Emotional Expression: Key to Health and Happiness
“If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good.”—Mencius
David A. Schwerin, Ph.D. and Amy Rhett
A person who functions harmoniously has developed the mental and emotional side of their nature, as well as their physical side. If one of these areas is deficient, the entire personality suffers. The emotional side of most human beings is underdeveloped and immature. The emotional side includes the capacity to feel. To the degree feelings are buried and unexpressed, the capacity to give and receive happiness is hindered. This article discusses the causes and consequences of unexpressed emotions and provides a roadmap for reclaiming our emotional nature and the significant benefits for doing so.
It is generally acknowledged that man’s nature has two sides: a rational side and an emotional or feeling side. In most cultures, we tend to think that the rational is better or superior. We can trace the origin of this generally accepted view by looking at man’s development over millennia. Primitive humans expressed emotions that were aggressive and destructive in character. Violence, greed and rage were unchecked by a conscience or other inhibitions. As man evolved and his rational faculties developed over millions of years, he began to recognize the relation between cause and effect; he could see that his destructive actions resulted in pain and suffering for himself and others. He then learned to use his reason and his will to control these violent and destructive patterns of behavior.
According to the Pathwork, a practical body of psychological and metaphysical wisdom (www.pathwork.org), this repression of emotions was a necessary phase of man’s development. With reason and will playing an important role in bringing primitive emotions under control, social mores and a social conscience began to evolve. Cultural norms also worked to inhibit and keep these primitive emotions in check. However, this process has resulted in a very imbalanced development. Man’s reason and will have matured but his emotions have not evolved to the same degree.
Man has sought to hide these primitive emotions—to push them out of his conscious awareness—in the belief that if he didn’t see or experience them, they would cease to exist. Unexpressed emotions, however, don’t disappear. They remain and form energetic blocks in the body until they are consciously released. We are painfully reminded of their existence when they explode in uncontrolled expressions that later embarrass us or sometimes cause real harm to others. Human beings now face the negative effects of this lopsided development, in terms of unrealized potential both on the individual and societal level.
Just as reason and will were used to instill the self-discipline necessary to control primitive emotions, Pathwork teaches that human development now needs to focus on using reason and will to allow the full expression of our emotions so that they can properly mature. A qualified therapist, trained in psychology or other psycho-spiritual disciplines such as the Pathwork, can play an important role in supporting individuals to give voluntary expression to negative, primitive emotions. By creating an environment where people feel safe to express their anger, fear and frustration, previously hidden feelings can be expressed at a time and in a place where no one is harmed or offended. This allows individuals to consciously choose when and how to express their emotions rather than continuing to live in fear of their emotions, suppress them and have them erupt in involuntary, destructive expressions. As the Pathwork teachings make clear, “Every protest not voiced sits in you and makes you express it where it is inappropriate.”
Negative effects of unexpressed emotions
To fully understand the importance of healthy emotional expression, it is helpful to review what happens when emotions are repressed. Though we try to pretend they don’t exist, stifled emotions are like a river that is dammed up to prevent the water from flowing. When enough water accumulates behind the barricade, the force of the buildup erupts in a violent outburst. History provides many examples of how suppressed emotions break forth into large-scale outbursts such as rebellion and rioting. Throughout the world, news headlines vividly describe mass shootings and other violent attacks often aimed at random groups of people. On an individual level, we witness emotional outbursts when someone loses their temper and says hurtful things.
In addition to denying our emotions, we often present a face in public that may be very different from what we actually feel on an unconscious level. We may outwardly act nice or generous or present a calm, controlled exterior to reassure others and ourselves that all is well inside of us. The surface or outward appearance we present is a layer we add to cover our uncomfortable, negative feelings and keep them out of our conscious awareness.
Because we are not aware of our suppressed emotions, they remain undeveloped and immature. When they are expressed in uncontrolled ways, they are likely to embarrass us or cause harm to others. Since we fear they may violently erupt at any time, we continue to try to restrain and deny them and thus they remain in a primitive state. As long as feelings remain unexpressed, our energy stagnates and our creativity is hindered. If continually ignored, suppressed emotions can also cause a range of physical diseases and psychological illnesses. All these problems reinforce the need to learn how to use reason and will to overcome the fear of our feelings and express them in a safe manner. As Buddha warned, “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
The individual level
As we have discussed, reason and will became highly developed and valued over the course of man’s development. This has led to many important achievements, particularly in the fields of science and technology. Meanwhile the range of feelings accessible to most humans has become severely limited. On an individual level, situations arise during the progression from childhood to adulthood that evoke feelings ranging from sadness to rage to despair. Young people are not equipped emotionally to deal with threats to their existence, whether the threat is real or imagined.
