20/06/2026
Here is a brief review of trauma responses or defenses. They are the same protective devices that may have developed in your childhood to colour the reality of what was happening to you, to make it more pleasant, or to put the painful reality out of your mind so you could survive.
**Supression** is consciously choosing to forget things that are too painful to remember. You make a decision to put the memory away, or to “forget”, so you don’t have to feel the painful or unacceptable feelings associated with it.
**Repression** is automatically and unconsciously forgetting things that are too painful to remember. Such painful and frightening memories are **automatically** shifted into the unconscious mind where they are “lost”, deleted, or hidden.
**Dissociation** (Freeze) a child or adult using dissociation psychologically takes his or her emotional and mental self away where the abuse is not experienced in full. People usually reserve this trauma response to survive abuse they believe is life threatening, such as being beaten as if they might be killed, being humiliated and shamed, or being abandoned. The fear is either that, who they are is going to be destroyed, or that they’ll be physically destroyed.
**Minimisation** means you see what happened to you, or what’s happening now as less serious or important. It’s downplayed, trivialised, and rationalised.
**Denial** is in operation when you can see and grasp certain realities in other people’s lives, but can’t see the same realities apply in your own life. You have intellectual awareness that something is a problem, but can’t feel any feelings about it, take responsibility or appropriate action about it. We often say the letters of DENIAL spell out **D**on’t **E**ven **N**otice **I** **A**m **L**ying (in other words, people in denial are lying to themselves).
**Delusion** is a process that is more profound and serious. Delusion means you believe something in spite of the facts but don’t assign proper meaning to them. A person in delusion can hear or read that a certain situation is abusive for a person and just disregard the information, believing the situation isn’t abusive for anyone. A serious problem for delusional people is that like all the other trauma responses and defenses they can be invisible to the person. A person may not realise they are deluded. This is a very dangerous and vulnerable position to be in, since reality itself and anyone with a strong sense of reality tend to threaten the view a delusional person has of the world. So people in delusion tend to isolate themselves from those who might reveal the truth about their lives and listen to people who reinforce their delusions.
