When a patient reports that prior trauma has had no lingering impact whatsoever, my antennae are up. This is where I suspect that emotions related to the events have been walled off and are contributory to the hypertension. If someone has survived particularly severe trauma without apparent psychological impact, that alone indicates repression, our

As the process continued James became aware, to his surprise, of an even deeper level of emotion—that submerged beneath the anger were sadness, sorrow, and hurt for himself. This reflected the beginnings of self-compassion and thus healing through reintegration of mindbody. The anger, at times, is designed to protect the person from these emotions

We repress emotions without knowing we are repressing them. This is a simple and important statement, but one that many people either do not comprehend or do not believe. Repression does not involve making a conscious effort to put aside emotional pain. We simply don’t feel the pain, essentially a gift from our unconscious defenses that keep it

a repressive coping style might have resulted from growing up in a family that did not discuss or share feelings or emotional pain, with no one available to comfort them at times of distress. Instead, without that support, they learned, by necessity, to numb themselves, to not feel.

When patients’ underlying feelings are recognized by the therapist, patients frequently express relief and become aware of a reduction of physical tension.

identifying, clarifying, and challenging the defensive maneuvers patients employ. Most patients are unaware of these defenses and are unable to even define their feelings as distinguished from their thoughts. In addition, they often confuse one emotion with another.

I have observed that some patients, upon being relieved of the pain of TMS by some chemical therapy or a placebo, become anxious or depressed rather than developing another physical symptom. But then when their emotional symptoms were relieved by a tranquilizing or antidepressant medication, their body pains returned!

The marketplace and economic factors have taken over.

It is not the emotional distress that we feel, but those emotions we have repressed and are unaware of, that leads to hypertension. The process by which we unknowingly keep distressful and threatening emotions from awareness causes persisting stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS),