Suppression refers to a conscious effort to inhibit the outward expression of emotions. This can involve minimising facial expressions, controlling body language, or attempting to hide emotional cues.
However, suppression can also extend to internal experiences, involving attempts to block or minimise the conscious experience of the emotion itself.
For example, someone might consciously try to avoid thinking about a distressing event or attempt to distract themselves from feeling sad after a loss. Another example would be someone who is angry trying to act calmly and rationally, without showing their irritation.
How It Works
Suppression is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person consciously pushes unwelcome thoughts, feelings, or impulses out of awareness.
In other words, one makes an active decision to avoid thinking about something that causes distress.
For example, someone with intrusive memories of a trauma might deliberately block these thoughts from their mind when they arise
This process is intentional (even if sometimes semi-conscious) and involves directing one’s attention away from the upsetting content.
It’s important to distinguish suppression from repression, another defense mechanism. Repression is an unconscious process – the mind automatically buries painful memories or impulses without the person realizing it.
In contrast, suppression is carried out with awareness: the person knows they are troubled by a thought or feeling but chooses to set it aside.
Because suppression is conscious, it is sometimes considered a more mature way to cope – the individual acknowledges the emotion or thought, but intentionally decides not to engage with it at that moment.
This conscious aspect means suppression plays a role in decision-making: one actively decides when and where to deal with the upsetting matter.
For instance, a person might put aside anger during an important work meeting, planning to address the issue later in private.
In sum, suppression works by using focused attention and self-control to keep unwanted emotions and thoughts out of immediate awareness.
Examples
- Deliberate Distraction: After a painful breakup, a person keeps themselves busy with work and hobbies to avoid thinking about their ex.
When memories or sadness intrude, they purposefully shift their attention (turn on the TV, call a friend) to suppress the heartache.
They know they’re upset, but they choose not to dwell on it during the day. - Postponing Worry: A college student anxious about an upcoming exam notices panic rising the night before the test.
They decide to “not think about it” and watch a calming movie, effectively suppressing their worry so they can sleep.
In this case the suppression is temporary – a conscious effort to manage anxiety until the exam is over. - Avoiding Triggers: A person who survived a car accident finds themselves recalling the crash whenever they drive.
They actively try to push those memories out of mind while on the road so they can concentrate on driving.
If the memories start flooding back (intrusive thoughts), they might turn up the radio or firmly tell themselves “Now’s not the time,” consciously suppressing the recall of the trauma. - Professional Demeanor: A nurse working in a hectic emergency room might witness distressing sights.
During the shift, the nurse suppresses emotional reactions (fear, sadness) to remain focused and effective.
They intentionally set aside their feelings about a tragic patient case until later, when off duty, because breaking down in tears at work would impede their ability to help others.
This conscious emotional suppression is a coping mechanism to get through acute stress.
Advantages
In certain situations, suppression can offer practical benefits for managing emotions and stress in the short term. Some potential advantages include:
1. Immediate Emotional Control:
By suppressing strong feelings, a person can maintain composure and continue to function in high-pressure or sensitive situations.
For example, choosing to temporarily “swallow” one’s anger or fear can prevent an outburst at the wrong time.
This can be useful for staying focused on tasks or responsibilities without being overwhelmed by emotion.
In social scenarios, suppression may help someone remain polite or professional – such as the case of postponing anger with a spouse until guests have left, thereby avoiding a scene.
In these ways, suppression can serve as an adaptive “pause button,” letting one focus on immediate goals or appropriate behavior.
2. Reduced Immediate Distress:
Pushing away distressing thoughts can lower one’s acute anxiety or sadness, providing a respite from emotional pain.
By not dwelling on upsetting thoughts, individuals might experience less immediate physiological stress (lower heart rate, steadier voice, etc.), which can help them get through a crisis or daily stressor.
In fact, some research suggests that training oneself to suppress fearful thoughts can decrease their emotional impact.
In a recent study, people practiced suppressing thoughts about personal fears; as a result, their anxious thoughts became less vivid and less anxiety-provoking, and participants reported reductions in anxiety and depression levels over time.
Notably, those with high trait anxiety showed the greatest improvements, indicating that thought suppression training improved mental health rather than worsening it.
