We still live in a society that discourages outward signs of emotion. And even though adages like ‘boys don’t cry‘ and ‘nice girls don’t get angry’ are beginning to sound like flashbacks to less enlightened times, the sentiment is still here. From our earliest memories, we are encouraged to deal with our emotions by not dealing with them.
It’s like tidying our room by stuffing all the offending items under the bed. The room looks better, but we haven’t dealt with the problem, and when our room gets untidy again, there’s only so much more we can stuff under it. And there it sits, playing on our minds; we know it’s there and better dealt with, but it’s easier in the short term to avoid it.
As adults, we learn alcohol allows us to not even think about it, but when the party ends, we’ve made another mess. Now everything is starting to spill out; we’ll have to look for more places to hide it.
First, society, and then alcohol, rob us of our ability to deal with emotions in manageable chunks, eventually undermining our capability to deal with them at all.