The Emotion You're Avoiding Is Costing You Everything

You're sitting in a meeting. Someone says something that stings. Your chest tightens. Your face flushes. And then you do what you've been trained to do your entire life: you push it down. You smile. You move on. You tell yourself you're fine.

That's not strength. That's avoidance. And it's costing you more than you realize.

Grace Laubenthal knows this intimately. At 16 years old, she hit a bicyclist on her way to work in Iowa. The person died. She was facing potential jail time, an ankle monitor, and a community that suddenly saw her as the person responsible for a tragedy. And the worst part? She couldn't fully feel any of it.

Not because she didn't want to. Because she didn't know how.

What she discovered through years of therapy, coaching, and brutal self-examination is that the emotions we suppress don't disappear. They calcify. They live in your body. They run your subconscious mind on repeat, sabotaging your decisions, your relationships, and your potential, all without you even knowing it's happening.

If you're serious about building a life that actually works, you need to understand what Grace learned: your suppressed emotions are the invisible architecture of your limitations.

The Circle of Sadness Trap: Why We Hide What We Feel

In the Pixar film Inside Out, Joy, the dominant emotion, creates a literal circle for Sadness. The message is darkly funny: Keep sadness contained. Don't let it spread. Everything will be fine if we just manage it.

It's also exactly what most of us do in real life.

We tell ourselves sadness is a distraction. We tell ourselves we don't want to feel it. We tell ourselves that ignoring it is the path to moving forward. And the result? The sadness doesn't stay in the circle. It leaks out sideways. It becomes anger at the wrong person. It becomes anxiety that has no name. It becomes the voice in your head that whispers you're not good enough.

Grace experienced this firsthand. After the accident, she couldn't grieve openly. She couldn't be too sad, her parents would worry. She couldn't be too happy, people would think she didn't care. She existed in this narrow band of acceptable emotion, which meant she existed in a prison of her own making.

"A lot of us shove our emotions," she says in the conversation. "We shove our sadness because A, we think it's a distraction. B, we don't want to feel it. Or C, we just want to ignore it. And I think when we do one of those three things, it just keeps it inside and it gets pushed inside of your head. It stays in your body. And you never allow it to pass through to really open up all of the other emotions that you want to feel as well."

The irony is brutal: the very thing we're trying to avoid, the sadness, the grief, the pain, is the thing that's keeping us stuck.

How Suppressed Emotions Become Subconscious Programming

Here's the neuroscience part that changes everything: 95% of your thoughts are subconscious.

That means the vast majority of what's running your life, your decisions, your reactions, your self-talk, is happening below the surface. You're not consciously choosing it. You're living it out of habit, trauma, and the emotions you never processed.

Grace realized this when she started noticing the stories she was telling herself. This client won't work with me. This deal won't close. I'm not good enough. These weren't random thoughts. They were the echoes of unprocessed fear and shame from the accident, emotions she had stuffed down and never fully felt.

The breakthrough came when she started to notice the pattern itself.

"What I've had to do is I'll notice I tell myself something, oh, this client's not going to work with me. This client is going to work. Like once you start to notice what you're telling yourself, then you can shift it. And so it's just consciously shifting the things that you're saying to yourself. It starts with just noticing it, awareness and then shifting it."

This is the work. Not grand gestures. Not weeks of therapy (though that helped). Just the daily, unglamorous practice of catching yourself mid-thought and asking: Is this true? Or is this the voice of the 16-year-old girl who was terrified?

The emotions you suppress don't disappear. They become the invisible script you live by.

The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything: From Victim to Creator

There's a quote from Dan Sullivan that lives at the center of Grace's transformation: Everything in life happens for you, not to you.

Read that again. Let it land.

When you believe things happen to you, you become a victim. Your power is external. You're at the mercy of circumstances, other people, bad luck. You have no agency. You're just reacting.

When you believe things happen for you, the entire equation flips. You're in the driver's seat. You have power. You have choice. The tragedy, the loss, the hard thing, it's information. It's material. It's calling you toward something.

Grace didn't just survive the accident. She didn't just move past it. She fundamentally rewrote the story she was telling herself about what it meant.

"For anything to change, the only thing that needs to change is you. You're the one in the driver's seat. You have the power and it's your decision."

This isn't toxic positivity. This isn't pretending the hard thing didn't happen. Ryan, the host and a family law attorney, pushes back on this exact point. He asks: How do you feel all your emotions without wallowing in them? How do you move past them without suppressing them?

And Grace's answer is the real insight: you don't do it all at once. You do it every day.

Every morning, you wake up and choose the lens through which you're going to interpret your life. Not because it's easy. Because it's the only way to actually build something.

The Joy You're Missing Lives on the Other Side of Sadness

The most beautiful moment in Inside Out comes when Joy finally understands that she can't exist without Sadness. The core memory that seems to be pure joy, Riley's hockey team celebrating her, only becomes a core memory because it contained sadness first. Riley missed the winning goal. She was devastated. And her team showed up for her anyway.

That's what makes it a core memory. That's what makes it matter.

Grace lives this truth. The greatest moments of joy she experiences now, travel, new places, shared experiences with people she loves, are only possible because she did the work to feel the sadness underneath. She didn't bypass it. She moved through it.

"If you are willing to feel the sadness, you are going to feel the joy so much greater. And so you can't have a great amount of joy without sadness."

This is the trade-off nobody tells you about. You can't have one without the other. You can't have real joy, the kind that sustains you, that builds meaning, without first being willing to feel the full spectrum of what it means to be human.

Three Things You Can Do This Week

If you're serious about breaking the pattern of suppression, here's where to start:

Get curious about what you're avoiding. Don't judge it. Don't try to fix it yet. Just notice: What emotion am I not letting myself feel right now? Sit with it for five minutes. That's it.

Audit your self-talk. Pay attention to what follows "I am." If it's doubt, fear, or limitation, consciously shift it. Say it out loud if you have to. "I am capable. I am worthy. I am learning." This rewires the subconscious script that's been running on repeat.

Do one thing this week that makes you happy. Not someday. Not when things calm down. This week. Golf. Travel. A hike. Time with people you love. The point isn't the activity, it's the practice of honoring what brings you joy instead of postponing it.

Listen to the full conversation with Grace Laubenthal on Yes And Land | More at ridethewave.media/yes-and-land