Repression
The psychological act of excluding feelings, thoughts, fantasies or desires from one’s conscious awareness and attempting to hold or subdue them in the subconscious. Repression is usually an unconscious mechanism (we do it without being aware of it) that can be detrimental to mental and physical health. People tend to repress an experience they find painful, terrifying, difficult, shameful, or otherwise challenging. We often dismiss or deny painful emotions as a means to maintain psychological stability, or because we simply don’t have time to deal with them in the face of our responsibilities. Unfortunately, powerful feelings, thoughts and desires that are repressed in this manner remain in the subconscious mind, where they sabotage our psychological, spiritual and physical wellbeing (see psychogenic illness). Repressed emotion can be safely released through the use of psychotherapy, hypnosis, expressive therapies and other tools of contemporary psychology. Repression is not the same as thought suppression, which is entirely conscious and thus can be more readily dealt with.
