The Healing Power of Expression (1)

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In the English language the word expression has multiple meanings. In this blogpost we won’t be discussing the look on someone’s face, nor the mathematical meaning where a symbol or a group of symbols represent an amount (e.g. 4xy2). Instead we’re going to dive into expression as the act of expressing ourselves by means of words, actions, sounds or movements.

We express ourselves continuously. Even when we think we’re not expressing ourselves, we still are by means of our body language, facial expressions etc. Whether we perceive to be expressing ourselves is a different matter and that’s significant, because it’s in this perception of expression, in knowing that we’re expressing ourselves, where healing power can be found. To express ourselves and to know it, means that we accept our particular ways in which we express, and that means we acknowledge and embrace them, otherwise there can be no acceptance. Moreover, with acceptance of our ways of expression, we basically accept ourselves as we are. When that is the case, one energy-sucking trait vanishes: shame. So when and how do we know to be expressing ourselves, and when don’t we? Let’s get into it.

In performing arts of any kind, there usually is an obvious awareness of expressing ourselves. Also in many therapeutic settings, particularly when we’ve run into some or other psychological block, there is a fair amount of awareness that we’re in expression-mode. Yet when our emotional buttons are being pushed for instance and we’re triggered into a tremendous outburst of rage, anxiety, grief or ecstasy, we’re commonly not too aware of the way we’re expressing ourselves – at least not while we’re in the middle of the outburst.[1] This is the phenomenon of ‘explosion’, which will be discussed later on. Suffice it to say for now that an explosion can be distinguished from conscious expression in the sense that the latter has healing power, while the former doesn’t.

However, the most ordinary way in which we express ourselves is through our everyday behaviour which is characterized by one trait in particular: habit. Furthermore a main characteristic of habit is that we are mostly not aware of our habitual behaviours.

Habits come in all kinds of ways and can be either helpful or harmful. Opening the door for a lady or buckling up our seatbelt without thinking about it would be regarded as helpful habits, reaching for a cigarette or a drink first thing in the morning might be considered harmful. Next to these there’s that ocean of particular little habits that we do without being aware of them. Whether it be chewing nails; tapping our fingers to beats or playing drums with our teeth; biting our lower lip; fidgeting with clothes, fingers or hair; plucking and/or stroking moustaches, beards and chins; compulsively talking to ourselves or others; looking away when spoken to; sniffing socks and/or underwear; ‘helping’ others by telling them what they want to say when they’re looking for a word; limitless pleasing; eating the contents of our nose; obsessively trying to control our urges or some or other situation; a particular way of walking; or instantaneously blurting out any word or sentence which made the journey from our brains to our mouths; we can’t help but doing it because that particular behaviour has become as ingrained as breathing.

Having now distinguished four ways of expressing ourselves (through arts, therapy, habits and explosions), let’s explore the nature of these different ways and find out which ones can become energy leaking and potentially injurious, and which ones harbour the potential of energy storage and healing power.

Explosions happen when our emotional buttons are being pushed. These buttons commonly represent an unprocessed pain from childhood, i.e. ‘child pain.’ It’s behaviour we taught ourselves as a child to either get what we wanted (i.e. food, love, attention, affection, etc.) or to cope with difficult or traumatic situations and experiences. The automatic behaviour in response to a pushed button therefore literally mimics the behaviour we exhibit as a child. As soon as our buttons are pushed, we feel the same pain we felt as a child and that triggers our reactions learned in childhood; in other words, childish behaviour. We go from child pain to being a child again.

A distinctive feature of an explosion is the great emotional charge of our behaviour. In children, the ratio, our ability to think, is not yet fully developed, but emotions are. The automatic reaction to a pushed button is full of emotion from a deep-seated fear that something bad will be done to us or something precious taken away. Therefore at such a moment we are mainly busy with protecting ourselves and have no eye for what is happening in our surroundings. Hence why so many adults often show childish behaviour and are then hardly amenable to reason. Exactly that is why shame often follows an explosion, for we have no control over our behaviour and it usually is excessive in relation to the situation in which it occurred.

