“She did ‘repress’ very many memories, which only began to come back as she began to deal with what happened to her”
Certainly something like that happened, but it wasn’t repression. It’d be more accurate to say that they were bad memories she didn’t like to think about. And they didn’t “come back,” they were always there. That’s the point. Either they’re in the memory or they’re not. There is no such thing as memories that are in you without them being in your memory.
“If you don’t want to remember something, you sure enough can ‘repress’ it by choosing to forget it.”
No, wrong. You can’t ever intentionally kick anything out of your memory, that’s absurd. It’s an automatic process. You can choose to quickly change your mind when something bad comes up, but that’s it. It never goes away because you choose so.
Even if it did, that wouldn’t be repression. Repression is not a choice, or if it is it’s your psyche, not your consciousness, that’s choosing for you.
I was in a horrible marriage to a deranged psychopath- I finally divorced her to protect my children from her. When she finally died in a car accident I can only remember relief of knowing she would never be able to come back and hurt them.
When I was seeing a court-ordered doctor for psychological eval for the divorce (he recommended I have sole custody and she not even be allowed unsupervised visitation) I remembered things I had completely forgotten because they were so horrible.