The Potential Neuroscience of Repressed Emotion
Dillon Freed
December 2023
Graduate Center CUNY
Introduction: A Strange Technique
There is a strange technique to deal with emotional trauma that I came across about a decade ago. The idea behind the technique is to let emotion arise, not to analyze it, not to vent it, not to try to escape it, but to merely allow the emotion to come up and feel it - thoroughly. This applied to emotion that arose in the moment, but perhaps more importantly, emotional memories that had been “buried away.” To allow the emotion to arise meant to “ask for more of the emotion”, as it were. Now, at the same time one is feeling the troubling emotion, there is an aspect of oneself that is watching only, and not feeling. Phenomenologically this “watching-feeling” seems to be happening simultaneously; of course, in reality, the two states may be oscillating back and forth between feeling the emotion and distancing oneself from the emotion.
This method of dealing with emotions, it appears, arose from some rather strange New Age movements. It is often simply called “releasing” or “letting go of repressed emotion.” I’ve always been rather open minded to “self-help” and other therapeutic techniques from REBT to NLP to Psychoanalysis to Jungian therapy and so on. And since the glowing testimonies of those who used this “release method” seemed legitimate, I decided to give it a try. (Plus it aligned with something I had always practiced anyway, in which I allowed mental images to not be “repressed” but to flow through the mind). At any rate, to my surprise, quite frankly, this method worked better than anything I had ever done or employed before in eradicating troubling feeling states. Let me explain more clearly how it is done with a concrete example.
Around the time that I found the method I had just experienced an unexpected break-up. Typically, I took such things hard, and the emotional torment would last for quite some time. Feelings of inferiority, feelings of jealousy along with fantasies of revenge (e.g. “I’ll be very, very rich next time she sees me, and very, very muscular of course,” etc.) Well, I used the method, and allowed all the feelings to arise, I allowed them to “run.” And they ran - they ran around the clock. I even let the emotions run in the background while at school and work - they were there, not being suppressed. I let them run while I slept - even in dreams the feelings seemed to be present - I didn’t interfere with them. It felt as if the emotion would be endless, and that there was this cycle and layers of emotions as well: from fear to pride to humiliation to despair, they came in repeating waves (with accompanying images and stories). There were worries and fears that were latent, emotions from past relationships that were unresolved that came forth. It was quite frightening to face this, but I also let that “fear of fear” run as well. It too was an emotion I let arise without judgment. After two weeks of this intense “feeling out", I suddenly had this emotional climatic moment when the intensity of the emotions seemed to be almost unbearable, but then suddenly, from one moment to the next, it was all gone - I was over it, completely, the break-up no longer bothered me. There was no question about this, it was final. In two weeks, I - someone who could hang onto a relationship for a year after the separation - in a fortnight was liberated of it. Since then, I’ve used the method for the death of loved ones, some illnesses I’ve been through, and more.
Now, I say all of that to say this: I was very curious about what was happening in the brain as I “released” this emotion. Again, it was as if there was a part of the self/brain that was watching, and then another aspect of the self/brain that was feeling these emotions. No one around me would have known I was engaging in this process of releasing, as part of the method means not “expressing” the emotions with words, or tears, or facial expressions, or screams, or groans - you passively let the emotion arise. (Not that something like talking it out or weeping can’t be healthy, it’s just not how the method works).
Controversially, I would also say that it certainly, phenomenologically, felt something like the “hydraulic” theory had some sort of neurophysiological existence. I could feel, during the break-up, emotions in the background, emotions that had built up over time that I had not recognized, or better yet, had recognized and quickly and promptly shifted away from, essentially suppressing those emotions. And while I focus mainly on repressed emotions, surely many of the feelings were generated at the trigger point of the event - not all of the emotions coming up were from the repressed past. Naturally, the promoters of the method seem to think that the emotions were stored in one’s “aura” or “energy body” or in the “field of consciousness” - I did say the method, as far as I can tell, was created by “New Agey” groups - but I was again concerned with a more mundane explanation for repressed emotions: activity in the brain. My basis of thinking there is a neuroscientific basis for repression stems from the following belief: Any phenomenological experience must have certain neurophysiological correlates - there should be some brain (and body) activity to explain any common, subjective experience, or what we might call “folk psychology.”
So thus, this paper explores the nature of repressed emotion as well as takes some guesses at why the above described method apparently works - and works well. It’s interesting to consider how emotions could be stored in the brain, and maybe, somehow, also are “built up” over time. What exactly would that look like in terms of neuroscience? How would this experience of “repressed emotion” be instantiated in neuronal tissue? Are there alternative explanations other than repression? I’m not suggesting I know for certain that the following is how the brain behaves, this paper is largely speculative. Luckily, it seems others have considered the neuroscience of repression and repressed emotion as well. It’s not a large area of investigation, but there is some work on it.
