Express It or Repress It!

                 Healing Happens 

An essay chronicling a journey of healing

By Doug Johnson

Express It or Repress It!

Repressed Expression Leads to Violence, Disease and Depression.

Expressed Repression Leads to Harmony, Wholeness and the

I’m a big fan of expression.  Not only have I found it to be fundamental to living a healthy and happy life, but I found it to be the cornerstone of my own healing.  You can’t heal what you can’t express.  Expression is the vessel within which the aspects of ourselves that are in need of healing are able to travel from the unconscious into the subconscious and can then permeate consciousness where true healing is possible.

Throughout the course of our lives we repress, conceal, excommunicate, disenfranchise, fail to honor and attempt to completely snuff out different aspects of ourselves in order that our basic needs may be met.  These repressed aspects of ourselves don’t die or completely disappear.  Instead, they fester inside of us, wreaking whatever havoc in our lives they must in order to get our attention.  They make us ill, whether emotionally, mentally, physically, and/or spiritually.  They manipulate and destroy any and all aspects of our exterior lives.  We go on being “strong” just as we’ve been taught, trying to remain unaffected and forever ignoring our interior lives.  We become addicted to any assortment of unhealthy and healthy things to keep ourselves from feeling what is going on inside of us.

Meanwhile, the repressed aspects of ourselves continue their mission of emancipation, hoping to become one with us once again.  Their means are very clever indeed.  These repressed aspects bring us into situations that will reflect and illuminate their state of repression; draw us to causes, legitimate or not, that reflect their cause; and cast our judgment at those whose actions somehow mirror our actions toward them.

Western society, with it’s dependence upon all things left-brained and it’s constant debasing of all things right-brained, has rendered us so incapable of understanding our interior lives that we are left to blame any and all of our pain and misfortunes on external factors.  We routinely buy into the belief that other people, events and circumstances have victimized us.

I suffered from depression off and on for many years.  At nine years old, I became cognizant of my pain and started trying to alleviate my pain by various means.  By the time I was a senior in high school I realized that none of those means, among them athletics, playing music, religion, girls, and doing well in school had helped.

It was then that I took a psychology class and was convinced that psychology held the answers for me.  Over the next ten years, despite seeing a professional psychologist and reading several psychology and self-help books, my depression had only worsened.

Soon after I turned 27, my depression staged a powerful, all-out offensive front taking me to new depths and immobilizing me there.  I was having a very hard time functioning and had become a hostage to a mind I no longer had control of.  My sister urged me to try professional therapy again, but after ten years of unsuccessfully turning to psychology for answers, I held little doubt that a professional therapist could help.  Then again, the thought of continuing to live the way I had been living was absolutely unacceptable, as was death.  I finally vowed to do whatever I had to do in order to truly heal. 

I set aside all of my goals and began what was to become a three-year journey – the journey of the dark (k)night.  It was a dreadful but amazing time in my life.  It was absolutely the toughest thing I had or have ever done in my life.  Not surprisingly, it was also the most profoundly impacting event of my life, rivaled only by becoming a father.  I can not imagine having lived the last 13 years of my life still suffering from the pain and depression I was suffering when I began the journey.

The first six months were very tough, but eventually things began to click, and synchronicity began routinely showing its face right on cue.  I don’t subscribe to any definitions or character portraits of God these days, but it has been my experience that there is a magical, mystical energy that affects life.  I call this God.  On my healing journey, my experience was that God would not heal me (despite my begging and my pleas), but that God would show me what I needed to do to heal myself.

Over this three-year journey, I was lead to some incredible people and sources of information that were instrumental to my healing.  An open mind and a discerning heart were requisite.  The people ranged from a traditional licensed psychologist to people on the fringes of the healing arts and many in between.  The sources of information ranged from books, lyrics, lectures, radio shows, overhearing a few words from a nearby conversation, a transient’s off-the-cuff remarks, to a voice that spoke to me one night for three hours while meditating.

There were a few experiences in my healing journey that were monumental.  The first was giving up my victimhood.  Most of the world’s major philosophies and religions, including Christianity, sight the principle of “free will”.  According to this principle, everything in our lives is of our own will.  How could that be?  Who in their right mind would choose to experience the situations that cause us great pain and suffering?  No one it seems.  But this principle comes from the realm of the eternal, the spiritual – not the realm of the mind. 

When I first heard the principle of free will I was twelve years old.  I immediately reasoned that it couldn’t be, but in my gut I sensed the truth of it.  Now, fourteen years later, I accepted this principle into my life.  I soon became aware not only of how often I played the victim, but of how much easier it was to be the victim…or so I thought!

