The cause of stress is always the same: You experience a situation in which you feel too overwhelmed, confused, or scared to express your true feelings. You’re fighting for your own life with your own situations and it feel as though you are losing. Please note the enemy comes in different circumstances, problems and ordeals. Whatever the problem, if it seems too big to solve, you may believe you have no choice but to internalize your fear and anger. I called this stress-rolling, it’s displaced aggression, triggered by our need to dump our anger on someone else, and someone we know won’t fight back! So, wrong!
Unfortunately, feelings don’t want to stay hidden. Like water held back in a dam, they are always pushing, seeking a way out. A crack or small break will do. The “crack” in our ability to suppress negative feelings in relationships is when our defenses are lowest, our fears smallest. Our hidden feelings seep or burst out when we’re with people we trust or who aren’t in a position to resist us.
To eliminate a tendency to stress-roll, you first have to notice it in the other people; one sign that you are stress-rolling maybe feelings of shame or guilt. This might show up if you have rolled your negativity onto someone else. Deep down your conscience will be whispering “I’m not being fair”. Listen up!
The key to stress-rolling is to remember no matter how much stress we roll downhill, no matter how we justify the rolling, ultimately we still have to deal with the situation that caused our disconnect. The only thing stress-rolling accomplishes is the creation of new enemies out of old allies (or potential allies) a classic lose-lose situation. So the moment you get the slightest inkling that you’re stress-rolling, excuse yourself, take some deep breaths, and determine what’s really bothering you, because the core issue is often so upsetting that you have pushed it out of your consciousness, you may not be able to articulate it at first. Cheers!