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 Wholeness, Healing and the Soul’s Liberation.
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, such as love, affection, and attention, may be met. These repressed aspects of ourselves don’t die or completely disappear. Instead, they fester inside of us, often wreaking havoc in our lives to get our attention. They can make us ill, whether emotionally, mentally, physically, and/or spiritually. They can manipulate and destroy any 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 even healthy things to keep ourselves from feeling what is going on inside of us.