Repression v. Acceptance

So what's the difference between the two?

If you're out in everyday life, with your past issues and karma, and an interaction goes poorly because you see your past issues in the interaction and protect yourself as you did in the past, or karma just bites you in the ass, you have the karmic choice: suck it up and damage the ego or generate more karma.

Sucking it up and damaging the ego can be done incorrectly, to be sure, because that's a method of making sure that one does not produce any more karma, or a method of protection.

Repressing the dissapointment by ceasing to think about out it or drowning it in sensory experience does nothing to the dissapointment. In fact, the next time you are dissapointed it will pop right back, exacerbating the difficulty of the karmic choice.

Accepting it certainly results in ego damage, but if done properly does not preserve the dissapointment. By realizing that the ego caused the dissapointment in the first place, it will accept the damage and use it to not make a similar mistake in the future, localizing the damage to that which caused the dissapointment in the first place. Repression generalizes the damage over the whole ego, leading to unpredictable consequences from that damage.