About a year later, I had an experience that helped me realize the truth of the principle of free will on a deeper level.  While working with a gifted massage therapist who used several different methods to induce self-awareness, I found myself transported to a bizarre but blissful, spiritual place.  I was talking to a guide about some of the lessons I wanted to learn in life.  Somehow I knew I was revisiting a place I had been to before coming into this life.  The massage therapist called this “the place of planning”.  I told the guide that I wanted to learn how to unconditionally love someone that has caused me great pain.  Another spirit came over and volunteered to be the someone who would cause me great pain. 

An incredible thing then occurred.  A tingly pain had resided in my gut since I was nine years old.  It was usually unnoticeable but under certain circumstances it would become moderately painful.  As soon as I had thanked the spirit who volunteered to cause me great pain, I felt that pain lift out of my gut and out of my body and float away.  My body felt as if it were twisted and as if my legs were in the air, apparently due to the energy in my body that for 19 years had to circumvent this blockage now being able to flow straight through. 

I felt a shift throughout all the levels of my being.  The truth of this healing resonated through my entirety.  This was definitely a monumental moment not only in my healing journey but in my life.  The hopelessness I had been harboring after years and years of unsuccessfully searching for healing suddenly disappeared.

This deeper understanding of the principle of free will would pave the way for my experiencing several deep, true and tangible healings over the next two years.  Realizing my free will and accepting responsibility for it was incredibly empowering.  The truth of it set me free.

After this healing experience, I was extremely blissful for several days.  In fact, I thought and hoped I had found the healing I had been long searching for and could now get back to my normal life and goals etc.  What I didn’t know was there was a legion of repressed, injured, festering aspects of myself that were now lining up to settle things with me.

It’s similar to a big event at a sports arena:  As the event finished, somehow all of the exits were closed and all of the spectators were trapped.  For years they remained stuck, all working in different parts of the now dark building trying to find or make their way out.  Then one day a door briefly opened, allowing one spectator to get out before it quickly closed.  The flash of light from the open door briefly illuminated the entire arena, and all of the spectators then rushed toward that door in hopes it would soon open again.

Sure enough, about five days later I began to feel strangely agitated – the agitation I now know to be the first sign of an old, repressed aspect of myself making its way into the subconscious, where with some help it will then pierce consciousness.  I was very disappointed and befuddled that I wasn’t totally healed yet.

Reluctantly, and, frankly, with no other options, I re-committed to my healing journey, vowing to stay on it until it was over.  I continued to find people who had been where I was trying to go – who could actually teach experientially what I needed to learn about healing.

I was about 17 months into my healing journey by this time.  My depression was largely gone, but I continued going through a very intense period of fully experiencing and expressing my pain.  As long as I continued to do this, my depression declined to storm my brain and manipulate its chemistry.

I’m always disappointed when I see “create wealth”, “live the life you want” and certain self-help books whose success is dependent upon the reader thinking a certain way.  These books all say “You have to change your thinking!” but either give no means or an ineffective page or two on just how to change your thinking.  Changing your thinking is one of the toughest challenges in life!  But your thinking is also the one thing in life you have absolute domain over. 

Your mind thinks the way it does for a reason.  The unconscious uses your thinking to draw attention to what you are in need of giving attention to. Thinking is very stubborn.  It will not change until you have changed.  If you want to change your thinking, you must first make the changes your thinking is trying to get you to make.

My depression was largely due to a backlog of emotions I had failed to express.  Some of these repressed emotions were of a positive nature, such as joy and love.  The biggest culprits for me, however, were sorrow and grief.  I had learned at a young age that crying was wrong.  So, to the best of my ability, I didn’t cry.  The funny thing is, I was always sad.  Even when I was happy, I was always sad.  I couldn’t figure out why I was sad or what I was sad about, I just was.  I felt guilty about it, for not only was it wrong to feel sad, but I was feeling sad for no legitimate reason!  This was great for my self-esteem.

During the first few months of my healing journey, the floodgates gave way.  I experienced episodes of intense crying that would last for several hours.  While I didn’t know what I was grieving, somehow I knew I needed to grieve.

The unbearable state of my life and the urging of my sister pushed me to begin working with a licensed psychologist.  Unfortunately, the state of my mind was rendering impossible my following the strategy my psychologist had laid out for me.  She realized how out of control my thinking had become and suggested I go on some kind of medication that would stabilize my thinking and enable me to make some progress.  I was very resistant to this.  I wanted to find real, permanent answers to my depression and not have to rely on drugs to make me feel better.

