Lifestyle Choices

One of the fears that people have of expressing feelings is that the brutish animal within will be released with damaging results. Animal feelings are not, in fact, essentially destructive. If you look at a bird flying at a cat to protect its babies or a hungry lion stalking its prey, you see raw aggression. Such aggression is nearly always used to protect the young, or search for food. More limited or ritualized aggression is usually used to fight for a mate or for supremacy in the social hierarchy. The socially evolved mammals, such as the apes, have highly developed caring instincts. We human beings are the most destructive species and also the species that most represses animal instincts.

The problem with repression is that it creates the need for more repression. If you trap a bear within a cage, the bear naturally gets angry, but when the anger is of no avail it may become twisted into vengeful nastiness directed at anybody unfortunate to come within range. Meeting the bear for the first time, it is easy to think that its nature is inherently nasty and to forget that the nastiness was first created by the cage. This is an allegory of human repression of feeling. In general, repressed feeling tends to become twisted. When natural reaction is held back for a long time, the human warmth of the reaction becomes replaced by coldness. Anger turns to hate and spite. But the withheld feeling does not disappear; it lurks in the background, making the odd appearance by twisting its way through chinks in the armour. Hate becomes a needle of witty sarcasm. Spite takes hidden pleasure in another’s pain. It is so easy to construe this as evidence of innate nastiness and then to build stronger barriers of repression, not realizing that there may also be positive feelings trapped within.

Anger can be loving, hateful or defensive. It can be a way of penetrating or confronting another person in order to make warm contact. It can be a way of trampling on another with the intent of hurting. It can be a defensive camouflage to avoid softer feelings, intimacy or fear. Repression is necessary for those who cannot or do not wish to get through to ‘inner levels of positive feeling. Some people do not have enough hope to believe that they can be positive inside. To some extent the degree of repression that you require is related to your inner wisdom. Some people do best by following a line of duty, while others can learn to trust and follow the goodness of their own hearts.

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