the.com/repression
the basement where your mind hides what it can't afford to feel right now
means The act of forcibly pushing unwanted thoughts, feelings, or memories out of conscious awareness, often without realizing you're doing it.
from From Latin 'reprimere,' to press back or hold down — built from 're-' (back) plus 'premere' (to press), the same root that gives us 'press' and 'pressure.' The literal sense of physically pushing something down arrived in English in the 1400s; Freud later borrowed the word for the mind's habit of pressing inconvenient feelings beneath the surface, where they tend to push back.
- freud's word
- German Verdrängung literally means a pushing-away
- costs energy
- suppressing thoughts measurably increases stress and effort
- rebound effect
- forbidden thoughts return harder once you stop guarding
- body keeps score
- buried emotions linked to chronic physical symptoms
- motivated forgetting
- the brain can actively suppress unwanted memories
tiananmen square 1989 — chinese military killed estimated 100-2,600 pro-democracy protesters in beijing on june 4, 1989
bloody sunday 1972 — british soldiers killed 14 unarmed civil rights marchers in derry, northern ireland on january 30, 1972
srebrenica massacre 1995 — bosnian serb forces killed approximately 8,000 bosniak muslims in july 1995 during balkans conflict
gulag soviet union — soviet labor camp system killed an estimated 1.7 million prisoners between 1930s-1950s under stalin