Let me try to put childhood repression into perspective, this being how I experience it:
I’m full of it. You’re full of it. We’re all full of it.
Anything that is spoken of as being ‘denial’ is really the denial of some aspect of yourself, of your personality, something that you were made to do during your forming years and are still doing it.
When you are ‘in denial’ you are really denying – not allowing yourself to express – all the feelings you feel, this being largely what your upbringing consisted of: feeling-denial.
Consequently you live, I live, we all live, denying many bad feelings, all of which cause us pain. And pain we may or may not be currently aware of.
When your parents stopped you from being your true-self as a young forming person, they made you deny parts of yourself. You put yourself aside, suppressing yourself, and have then kept this suppression, repressed – hence your childhood repression.
From conception to the formation of your mind, around six years old, each time you were stopped from expressing yourself as you wanted to, you suffered, and all that suffering is still within you.
For example:
‘Stop that James, don’t do that that way, do it like this… that is not the way to do it, I told you how to do it, so do it as I told you… oh how many times do I have to tell you, not like that, like this… are you stupid or something, you do it like this… stop being naughty, smarten up will you, and do as you are told… if you don’t do as I say I won’t take you to the park and I’ll tell your father you’ve been misbehaving and he can deal with you when he gets home…’
What chance did I have of ever expressing myself how I might have wanted to. It was all her way, all their way, NOT MY WAY, and that hurt. It fucked me up; fucked me up no end, but it wasn’t until I started to heal my childhood repression that I got back in touch with the feelings associated with episodes like this. And what have I felt?
Anger, huge amounts of anger. Misery, pain and many more bad feelings. And I have felt a lot of them. And I still feel them as I uncover yet more truth about how badly and how unlovingly I was treated by the very people who I believed loved me; who I believed cared for me and had my best interests at heart.
Being forced to not be how you want to be, to be how they want you to be, has caused a lot of damage within you – traumas on various levels, and great amounts of suffering. Imagine if someone came along to you now and said stop what you are doing and do what I tell you to do – how would this make you feel? And how many times in your early childhood did this happen to you, being told by those who were bigger, stronger and older than you – your parents and other adult carers – that you couldn’t be how you wanted to be? And so how do you think you felt about such things happening to you when you were a little child, especially when you had no power, when your saying no was easily rendered ineffective by them as they just took you over forcing you to comply to their demands?
But do you remember each and every one of these times when you were overpowered by them? No, how can you. But each of those times and all their associated bad feelings are still inside you. And will continue to be, until you want to re-connect with them; until you want to go back to them and re-experience all the anger you felt and all the pain you suffered being stopped from living how you wanted to live.
Your childhood repression is a HUGE thing within you. It governs your every moment, and mostly you are totally unaware of it. But it’s there, it’s all there, for where else could it be, it couldn’t have just gone away.
Your childhood repression is within you, and it’s within you irrespective of what you may or may not believe about it. And the longer you deny it, the greater the pain it will cause you.
