Expression over Suppression: How Emotions Affect Our Mental Health

“These pains you feel are messangers” Rumi

This next month is about exploring the role of emotion in our recovery, examining emotions that are common in mental illness, and looking at how art can help us to accept, feel, and understand emotions.

Emotion refers to the variety of feeling responses that an individual can experience. Emotions occur as a response to one’s experience in the present but also thinking about the past and future. When we are triggered, our body experiences feelings in response to events in the past.

We often divide emotions into “positive” or “negative,” depending on how we feel about expressing them. When we are not comfortable with an emotion, we are likely to repress it, hiding how we really feel. This has long term consequences for physical and mental health. In the book, When the Body Says No, Gabor Maté talks about how repressed emotions can cause physical illness (2004).