**🔼 Up:** [[Psychological Defence Mechanisms]] **\#️⃣ Tags:** #defencemechanism > **🌱 Planted:** Tue 24 December 2024 --- Repression is a [[Psychological Defence Mechanisms|Psychological Defence Mechanism]] where someone unconsciously blocks or pushes down the experience of their feelings and emotions so they are out of awareness. The act of repression happens so quickly that it is impossible to detect, so much so that the person who is repressing their emotions is completely unaware of their existence. **Where [[Denial is the inability or refusal to acknowledge or accept reality]], repression would be the outcome of that refusal.** It's unclear exactly how repression works, but the human brain appears to have the ability to automatically repress overwhelming feelings if it judges a situation potentially dangerous or traumatic. Repression isn't something that someone chooses to do (where as [[Suppression is the act of setting feelings and emotions aside|Suppression]] is the opposite)—it's usually an adaptive strategy that develops in childhood where caregivers are unable to tolerate the child's natural emotional expression, so their system learns it is best to shove it down and not experience it at all. For example, if a child's expression of their natural anger is met with retaliation, control or force out of their caregiver's own traumatic past, each time the child's later feels anger, the emotion will be instantaneously repressed before it has a chance to be consciously acknowledged. This is why we can't just tell someone who has been experiencing repression for a long time to simply go in and access these type of emotions—they are not actually consciously available to them. The effects of repression go far beyond the blocking or pushing down or feelings and emotions, though—[[The effects of childhood are encoded into the body and personality|it shows up in our personality styles and our bodies]]. --- **➡️ Next:** - [[Suppression is the act of setting feelings and emotions aside]] - [[Denial is the inability or refusal to acknowledge or accept reality]] - [[Dissociation represents the inward numbing, disconnection and withdrawal from external reality]]