I am definitely guilty of this: it’s called suppression and repression.

How many times are you confronted with something you just don’t want to face?

Maybe it’s talking to your boss about a raise.

Maybe it’s having a conversation with a boyfriend or girlfriend that literally is a conversation that you are dreading.

Maybe it’s confronting your mom or dad over something that you really need to talk to them about.

Maybe it’s talking to your brother about a business opportunity that he borrowed money for and never paid you back. Whatever it might be, we tend to all repress and suppress the hard things that we need to say to other people. So what happens when we suppress or repress things? What happens to our conscious and unconscious programs that we carry within us from literally all the social customs and family training we’ve had our whole life?

What happens to all these suppressed feelings? Well, I can tell you what happens.

Irritability, mood swings, tension.

Stomach pains, cramps, head aches, indigestion.

Insomnia, and even, if we keep it in long enough, cancer.

When we repress a feeling, it’s because there’s so much fear over the feeling that it’s not even consciously felt at all. We’re so afraid to have the conversation that we’re supposed to have with somebody, so we repress it, and we just hope it goes away, and pray that it goes away.

I am so guilty of this, because this is exactly what my father taught me when I was a kid growing up. My dad never talked about anything.

My brother died when I was three and a half years old. He was nine months old. Nobody ever talked about it. My dad repressed it, and suppressed it, so did my mom, and what happened?

Two years later my mother was in the car with me. Mother must have triggered her when we left my grandmother’s house in Queens, and as we were driving home, a car was stopped in the left hand lane.

Instead of my mom braking as you normally would do, she sped up, and went 65 miles an hour into the rear end of a parked car.

Four more cars piled into the back of us. I was in the middle of this accident, thrown from the back seat to the wind shield back to the back seat again.

My mother suppressed and repressed all her anger, all her everything, all her fears, and took it out on the car in front of her with her five year old boy in the car. I have some really wonderful programming, some things to me that are really fucked up.

I know when I need to have a conversation with somebody, or I need to make changes, or I need to talk about something that’s difficult, I will repress and suppress it.

And hope that it goes away.

You see, I learned that incorrect programming from my father, and from my mother.

And you know what, it will go away, and it does go away, because we are so good at tricking our mind that we’re able to make it go away.

But here’s the kicker.

It only goes away for a short period of time, and then something else triggers to make you realize that you still have the issue, and still have the problem, and you still have all this anger around it, and then the anger starts boiling up again.

You start feeling it in your stomach, in your heart. You have anxiety.

Because you haven’t handled the situation. All you’ve done was repress and suppress the situation.

Some of you suffer from simple suppression and repression.

Like not being able to meet the opposite sex, or losing weight, but you know what, it all makes a big difference. No matter what you suffer from, it’s something that you are afraid to go and literally confront.

So in 2017, whenever anything comes up, I am now going to fucking face it, hands down right away. If I don’t like something that my ex does, if I don’t like something that a brother does, or a friend does, I’m going to have the difficult conversation immediately. Because otherwise, I’m just going to keep suppressing, and repressing, and I’m going to continue to get the irritability. I’m going to continue to get the muscle pains in my neck and back, the headaches, the cramps, the indigestion, the insomnia, the hypertension, and all the other somatic conditions that happen when you suppress things.

Healthy people do not suppress and repress, so come and get healthy with me because I know how it feels. I’m really good at fucking coaching people through this. Do you want to know why? Because I’m terrible at doing it myself. So I’ve got a list of things that I make.

I call it the things I suppress and repress list.

And guess what I’m going to do? Every single day I’m going to look at that list and everyday I’m going to write and cancel and scratch off something, and have a difficult conversation that I’ve been having trouble to have, because otherwise I’m never going to heal. Even though I’ve got the power to heal all of you, and I’ve got the power to take care of all of you, what’s going to happen, is I’m not going to heal myself, and I’m going to continue to have the things that are bugging me. Come and join me on this. I’ve got you by the hand. I’m good at holding your hand.