So You're Repressed...Is That So Bad?

I'll go out on a limb here and assume that even if you had a pretty decent upbringing, somewhere along the way you developed some habits to deal with the world that get you into trouble every now and then.

Maybe you don't know what to do with anger...

Or it could be that you never learned how to speak up for yourself...

Perhaps you struggle to connect deeply with other people...

While conventional wisdom would have you talk through your feelings about these things or go off in endless search of insight, I think it's far more useful to get a sense of how this stuff plays out in the body moment by moment.

Why?

Because we can't not behave, and every behavior takes place through the body.

Here's where I want to turn our focus towards repression.

It gets a bad rap.

The rampant misinterpretation of Freudian theory (brought about by shoddy translation from German into English) would lead you to think that you have a dark, dank basement full of skeletons that you've buried over the years. Repression might make you think of burying something or squashing it.

But that's far from the truth of what's going on.

The original German translates a bit more accurately as "turning away from." What that means is that anything "repressed" is simply something from which you've diverted your attention. It's less a matter of digging up some gnarly, half-forgotten terror and more a matter of turning your attention towards options that haven't been on your radar for awhile.

It's a matter of learning to make use of a potential that's been lying dormant within you.

I don't know about you, but that's a far less daunting task in my book.

That doesn't mean it's always going to be easy or pleasant.

But maybe -- just maybe -- we're not so full of muck as we've been led to believe.

Something to ponder...