How Repressed Emotions Make Us Sick

The School of Life released a video which introduces the psychoanalytic concept of repression, its causes and its effects. In this article, I summarise the video.

Repression

Repression is a phenomenon in which we are unaware of our emotions.

“We might be angry or sad while lacking any active awareness that we are so. Or guilty or envious without any grasp of what is at play behind a thin psychological curtain.”

Causes of Repression

Repression occurs when an emotion threatens either our calmness or our self-image.

“And so we remain unconscious, always, because we are resistant to ideas that threaten our sense of calm, our self-image and our gratifying illusions about who we are. We surely can’t be angry because we’re kind people who couldn’t feel negatively about a beloved elderly relative. Or we can’t be sad at not being invited to the party because we don’t care about trivial social matters. And it isn’t possible that we are envious because we aren’t people to covet others’ advantages.”

Effects of Repression

Repression causes physical pain if we ignore our conscience’s efforts to alert our minds to the repressed emotion through psychological pain. Our conscience prefers understanding, as compared to forgetting, our emotions. However, it cannot understand an emotion if the emotion is repressed. As such, it first attempts to alert our minds to the repressed emotion through psychological pain. And, if its attempts to alert our minds through psychological pain fail, then it proceeds to do so through physical pain.

“While the greatest share of our mental apparatus privileges forgetting over understanding, we do, nevertheless, have a conscience. There’s a part of us that wants the truth, however bitter it might be. A minor part, but a notoriously insistent and ingenious part that won’t leave us in peace until its case has been heard. It will, in order to stir us from our reverie, give us all manner of problems – breakdowns, illnesses, twitches, compulsions – in the hope of letting us know that there is something we would benefit from reckoning with. When our conscience has done everything it can to alert our minds, it has a tendency to set to work on our bodies. More specifically, it forces us to feel in the form of a symptom what we haven’t felt outright as an idea or insight. Lack of awareness returns to haunt us as physical ailments. If our intellect won’t look at our anger, the feeling may be sent to dwell in our lower back. If our anxiety isn’t being dealt with psychologically, it may be relegated to our gut. Romantic frustration that is denied may, literally, begin to wreck our hearts. Our unfelt feelings end up as back pain, constipation, insomnia, migraines and arrhythmias.”

Because the physical pain is caused by our conscience’s efforts to alert our minds to repressed emotions, the pain can be ameliorated by turning our attention to the emotions themselves.

“In order to spare our bodies some of their mute agonies, we should submit them to a curious-sounding exercise. With our eyes closed, probably while we are lying in bed, we should pass over our different organs and zones and ask: If this could speak, what might it want to tell us? What might the heart ask for, the legs, the shoulders, the stomach? Our minds are probably better able to think of answers than we might presume. It could be surprisingly clear, once we ask the question, that our shoulders are desperate for the relationship to end. That our stomachs want us to take on less responsibility. That our hearts want a chance to say sorry. That our ribcages has had enough of pretending it’s happy, and that our lungs need an opportunity to scream.”