Holding back or controlling something forcefully, like keeping emotions hidden or preventing something from happening.
From Latin 'reprimere' (re- 'back' + premere 'to press'), used in English since the 1300s to mean physically or mentally holding something down.
Psychologists found that repressing emotions actually increases stress hormones in your body—trying not to feel something often makes it stronger, like trying not to think of a purple elephant.
Applied historically to women's anger, sexuality, and voice as moral virtue ('repression' as feminine discipline), while men's repression of emotions was pathologized—creating gendered double standards around emotional expression.
Distinguish clinical psychological repression from social suppression. Name the agent and mechanism: 'systemic suppression of X' rather than 'repressed X' without subject.
["suppressed","constrained by [agent]","denied expression of"]
Feminist psychology reclaimed women's emotional and sexual expression as healthy, challenging the clinical pathology of female anger and desire that 'repression' language often implied.
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