Children may experience a one-time traumatic event such as the death of a parent or an ongoing abusive relationship with a family member, teacher or other authority figure. A child whose father is an alcoholic, for example, may grow up in a state of fear and anxiety, always on alert for an outburst of anger or violence. Children frequently depend on their reasoning and willing faculties for their very survival. Feelings, on the other hand, are suppressed, particularly when they seem overwhelming.
Based on these early experiences, children make certain faulty conclusions about themselves, others and life in general. According to the Pathwork teachings, these misconceptions are generalized and held as beliefs that strongly shape and influence a child’s life. In our example, the child of the alcoholic father may conclude that he or she is responsible for the father’s violent or insensitive acts. From this experience, the child may also determine that all men are untrustworthy and even to be feared.
This example demonstrates the deep personal insecurity that can develop when a child experiences:
Feelings and emotions that are frightening and overwhelming.
A deep sense that they are bad or flawed in some irredeemable way.
Both the feelings and the mistaken beliefs must be hidden from oneself and others no matter what the consequences. These emotions and beliefs are all below one’s conscious mind and because of this, similar experiences tend to recur over a person’s lifetime.
The role of defenses
Another reason why experiences tend to repeat is because of the defenses we adopt in childhood to keep emotions hidden and out of our conscious awareness. The Pathwork describes three main defenses we use to try to prevent painful experiences from recurring, depending on our particular “personality type” The emotion type tends to appease and placate; the reason type tends to withdraw; and the will type tends to use aggression and control. All of these defenses are designed to achieve the same thing: avoid pain and ensure we are safe, cared for and loved.
The real motive behind each type of defense is to force others to do what we want and make us feel secure. This is most obvious in the case of the will type, but is equally true of the other personality types. This is why the defenses are also called forcing currents in Pathwork terminology. However, forcing currents only create resistance. People do not respond in the way we want and that in turn:
Evokes exactly the feelings that we believe are so painful and want to avoid
Reinforces the belief that we are bad and the world can’t be trusted
Motivates us to blame others
Confirms and reinforces our belief system so we feel vindicated and self-righteous
Encourages the perpetuation of the vicious cycle in the hope that our problems can be solved if we only tried harder (see diagram below)
Fig. 1: The vicious cycle
Despite countless iterations of this vicious cycle, individuals typically cannot find solutions to their problems by themselves. To do so, they need to first see the cause-effect link between repressing emotions and the negative consequences in their lives. They must learn to use reason and will in a more constructive way.
A path toward healing: Voluntary expression
Repressed feelings form energy blockages that build up over an individual’s lifetime, as well as over the evolution of humankind. These feelings are either unconscious or only partially conscious. It is therefore important to cultivate an awareness of the feelings that we try so hard to avoid. Understanding how we defend against these feelings helps deepen our awareness of denied emotions and their harmful effects.
Failure to do the necessary introspective work means we don’t live in a unified way. One part of us is intent on avoiding our feelings and another part is unaware of this harmful process. This split drains our vital energy. We become cut off from our inner selves, saying one thing but feeling another. To first become aware of and then admit we have hidden feelings can be liberating. By using all our faculties—reason, will and emotion—we create a bridge to inner unity and fulfilling self-expression. As the Pathwork states, “The acceptance of your hate will make you more loving; the acceptance of your weakness, stronger; the acceptance of your pain, more blissful.”
Case study: Alice
A client, who we will call Alice, was distressed because of her work situation. When her boss hired her, she felt supported and appreciated in her new job. Alice was working with a former colleague named Susan, who had been hired at the same time and who she considered her equal. However, it became clear within a few months, despite her real contributions and successes, that Alice’s colleague Susan would be promoted and made her superior. When the announcement of Susan’s promotion was made, Alice fell into a state of deep grief. During her hour-long trip home from work on a crowded train, she was not able to keep herself from crying and feeling shock and disbelief at her situation.
Her reaction was clearly out of proportion to the incident and indicated the existence of deeper feelings that had been previously suppressed. With the aid of a therapist over the course of a year, Alice slowly worked through the layers of her psyche and reached the point where she could express her deeper feelings. In this safe environment, she was in control of her emotions rather than being overwhelmed by the involuntary expression that overtook her the day her boss announced Susan’s promotion.
The healing process requires retracing the steps that originally gave rise to the current disharmony or problem. The first step is to become aware of the fact that we have feelings we are afraid of and deny. Once we see that avoiding feelings keeps us in an endless cycle that attracts similar experiences, we can begin to choose when and how to experience our deepest feelings.
