Be a human, not a robot! Suppressing emotions is a technique people use to be able to make their feelings more manageable in the current moment. There are healthy ways to deal with your uncomfortable emotions, including mindfulness and meditation, but others run to alcohol and drugs to numb those painful emotions. While that works as instant relief, there are negative long-term consequences to suppression and avoiding your feelings. Say you have a negative emotion, and you push that negative emotion away, leading to stronger negative emotions, which you keep pushing away, and this creates a vicious cycle of not dealing with your emotions. Research has shown that thought suppression is a dangerous habit, especially for people with BPD, OCD, and/or PTSD. Some ways of suppression could include distracting yourself instead of facing an emotion, pretending that everything is fine, avoiding places or people, indulging in an irresponsible amount of drugs and alcohol, or checking out mentally.
“At low levels of life stress, higher levels of thought suppression were associated with lower levels of depression. Findings suggest that thought suppression may offer a protective effect at lower levels of life stress; however, as life stress increases, the tendency to suppress negative thoughts may actually contribute to the very emotional state that a person vulnerable to depression is trying to avoid.” ( Beevers & Meyer, 2004) Emotions affect your belief system, quality of life, habits, and they influence your actions and intentions.
Different types of energy have different energy waves. Some emotions engulf you and overwhelm you, while others pass and process easily. Avoiding feeling the emotion or talking yourself out of feeling the emotion could lead to rumination and holding onto unhealthy emotions. In the book “The Body Keeps Score” by Bessel van der Kolk, he summarizes how emotions get trapped in the body, and unprocessed emotions often conclude in depression and anxiety. An example of this is getting a deep tissue massage or doing camel pose during yoga and feeling emotional afterward.
Suppression does not only happen with surface emotions, but people tend to suppress their sexuality too. Suppression of sexuality means feelings of guilt and shame pertaining to sexual impulses. Whatever the reason may be, because of religion, culture, or personal morals, suppression of any kind will lead to general unhappiness. Gay, conservative, Catholic author Andrew Sullivan has written that “the suppression of core emotions and the denial of their resolution in love always, always leads to personal distortion and compulsion and loss of perspective.” Being comfortable in your sexuality, whatever that is, seems to be a key component to happiness.
A study from the University of Texas found that by not acknowledging our emotions were actually making them stronger. They found that subjects who were asked to suppress their emotions and show no reaction to a notoriously disgusting scene in the 1983 film “The Meaning of Life” and another in the 1996 film “Trainspotting” were more aggressive afterward than subjects who were allowed to show their revulsion. (“Psychologists find the meaning of aggression: ‘Monty Python’ scene helps research”, 2011)
How can we make sure that we are not suppressing our emotions and instead using healthy coping methods? Here are some tips and tricks:
- Work on developing emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence includes self-awareness, self- regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Developing your EQ can help you become more aware of when you are feeling the emotions, understanding those emotions, and cope healthily instead of numbing out or avoiding.
- Practicing mindfulness: what is mindfulness? Mindfulness has been defined as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn 2014) Being there, in the present and feeling your emotions thoroughly. Focusing on what is in the now instead of the past or the future.
- Learning how to process your emotions by releasing them, feeling them, and moving on. One way of processing your emotions is by asking yourself “why” “A focus on understanding and analyzing one’s emotions by asking ‘‘why do I feel that way?’’ is at the heart of diverse therapeutic strategies for working through emotional distress. The present findings point to a boundary condition that delineates when ‘‘why’’ processing is likely to be cool and abstract, resulting ultimately in the attenuation of negative affect, and when it is likely instead to trigger rumination and hot processing.” (Kross, Ayduk, & Mischel) A boundary is the main word in the previous paragraph because without boundaries, asking why could instead lead to rumination. (Be careful!)
“Studies show that asking “why” while one is immersed in an egocentric self-perspective, rather than helping to reduce negative affect, may in fact have the opposite effect, functioning to enhance distress. It is noteworthy that the processing enabled by the distanced-why strategy is different from both emotional avoidance (e.g., distraction, suppression) and intellectualization (being overly abstract and analytic while repressing emotion) because the emotions are faced (i.e., participants were specifically asked to focus on their emotions) and experienced to some degree, rather than avoided and not felt” (Kross, Ayduk, & Mischel)
- Expressing yourself and show up as your most authentic self. According to the results of a study, there is a statistically significant relationship between authenticity, happiness, and life satisfaction. Sariçam, H. (2015). Previous research findings emphasized that high scores of authentic living is positively related to well-being (Kernis; 2003; Neff & Suizzo, 2006; Roberts & Donahue, 1994), high self-esteem (Neff & Harter, 2002), life satisfaction (Lopez & Rice, 2006) as well as negatively related to anxiety and stress (Sheldon et al., 1997), depression (Lopez & Rice, 2006), psychological vulnerability (Satıcı, Kayış, & Akın, 2013), and also our study results are supported by all these findings. If your actions are not based on your actual values and belief system, or you’re not expressing yourself, that could cause long term consequences.
References
Thought suppression and depression risk, Cognition and Emotion, 18:6, 859-867, DOI: 10.1080/02699930341000220
Kross, E., Ayduk, O., & Mischel, W. (n.d.). When Asking “Why” Does Not Hurt Distinguishing Rumination From Reflective Processing of Negative Emotions – Ethan Kross, Ozlem Ayduk, Walter Mischel, 2005. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01600.x
Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Wherever You Go, There You Are Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Hachette Books, 2014.
Sariçam, H. (2015). Life satisfaction: Testing a structural equation model based on authenticity and subjective happiness. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 46(2), 278–284.
Psychologists find the meaning of aggression: ‘Monty Python’ scene helps research. (2011, March 24). Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110323105202.htm
*This blog posted was posted on a previous website but has been moved here for organizational reasons.*