You may not want to get in touch with your messiest feelings—sadness, rage, resentment—but one way or another, they're going to get in touch with you. Martha Beck shows you how to defuse and deal.

"Of course I'm out of my mind," said one of my daughter's friends the other day. "It's dark and scary in there!"

I wish all of us were so honest. Freud's great contribution was the recognition that consciousness holds only a small fraction of the things we know and feel. Beneath this tidy space lie the subconscious and unconscious levels of thought—cavern systems containing hidden labyrinths and spooky creatures. It's a place most of us avoid, pushing away dark thoughts in a process known as repression.

The problem is that, as therapists like to say, "What we resist persists." The further we withdraw from difficult issues, the more likely they are to spill out. The only way to keep this from happening is to go spelunking in our own forbidden, forbidding depths.

The Things We Almost Know
Repression sometimes occurs involuntarily—for instance, when soldiers in battle experience so much pain and fear that they psychologically dissociate and later have a flat, emotionless memory (or no memory at all) of the event. Most repression, however, involves an element of choice. This is not the kind of explicit decision-making we use to solve intellectual problems but the conditioned avoidance of psychological pain.

This can be exhausting, because the mind doesn't like hiding things from itself. We often deal with this by keeping our attention riveted on other things: eating, shopping, work, television, alcohol—anything but quiet relaxation. The best long run result we can hope for is chronic stress; the worst, flat-out breakdown.

To figure out whether you may benefit from mental cave diving, take this quiz.

From the March 2005 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine