Semantics or not, that's actually a very important topic. From my limited understanding, the meditation approach would be to firstly notice the thought or sens

Semantics or not, that's actually a very important topic. From my limited understanding, the meditation approach would be to firstly notice the thought or sensation, but then to neither repress nor necessarily express the emotion further or get carried away with it. The rationale being that repression is a short term band-aid that does not allow for resolution of the issue, and can also be a way to conveniently trick yourself into ignoring important things (which you might want to be considering / processing). On the other hand, you also don't want to get further into the emotion, as it may add fuel to the fire (like getting carried away with stories in your mind about what you should have responded with during an argument, etc). So, there's some kind of balancing act there. So reify might actually be a good word, although it may go to far, as you pointed out.