In the following I break the paper into three sections. The first section will discuss the neuroscience of repression. It would be silly to write a paper on repression if repression of unwanted feelings had been ruled out by science. In the second section, which is certainly going to be more controversial, I want to focus on how humans can have a feeling of emotional “pressure”, that is a sensation of an accumulated emotion or feeling, dare I say again, almost a hydraulic feeling of emotion that can be released. This second part will contain more speculation than the first. In the final and third section, I want to explore how the method I opened with, this “releasing” method, could work neurophysiologically. Again, this section too will be heavy on speculation.
Does the Brain Repress?
Defining Repression and Emotional Repression
The main idea behind repression, in psychoanalytic terms, is that the ego needs to be protected from darker or uncivilized impulses coming from the unconscious, such as from the id or the Jungian shadow (Smith and Lane, 2016). Axmancher, et. al., (2010) wrote: “‘Repression’ was introduced by Herbart to designate the (nondefensive) inhibition of ideas by other ideas in their struggle for consciousness. Freud adapted repression to the defensive inhibition of ‘unbearable’ mental contents,” (p. 3). Another way to put it is that there is something that is a part of you, but it is not in awareness as if it were in awareness it would be too emotionally traumatic. Slavin (1990) noted that the classic interpretation of repression is that we have desires or drives that conflict with social reality in some way. He wrote that repression is a product of “an innate ‘dividedness’ and tension at the core of human nature and the human condition,” (p. 309). In this view, one might say repression, at root occurs, because of this division of how we wish to act and how society can demand we behave.
The relationship between repression and emotional repression should be briefly noted. I’d like to make the case that repression is fundamentally always a repression of emotion or feelings, not merely “ideas” (for this paper, I’ll use the terms emotion and feelings interchangeably). In other words, an unwanted thought is actually an unwanted feeling in verbal or “pictorial” disguise (i.e. mental imagery), or we might say, the repressed thought is one that will lead to or produce an unwanted feeling. I think this is, generally speaking, what Freud had in mind when speaking of repression anyway (Michael, 2020). As an example, if we have a desire to cheat on our spouse, we avoid the thought of doing so because of the shame we might feel if we acted, or perhaps, the guilt we might feel if we acted and liked it, or the fear of retaliation by the spouse or the end of the marriage, et cetera. It’s emotions all the way down. So to reiterate the position of this paper, what is typically called repression of ideas, is actually more so the repression of emotion, as it seems the main goal of blocking things from consciousness is to preclude feeling things we do not wish to feel.
This brings us to a debate in psychoanalytic circles regarding the difference between repression and suppression. Classically, repression occurs unconsciously, and suppression occurs with conscious effort. I think, in the vast majority of cases, both suppression and repression are active. An unwanted feeling is first felt either consciously, or just on the edge of consciousness (perhaps subverbally) and then that part of the feeling is suppressed, and the greater bulk of the feeling is then repressed by unconscious means. In other words, we push from our minds an unwanted feeling, we do so very quickly in a, let’s say, semi-conscious manner. The rest of the emotion is held down by non-conscious mechanisms. As an example, we feel jealousy, but only the “tip” of our jealousy. We briefly play with some jealous imagery, but then consciously shift our thoughts to a safer place, not allowing the rest of the emotionally charged jealous content to arise. In this paper, when I use the word repression I am thinking of this process unless otherwise noted: there is a conscious or semiconscious blocking of a feeling which leads to an activation of unconscious mechanisms which essentially keep the depth and breadth of the emotion from consciousness.
Emotional repression therefore has two phases in my estimation: As just stated, the first is the initial blocking of part of the emotion by a suppressive force, and unconscious repression keeps the remainder of the emotion from consciousness. The second phase of repression, which I think is very interesting, is what I see as the “storage” of repressed emotion, and its apparent phenomenological feeling of “build up” and its possible corresponding neurological “build up.”
One more point on defining repression. I’d like to posit that nearly all emotional regulation, in some way, leads to a type of emotional blocking. Whether one alters a situation or environment to change an emotion, cognitively reframes the emotion, attempts to escape the emotion through distraction - all of these methods are in some respect repressive. To put another way, I think the mechanisms of repression are present in all forms of emotional regulation from meditation, to mindfulness, to various therapeutic interventions. They end up being a form of the suppression-repression process even if that isn’t the intention. Of course, I may be guilty of what Kihlstrom (2002) accused Erdelyi (2006) of: expanding repression so much that it loses any meaning; however, I think the extended definition is merely explaining how repression actually works.
