Is it possible to repress our thoughts like our spoken words?

As a Christian, I can. My first memories are wanting to kill myself. Scripture tells me to “Take captive every thought.” With God’s help, it IS possible, and I did it. As a result my personality is totally different and 1000% better than when I started out.

And I didn’t spend years with a therapist to do it.

Like @snowberry said, its part of some religious beliefs. Everyones heard of the Catholics ‘impure thoughts’. Conscious redirection would be an apt description.

You can train your mind to do a lot of things with spontaneous thoughts.
Meditation practice is largely about allowing the thoughts to come and go and not give them a lot of power/attention along the way.

We repress thoughts subconsciously. If a thought makes it to consciousness, it can’t be suppressed. We can mentally argue against it. In meditation, the idea is to accept a thought as just being a thought, not an indication of who we are or something that needs to be acted on.

I’m not religious, but yes, you can repress your thoughts. I have done it several times. It is all about setting personal triggers in the mind, and when <thought A> comes up, willing it to go away.

It is not easy, but it is doable.

To repress your thoughts you’d have to be aware of what they were, so, no.

@kritiper you don’t know what you think- your own thoughts?

Yes. It’s a defense pattern everyone has. But since it affects our thoughts, we often are not then very aware that we did that. Ideally, we later get the listening and attention needed to remember what we repressed, and to work through it later.

When we don’t sort out those repressed thoughts and emotions (q.v. many adults who never seek any kind of non-physical healing), we tend to get more and more messed up.

@kritiper our attitude dictates our thoughts. Our thoughts dictate our words and behavior. I’m quite aware of my thoughts. I’m not always paying attention to my behavior, but for the most part I’m also quite aware of my words.

I suppose that is where “Think Positive thoughts” came about because if thoughts have power then let it be good thoughts that uplift humanity.

Because thoughts have energy that goes out into the universe of collective consciousness that others can pick up on..example: many inventions were just a thought yet many around the World had the same idea and produced similar inventions.

Here is a fascinating video that talks about our thoughts and how powerful they can be.
Book: Something Deeply Hidden..by Sean Carroll
He explains his theory in this video clip:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/sean-carroll-universe-a-tiny-sliver-of-all-there-is?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=pbsofficial&utm_campaign=newshour&fbclid=IwAR0lbjKaQq2Cas15KTNiI-yZ727rhhCTN21o3BrLIA7cRw1S2FdMH_UsuRE

@snowberry What are you saying??

@kritiper “To repress your thoughts you’d have to be aware of what they were, so, no.”

Everybody I know is aware of their own thoughts. Don’t you know yours?

@snowberry To answer the question, no, you cannot repress your thoughts because you are capable of already knowing what they would be.
Does that help you to understand what I said??

@kritiper I don’t “repress” them, I redirect them. Not the same as what you’re saying. It works.

What I’m saying is that your brain is like a computer. All of your programs are there in the CPU (in the subconscious mind) but they all don’t have to be on the monitor screen (the conscious mind.) So a person is always capable of those subconscious, programmed, thoughts.
Repress, redirect; Call it what you will. What one accepts as the correct definition depends on your point of view.

Some people are fairly successful in doing so.