-week course I’m teaching a new, live course called The Healing Link. If any of this is landing for you, I’d love to have you join us. You can use code substack10 for 10% off at checkout.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.