But my mind was a mess.  It would endlessly and adamantly obsess over the same situation.  The lack of control I had over my thinking was mind-boggling.  One night I timed myself to see how long I could think about something other than the situation I kept obsessing about.  I timed myself several times, each time thinking about something fun like surfing, playing music, and even Disneyland.  The longest I could go was eight seconds!  In eight seconds or less, my thinking would segue from what I wanted to think about to what my mind wanted me to think about.

My sleep was also in ruins.  No matter what time I got in bed, I couldn’t fall asleep until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m.  No matter how exhausted I was, my mind was buzzing, hyper-alert, re-imagining the situation I had been obsessing about over and over again.  Once I fell asleep, I would wake up three to four hours later as if a bomb had gone off.  Immediately I’d realize I was still obsessing about the same situation.  I would then realize that I really didn’t fall asleep.  I just sort of dozed off while my mind continued rehashing the situation over and over and over again.

After a couple months of making no noteworthy progress with my psychologist, I agreed to try the meds – Prozac to be exact.  I’m very glad I did.  Once I got through the tortuous process of coming on to Prozac, my mind stabilized.  My psychologist and the psychiatrist we worked with were great.  They found the just the right dosage that was high enough to stabilized my mind and my sleep pattern, but low enough that I still felt my pain and grief.

I was on Prozac off and on for one year.  I grieved and grieved and grieved.  Despite my still not knowing what I was grieving, it became clear to me that this grieving was an essential part of my healing.  My reluctance to the grieving process disappeared now that I knew the Prozac would keep me from getting sucked into the endless swirl of depression.

I was extremely lucky to have a support system throughout all of this.  Countless times I cried in the arms of any one of my family members.  Even though I was still holding some of them accountable for my pain, they were graciously there for me.  A support system is imperative for anyone going through the healing process.

Life is like a factory.  A conveyor belt continually transports potentially damaging issues to the processing area.  If these issues are not processed a backlog begins to accumulate.  Unfortunately, western society does not give us the tools to process our issues.  Instead of teaching us to bravely face our issues, it teaches us to “be brave” and not face our issues – to “be strong” and ignore our issues. 

When these issues are processed properly in the first place, chiefly by learning what they are trying to teach us and by properly and totally expressing the emotions these issues trigger, they cease to exist.  But if left unprocessed, they fester internally and permeate every moment of one’s existence from thereon with their essences.  If one decides or is forced to one day go back and rescue these long-repressed aspects of oneself, expression is the first order of duty.

When these repressed aspects begin to bubble up from the unconscious, the pain and agitation is very nebulous.  Merely expressing this pain, however, rolls out the welcome matt.  The pain will eventually use this matt as it steps into consciousness.  Once it makes its way into consciousness, the origins of the pain will begin to become clear.

I used to fall in love with sad women.  At the beginning of my healing journey, the situation my mind was so adamantly obsessing about was yet another pseudo-relationship with a sad woman.  On the chance I would actually get involved with a stable, happy woman I couldn’t handle it.  I’d immediately be off to find a sad woman.  These sad women always took a liking to me at first.  But soon thereafter they would cut off any and all meaningful communication with me and start going out with someone else.  They usually wouldn’t even tell me they were no longer interested in me.  In the ensuing days and even weeks that would go by before I would find out that they were no longer interested in me I’d be left hanging, still thinking the relationship was going to happen.

So let’s see here.  I had an expansive backlog of repressed sorrow and grief.  I needed to heal the division and become one again with my repressed sorrow and grief. Meanwhile I kept getting into pseudo relationships with sad women, yearning to become one with them.  Hmmm.  I came into life as we all do with the natural inclination to express sorrow, but then one day I began repressing my sorrow to the best of my ability in order to maintain my parent’s love and approval.  Meanwhile, the women I was attracted to always liked me at first, but would soon give me the silent treatment as they cut me off and sought the love and approval of another guy.  Hmmm.  My repressed sorrow and grief for years vainly hoped to someday gain my attention and acknowledgment.  Meanwhile I, for years, vainly hoped to someday gain the attention and acknowledgment of the sad woman.  Is it possible this relationship pattern was trying to tell me something?

The symbolisms that often appear in our exterior lives can be incredibly poignant.  The sad woman pattern was a pattern of mine for years.  I look back and wonder “How could I not have seen this?”  The pain, torture and embarrassment I would have saved myself. 

