Repression is the root cause of depression
You don’t have to force yourself to feel. But when feelings, emotions, and thoughts naturally arise—seeking to be felt or expressed—can you be honest with yourself about what you do in response? Can you recognize the pattern of numbing your emotions and thoughts? Of closing your heart to avoid feeling?
The rejection and struggle with so-called "negative" emotions lead us to repress them, escaping into things that make us feel positive. We do everything to maintain a "happy feeling" and anything to avoid a "low feeling"— or in other words the melancholic feelings. But hiding our darker parts (our shadows) from the light IS the very ingredient for depression. Many people who are depressed wear a mask for the outside world, which only deepens their internal suffering.
I have learned that for deeply emotional people (some are naturally more emotional than others), it can be difficult — and even destructive — to show up in the world, whether at work or fulfilling other obligations when their energy simply does not allow them to.
It’s easy to ignore your emotional states, override your body’s chemical responses, and go against your natural rhythm — especially in a world that pressures us to conform and compromise.
In this fast-paced system, we rarely take the time to be fully present with our real emotions, thoughts, and feelings — either because we are too busy or because we fear confronting our inner truth. Wearing a mask has become our default coping mechanism.
We expend so much of our precious energy resisting our natural energy flow — suppressing what is truly happening inside us — rather than finding healthy, authentic ways to express ourselves.
We are still far from being truly authentic, simply because we don’t live according to our own timeline — one where we honor what our body needs and follow our natural rhythm.
Alchemizing our feelings, thoughts, and emotions — our body’s sensations — is a process most people are unaware of, yet it is vital to our mental, emotional, and physical well-being. The biggest obstacle to living naturally is time itself — this pressure to keep up, leaving no room for us to process and express our emotional state freely.
In this world, it is easy to betray your natural self. You are expected to laugh when you can’t, be spontaneous when you don’t feel like it, and conform to certain behaviors to be accepted. Melancholy, vulnerability, and simply "feeling low" (expressing our very humanness) are not widely accepted, either in ourselves or in others. It does not fit the image we want to portray. Instead, we strive to appear successful, to be capable of managing everything at once: running a household, raising children, working full-time, etc. But for emotional people a.k.a. creative people (I’ll explore this connection in another article) the norm works in reverse. Their well-being depends on solitude, self-care, and allowing their bodies to naturally process emotions and feelings. It is about giving themselves permission to be — and to show up only when they truly feel ready.
Compromising your health and well-being is no longer necessary. That is a conditioning of the old world.