But can an Emotion Be “Unconscious”?
Before moving on, it should be noted that there seems to be a bit of an oxymoron here: how can emotion be “unconscious.” That seems impossible. Indeed, Freud himself wrote, “But in psychoanalytic practice we are accustomed to speak of unconscious love, hate, anger, etc., and find it impossible to avoid even the strange conjunction, ‘unconscious consciousness of guilt,’ or a paradoxical ‘unconscious anxiety’ (quoted from Michael (2020), p. 1).”
My response to this is twofold: First, once more, I think most emotions are first felt consciously as stated above, and then move to the unconscious. Second, I also assert that emotions that are in the unconscious still have an impact on consciousness - in the form of feeling and mood changes. So the emotions are very often intruding on consciousness but in disguised forms that we might call “defense mechanisms” or vague “moods” or physical symptoms like a headache. The repressed emotion creates a conscious impression that is preverbal (often ineffable, as “something is off with me, I can’t put my finger on it”) and very consciously “thin” in nature; so the “unconscious” emotion is actually unconscious; it's just transformed. Then again, I did say in a footnote above that there is something like purely unconscious repressed emotion. Is totally unconscious emotion possible?
For truly repressed emotion that isn’t at all consciously felt, it seems that such an emotion could be exerting influence on certain systems toward certain conscious thresholds. For example, speculatively, stress not “dealt with” increases stress hormones and perhaps that vitiates some neuronal membrane ion channels, which leads to something like excessive serotonin uptake, which in turn leads to anxiety attacks (Tafet, et. al., 2001 ). A person feels completely fine (the emotion is unconscious) until they “break down.” More evidence of at least unconscious processing of emotion comes from studies in which there are physical reactions to subliminal emotional stimuli (e.g. galvanic skin response students to emotional stimuli subliminally presented (Svobodny and Detkov, 2023).)
There are a few other solutions to this paradox of unconscious emotion, such as simply expanding the definition of emotion to not necessarily include it being “conscious” - perhaps we are just wrongly defining what an emotion is (Michael, 2020). Another possible solution suggested by Michael (2020) is based on Robert’s construal theory: “This second solution to the paradox is suggested by Roberts’ account of what it is to feel an emotion. Recall that, for Roberts, having an emotion is having a first-order construal, while feeling an emotion is having a second-order construal, that is, a construal of oneself as construing some object in a certain way. This allows us to distinguish between two forms of consciousness: the conscious experiences that (partly) constitute the emotion and the consciousness of the emotion,” (p. 7). So there are levels of emotional awareness. This is somewhat similar to something like Ledoux and Brown's (2019) paper on the Higher Order Theory of Emotional Consciousness, in which representations are made available to higher order brain regions, and only become “conscious” when a self representation is produced. It seems possible that the first order regions could continue to hold (and repress) emotions even if they do not reach consciousness.
Usefulness of Repressing Emotion
One more item before investigating how the brain might repress emotion is to consider why repression exists. For repression to be real, it would seem that there has to be some aspect of the brain that tries to protect the sense of “self” and that protection of the self must have some evolutionary and/or social and cultural benefit. Why else would emotions be repressed? But this is where things get tricky in regards to neuroscience, because to assert the “self” must be protected, we have to define the self, and the self is an extremely difficult “thing” to define.
Salomon (2017) wrote: “While the concept of the self is intuitively evident, its multidimensional character has given rise to numerous definitions and models'' (p. 87). Despite the definitional difficulty, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers alike, tend to agree that the self is something like a complex combination of various functional and input systems, operating in conjunction as well as in parallel. Research has demonstrated the sense of self is produced by, among other things, a sense of bodily ownership (Blanke and Metzinger, 2009), mental models of the world (Metzinger, 2003), interoceptive and exteroceptive data streams (Salvato, 2020), bodily motion (Wright, et. al., 2006), visual input (cf. Rubber Hand experiments), a sense of agency (cf. the comparator model. (Carruthers, 2012)), breathing patterns (Adler, et. al., 2014), heartbeat patterns (Aspell, et. al., 2013), autobiographical memory (Lyu, et. al, 2023), a sense of time (Prebble, et. al. 2013), personal narratives (especially via the Default Mode Network (Menon, 2023)), and so on. At any rate, emerging from this baroque matrix of systems is a sense of self. It is as if all the various inputs are combined and what appears phenomenologically is a sense of “wholeness” and “unity,” or a feeling of “selfhood”, of “me-ness”, or we might even say, a sensation of “I am.”