Explosions often happen when, for a long time, our buttons are being pushed but we’re repressing our particular ways of expression – the more so if we for instance were ridiculed or even punished for them. Yet every time our buttons are pushed a stress response takes place in our body, releasing high amounts of energy in order to protect ourselves. Yet when we repress our emotions by not expressing them effectively, our physical state can be compared to a pressure cooker that needs to blow off steam, but the safety valves are blocked due to grease and old food particles. If that situation lasts long enough, the pressure cooker will explode, just like us, and a by itself completely insignificant occurrence can act as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back – sending us into an emotional outburst which is completely out of proportion. After we calm down and realise just that, shame is being added to our already existing mountain of shame and resentment, and the whole process starts all over again: button gets pushed + stress response — repression of emotions (i.e. blocking the safety valves) — building up of shame and resentment — pressure rises in the cooker — time passes and we think we’ve worked through the emotion — only to find out that in fact we didn’t when again the button got pushed + stress response etc. which ignites the next explosion. Both physiologically as well as psychologically we literally become stuck, rigid, permanently contracted. When a continuous state of tension becomes our ‘new normal’ and there’s no more room for balancing relaxation, both physical and mental illnesses are lurking.

In addition, in our society, emotional outbursts from adults are generally looked down upon, so most of us will try to suppress them as much as possible. That becomes especially difficult for those of us who have never learned an effective and meaningful way to express themselves, because when even the explosion falls away as an energy conductor, what happens to all that accumulated, pent-up and stuck energy?[2]

The second potentially injurious way of expression lies in our habits. Often they imply a promise; like when I get stuck in writing a blogpost, I then pluck my beard and stroke my chin with the expectation that it’s going to provide a breakthrough.[3] In a similar way, when someone’s emotional button gets pushed and the habitual response is eating, smoking, drinking or swiping, that behaviour promises the reduction of the uncomfortable feeling resulting from the stress response. Naturally our expectations are illusory because the plucking of my beard does as little for my creative process as smoking a cigarette does for the reduction of stress. Yet it’s the promise of a feeling of control which makes particular behaviour into a habit: if after stroking my beard and chin for ten minutes a new sentence is written, it’s very tempting to credit my action for the ‘return’ of creativity. If our button gets pushed and the smoking of a cigarette makes us forget, albeit temporarily, the uncomfortable feeling from our stress response, it’s very tempting to credit our action of lighting the cigarette for ‘lighting our emotional load.’ Hence why habits are often so difficult to break.

Habits of an unhealthy nature are potentially injurious by default. But those little ‘weird’ habits we do without being aware of them harbour potential energy leaking the moment we are being made aware of them. They happen most of the time when our minds are wandering off into some psychic or spiritual realm where the awareness of our body is zero. It’s beyond the scope of this blogpost to dive into the question why this is so, but it’s no wonder that when we’re being made aware of what our bodies are doing when our minds are absent, the mere idea that we for some time didn’t have control over our bodies – and someone else noticed it – can potentially cause shame and even panic; energy leakers if there are any.

An interesting exception thereto can be found in sexual union. When during sexual play partners are able to let go and ‘lose’ themselves completely in the other, the fact that there is no awareness of our own ways of expression at that moment is usually experienced as a sigh of relief, a breath of fresh air, for it is in these moments that we feel we can finally let our guards down and fully ‘be ourselves’. In rapidly growing and complex societies, sex promises more and more to be the only safe haven where we can let ourselves go in the company of someone else, because they are letting themselves go as well. That promise however is never fulfilled unless there is trust and a deep feeling of communion between the sexual partners, for without these prerequisites our guards will always be up in one way or another. When the sexual act is being performed for any other reason than the delight of sharing our whole being with another, be it money, power, status, or distraction, our guards will always be up with the inevitable accompanying stress responses and sex, as a potentially marvellous way in which we can express ourselves, will become injurious and anything but fun.

Next week part 2 of this diptych will be released, in which we are going to elaborate on ways of expression with the potential of healing power by means of some personal experiences.

Tata for now, and
Jolly greetings,
Erik Stout

[1] For example, most of us are not aware of our facial expression at the moment we experience a sexual orgasm. When a picture of our face is taken at such a moment and it is shown to people, usually they can’t tell if the facial expression is one of terror or ecstasy.

[2] People with narcissistic tendencies or disorders may at first sight have less difficulty in using the explosion as a means of expression, but this is a false assumption. The vicious circle as described also applies to them, usually with the same detrimental results.

[3] Until not so long ago, one of my habits when I got stuck while writing was to put one of my feet on top of the other knee, fidget with my thumb between the toes and then smell my thumb. I guess there’s a diagnostic code for it somewhere in the DSM-V.