These findings “challenge century-old wisdom that suppressing thoughts is maladaptive”, pointing to the idea that when done deliberately and skillfully, suppression may offer relief and emotional control in the short run.
3. Mature Coping and Focus:
In psychodynamic theory, suppression is classified as a mature defense mechanism, meaning it’s relatively healthy and adaptive.
Unlike primitive defenses that distort reality, mature defenses like suppression deal with reality more directly.
A longitudinal study of adult development found that people who habitually use mature defenses (such as suppression, sublimation, humor, etc.) tend to have greater success in work and relationships and lower levels of psychopathology.
This suggests that the controlled, conscious nature of suppression can help individuals navigate life effectively – they can postpone worry or emotion until an appropriate time, rather than acting out or falling apart.
By consciously deferring attention to distressing issues, a person can concentrate on one problem at a time and tackle challenges in a more organized way.
In the short term, suppression might also help avoid interpersonal conflict (e.g. holding back tears or criticism to prevent an argument), which can be socially useful until the issue can be addressed constructively.
In some cultural contexts, the ability to suppress overt emotional reactions is valued for maintaining harmony, and it can prevent minor issues from escalating.
In summary, when used judiciously, suppression can be a deliberate calming strategy – it keeps intense emotions in check, reduces immediate stress, and allows the person to keep functioning and thinking clearly under duress.
Disadvantages
Despite its short-term utility, suppression has significant downsides, especially if relied on over long periods. Potential negative effects include:
1. Emotional Buildup and “Pressure Cooker” Effect:
Continuously shoving emotions aside can lead to an accumulation of unresolved feelings. Those suppressed emotions don’t actually vanish – they linger in the mind and body.
Over time, this can create an internal “pressure cooker” where feelings intensify beneath the surface. Eventually, the built-up emotion may burst out in unintended ways.
For instance, someone who never expresses anger might suddenly explode over a minor annoyance because all the past anger has piled up.
If a person has difficulty expressing feelings, those feelings can build up until they eventually explode, often in response to a small trigger.
This kind of outburst can damage relationships or lead to impulsive, regrettable behavior.
In short, what is suppressed today can return tomorrow with greater force, unless it is eventually addressed.
2. “Rebound” of Thoughts and Feelings:
A well-documented pitfall of suppression is the ironic effect that the suppressed content can come back stronger.
Psychologist Daniel Wegner’s classic white bear experiments demonstrated that deliberately trying not to think about something often makes it more likely to intrude in your thoughts.
Modern cognitive theories likewise argue that even if one succeeds in pushing a thought or feeling away for a while, it tends to rebound – becoming more accessible and emotionally intense later.
In other words, suppression might win a battle but lose the war: the unwanted thought/emotion returns, sometimes repeatedly.
According to these theories, the mental effort to keep something out of mind actually keeps it at the fringes of consciousness, where it can resurface.
This rebound effect can amplify a person’s distress in the long run.
Thus, one criticism is that suppression treats the symptom (the immediate thought/feeling) but not the root cause – the underlying issue remains unresolved and may return in another form.
3. Stress and Psychopathology:
Over-reliance on suppression as an emotion regulation strategy is linked to higher stress and mental health risks.
Empirical studies have found that people who habitually suppress their emotions tend to experience more anxiety, depressive symptoms, and even trauma-related symptoms compared to those who use other coping strategies.
For example, one study noted that expressive suppression (concealing one’s emotional expressions) was associated with greater symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, and depression in individuals who had experienced trauma.
Suppressing feelings might provide temporary relief, but it can backfire by prolonging and deepening emotional pain over time.
The effort to constantly restrain emotions can itself be stressful – one might feel a chronic underlying tension.
In fact, suppression has been identified as a maladaptive or less effective coping method when compared to strategies like reappraisal.
It is considered a response-focused method (dealing with emotions after they arise) and tends to be detrimental to emotional well-being in many cases.
Over time, this can contribute to stress-related disorders.
For instance, individuals of lower social status sometimes use suppression to avoid conflicts, but studies show this may partly mediate their higher rates of depression – meaning suppression might be a pathway through which stress translates into depressive symptoms.