This “compression” to self-ness is vital, for now the self can act and plan as if it is a “single entity.” And of course, the self has a first person conscious experience. Consciousness plus a sense of self appears to grant an evolutionary advantage. The conscious self, as an experiential unity, and not merely an unconscious discrete swarm of inputs and subsystems, can seek to avoid pain and gain pleasure as a single entity. Metzinger (2007) stated: “the conscious self-model of human beings is the best invention Mother Nature has made. It is a wonderfully efficient two-way window that allows an organism to conceive of itself as a whole, and thereby to causally interact with its inner and outer environment in an entirely new, integrated, and intelligent manner. Consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective are fascinating representational phenomena that have a long evolutionary history, a history which eventually led to the formation of complex societies and a cultural embedding of conscious experience itself” (p. 1).
So the conscious self is useful, but what of repression? Why would the self repress? What evolutionary advantage would it grant? One can think of a few reasons for this: the ability to block out emotion increases the ability to focus and pay attention to one’s surroundings, and 2) constant emotions like fear or anxiety are metabolically expensive. Repressed emotion keeps consciousness clear to act, and helps save energy and
Beyond protecting the physical body, repression might also have been developed to protect us psychologically. The classmates who laughed at us during the competition, the woman who rejected us, and so on are threats to our social well-being and self worth. If these feelings are not moved from consciousness that could impact our social standing (position in the dominance hierarchy), they could alter the way in which we view ourselves (loss of self-esteem and therefore a decrease in mating chances), and also, again, interfere with our survival via distraction.
In sum, there does seem to be some sort of system or neuronal mechanism that attempts to protect the conscious self, not just physically, but psychically. An attempt to keep the self, as much as possible, “together” - able to engage in activity without distraction, able to feel good about itself, and able to react to the environment appropriately.
The Neuroscience of Repression
So we defined repression as that which the conscious self does not wish to entertain, be it too frightening or painful or distracting. We noted that emotions could potentially be felt unconsciously or at least have impacts on consciousness that are not felt in awareness, and also that there was an evolutionary “motive” for repression. Now we ask the question: Is there any scientific evidence or theories in regards to repression? Are there neural correlates or neuroscientific models for such psychic phenomena? Anderson and Levy (2002), wrote in defense of the study of repression that while many “insist... that repression is unconscious, rendering it difficult to study scientifically... Freud never intended repression to be exclusively unconscious.... If so, the necessary tools to understand repression are readily available in the armamentarium of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The conclusion couldn’t be more different from what mainstream experimentalists have supposed: Repression is, in fact, a scientifically tractable problem,” (p. 512).
Let’s briefly explore several neuroscientific explanations for repression. Keep in mind, this list could be expanded and deepened, and is by no means thorough but rather a cursory overview given length constraints. The following are simply some ways that the brain could potentially repress emotion:
Repression by way of Executive control
It’s been known for quite some time that the prefrontal cortex can help with emotional regulation (Ochsner, et. al, 2002). Anderson and Green (2001) wrote: “Whatever their neural basis, our results establish a direct link between internal operations that control phenomenal awareness of a memory and its later accessibility. These findings thus support a suppression mechanism that pushes unwanted memories out of awareness, as posited by Freud,” (p. 368). Boag (2007) wrote: “Specifically, 'neural inhibition,' triggered by social factors, can account for Freudian repression, without succumbing to circular explanation. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that a plausible mechanism of inhibition exists, providing testable avenues for the 'cornerstone' of psychoanalysis. Evidence of the role of the frontal lobes [a seat of executive control], a brain area that appears to mediate the influence of social factors upon impulse control, demonstrates that repression is plausible within a dynamic neural framework,” (p. 375). Anderson (2007) further noted the executive control role in selective retrieval and retrieval induced forgetting.
The Default Mode Network
The brain has been found to have a system that produces something like “self-generated thoughts” (Andres-Hanna, et. al, 2014). This is the Default Mode Network (DMN); the “default” is that it seems the brain will begin thinking about itself, and producing content not directly linked to the external environment: “Thoughts and feelings can arise that are only loosely related to ongoing sensory input,” (p. 30). A possible mode of repression in the DMN would be that as the brain conjures thoughts of the self, emotions that are not desired are inhibited, or as I suggested above, the emotions are only partially felt and the remainder is cordoned off from consciousness. We might suggest that the network only allows so much emotional content to come forward from memory, especially negatively valenced emotional content. There is some evidence that the DMN has the capability to repress. A study by Murakami, et. al, (2015) found that emotional suppression decreased amygdala activation while at the same time increased activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - a key area of the DMN. Relatedly, Pan et. al., (2018) found that “[suppression in the name of emotional regulation] was reliably associated with efficiency in the fronto-parietal network and default-mode network,” (p.70).
