Politics of emotion

When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long (Psalm 32:3)

Suppression…is it keeping a lid on our emotions... denial, repression and escapism? Time heals all wounds… does it apply in all situation? It’s debatable. What it really means is ‘Give me enough time and I can suppress anything’. Where does forgiveness and forgetting stand? Hiding negative emotions does not decrease the extent to which emotions are experienced, it only make one appear but not feel less emotional. It is amazing that we are better at suppressing than at letting go. In fact, we suppressed so much that we are in some way like a walking time bomb. Our body shows signs of stress… shoulders stuck in our ears, stomach in knots and then we exploded. The other side of the pendulum swing of suppression is expression… our emotion in action. Is negative expression more detrimental or encouraging than suppression? Neither suppression nor expression is a problem in and of itself. They are merely two different ends of the same spectrum of how we usually handle our emotions. A problem arises when we don’t feel in control over which one is happening, and many times we find ourselves doing the opposite of what we intended. Very often we get stuck on one side of the spectrum or the other. These are the moments when we need to find the freedom to let go.