Cultural Programming with Impact V: The Human Need to Express

There is perhaps no human instinct more natural than the need to express.

Before we learn language formally, we cry, move, draw, imitate sounds, dance without rhythm, invent stories, and react emotionally to the world around us. Human beings are born expressing long before they are taught how to communicate properly. Expression exists within us before structure does.

Yet somewhere along the way, many people slowly lose connection with this part of themselves. Life gradually teaches us caution before authenticity. Fear of judgment, emotional pain, rejection, trauma, social conditioning, and the pressure to conform often begin shaping human behavior from an early age. Over time, many individuals learn to suppress emotions, creativity, and spontaneous self-expression as protective mechanisms that help them adapt socially or emotionally.

In many cases, expression does not disappear completely; it becomes buried beneath layers of survival and self-protection. Research in affective science and psychology has shown that expressive suppression; the inhibition of emotional expression, is frequently linked to emotional stress, anxiety, reduced well-being, and difficulties in social connection (Yu, Haase, & Chang, 2023). Studies in neuroscience further demonstrate that emotional suppression significantly alters the brain’s emotional regulation processes and social-emotional interactions (Liu et al., 2023). 

Modern life can intensify this disconnection even further. Productivity-driven environments often reward efficiency, emotional control, and functionality more than vulnerability, imagination, or creative freedom. Many adults gradually become disconnected from spontaneity, playfulness, and emotional authenticity, replacing expression with performance and emotional restraint. Research increasingly suggests that creativity and emotional states are deeply interconnected, and that emotional suppression can interrupt creative and expressive capacities (Rösemeier, Hu, & Nijstad, 2025). 

Trauma and adversity can also contribute to this loss of expression. Research on childhood trauma and emotional regulation indicates that difficult life experiences often lead individuals to suppress emotional expression in social settings as a form of self-protection, particularly among those experiencing anxiety or depression. Over time, silence can begin to feel safer than visibility, and emotional control safer than vulnerability.

Perhaps this is why artistic and cultural engagement can feel unexpectedly emotional for many people. They are not simply encountering entertainment; they are reconnecting with parts of themselves that had been silenced, hidden, or forgotten. Through music, movement, storytelling, theatre, crafts, or collective participation, people are sometimes given rare permission to feel, imagine, and express again in ways that everyday life no longer easily allows.

And this is exactly what I have observed throughout my PhD research, and in fact, long before the research itself through years of interaction with different communities, including vulnerable target groups and young women living in care shelters in Egypt. I repeatedly witnessed how many individuals initially struggled to express themselves emotionally, creatively, or even verbally. Years of fear, social pressure, trauma, neglect, or emotional suppression had often disconnected them from parts of their own identity and innate human nature. Yet gradually, through engagement with arts and culture, storytelling, crafts, movement, music, theatre, and collective participation, something began to shift.

I observed how the moment individuals started expressing themselves safely and authentically, they slowly began reconnecting with themselves again. Confidence started emerging. Emotional openness became possible. Human connection became easier. In many cases, healing did not begin through direct intervention or instruction, but through the simple yet profound act of expression itself. It was as though creativity and self-expression allowed them to return, even temporarily, to a more natural human state that existed before fear, survival, and social conditioning interrupted it. This taught me that humans do not only need to consume culture; they need to express themselves through it. And perhaps that’s why it is a human right!

The right to cultural engagement and artistic expression is recognized under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community [and] to enjoy the arts.” Perhaps because culture, creativity, and expression are not secondary luxuries added to human existence, but part of what makes us fully human in the first place. 

Looking back today, I realize that many of the ideas shaping my work and research began forming much earlier than I consciously understood. In 2010, I participated in the Long-Term Training Course on Non-Formal Education and Euro-Arab Cooperation, which kicked off in Strasbourg by the Council of Europe. At the time, the project I was developing during the course revolved around cultural engagement and self-expression in public spaces. I could not have imagined then that shortly after returning to Egypt, I would inaugurate AGORA in the midst of the Egyptian revolution through a public space festival that aimed to support positive self-expression through arts and cultural engagement in public spaces, particularly among youth, and with the support of the armed forces as part of broader efforts toward youth integration and constructive social participation.

I also did not know at the time that the concept of non-formal education, which I was being introduced to for the very first time during that course, would later become one of the central tools shaping both my professional practice and my PhD research framework on resilience-building. Looking back now, it feels as though all the pieces slowly aligned over the years in ways I could never have predicted, as if the universe was quietly and beautifully conspiring to guide me toward this journey long before I fully understood where it was leading.