Neural Pathways for Unconscious Processing
We know that the brain can process information without conscious awareness (e.g. “blindsight” (Celeghin, et. al., 2015)) and that there are physiological changes in response to subliminal processing of emotions like fear (Weiskrantz, 2000). Tamietto and Gedler (2010) wrote, “Many emotional stimuli are processed without being consciously perceived. Recent evidence indicates that subcortical structures have a substantial role in this processing,” (p. 697). Relatedly, Axmacher, et. al (2010) noted: “Such an interaction between amygdala and hippocampus may be necessary for the enhanced declarative memory of emotional events because these two structures support complementary processes, as revealed by a hippocampal-amygdala double dissociation: While integrity of the hippocampus is necessary for the conscious memory that a particular stimulus was, during conditioning, associated with a shock, the amygdala is required for the unconsciously associated vegetative reaction,” (p. 211).
Bayesian and Construal Model
Michaels (2020) incorporated the construal theory of emotion and the free energy principle as a method of how the brain could repress emotion: “The repression of the consciousness of an emotion is an active process that seeks to reduce attention on – ...or the precision of one’s model of – how one is experiencing or responding to the object of the emotion,” (p. 7). He also gave an account of how a Bayesian model can possibly describe hysteria as a product of repression. He wrote:
The argument, in brief, is that the repression of a memory can lead to the repression of accompanying emotion. As a result, when the memory, and hence the accompanying emotion, is unconsciously triggered, the patient may experience the bodily feelings generated by the emotion, but these feelings lack any explanation due to the unconsciousness of the emotion. Unexplained bodily feelings constitute prediction error – or free-energy – according to the Bayesian brain framework.... Without the availability of the correct explanation for these feelings, the brain attempts to construct a plausible alternative explanation, which in the right circumstances would be a symptom “belief.” This, in turn, can lead to the generation of symptoms of hysteria. If this account is correct, then it demonstrates the important role that unconscious emotion plays in the emergence of the kind of phenomena that psychoanalysis was first designed to address. (p. 1).
Relatedly, one could imagine some unconscious or conscious rule set that the brain follows (possibly similar to Nussbaum’s idea of background processing of emotion, or those “evaluative judgements that persist through situations of numerous kinds” (Nussbaum, class reading)). These “evaluative judgments” could be filters that reduce surprise, quickly and unconsciously categorizing emotional input.
Higher Order Theory of Emotional Consciousness
One more potential model of repression could be broached. The Higher Order Theory of Emotional Consciousness was proposed by Ledoux and Brown (2019). In their paper, they explain that, for example, “fear” may activate a defense circuit. The fear does not become a conscious fear, until a representation of the lower order state of the fear is presented to a higher order region. This first representation of the fear would create a sensation of the emotion, ever so faintly conscious, but not indexed to the fully conscious self, only to a sort of thin sense of self, which Ledoux (2019) labeled the noetic self. To have full awareness of an emotion requires the presentation of the fear to a “self-representation”, which might be compared to the feeling of a “unified self” mentioned earlier. Ledoux (2019) calls this full self, the autonoetic self. It seems that a feeling could be stored or repressed, that is, encoded as a memory at the first order level, or even the higher order level of the noetic self. At that level, the repressed emotion would potentially be “pushing” on consciousness a little more than the first order state via presentations of representations.
Objections to Repressed Emotion and Brief Replies to Them
I don’t wish to explore at too great a depth the objections to repression in this paper, but I will mention what I think are the three main counters to the existence of repression. First is the contention that there are many who think that repression does not exist, and that we are talking of nothing “real” as it pertains to psychological or neurological function (Kihlstrom, 2002). However, clearly, it seems to be something that people on the “front lines” of the mental health battle keep encountering. So it’s real in some aspects. Anderson (2006) stated: “In the popular media, skeptics of repressed memories have cast repression as a ‘myth,’ a bit of clinical folklore with no bearing on reality, and a process for which no scientifically valid psychological mechanism exists. In contrast to this, repression, or at least behavior resembling it, is often reported by psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals who interact regularly with psychological patients. The distance between these perspectives on repression is striking, reflecting an enduring disconnection between those who claim to witness the phenomenon or its effects, and those who insist on rigorous specification and evaluation of this construct,” (p. 327). There is always the possibility that repression is an illusion, but even if that is the case, there must be something neuronally creating such an illusion that gives rise to the phenomenological experience of repression.
