Paradoxical Effects of Emotion Suppression
Unified Protocol: A Transdiagnostic TreatmentPatients will often report attempts to try to suppress their emotional experiences. Suppression is a form of avoidance. It's an emotional behavior that comes up quite often in therapy. What they're doing is they're telling themselves that whatever it is they're feeling or thinking is actually not supposed to be there, right, or that they don't want it to be there. And as we are naturally sort of drawn to things that might be a threat to us, if we see those experiences as being a threat by engaging in the suppression, we're more likely to actually focus on it in the end.
There was an experiment that was conducted by Daniel Wegener in which he asked people to not think about a white bear. Took two different groups. First group, he said, you know, I'd like you to think about a white bear. And he recorded how frequently they thought about the white bear. He took a second group, and he said, don't think about a white bear.
Do whatever you can to try not to think about this bear, but just don't think about a white bear. He found that the group that tried not to think about it thought more about it than the group that was allowed to just think about the bear. The act of suppression, the act of trying to get away from the thoughts drew their attention right to the thoughts. The same holds for emotion. Because if somebody experiences a strong emotional reaction and they're telling themselves, I shouldn't be experiencing that, I can't experience that, and they try to suppress it as a result, the act of suppression, the act of focusing on it in a way that it's threatening causes the emotion to intensify.
Take fear as an example. We see this in panic disorder all the time. The person starts to have the physical sensations of a fear response. They look at that fear response and they say, oh my god, I'm having a fear response. I can't experience that. I'm gonna have a panic attack. The brain responds as though there's a threat because the person perceives a threat.
And so the fear starts to ramp up. So suppressing the fear actually causes the fear to become more intense. This is sort of a paradoxical effect. The attempt to try to suppress something may actually cause it to increase in intensity. This is an important point in the unified protocol. What we're trying to do is we're trying to change those patterns. Trying to say to the person, you don't have to suppress it. You don't have to suppress the thoughts.
You don't have to suppress the memories. You don't have to suppress the feelings. That's okay that they're there. What you need to do is really respond to it in the most helpful way to you, the most adaptive way.