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

Content: Even during lesser travails, suppression often seems the best we can do. . . . Mostly, we suppress emotions as a way to avoid expressing them. All social groups, beginning with the family, develop their own sets of good manners and mores which govern the acceptable and unacceptable times for emotional expression. A society full of people all spontaneously expressing their emotions threatens unending chaos. In order to form polite, civil, working groups, individuals must somehow control their emotional energies; 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.