Another counter is that emotional trauma is actually remembered better, with higher resolution (which is why traumatic memories are so intense and potentially crippling) (McNally, 2005). As stated above, I think emotions can be felt acutely but not fully. Further, Axmacher, et. al (2010) wrote of evidence of the unconscious blocking off intense emotion compared to moderate emotion:
While these studies provide compelling evidence for an enhanced memory of stimuli which induce moderately negative emotions, this is not necessarily true for two problematic cases involving extremely negative emotions: the emergence of an unconscious conflict, which is subject to repression, and traumatic events that overstress a person’s executive capabilities and thus lead to dissociation. As a result, conscious recall of these contents is impaired, but they continue to exert an unconscious effect which dramatically influences subsequent life – for example, by uncontrollably occurring intrusions and dissociative flashbacks, panic attacks, or psychosomatic symptoms... In other instances, victims of a traumatic experience may be able to recall details from the trauma, but only in a contorted manner – for example, from a detached view outside of themselves, or without the associated emotions. (p. 1)
I’d like to provide some examples to extend my reply a bit to this objection, especially in regards to the “releasing” method mentioned in the introduction. Consider the death of a loved one and how most people handle such a death. The grief is felt consciously and intensely, but I posit again, the true depth of that emotion is actually not handled, the emotion while supremely difficult (and potentially debilitating) is actually, despite its severity experientially, not felt thoroughly. There are things that one simply cannot “look” at, or can only glance at for a moment. I recently had a friend who was going through a terrible divorce in which his significant other cheated. He was certainly in an immense amount of pain. But though it felt as if he was “deeply” experiencing the pain, it was obvious that there were things that he simply could only look at out of the “corner of his eye” for fleeting moments, such as the memory of his now gone significant other being sexually with the man she cheated with. It was all “too painful” - the mere thought of the departed lover with the other would induce panic and almost physical sickness. But you see, that emotional memory, while devastating, was again only felt partially; he did not “face the emotions” related to the infidelity in their entirety. The emotional memory kept returning to him, repeatedly (contra Axmacher), but the extent of the emotional experience is still limited.
Another counter is that we have other explanations for repression such as dissociation, typical forgetting, poor encoding, emotional regulation, and so on (Otgaar, et. al., 2021). I touched upon this earlier, but to expand, my counter is that I think many mental and psychological mechanisms fall under the umbrella of repression, or are mechanisms of repression. Erdelyi (2006) agreed when he wrote, “Substantial experimental literatures on attentional biases, thought avoidance, interference, and intentional forgetting” represent repressive tendencies of the brain, and “that the inaccessible materials are often available and emerge indirectly.” He also noted that “Freud's clinical experience revealed early on that exclusion from consciousness was effected not just by simple repression (inhibition) but also by a variety of distorting techniques, some deployed to degrade latent contents (denial), all eventually subsumed under the rubric of defense mechanisms (‘repression in the widest sense’),” (p. 499).
Can Emotions Accumulate?
Emotions seem to rise and fall over time, they have a lifespan. I’m arguing that certain emotions, especially certain negative ones, have a sort of preternatural long age, or an almost ghostly or poltergeist-like existence after what seems to be their “death.” Résibois, et. al., (2017), wrote that “emotions unfold across two phases in which different types of processes come to the fore: emotion onset and emotion offset,” (p. 1261). What if emotions, after “offset”, have only been turned off from the view of the conscious mind and can turn back on?
As we spoke of in the last section, there appears to be little doubt that emotions, or at least the extent of emotions, can be blocked from awareness. But do these emotions build up? From a folk psychology perspective, clearly we can feel like something is “bugging us,” or we can feel something “in the back of our mind” or “under the surface.” We can further feel as if we are reaching a “breaking point.” Anyone who has ever been dumped or fired or has failed an important test knows that as one goes throughout the day, there is a feeling of loss underneath conscious experience and it can linger there for sometime.