In summary, while suppression can mute emotions in the moment, those emotions can exact a toll on mental health if left unaddressed, contributing to heightened stress, mood disorders, or anxiety disorders in the long term.
4. Cognitive and Social Costs:
Actively suppressing thoughts or emotions consumes mental resources.
Psychologists have found that suppression can impair memory and cognitive performance, since the brain is busy keeping the unwanted thought out of awareness.
The mental effort of keeping one’s cool by suppression takes up attention and working memory, leading to poorer recall of information.
Additionally, suppression may interfere with decision-making (because suppressed feelings that carry important information are being ignored) and with learning (if one regularly pushes away feedback or negative feelings, they might not adapt or problem-solve effectively).
There are also interpersonal drawbacks. Emotions serve a social communication function, and consistently hiding one’s true feelings can distance a person from others.
Research indicates that habitual suppressors tend to report lower social support and less closeness in relationships.
Others may perceive a suppressing individual as cold, unapproachable, or not authentic, which can strain friendships and partnerships.
In a study of college students, those who used expressive suppression had more difficulty forming close relationships during the transition to college, partly because suppression hindered open communication and emotional connection.
Thus, chronic suppression might protect those around you from seeing your distress, but it can also isolate you socially or prevent genuine relationship growth.
Taken together, these cognitive and social costs mean that suppression, especially if it becomes a habitual coping style, can undermine one’s memory, mental clarity, and support networks.
Coping with Suppressed Emotions
While suppression can be useful temporarily, it’s important to handle emotions in a healthy way before they build up.
Here are some strategies for managing and releasing suppressed emotions constructively:
1. Acknowledge and Label Emotions:
The first step is to recognize what you’re feeling. Often, people who suppress emotions become so accustomed to pushing feelings away that they lose touch with them.
Building emotional awareness is key. One can regularly “check in” with themselves to identify feelings (“I feel angry right now” or “I’m hurt about what happened”).
Psychologists recommend naming your emotions because putting feelings into words can reduce their intensity and make them more manageable.
This doesn’t mean one must immediately act on the emotion – just admit to yourself that it exists.
In therapy, clients are encouraged to increase their comfort with talking about feelings and to identify emotions that were previously ignored.
Simply acknowledging an emotion as valid can reduce the unconscious pressure it exerts.
2. Express Emotions in Healthy Outlets:
Finding a safe channel to release feelings is crucial. Suppressed emotions seek expression, and giving them a voice can prevent the harmful “pressure cooker” scenario.
One effective method is expressive writing. Research pioneered by James Pennebaker has shown that writing about one’s deepest thoughts and feelings – especially about stressful or traumatic experiences – can lead to improvements in mental and even physical health.
Setting aside time to journal freely about what’s bothering you allows suppressed feelings to come out on paper.
Many studies have replicated the finding that such writing (even just 15–20 minutes for a few days) is associated with reduced stress, better mood, and even stronger immune function.
Similarly, creative outlets like art or music can help externalize emotions non-verbally. Another outlet is talking to someone you trust – sharing your feelings with a friend, family member, or therapist.
Even if the problems can’t be immediately solved, the act of expression itself is therapeutic.
In counseling (or support groups), people learn to verbalize long-suppressed emotions in a safe space, which often brings relief and insight.
The listener’s empathy can validate your feelings and reduce the sense of isolation.
The key is to release the emotion in some form (spoken, written, artistic) rather than continuously holding it in.
3. Replace Suppression with Healthy Regulation:
Instead of simply pushing emotions away, one can practice healthier emotion-regulation techniques.
For instance, cognitive reappraisal involves consciously reframing the situation that triggered the emotion, to alter its emotional impact.
This strategy addresses the feeling earlier in the process (before it overwhelms), often making it less intense – and research finds it’s generally more effective and less draining than suppression.
For example, if you are upset that a friend missed your call, you might reappraise by considering they were busy or dealing with an emergency, which reduces anger more effectively than just ignoring the anger.
Another approach is mindfulness and acceptance: instead of trying to banish the emotion, you observe it non-judgmentally until it passes.
Mindfulness meditation can train people to sit with their feelings (even painful ones) without immediately reacting or ruminating, which paradoxically can reduce the urge to suppress.
