Title: The Costs of Suppression
Headings: The Costs of Suppression
The Costs of Suppression
Flow

Content: maturing socially means learning to rein in one’s natural (but childish) tendency for emotional expression. Yet while emotional suppression may sometimes serve a useful purpose, over the course of a lifetime, inhibiting the free flow of emotional energies causes serious damage to our bodies, minds, and spirits. Our efforts to stifle emotion become a stifling of life itself. Though the symptoms vary, most people die from a slow suicide of self-strangulation. Therefore, it behooves us to understand just how badly emotional suppression injures us, even as we find healthier ways to deal with ever-flowing emotional energies. Emotional suppression causes systemwide dysfunction and disease. When we suppress an emotion, the energy of that emotion does not go away. Instead, it subsides—it sinks deeper. Rather than resolve the emotional energy through some some form of response, we choose (however unconsciously) to hold it inside. Though the immediacy of the feeling may pass, the energy does not.