We can thus see how the effort to keep this information from the self and others are one and the same effort. To reveal it to oneself or others is to evoke imagined retaliation. To reveal it to others, is to risk having them revealing it to oneself. To reveal it to oneself is to risk acting on it and thus revealing it to others. This constellation, by the way, is fairly common.
Far form being a hypothetical, it is about the psychology of power, opposition and aggression.
As for how we can repress things without letting ourselves know we are doing so, that's the great mystery of unconscious thought and action, but it has been amply demonstrated that such psychological processes exist. A sends a message to B without realizing it consciously. B picks it up consciously. Say a psychotherapy client acts in a dependent manner toward a therapist in a way that sends out the message that the client wants the therapist to act as a parent. Communications may also be misperceived or perceived partly, rather than being missed altogether, which is another way of saying that a message is disguised, rather than completely blocked out.