There also seem to be some common examples of emotional repression that are familiar to us. For example, sufferers of PTSD seem to experience repressed emotion when it erupts into flashbacks and hijacks their conscious experience (Bourne, et. al., 2013; Rauch, et. al., 2006). Axmacher, et. al. (2010) wrote: “Typically, declarative memory for these [emotionally intense] contents is impaired – possibly due to repression in the case of internal conflicts or due to dissociation in the case of external traumata – but they continue to exert an unconscious pathological influence: neurotic symptoms or psychosomatic disorders after repression or flashbacks and intrusions in PTSD after dissociation,” (p. 211). More evidence of “repressed emotional accumulation” might be seen in the “sudden” onset of anxiety or panic attacks (Tafet, et. al., 2001). It may also be observed in something like what is colloquially known as “going postal” - that is, people who “snap” (cf. the movie Falling Down) and go on killing sprees (Wossham, 1998). More potential hints at emotional repression build up would be unexplained physical symptoms, mood swings, intrusive thoughts, avoidant behavior, insomnia and other sleep issues, depression, memory gaps, social withdrawal and more.
In this section, I want to consider how humans can have a phenomenological feel of “pent-up” emotions in regards to what might be happening in the brain. Here are some potential explanations and models to explain that feeling:
“Looping” Emotional Engrams
It could be that there are emotional “memory engrams.” Sometimes I call these “feeluries” - feelings as memories. In short, on this theory of repressed accumulation of emotion, an event triggers the formation of a feelury (an emotional engram), and this engram stays active, “firing” unconsciously in the “background,” as it were, of conscious thinking. Feeluries could be felt as a “psychic” pressure (perhaps at the noetic stage of Ledoux and Brown (2019)). Why? Perhaps an engram that continues firing but never breaks into the threshold of full consciousness, stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, leading to health problems (fatigue, insomnia, digestive issues. etc.), along with mood control problems, and so on. This increase in overall body activity produces a feeling of the system being over taxed and “pressurized.” The feeling of pressure could also be from the constant attempt of the emotion to reach consciousness. In other words, the sensation of “hydraulic build up” might be something like a bottleneck of attention - attention on the task at hand having to switch to focusing on vague emotional content jutting into awareness. Typically, the negative feelury is inhibited by other structures that monitor social standing, self-esteem, or the like. Feeluries are likely stored in many areas of the brain in a constellation of cells and regions, and are activated by events that will allow its expression. The engram loops and fires as it has been linked to the survival or thriving of the self (as mentioned in the section titled the Usefulness of Repression).
Emotional Size/Intensity
A related question to accumulation is “do emotions have ‘size’”? A weird question, I know, but an interesting one. What would it mean that some emotions are “bigger” than others? Experientially it seems true that some emotions feel larger than others to us (this probably explains our understanding of the neoteric slang of “big mad:). Why? Perhaps more neurons are recruited to register the emotional intensity? Perhaps it has to do with the amount of neurotransmitters or hormones that are released. Or maybe, more neuronal regions (auditory, visual, limbic, etc.) that come online for certain emotions are what create the feeling of “size.” It is possible that the “size” of emotion corresponds to the number of body systems that are involved in the expression of an emotion. For example, when faced with truly bad news people may swoon, may lose balance, lose their legs, have stomach upset, vomit, shake uncontrollably, have a hot flash, feel dizzy, and so on. One could imagine that the feeling of build-up is just a series of micro-changes on a variety of levels in regards to the emotion, an increase in “size,” which we could also call emotional intensity.
Episodic Emotional Memory Firing
On this view, emotions are not looping endlessly, but instead they are just firing intermittently, as a reminder of important emotional content. The feeling of emotional build up is thus the frequency of this intrusion on consciousness. Sort of a “Chinese water drop” torture of unwanted emotion, the constant exposure to the emotion gives a feeling of pressure. Whereas the “looping feeluries’ I view as something that just continues churning in the background of consciousness, this I see as turning on and then turning off. The off might as well be “unconscious” even if it is not actually repressed.
Layers of Emotions
Another conception of why we feel pent up emotion, could be that something triggers a cascade of feelings. One thing you notice in “releasing” an emotion is that it seems to 1) reveal layers of emotions, almost a network of feelings, and 2) the emotions come in waves and cycles. So what seems to be “the pressure of feelings” are just emotions that have been triggered by some event (internal or external), that in turn, trigger an emotion and many connected emotions. It might be something like a chain of thought, but instead of a chain of thought, it’s a chain of feeling. And the more that the self feels threatened, the longer this chain of feeling can go on for. For example, the chronic illness of a loved one can trigger grief, which in turn triggers guilt for not spending more time with the loved one when they were healthy. Next, one might experience shame because secretly there is a desire for the loved one to pass away so the burden of caring for them will be over. Then guilt returns for feeling such things, and so on. Evidence for connected emotional states is robust (Ledoux, 2019), and I would suggest the tacit knowing, or intuition, that there are layers of emotion beneath the conscious emotion one is feeling, could give the sensation of emotional build up, very similar to a feeling of “overwhelm.”
