UNCONSCIOUS DEGREES
of BEING OUT OF AWARENESS
--
"Focusing on the Unconscious and Semi-Conscious
degrees of Being Out of Awareness - as well as on promoting positive, holistic
change through the development of a supportive, genuine, and empathic
therapeutic relationship".
Repression is the
psychological act of excluding desires and impulses - wishes, fantasies or
feelings - from one's consciousness and attempting to hold or subdue them
down in the subconscious.
It is often claimed that
traumatic events are repressed, yet it appears that the trauma more often
strengthens memories due to heightened emotional or physical sensations.
These sensations may also cause distortions, though human memory in
general is filtered by layers of perception and incomplete.
One problem from an
objective point of view is that a "memory" is measured and recorded
by a person's actions or conscious expressions, which may be filtered
through current thoughts and motivations.
In the Primary Repression phase,
an infant learns that some aspects of reality are pleasant, and others are
unpleasant; that some are controllable, and others not. In order to define the
"self", the infant must repress the natural assumption that
all things are equal. Primary Repression then is the process of determining what
is self, what is other; what is good, and what is bad. At the end of this
phase, the child can now distinguish between desires, fears, self, and others.
Secondary Repression
begins once the child realizes that acting on some desires may bring anxiety.
This anxiety leads to repression of the desire. The threat of punishment
related to this form of anxiety, when internalized becomes the
"superego", which intercedes against the desires of the
"ego" without the need for any identifiable external threat -- but
due to the internalized feelings of anxiety, in ways leading to behavior
that is illogical, self-destructive, or anti-social -- because it is viewed as
aversive - has a powerful relationship to what will be drawn out of the
unconscious to be made available for honest, conscious deliberation.
A therapist may try to
reduce this behavior by revealing and re-introducing the repressed aspects of
the client's mental process to his conscious awareness, and then teaching the
patient how to reduce (mindfulness) any anxieties felt in relation to these
feelings and impulses.
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