Over the course of several months, Alice became aware of her defense: how she would try to please her boss by excessively striving for perfect behavior and exemplary work habits. She observed how hurt she felt when these efforts failed to get her boss’s attention and approval. She began to use her reasoning skills to connect cause and effect: her attempt to be “perfect” was actually alienating her boss and producing exactly the opposite effect from what she intended.
Uncovering deeper feelings
It is helpful and usually essential to understand a person’s family history. In this case, Alice was operated on right after birth for an umbilical hernia and separated from her mother almost immediately. She also experienced another lengthy separation at around ten months when her mother left her in the care of another couple so she could give birth to another child. Thus, a period of maternal support and closeness was interrupted and followed by a period of separation and feelings of abandonment. Alice had experienced a similar pattern in her marriage: an early period of happiness was followed by the pain of learning that her husband was having affairs with other women.
Underlying these patterns and the emotional reactions about her work situation, Alice had a core belief that those who are in a position of authority or who are sources of support would find her flawed or deficient and prefer others to her. She would try to be perfect and please those in authority, but this would only drive them away and thereby confirm her mistaken belief that she was somehow imperfect.
As Alice was able to drop below her defense of appeasement, which only made Alice hate herself and her boss, she began to gain a deeper understanding of what caused this hatred. She felt hurt that her boss did not recognize her achievements and favored other employees over her. When she relaxed her forcing current and expressed the grief she felt about the fact that her mother was not always available to her as a child, she could stop demanding that her boss fulfill these needs. Now that Alice was an adult, she had to accept that neither her boss nor anyone else would be able to satisfy her unmet childhood needs.
Alice began to understand how she was recreating and reliving the early patterns that had been established in her infancy. She became aware of the beliefs that she had first formed about her mother and about herself: that there must be something wrong with her and if only she were perfect, all would be well. This allowed the deep feelings of hurt and despair, terror and rage to come to the surface and be safely experienced.
Not only was Alice able to learn to use her reason and will faculties to uncover deep feelings, but she also learned to use them to reassure the immature part of her personality that the current situation was different than it had been in her childhood. As an adult, she had resources that she lacked when she was a helpless child. She stopped perceiving her boss as her mother and herself as a defenseless child. This meant she could connect with the fearful, immature part of her personality with a sense of compassion and understanding. She also learned to express herself differently. As the immature part of Alice became more secure and confident, she was able to identify situations where appeasement was inappropriate, and she began to assert herself constructively to satisfy her needs. She could, for example, speak up about not being included in an important meeting.
True and lasting healing
The feelings that Alice learned to express led her to experience a new aliveness and genuine sense of security. She no longer needed to be afraid of her feelings. She learned that as feelings are experienced, energy blocks are released and no longer clog or deaden one’s energy system. Clearer thinking and a greater sense of well-being were welcome additions to Alice’s life.
Positive feelings cannot be forced, which is what people often try to do. Pretending that we are happy and content, when underneath very different feelings are present, never works. There needs to be congruence between what a person is feeling and expressing. Denying an experience or feeling compels us to re-experience it over and over, with each repetition enlarging the pain and hurt. Once Alice was no longer focused on winning her boss’s approval and put her attention and energy into her work, she not only felt genuine satisfaction in her job, but was rewarded with a promotion and raise, both of which came only after she had given up demanding them.
The meaning of laziness
According to the Pathwork, laziness is directly connected to feelings that have not been fully experienced. Laziness is not something that can be forced or willed away. Laziness is the result of apathy, stagnation and paralysis, all of which are caused by blocked energy. The energy blocks arise when feelings are not expressed, and the underlying cause of the repressed feeling is not understood.
Passivity, inertia and laziness are good indications that there are hidden feelings that a person is unable or unwilling to acknowledge and experience. Feelings are moving energy currents. They constantly transform from one type of feeling into another, if the energy flows freely. When the natural flow of energy stagnates, it obstructs living energy and inhibits movement. People can use laziness as a defense to prevent any movement that might evoke undesirable, painful feelings. Once the negative effects are understood, it is easier to motivate people to re-direct their will so they can overcome their fears and find the courage to experience all their feelings.
Dealing with fear
A specific problem with denied feelings is that they create additional layers of uncomfortable feelings we want to avoid. For example, denying fear creates anxiety about feeling the fear. Similarly, denying anger creates frustration at being angry, and the frustration is exaggerated and prolonged. This secondary pain that results when the original feeling is suppressed can seem unbearable. When a person becomes aware of and begins to feel their pain, a dissolving process begins automatically. This is true whatever the feeling may be—fear, anger, sadness, etc.
