When You Suppress Feelings, You Only Intensify Them—Why?

What alleviates undesired thoughts and feelings may augment them in the longer term.

23 Oct 2024, 18:29 by Leon F Seltzer PhD · Psychology Today

Reviewed by Margaret Foley

Key points

What’s suppressed isn’t in your deliberative conscious mind but will continue to lurk in your subconscious.
Your beliefs don’t require explicit permission to manifest and over time may reveal themselves autonomously.
As unprocessed emotions inside you build up, it may take less and less pressure to push them to the surface.

It’s crucial to recognize that, neuroscientifically, suppressing your thoughts or feelings isn’t the same thing as eliminating them. What you’re really doing is ferrying them out of consciousness.

But when you endeavor to black out what’s going on with you psychologically, what you’re neglecting to address, and conscientiously process, won’t disappear.

Despite such cognitive/emotional matters becoming, in a sense, “out of sight,” they’re hardly “out of mind.” They may (temporarily, at least) be removed from your deliberative conscious mind, but they’ll continue to lurk somewhere in your subconscious.

That is, they merely go from foreground to (harder-to-access) background. Traveling to more remote regions of your brain, they’ve now been relegated to your subconscious mind.

Given how the complicated human psyche operates, your beliefs don’t require explicit permission to manifest and consequently may reveal themselves autonomously.

Here’s how, without needing—or receiving—your endorsement, such willfully buried thoughts and feelings manage on their own to reach the surface:

1. Increased Emotional Pressure. When the lid of a pressure cooker is on tight, a head of steam builds up internally, such that over time the lid will shake or blow off entirely.

So it is with the emotional pressure, which radiates within you when you won’t allow (unpleasant) emotions to be discharged naturally. When unattended to, even a minor annoyance has the potential to get exacerbated and eventually trigger an outburst plainly disproportionate to the original provocation.

Additionally, it should be noted that although this post is focused on the suppression of thoughts and feelings, repressing them—involving their unconscious transmission to even less accessible areas of the mind—can also lead to unplanned and unwanted emotional eruptions.

This is to say that, similar to procrastination (which it’s an oblique form of), avoiding what you don’t want to deal with is much more likely to gather a head of steam than dissipate.

2. Heightened Sensitivity. As a consequence of the above, as unprocessed emotions inside you build up, it may take less and less pressure to trigger the thoughts and emotions you’ve suppressed.

3. Emotional Overwhelm. Almost by definition, feeling flare-ups are uncontrollable. And feelings that aren’t under your volition will probably cause you to feel overpowered and defeated.

4. Emotional Suppression and Your Health. Neuroscientifically, the interrelationship between mind and body is by now settled science. But to get more specific about how mind and body are biochemically correlated, we need to explore the ways that distraction, numbing out, or substituting one physical activity for another helps you to “forget” what’s going on with you internally.

Besides anxiety and depression, many stress-related, psycho-physiological illnesses have frequently been linked to emotional suppression—most notably, heart disease and cancer. Moreover, research has shown that suppressing the feelings that result from negative beliefs (particularly about yourself) affects your mortality as well.

Such suppression won’t immediately kill you, but in various ways, it will affect your health and longevity. Despite your dysphoric state not actually being expressed, the cumulative stress—and distress—will, by being suppressed, take its toll on you.