And ultimately, it led me to a core realization. After more than 25 years of observation, practice, and continuous curiosity-driven research, I can confidently say that expression is deeply connected to visibility. When human beings express themselves, they are not only releasing emotions; they are affirming existence. They are saying: “I am here. I feel. I exist".

In contexts marked by social pressure, displacement, trauma, marginalization, or emotional suppression, cultural engagement may often be perceived as a luxury, while in reality it becomes a fundamental human need; a need to survive, recover, sustain, and grow. Within many vulnerable communities, expression itself becomes an act of resilience. The ability to create, speak, move, sing, write, or participate artistically can help individuals reconnect with agency, identity, confidence, emotional safety, and ultimately with their own humanity.

This brings us back once again to AlFitra الفطرة the innate human nature. Human beings were never created merely to function, produce, and survive. Our innate nature was fundamentally structured around expression in its many human forms: storytelling, movement, music, rhythm, crafts, rituals, poetry, drawing, dance, performance, gathering, and collective participation. Across civilizations throughout history, intangible cultural heritage itself emerged through this deeply human instinct to express identity, memory, emotions, beliefs, values, relationships with nature, and connections to land and community. UNESCO (2003) itself defines intangible cultural heritage as the practices, expressions, knowledge, skills, and cultural traditions transmitted from generation to generation, constantly recreated by communities in response to their environment, history, and social existence. In many ways, heritage itself is humanity expressing who it is.

From cave paintings and oral storytelling traditions to embroidery, music, theatre, spiritual rituals, and public celebrations, human civilization has continuously evolved through creative and cultural expression. This suggests something deeply important: human beings are not accidentally creative. We are naturally wired for cultural engagement, collective meaning-making, imagination, and self-expression. Research in anthropology, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology increasingly supports the idea that artistic and symbolic expression played a central role in human evolution, social bonding, emotional regulation, learning, and collective survival (Dissanayake, 2008; Boyd, 2009). Creativity and cultural participation were not secondary luxuries that emerged after survival; they were part of how human beings survived, connected, learned, and evolved together.

Perhaps this is why cultural engagement continues to hold such transformative power today. It reconnects human beings with something ancient within themselves; something deeply human that modern life often suppresses but never fully erases. And perhaps this also opens a much larger conversation about the relationship between human evolution and cultural engagement itself, which I will explore further in the next article of this series.

Until then, the question is no longer whether arts and cultural engagement are important. The deeper question may instead be: how did human beings gradually drift away from their Fitra; their innate human nature, and how can they reconnect with it again through culture, creativity, expression, participation, and shared human experiences? Perhaps cultural engagement, in its deepest sense, is not simply entertainment or leisure, but a pathway through which human beings reconnect with themselves, with others, and with the very nature they were originally created with.

Human beings do not only need to consume culture; they need to express themselves through it. And while cultural consumption may exist alongside many other forms of consumption in modern life, cultural expression remains one of the most primary and fundamental forms of human existence and connection.

References:

Boyd, B. (2009). On the origin of stories: Evolution, cognition, and fiction. Harvard University Press.

Dissanayake, E. (2008). The arts after Darwin: Does art have an origin and adaptive function? In K. Zijlmans & W. van Damme (Eds.), World art studies: Exploring concepts and approaches (pp. 241–263). Valiz.

Eldesouky, L., & English, T. (2023). Keeping up appearances: The role of motives and utility beliefs in expressive suppression. Motivation and Emotion, 47(3), 381–398. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-022-09999-2

Liu, Z., Lu, K., Hao, N., & Wang, Y. (2023). Cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression evoke distinct neural connections during interpersonal emotion regulation. The Journal of Neuroscience, 43(49), 8456–8471. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0954-23.2023

Rösemeier, L., Hu, Y., & Nijstad, B. A. (2025). Creativity and emotions: A review of advances in theory and research. Academy of Management Annals. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2023.0096

Tyra, A. T., Fergus, T. A., & Ginty, A. T. (2024). Emotion suppression and acute physiological responses to stress in healthy populations: A quantitative review of experimental and correlational investigations. Health Psychology Review, 18(2), 396–420. https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2023.2251559

UNESCO. (2003). Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention

Yu, C.-W. F., Haase, C. M., & Chang, J.-H. (2023). Habitual expressive suppression of positive, but not negative, emotions consistently predicts lower well-being across two culturally distinct regions. Affective Science, 4(4), 684–701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-023-00221-1