Hormone Changes
Some might say that the downstream effects of emotional memory storage is what causes the feeling of emotional pressure. What’s happening is that hormone levels shift with too much repressed emotion, and this produces changes in the peripheral nervous system. For instance, cortisol is known to occur over time with exposure to prolonged stress and may even lead to something like anxiety attacks (Tafet, et. al., 2001). The feeling of emotional pressure is the impact of cortisol on the system.
How could that “Strange Method” Work
Given the preceding, I think most would now agree that repression, or something like it occurs in some way, and that we certainly subjectively feel at times as if emotions “build up” in us. And I know that academic work motivated by some New Age techniques isn’t exactly common. However, sometimes strange beliefs or methods can shed light on how the brain works (I think the same could be true for something like automatic writing, and has been true for techniques like hypnosis). The method I described in the introduction, for me, has been transformative. I use it and almost nothing else to maintain emotional equanimity. Now, if this method is working and if it feels as if pent emotions are real, what would be happening in the brain that allows it to have therapeutic benefit? Let’s review how the method works before answering that question:
The goal is to allow emotions that have been blocked off to arise (for this section, it matters not how the emotions are “stored” to describe how the method might work), the idea is to activate the emotional memories and allow them to “run their course.” The aim is to look at that which you really do not wish to see, feel what you do not wish to feel, allow the full depth and extent of the emotion to be processed. And again, at the same time you are feeling the emotion, as deeply and as thoroughly as possible, there is an aspect that is merely observing. Is this dual feeling and watching actually happening simultaneously? Tough to say, but experientially, it certainly feels like one is both a witness to the emotion and also “within” the emotion at once. In any event, this releasing method seems to quicken “recovery” from emotionally traumatic events (and can be used to quickly get over more minor emotional events as well). So we return to the question as to “why, in regards to the brain, would this be an effective therapy?”
One answer might be that the method breaks associations. By a part of the self being “non reactive” to the emotions coming up, the fear/threat of the emotion becomes dissociated from the self. The passive watching tells the brain that what the unconscious considers a threat actually is not threatening any longer to the self. Not reacting to emotion while at the same time feeling the emotion, ends up training the mind to let it go. Neuronally, the synaptic connections of “learning” begin to weaken and disintegrate. The engram or whatever is no longer associated with a threat to the conscious self.
I think this “witness aspect” is key. If one does not engage that “stoic” observer, it seems that what happens is that one feels some of the emotion, but cannot handle all of the emotion. In other words, if one is only feeling the feelury, and doesn’t feel as if a part of oneself is a “witness,” then it seems to engage in repression again. In the brain, it could be that there is dual activation of the first perspective and various brain emotion centers (studies on mindfulness could shed light on this (Markič and Kordeš, (2016)). If one does not create a “witness,” it appears that the conscious self feels as if it is still threatened by the emotion and various mechanisms repress the remainder of the emotion. This might be why “crying” can be very healthy and necessary at times, but it doesn’t seem to actually lead to closure as much of the feeling is still being inhibited. We’ve all known people who can cry forever, or if they are addicted to rage, the rage only subsides for a brief period after expression of it, only to return. But of course, in reality, it never left, the majority of it just went back under consciousness.
Conclusion: The Future
The idea of repression is controversial in neuroscience. However, it appears that there is evidence for repression experimentally and clinically. Moreover, there are plausible models and mechanisms that could explain how repression could function. It’s important to note that emotional repression doesn’t necessarily mean 1) that the blocking out of emotion is completely unconsciously done, or 2) that the entirety of an emotion is blocked from consciousness. A broader view of repression includes a conscious pushing out of unwanted emotion, and an unconscious repression of the depths of the emotion not consciously experienced. Repression was said to exist in order to help a person continue functioning and also to protect the person's sense of self psychologically, and further, these were evolutionarily beneficial. I also tried to give an account as to why emotions could give the feeling of “building up,” and how the “releasing” method of emotion could be effectively therapeutic. The most likely explanation, I think, is that the mixture of feeling the emotions and not reacting to them, breaks the associations between the emotions and the sense of the self (psychologically).
For the future, the aim is to conduct a more thorough literature review of the neuroscience of repression, and consider possible experimental methods to test repression as well as the releasing method. Expanding the counter arguments and objections will also be necessary, while at once giving a more thorough development of potential neural mechanisms for repression and the release of emotion - separating the improbable from the possible.
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