It is important to understand this phenomenon and work patiently to uncover these deeper layers, so that a person can experience the original feelings directly. A qualified therapist can be extremely valuable in helping people see and understand the source of their problems and the way to alleviate them.
According to the Pathwork, feeling fear is the key to experiencing all other feelings. This is because we fear our feelings and want to avoid them. When we can feel the first layer of anxiety and then the fear itself, that fear will quickly dissolve into another denied feeling. This denied feeling, whatever it may be, will then become much easier to bear. In this way, we can get to the core of our denied feelings and the energy blocks that resulted.
Often the real reason behind the fear of our feelings is shame. We often believe it is humiliating to have certain feelings or be susceptible to certain emotional states we judge to be undesirable. Children are often told that they should be ashamed of what they are feeling or how they are behaving. They grow up believing that painful childhood experiences are the result of their being unacceptable and unlovable. This impels children to repress and deny their feelings and that repression creates problems that linger and grow more troublesome.
Accepting the fact that we are all imperfect and that it is human to occasionally feel embarrassment, humiliation, shame and pride will help dissolve one’s fear of these feelings. These issues must be confronted and faced with complete honesty. A person may have a hard time trusting the process if an immature part of his or her personality resists feelings or fears looking at distorted beliefs that have become ingrained in the psyche. When individuals are able to see that their childhood pain is due to the mistaken belief that they are flawed, real healing can begin.
The Pathwork teachings state, “Fear is not real. It is only an illusion, but you must go through the fear by feeling it. Through the gateway of feeling your weakness lies your strength; through the gateway of feeling your pain lies your pleasure and joy; through the gateway of feeling your fear lies your security and safety; through the gateway of feeling your loneliness lies your capacity to have fulfillment, love, and companionship; through the gateway of feeling your hate lies your capacity to love; through the gateway of feeling your hopelessness lies true and justified hope; through the gateway of accepting the lacks of your childhood lies your fulfillment now.”
A conscious choice
As we have seen, immature feelings still exist in all of us. As stated in the Pathwork teachings, “There is hopeless agony, there is violent rage, there is the feeling of absolute helplessness, first toward the world that seems to cause the agony and the rage, then toward the self because the ego does not know how to cope with these feelings. The way out of this predicament seems to be to deny the existence of the feelings. This seems the only alternative. But the more these feelings are denied, the greater their power becomes… All these threatening feelings become more and more aggrandized, exaggerated, and misunderstood. Then it seems indeed as though one’s feelings were leading one into a bottomless pit.”
It is easy to understand how challenging it is to change one’s views about expressing rather than repressing all feelings. We have seen that voluntary and safe expression of our feelings frees up energy that was previously engaged in trying to keep our emotions tightly under control. Allowing our fears to paralyze us diminishes our creative faculties. When part of our psyche is feared and denied expression, our experience of life becomes diminished.
When we begin to honestly face our hidden pain, hopelessness, anger and fear, we have made a heroic decision. With the proper support, we can use our reason and will consciously and courageously to express our feelings in an open and constructive manner. We will realize that what exists inside of us does not disappear simply because we suppress and ignore it. To the surprise of many, feeling one’s feelings is not as difficult or painful as is generally feared. With the help of trained therapist, anyone can learn to express emotions at a time and in a place that is appropriate and beneficial. Following this course helps us become stronger and more resilient, which builds self-esteem and enhances our ability to function at our fullest potential. Creativity and intuition will blossom, and life will become much more joyful and fulfilling.
“The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right and wrong is the beginning of wisdom.” Mencius
Note: The Pathwork Foundation is an international non-profit organization whose lectures, books and related material present a profound psychological cosmology. The Foundation is overseen by a Board of Trustees but the teaching and associated programs are carried out by local and regional organizations that are largely autonomous. These local affiliates are located throughout the world with a concentration in North and South America, Europe and Australia. Pathwork books and lectures have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Serbian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian and Dutch. Pathwork books written in Portuguese and Dutch are currently being translated into English and other translations are in progress. The 258 lectures that comprise the core of the Pathwork are available free for download at www.pathwork.org
David A. Schwerin, PhD., is the author of Conscious Capitalism: Principles for Prosperity and Conscious Globalism: What’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. (Social Sciences Academic Press (China). Dr. Schwerin is a Pathwork teacher who has studied Pathwork for over two decades. Amy Rhett is a Pathwork leader and teacher who has studied Pathwork for over twenty years. Professionally, Ms. Rhett was formerly an executive in marketing communications for a global financial services firm. She is currently Spiritual Director of Philadelphia Pathwork Region. www.phillypathwork.org