Again, the mind thinks the way it does for a reason.  The worst thing one can do is try to force it to change, because it won’t.  Instead, honor it.  Encourage it.  Seek to understand its message, its mandate.  When this mandate is understood, carry it out.  The mind’s thinking will then change.  When the purpose of the mind’s negative thinking is realized, the mind will go back to thinking in more harmonious ways…at least until it embarks on a new mission to draw our attention to another issue within us!

During my year of being off and on Prozac, I began doing Iyengar Yoga, a form of Hatha Yoga extremely adept at stretching and releasing isolated muscle groups.  This yoga practice went perfectly with my grieving.  Every time I thought I was nearing the end of my grieving process, my yoga practice would get a bit deeper, and up would come a whole new batch of grieving.

For eight years prior to my starting yoga, I had a lower back problem.  My lower back would go out once every one or two months, putting me in bed for one to three days.  Chiropractors and doctors were of no help other than providing some temporary symptom relief.  After six months of practicing Iyengar Yoga with a highly qualified instructor coupled with my fully expressing all of the emotions my body had pent up and was now releasing – especially the emotions that had been pent up in my hamstrings – my lower back was healed.

I was 17 months into my healing journey when I recommitted to staying on the journey until its completion.  This was shortly after my “place of planning” experience, when I  realized I had a lot more healing – an arena-full - to undergo!  I had been off Prozac for a few months.  I was no longer seeing the licensed psychologist I had worked with, but I continued to utilize her strategy of eating well, exercising, journaling and writing with my left hand (I’m right handed), and “pulling weeds”.

The journey soon connected me to several different people in the healing arts who were incorporating into their practices an awareness of the different steps involved in the healing process.  What once was a scary, frustrating and foreign process was soon to become a conscious, efficient, effective and even somewhat routine process.

One incredibly empowering characteristic of the healing process is that it happens within, completely independent of anyone else.  The healing takes place regardless of the actions or lack of actions of those being held accountable.  Receiving apologies from and getting closure with those being held accountable has no bearing on true healing.

Have you ever complained of something that happened to you in the past, and had someone say to you something like “It’s not happening to you now.  Get over it!  Why are you still complaining about it?”  There’s a valid reason we sometimes feel the pain from a specific incident or period of our lives for a long time to come.  Fortunately it’s not the incident itself.  It is our reaction to the incident.  The pain is due to the adjustments and changes we make within ourselves in response to the incident.

This became clear to me during the second true healing episode I experienced.  Having read several books by this time on family dynamics, I had a good understanding of the dynamics present in my family during my childhood.  While having this knowledge was very important, it did nothing to lessen the pain I was attributing to my childhood years.  I had even had productive conversations with each of my parents about my childhood and the issues I was holding my parents accountable for.  While these conversations did bring us closer and resolved several issues, they did nothing to lessen the pain.

One day, I began to feel the nebulous agitation that usually accompanies a painful, repressed aspect of myself making its way from the unconscious to the subconscious in its hopes for conscious resolution and reconnection.  Over the next few days I did what I had to, emotionally and physically, to express this fuzzy, vague pain.  It slowly became more defined until it became a tangible entity I could see and feel.

I began to talk with this entity, but typical for this stage, it wouldn’t respond.  After years and years of my repressing this entity, why would it trust me?  But I continued talking to it, making known my earnest desire to hear what it had to tell me.  Eventually, it started talking.  It was my repressed sorrow and grief, expressing how furious it was that I had chosen to repress it.  As I had by this time been faithfully expressing my backlog of repressed sorrow and grief for about two years, it occurred to me I had finally reached the bottom of the backlog pile.  (Of course, there were many other backlogs of different emotions and other issues I would soon deal with.)

I explained to my grief and sorrow that my parents did not like me crying.  It said “Parents?  What the hell are parents?!  No!  You decided to shut us up!”  “No.  You don’t understand.” I said.  “My parents wouldn’t let me cry!”  It replied “No!  You don’t understand.  You chose not to cry!”

Then it hit me.  These interior aspects of myself had no concern for or understanding of anything outside of myself.  To the residents of the inner world, the external world is but a bizarre abstraction at best.  The only thing my repressed sorrow and grief understood was that I, the ultimate ruler of my inner world, had chosen to repress them.

