Take a cup. Any cup. This cup is you.

Fill the cup part way with water. The water is your mind.

Look at the surface of the water. The surface of the water is your conscious mind.

In the course of life, the water of your emotions starts off running freely and without congestion or restraint.

But as we grow, we learn self-control. We learn that we cannot always do what our emotions tell us to do. We learn to delay gratification and restrain our impulses.

In short, we learn to repress.

Now this is a vitally important skill. It is, in fact, the very basis of what it means to be a human being and not an animal. Animals, lacking sentience, have very little but emotion to decide their actions. The brighter ones can learn a little restraint. For instance, dogs can be house trained. But for the most part, animals operate purely on emotion, or instinct, and human beings have a choice.

Imagine a classic “state of nature” scenario : an encounter with a dangerous predator. If you were feeling lazy that day, and had no way to shunt that emotion from your mind and deal with the immediate situation and choose the right choice (hint : it involves running), you would not survive to contribute your genetic legacy to humanity’s genome.

In order to exercise this choice, however, we human beings have to suppress out emotions. We have to clear the current emotion out of our mind so that we can do what we want to do and not just what we feel like doing. We have to have a mechanism for ridding our conscious mind of unwanted emotion.

We have to take the current emotion and push it below the surface of the water…. into the depths below our consciousness, into the unconscious mind which makes up the vast majority of our psyches.

We do this by basically freezing the emotion and turning it to stone. The petrified emotion then drops down into the murky depths of the mind, clearing our consciousness and letting us get on with things.

In theory, this is merely a delaying tactic, meant only to set the emotion aside until we can deal with it. But in reality, with unpleasant emotions, we tend to heavily favour long term procrastination. After all, dealing with emotions requires feeling them, and by definition, feeling unpleasant emotions is unpleasant, and putting off doing unpleasant things is the very definition of procrastination.

So by and large, especially with the complexities and demands of modern life on our clever but finite monkey brains, it is out of mind, out of sight. The rock of the emotion drops into the depths of our minds, and we do not give it another conscious thought. We act like it is gone forever, and had no effect.

But the water level has risen. And the higher it rises, the shorter the distance between our minds and the outside of the cup, in other words the world, becomes.

This is not just a metaphorical truth, it’s a biochemical fact. The more we suppress our emotion, the higher the levels of stress related chemicals in our bloodstream and the more likely we are to have a lot of very unpleasant reactions that actually remove the element of choice from the equation entirely.

Why? Because part of this emotional procrastination process is the idea that these emotions are gone forever. After all, all we consciously experience is the surface of the water, and there’s no sign of the emotion on the surface of the water, so it must be gone, right?

But as more and more of these rocks drop down into the depths, not only does the water (and your emotional stress level) rise, but your mind fills with rocks, making it harder and harder to do anything without one of them randomly bobbing to the surface, seemingly ‘out of nowhere’, and making us suppress them again all the harder.

And as this process continues, without an outlet, the mind as a whole can become more rock than water. The short term gains of banishing an emotion come at a heavy long term cost of carrying an unknown and unresolved burden with you for the rest of your life.

And the worst part is, without knowledge of what is going on below the surface of the mind, we cannot understand what is happening to us, or why. Things just seem to be getting worse and worse and the worse they get, the more negative emotions we have to suppress just to get through the day.

If this goes on too long, it can shut the person down entirely.

That is called depression.

The solution is to reverse the repression to depression process, to reach down into the waters of our unconscious mind and remove the rocks of suppressed emotion that are weighing us down. To bring them back up to the surface of the water and finish what we have started by experiencing them, despite how negative they are and how we would rather not experience negative emotions.

Often, this process is known as therapy.

If we do not, the water level will rise and rise, bringing those repressed emotions closer to the outside world and taking away our ability to choose our reactions. This can lead to depression, sudden rage out of proportion to the stimulus, bursting into tears for “no reason”, panic attacks, and anything else on the “mood disorder” spectrum of mental distress.

Emotions never go away until they are felt. There is no other solution. The only way out for these heavy rocks inside your soul is through the surface of the water… through your conscious mind. If you keep pushing these repressed emotions down when they surface, and continue to add to their number every day, you will slowly have your emotions and sense of self entirely displaced by them.

But if you can deal with these emotions, you can free yourself of their burden and become more happy, more content, more stress free, and more yourself than you have ever been.

You have a choice.