Relaxation techniques – like deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, or grounding exercises – can also help one to tolerate emotional distress in the moment.
These techniques signal to the body that it’s safe, counteracting the fight-or-flight arousal that suppression sometimes exacerbates. In practice, “aim for regulation, not repression” is a good motto.
This means working with the emotion (managing its intensity, understanding its source) rather than purely shutting it down.
By learning skills to self-soothe and process feelings, individuals can handle emotions in real time so that there’s less need for walling them off.
Freudian Theory
In Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, suppression and repression are related concepts but play different roles in the mind’s defense arsenal.
Freud saw defense mechanisms as tactics used by the ego to manage conflicts between our primal drives (Id), moral conscience (Superego), and external reality.
In this context, repression (“Verdrängung” in Freud’s German terminology) was paramount – it was the process of unconsciously blocking unacceptable impulses or painful memories from entering conscious awareness.
Freud described repression as motivated forgetting: the person is not aware that something has been pushed out of mind, yet that hidden content still influences them indirectly
For example, a traumatic childhood memory might be repressed so the individual has no conscious recollection of the event, but the unresolved emotion might later manifest as anxiety or dysfunctional behavior.
Freud considered repression to be a central mechanism underlying neurotic symptoms; the repressed feelings strive to return to consciousness, resulting in symptoms like phobias, obsessive behaviors, or dreams that symbolically represent the buried content.
Suppression, on the other hand, was understood by Freud as a similar mechanism carried out consciously.
Freud used the term “suppression” to describe a deliberate attempt to eliminate unwanted thoughts from consciousness
The person knows about the thought or feeling but actively tries to shove it away. For instance, Freud mentions that in early development, affects (feelings) might be suppressed (consciously pushed aside) so they “do not pass into the unconscious”
The crucial difference is awareness: suppression is an intentional choice of the ego, whereas repression happens without one’s choice or knowledge
Freud noted that the line between the two isn’t always clear-cut – they can interplay.
In his paper “The Unconscious” (1915), he wrote that “to suppress the development of affect is the true aim of repression”, implying that a repression often tries to achieve what suppression does – keep painful affect out of conscious mind
In other words, repression’s goal is essentially to prevent an emotion from being felt, which is very much what suppression does on a conscious level.
Thus suppression, in Freud’s view, could be seen as a voluntary extension or counterpart of the repression mechanism.
Freud’s theory placed repression as a fundamental cause of psychopathology, but he did not condemn suppression in the same way.
In fact, Freud indicated that conscious suppression can be a more adaptive maneuver.
Since the person remains aware of what they are pushing away (even if they choose not to focus on it), suppressed material is more accessible to later conscious work (such as therapy or deliberate coping) than repressed material buried in the unconscious.
Some interpretations of Freud suggest that he favored suppression over repression when possible – dealing with troubling thoughts at a conscious level (even if one must postpone them) was preferable to having them thrust into the unconscious where they could cause neurotic harm
Freud also recognized that suppression is often aimed at avoiding immediate guilt or anxiety.
For example, a person might consciously suppress a wish that clashes with their moral values to avoid feeling guilty – this is a conscious decision to not dwell on the wish, whereas repression would erase it from awareness entirely.
Later psychoanalysts, like Freud’s daughter Anna Freud, included suppression in catalogs of defense mechanisms, classifying it as a more mature, ego-driven defense.
In psychoanalytic therapy, the goal often is to convert unhealthy repressions into conscious suppressions that can be addressed.
By bringing repressed content to light, a therapist essentially turns it into something the patient can consciously deal with (even if the patient initially wants to suppress it again until ready).
Freud’s framework thus sees suppression as a less severe form of defense: it doesn’t distort reality as much as other defenses do, and it leaves the person with some conscious control.
However, Freud also cautioned that both suppression and repression are short-term fixes – they do not truly resolve the inner conflict. The unwanted thoughts and drives must eventually be confronted or sublimated into healthier outlets.
Sources
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- Freud, A. (1937). The Ego and the mechanisms of defense, London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
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- Freud, S. (1896). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defense. SE, 3: 157-185.
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- Wegner, D. M., Erber, R., & Zanakos, S. (1993). Ironic processes in the mental control of mood and mood-related thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(6), 1093.
- Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5.
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