I’ve written a few articles dealing with emotions, namely Learning to Cry and The Acidity of Anger. As the names of those posts suggest, they detail the challenges people face in responding properly to and effectively processing sorrow and anger. This concept is the essence of our next mind-killer, Suppression—a failure to integrate emotional energy, whether accidental or intentional. As with our last mind-killer, Storytelling, I want to build on previous work and make things accretive, not redundant. So, before proceeding further, please read these two articles, even if only as a refresher.
In summary, we often view ourselves from a strictly material perspective, as if we are nothing more than matter. But we function via energy. It differentiates our living selves from the moment we cease to be. It animates us. One way to frame these two elements is to consider our bodies as the matter portion and our minds as the energy portion. It’s not quite this simple, but it’s an adequate model for general purposes. These components are connected via our nervous systems. It’s the highway on which our internal energy moves. And an enormous piece of that energy is our emotions. It’s how we process our experiences.
However, when we resist the healthy expression of certain emotions, we often end up with trapped energy within us. Bessel van der Kolk refers to this as a “body memory” in his outstanding book, The Body Keeps the Score. This situation can lead to ongoing mental and physical dysfunction in our daily lives.
If you find that difficult to believe, consider the concept of memory itself. We retain the information from our existence within the organic matter of our brains. We can further retrieve this data at will. Nobody disputes this. But neurons exist in other parts of us as well. Whose to say that a particularly traumatic memory can’t be kept within your solar plexus, liver, or other tissues? After all, if we don’t integrate the energy from our experiences properly, it doesn’t just vanish. It has to go somewhere.
What causes an emotional backlog depends on the person. Some are very young and cannot deal with a traumatic event. Others continually bottle up frustration with a partner or friend. Or they may be unwilling to express their grief over a tragic loss as adults. This means that the emotions in question are primarily variants of the two aforementioned, although they can be accompanied by others like guilt, shame, and regret.
While storytelling deals with what we think about certain past occurrences, suppression concerns how we feel about it. More specifically, it’s how we respond to how we feel. It’s the other half of the equation in conditions like PTSD. And it can go on for years or decades, eventually crippling us from the inside out.
I first learned how much of an issue this was for me through the use of psychedelics, specifically psilocybin. Under its influence, I released an absolute deluge of what one facilitator called “divine energy.” Basically, I cried for hours, and I recounted this experience in Episode 9 of the RARE SENSE Podcast if you are interested in learning more. It opened my eyes to the fact that while both mental and physical healing modalities had been necessary during my journey, there was another type I had yet to consider that was equally important—emotional, the energy between the two.
As a service member, I experienced a lot of tragedy. Many friends died in extremely violent circumstances. They were shot, blown up, or impacted the ground at terminal velocity. My father also passed away at the age of fifty-nine from a sudden heart attack while I was on deployment in Afghanistan. It was only a few weeks after I had informed him on a satellite call that my wife and I were expecting our first child, and he would be a grandfather.
In a flash, that all changed. I went from conducting combat operations one day to flying home the next to be with my mom, brother, and sister for the memorial service, then returning overseas to finish the tour. A few months later, my son was born. Three weeks after that, I once again departed for another deployment. Through all of it, I barely cried. And I always did so reluctantly and within the confines of what I deemed acceptable for a modern warrior. Consider how much sorrow is warranted throughout that scenario and how little I allowed myself to express.
Conceptually, none of this is unique to me, though. Every veteran I know has experienced the death of teammates while serving our country. Professions like police officers and firefighters witness tragedy all the time. Everyone has lost or will lose a loved one to disease, an accident, or simply old age.
Yet many of us resist expressing sadness whenever a situation calls for it—maybe our entire adult lives. Of course, our job may require us to put our emotions on hold to ensure the team's safety. But even when off the clock and in our homes, we find ourselves pushing back, especially alpha types, who perceive such behavior as weak. The more we do this, the more it becomes second nature.
Interlaced with this sadness is often the curious case of anger. When we don’t allow the energy of our grief to flow correctly, we can end up overcompensating by leaning into our rage instead. The result is an emotional imbalance that can severely impact those around us. This was certainly the case for me when I exited the military. I could fly off the handle easily and did so in wholly inappropriate ways on more than one occasion.
Of course, others stifle their anger due to societal norms or (understandably) not wanting to hurt others. Like sorrow, they can bottle their angst and keep it to themselves. However, regardless of how we have maladapted the flow of this emotion, we are still dealing with an issue that traces back to suppression.
This gets increasingly pressurized over time until we are ready to burst, like shaking a carbonated drink with the top still on. You can even think of it like holding in a fart. The gas doesn’t disappear. It simply festers inside of you and gets worse. Now think about doing this repeatedly, never allowing any of it out. How long would you last before it became excruciatingly painful and disruptive to your life?
That analogy, while crude, isn’t any different from how we treat our emotions. Much like flatulence, the energy is a biological necessity. But we must also figure out the right time, place, and way to release it. And do so in a way that causes the least negative impact on those around us. Then, we can adopt practices that keep us emotionally healthier in the first place.
These are the subjects of my next article, where I’ll discuss the countermeasure of Integration.
DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.