The truth of this reverberated through my core.  I had failed myself.  I had failed to honor and express a vital part of myself.  I broke down, accepted responsibility for my actions, and began apologizing profusely and with all of my sincerity.  I begged and begged for forgiveness.  Once my sorrow and grief believed my sincerity, it said it would forgive me on the condition I would always be true to my sorrow and grief, expressing them whenever they needed to be expressed.

As I agreed to this, I felt my sorrow and grief and become one with me as the division between us disappeared.  An incredibly blissful and harmonic shift occurred on all levels of my being, my physical body, my emotional body, my mind and my spirit.  The truth of this was absolute.  The bliss lasted for about, well, three or four days, when a new, different agitation then began resonating within me.  The process was starting anew. 

I went through this process many times over the next year, reclaiming many of the parts of myself I had sacrificed.  Some of these had been repressed since childhood, but many of them weren’t repressed until my teens and twenties.  Among them were not only repressed emotions, but aspects of myself I repressed due to my need to be accepted by friends, peers, women, teachers, relatives and society in general.

The true, ultimate healing would always occur when I became one with the aspect of myself I had chosen to repress.  The process leading up to this unification was usually the same:  A nebulous agitation from within; my expressing this agitation; the agitation focusing into a tangible entity; my proving my desire to hear what the entity had to tell me; the entity talking and my listening to it; my apologizing and asking for forgiveness; the entity telling its conditions for forgiveness; my sincerely agreeing to adhere to the conditions; and blissful unification. 

This series of healing experiences brought my understanding of the principle of free will once again to a deeper level.  The pains inflicted on us by other people and external circumstances pass on their own, but the pain we inflict on ourselves in response to these situation does not go away until we make the proper amends within ourselves. 

More than a decade has ended since my journey of the dark (k)night ended.  Just as life goes on, the factory is still open, the conveyor belt is still running, and the events and resulting issues that need to be processed are ongoing.  Finding healthy ways to honestly and fully express these issues prevents them from leaving any long-lasting pains.

Occasionally a long-repressed aspect of myself that I failed to get to while going through the backlogs shows up.  When I sense this happening, I immediately throw out the red carpet to welcome a long, lost part of myself back home.  I usually get through the entire process with ease and efficiency, but not always.  There are always those lessons that seem to require great lengths of time to be taught correctly.

While my life is far from perfect these days, it is exponentially better than it was before I went on the journey.  I still have issues, some I ‘m aware of and some I’m not, but they no longer enslave me the way they used to.  My healing journey was by far the most challenging thing I have done in my life.  I’m ever thankful for the positive impacts it has cast over the remainder of my life.

I was inspired to write this by the many people I have encountered while on the journey and since then who are suffering as I once was.  My experience encourages me to pass on these suggestions to those suffering:

• Express yourself.  It is fundamental to healing.  You can not heal what you can not express.  Expression is the bridge to consciousness.
• Reach out to others.  A support system is critical to healing.  You must talk to people.  Yes, you’ll freak lot of people out, but eventually you will connect with those who will be a part of your healing’s foundation.
• Reach in to yourself.  Delve into your interior world.  Broadcast a message to the community of repressed aspects of yourself telling them that you want to make amends.  As you establish you sincerity and trustworthiness, they will begin to talk with you.
• Give up your victimhood.  Giving up your victimhood is very hard, scary even, but as long as you believe you’re a victim, you’ll continue to be one.  In addition, you’ll continue to draw victimizing situations into your life that will give you satisfactory reason to believe you really are a victim.  Stop giving your personal power away.  Fully and completely accept the principle of free will into your life.
• Don’t wait around for God to heal you – it probably won’t happen.  Instead, listen for and follow God’s advice and direction as to what you need to do to heal yourself.
• Inform yourself.  Read books, listen to programs, and go to lectures about healing.
• Learn the language of the unconscious.  Read books by masters of the subject such as Joseph Campbell and Robert Johnson.
• Pay attention to your thinking and your life.  Look for the symbolic messages that the repressed aspects of yourself are sending you via your mind, your health, your judgments, the causes you’re drawn to, your fantasies and dreams, and your exterior life’s situations and relationships.

Remember:

• Healing is not dependent on anyone or anything outside of yourself.  It is dependent on you being true to your entire self, bridging the divisions within yourself and becoming one again with the repressed aspects of yourself.
• Lasting pain stems not from the actions of others, but from our own doing, from our own decisions to repress different aspects of ourselves.  These decisions are usually made in response to hurtful actions of others and in order to gain love and acceptance from others.
• Your world won’t change until you do.  Changing your world is usually futile.  Changing yourself is always fruitful.

Healing, health and happiness,

Doug Johnson