What happens when one contains their emotions?

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Think of your subconscious as a steam engine. Feelings suppressed go into the boiler. The boiler turns them into steam. The steam goes into the pressure chamber. The pressure chamber has an outlet to the engine. Your state of mind, your mood, is that engine. Your engine can just pipe the steam back down into the chamber, or it can apply torque to something.

The only thing that relieves the pressure under the boiler is to deliberately release it into something. If you suppress your feelings, the boiler will get more and more pressurized until it exceeds the designed rating, then it blows up.

This hilarious scene in Pulp Fiction illustrates how this generally works. Leading up to this scene, Vincent just couldn’t do anything right. His carelessness landed them both in the situation and his immaturity was just making it worse and worse. He’s suppressing his immature wish for it all to just go away and it’s just building up.

Here is where the pressure starts to overfill. Vincent needs to say something, to apply torque, to take some action to try to get to where he needs to be. But he has no idea what to say or how to say it because this situation is way beyond his understanding. He needs to apologize but doesn’t know how to do that. So he just starts to describe his own mental state thinking Jules is just going to accept that and let it all go. This is the pressure boiling up and just releasing, instead of going into the engine for directed action.

Jules, on the other hand, has a much better grip on his own emotions, and uses it to shut Vincent down hard. Instead of Vincent’s undirected blithering, Jules aims squarely at Vincent and releases all of his steam, directly at him. When he’s done, he realizes a solution to his anger, which is to switch, so his final engine torque is to demand a change to the situation.

Jules didn’t have to blow up then, he had been keeping a lid on it throughout the whole situation and he could have just chastised Vincent again like he did after the hand washing deal. But it didn’t help before and it wasn’t going to help now. Where reason fails, anger and confrontation are usually the next steps.

So what happened to Vincent’s steam after Jules blew up at him? Well, this is where the steam engine metaphor starts to break down. We’re not mere engines. The pressure from suppressing emotions tends to reduce sharply any time one can even just talk about what’s going on with someone else. The mind is holding on to it, and the human connection caused it to release.