Violet, "repressed" as in repressed emotions is just an adjective. We try to describe what are extremely difficult concepts beyond what neuroscience can tell us.
Repressed emotions could also be translated as "emotions we don't want to feel". "silenced emotions". "quelled emotions". You should not think that we are repressing emotions from some horrible event in our childhood.
Let me give you an example: A cashier at a store disrespects you. After a few seconds you get upset.
What you were doing is repressing or avoiding your emotions: Low self-esteem, being disrespected, getting exposed etc. Low self-esteem is a big one. We all have some self-esteem problems. All of us. We are not smart enough. We don't convey authority. But we really do not like to ramble within those feelings and we move on quickly.
My dad was assaulted randomly (after his car broke down) when I was a teenager and he passed away a few days later. After that, I had so much pressure to succeed, finish high school, go to college. I turned the page quickly.
Exactly a year later, I started having horrible allergies. It was unbelievable. For 2 years I had non-stop allergies.
At the time I did not make the connection but it was evident. I never mourned my dad's passing. I never felt and resolved those negative feelings. I simply repressed or quelled those emotions. But those negative emotions were dutifully recorded in my implicit memory.
Why did it take a year to surface? I don't know. What I noticed that the brain uses an event or incident to trigger symptoms. In that case, I learned from the newspaper that the pollen level was high. The same day, a neighbor told me that it must be tough to be an orphan. I was so hurt to hear the word "orphan" for some reason. I had an anxiety attack. Bingo, the allergies started.
When I was a kid growing up in Europe in the 60s, psychosomatic symptoms were very well accepted. It was a fact of life. gastrointestinal symptoms -> stress. Allergies -> stress. Migraine headaches -> stress.
But then Freud became obsolete and surprisingly enough steroid injections became popular (which for many disproved psychosomatic symptoms because steroid injections were apparently curing musculoskeletal symptoms).
I really knew that I was onto a cure when I started feeling my emotions and it would correlate with the pain vanishing. My PN pain would vanish for 5 seconds. Then it would come back. Then I would feel another emotion. The pain would go away for 10 seconds...1 minute... 20 minutes etc.
Pain and emotions are processed by the same area in the brain.
If you are interested, you should look at Dr. Bob Hanscom's book:
Back in Control: A Spine Surgeon’s Roadmap Out of Chronic Pain
http://www.drdavidhanscom.com/book/
http://www.amazon.com/Back-Control-surg ... ob+hanscom
Dr. Hanscom is an orthopedic spine surgeon who has been performing complex spine surgery since 1986. he is specialized in correcting botched spine surgeries. It was his observation that most spine surgery should never be performed.
This book is his own experience out of chronic pain:
A treatment paradigm has evolved from my personal experience as well as learning from my patients.
My goal for my patients is not just learning to live with pain or manage it. It is now becoming pain free.
Also, I have mentioned Dr. Candace Pert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candace_Pert
Candace Pert lives in a world where emotions make scientific sense. As former Chief of Brain biochemistry at the NIH for 13 years, she studied the inner workings of the body with an eye towards identifying and locating the chemistry of emotion. In 1993, Pert appeared on Bill Moyer's landmark TV program, Healing and the Mind, where she explained her theories of emotion to a national audience. She attracted attention for being that rare scientist who can explain her work with a sense of humor and passion.
Pert: In the late seventies and eighties, I performed numerous mapping studies in the brain of both the peptides and their receptors. The receptors tended to map out in areas like the amygdala and the hippocampus that had been previously implicated as being part of the emotional circuitry. We could also map the peptides in other areas of the body, such as the immune system and the glands. At first nobody could make any sense out of this. Why would these molecules be circulated in all of these areas? What purpose might they serve? To most people who are in the Western scientific tradition of separating brain and body, this seemed counter-intuitive.
But my team realized that this system of molecules formed a communication network throughout the brain and body. It seemed consistent with my almost intuitive feelings about the biological basis of emotions. I was familiar with some of the concepts coming out of California, from Esalen to Stanford, of how health and disease, mind and body are intertwined. What we were seeing made sense to me.
I have a whole theory about this. I believe that emotion is not fully expressed until it reaches consciousness. When I speak of consciousness, I include the entire body. I believe that unexpressed emotion is in process of traveling up the neural access. By traveling, I mean coming from the periphery, up the spinal chord, up into the brain. When emotion moves up, it can be expressed. It takes a certain amount of energy from our bodies to keep the emotion unexpressed. There are inhibitory chemicals and impulses that function to keep the emotion and information down. I think unexpressed emotions are literally lodged lower in the body.
Dr. Gabor Mate (when the body says NO) that you have read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabor_Mat ... physician)
Modern research is confirming the age-old wisdom that emotions are inseparable from our health and physiology. Repressed emotions bring on stress that can lead to disease.
On the psychological front, there is the founder of psychosomatic medicine, Prof. Franz Alexander
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Alexander
According to Prof. F. Alexander, the development of PSD (psychosomatic disorders) requires three preconditions:
1) The patient should have a psycho–emotional upset;
2) A certain specific situation serves as a psychosomatic trigger;
3) The patient must have a constitutional mental vulnerability and a certain biological factor increasing the propensity to PSD.
I have seen that situation so many times on this forum.
1) An emotional trigger (fear of STD for some of the kids that posted on this forum for example)
2) A trigger: fall, biking, too much sitting
3) A genetic predisposition.
