My expressive-assertive needs include first and foremost a need to ventilate my powerful emotional feelings to a person who really listens and cares. My feelings of anger, frustration, disappointment. My joyful feelings of elation, excitement, enthusiasm. My sad feelings of loss, pain, hurt, rejection.
All these feelings are charged with energy, like electricity flowing through a dynamo. They have to be released.
Holding in explosive feelings like these is like stopping up a spout of a kettle and not allowing the steam to escape. The pressure builds up, until eventually the entire kettle blows apart!
The same thing happens in my body when I hold in my strong feelings. The energy of those feelings, the expansive, explosive energy has to be released in some way. When I don’t express those feelings outwardly with appropriate words and affect, then their energy usually turns inward and literally batters my body, causing all kinds of psychosomatic disturbances, symptoms such as ulcers, high blood pressure, stroke, debilitating conditions such as diverticulosis, diverticulosis, asthma and arthritis. All these are a result of bottled up feelings and trapped energy.
The smothered energy either attacks my body in this way, causing those painful physical conditions, or else it finds another “escape” in neurotic, self defeating behavior, such as over-eating, excessive drinking, sexual acting out.
Sometimes the avenue of escape is in the form of sarcastic speech or abrasive manner that can severely injure and even destroy my relationships.
– Rev. James E Sullivan (Journey To Freedom).