**\#️⃣ Tags:** #Wisdom #Language #Repression > **🌱 Planted:** Thu 24 April 2025 --- So we have [[Publish/Elements/Dictionary/Repression|Repression]] in the sense of a [[Defence Mechanisms|Defence Mechanism]] where we need to effectively block our true and authentic internal experience due to something like [[Developmental Trauma]], but what if much of what we call 'repression' or the 'unconscious' largely arises from the inability of our language to capture the interconnectedness of reality? In [[Language causes the inseparable to become separable]], we talked about how language divides the world into subject and object, nouns and verbs, things and actions. When we use language, we indeed communicate effectively, but we also cannot avoid screening out both the wholeness and interconnectedness of things. Because our language focuses on individual and separate entities, it makes it really hard to even know about the underlying connections and interdependencies between them. In [[Psychotherapy East and West by Alan Watts|Psychotherapy East and West]], [[Alan Watts]] argued that what the West calls the "unconscious" is often just reality filtered out by our language systems. This means certain aspects of whole, flowing and continuous experience is constantly slipping through the cracks of our awareness and in doing so, it causes aspects of our experience to become implicit, unspoken and eventually unconscious. Here, we don't repress in the sense of pushing an experience down, we don't even perceive it because our language never gave us the chance to hold it. Repression therefore occurs not through the defence mechanisms, but through the structure of communication itself. If we grew up in a culture where there is no word, term or classification for certain feelings and rich internal states, for example, then we don't ever get the opportunity to register that experience. Then, we're left in a state where we're disconnected to ourselves because our tools of awareness don't allow us to make meaningful contact with what we're feeling. A good example of this is when those from [[Developmental Trauma|✦ Complex Trauma]] backgrounds come into contact with language and classification structures that allow them to both articulate and make meaning of the painful experiences of their past and upbringing. This is why it can be so liberating when we finally find the right language to describe something we've been feeling and experiencing inside for so long, yet never had the right terminology or words for.