As a child we need to feel it is safe to experience our true feelings. When this sense of safety is not present we feel we have to split or numb, denying the truth of what we feel to gain a parent’s approval. Permission needs to be given to us in terms of parent’s allowing and mirroring or mediating the child’s true feelings.. When this permission and allowing is not available it leads to fears of rejection. This is something I have been experiencing in therapy finally, the feeling if I am a mess or truly authentic emotionally I may be rejected.. In addition, when our parent’s feel threatened by our feelings due to their difficulty with their own, our authenticity has to be sacrificed, we do what we can to ‘belong’ and not be ignored. We may learn to fawn or freeze.
When one does not feel safe to be vulnerable then one also cannot mature emotionally. A person who can not experience true feelings remains immature on some level and out of this immaturity we will have problems relating to others. Being accepted for our feelings means we are loved because of who we are, not how we behave. Behavior modification techniques used on children lead to them sacrificing themselves but the real feelings stay inside of us and then appear as mental health issues later in life.
As Gabor Mate writes
While the expression of an emotion can be inhibited, or even its conscious experience blocked, the emotion itself is energy that cannot be obliterated. By banishing feelings from awareness, we merely send them underground, a locked cellar of emotions that will continue to haunt many lives.
Speaking from his own experience
I know for myself that the early hardening of my heart to my own pain shielded me not only from grief but also from joy, Rediscovering joy – or better yet, discovering it newly – remains part of my life’s journey to this day.
When as adults we can allow these feeling expression we can actually find a way to liberate ourselves from depression and anxiety. Much of our anxiety often involves a fear that if we ever took the risk to be emotionally real some terrible disaster may befall us, so feelings of anxiety may attend the liberation of repressed emotion, in my experience, if our emotional expression was not encouraged.
Emerging From The Dark Night 