When we don't speak our truth, Our Body Does
Coming from a country in the East, where freedom of expression is almost its identity - whether it is rage on the road, frustration in work environments, protests on the streets or rivers of tears in personal conflicts - everything is allowed and accepted by loved ones and strangers alike as normal human behaviors in certain situations, I instantly noticed the contrast in the West. Countries in North Americas and Western Europe may be well developed economically, infrastructurally and in many other ways to offer a relatively convenient life to their citizens, yet it is almost impossible for everything to be perfectly in order in an average human being's everyday life that one never gets a little upset, a little angry, a little frustrated or a little emotional, unless they carry a heart of a saint in their chest - staying guarded from the turbulences of the outer changes to affect their inner world.
When the dynamics of human psychological response to situations don't vary - no matter what ethnicity they belong to and which country they dwell in, why the norms of what's socially acceptable are different across regions? There's perhaps no answer to this question, because no one ever set any rules in any book to be followed in this regard. And yet, what's acceptable is so deeply embedded in the culture, that it almost run unspoken in their veins - still without their human blood having accepted the suppressed presence running alongside.
Most people in the west, in fact, remain unaware to the fact that their natural freedom of expression is being compromised and suppressed in the cultural layers of conformity and social acceptance. In the guise of "protection of freedom" for all, the culture expects one not to question, be curious, or raise any concerns when they come across anything drifting from normal. And this expectation itself normalizes all anomalies. Without any enforcement, it teaches one to keep quiet and carry on. But how far can one carry on, carrying a load of unexpressed emotions in their chest? In order to avoid outer conflict, one thus unconsciously creates inner conflict - where the body fights overly for the right to express for the entire being compensating for the needs of the mind and spirit - who remain unconscious that their true expression is being suffocated. And that is why the rage of the inner conflict runs inside the body, than outside - invisibly and silently for most humans in the west.
While one remains cognitively unconscious of this load they carry, their body remains aware at all times, and it keeps seeking a channel to let out the stored, the hidden, as it yearns to breathe freely. And that is when emerge those pains - the unexplained aches - the back aches, the neck pains, the migraines, chronic inflammation, fibromyalgia and many such conditions - that neither kill one nor let you live. For these pains remain in existence for one to see through them - listen to the hurting body, screaming in pain.
But as acclimatized as we become to suppression in all its forms, we learn to suppress the physical pain too - silencing it with pain killers and anti-inflammatory drugs, or worse, alcohol and recreational drugs. The medical bureaucracy not only supports this suppression, at least with the prescribed drugs and unnecessary surgeries, but enforces it through their dance with insurance compliance and pharmaceutical aspirations - knowing fully that pain killers don't rectify or heal anything ever, they only numb the pain receptors.
Body's unspoken awareness is the only protective agent that tries its best to pull an already numb and unconscious mind out of its prolonged, sustained suppression. And when we begin suppressing these calls of the body too, there remains no hope for expression, only peace with oppression - that comes guised in civilized societal norms, inoculating suppression - immunizing one to their own needs of expression, succumbing to repression.