Swallowing Poison: Why You’re About to Explode

Someone asks you what is wrong. You clench your jaw, force a smile, and say the three most dangerous words in the English language.

“I am fine.”

You think you are being strong. You tell yourself you are keeping the peace. You pride yourself on being low maintenance.

But you are not keeping the peace. You are hoarding the war.

Imagine a pressure cooker on a hot stove. If you weld the steam valve shut to keep it quiet, you have not made the kitchen safer. You have turned an appliance into a bomb.

The Body Keeps the Score

We tend to think of emotions as abstract thoughts that live in the clouds. But neuroscience tells us that emotions are physical, chemical events.

When you are angry or hurt, your body floods with cortisol and adrenaline. This is energy. And physics tells us that energy cannot be destroyed. It can only be moved.

When you do not speak, that energy does not vanish. It goes into your tissues.

It becomes the migraine at 2:00 PM. It becomes the chronic back pain that no chiropractor can fix. It becomes the sudden, irrational rage when you drop a spoon in the kitchen.

Your body is keeping a ledger of every time you swallowed your truth. And the bill is coming due.

Conflict Accumulation

We avoid difficult conversations because we are scared of the blowup. We don’t want the awkwardness. We don’t want the fight.

But the Realist knows that conflict avoidance is actually conflict accumulation.

By avoiding the five minute argument today, you are guaranteeing the nuclear meltdown next year. You are trading a moment of discomfort for a lifetime of resentment.

Psychologists call this Gunnysacking.

Imagine you are carrying a burlap sack on your back. Every time your spouse annoys you or your boss disrespects you, and you say nothing, you put a rock in the sack.

At first, it is manageable. But eventually, the sack gets too heavy to carry. One day, someone makes a tiny mistake, and you dump the entire sack on them. You scream about things that happened three years ago.

You look crazy to them because the reaction does not match the event. But they don’t see the sack.

The Sanitation Protocol

We need to stop viewing confrontation as being mean. We need to view it as sanitation.

You take the trash out of your house every week. You don’t do it because you hate your garbage can. You do it because if you don’t, the house will rot.

You must do the same with your grievances.

To do this, I use The 24-Hour Rule.

If something bothers you, you have twenty-four hours to bring it up.

• If you bring it up, you can solve it.
• If you do not bring it up within twenty-four hours, you lose the right to be angry about it. You must let it go completely.

This rule forces you to choose. You must either speak (fix it) or release (forgive it). No hoarding allowed.

Pop the Blister

You are currently holding onto a poison pill. There is something you wanted to say to your boss, your spouse, or your friend three weeks ago, but you swallowed it.

Say it today.

You don’t need a fight. You just need to empty the sack. Try this script:

“Hey, I have been carrying this for a while and I need to put it down so we can be good again.”

Speaking your mind is uncomfortable. But it is less painful than rotting from the inside out.