You’ve probably heard people say that emotional suppression is bad, and self-soothing is good. But how do you know which one is which?
I don’t actually think that suppression is all bad. To understand why, and to answer the question of how to distinguish them, I’ll start with a few words on why I think we’ve evolved the ability for emotional suppression in the first place. Why have a system of possibly intense feelings combined with a system for suppressing them, as opposed to just having less intense feelings in the first place?
I think the answer is that the system we have affords more flexibility - intense feelings lead to behavioral responses like fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, each of which may be an adaptive response in a particular situation.
Suppose there’s a particular route you often need to take, where you might also be ambushed by an animal in a way that makes running away the right response. Say it’s a jungle path between two villages, and there are tigers around.[1]
If this happens to you, then just the thought of taking the path might make you nervous and twitchy. When you’re on it, you may need to suppress your desire to run away. We might say that a sense of panic and flight response has become associated with the path.
If the feeling of panic is too strong, it might prevent you from taking that path in the first place. But the fact that the response is getting activated on its own is genuinely useful - it means that you are alert to danger, and prepared to run away at the first sign of being attacked. You don’t want it to be so strong that you can’t suppress and override it, but you do want it to be there.
So for the desired behavior of “I can take the route, but on the first sight of the tiger I’ll flee”, you’ll get this with a mechanism of “have the panic active but suppressed”. Suppression here is analogous to pushing down something that’s trying to come up - the moment you stop pushing it down, it’ll come out and cause you to bolt.
Slightly more technically, we might say that there’s a flight network in your brain that’s sufficiently active to bring up physiological stress responses that prepare the body for a quick escape. It’s transmitting some degree of motor system bids to run away that are being inhibited and outcompeted by bids associated with just walking forward. The moment you see a sign of danger, quick subcortical threat pathways will fire an alarm and cause the flight impulse to win. As those pathways bypass reasoning, you’ll literally be running before you know it.
This gives us one story for what emotional suppression is: it’s the act of repeatedly ignoring a feeling or associated impulse and repeatedly choosing some activity that replaces the feeling or impulse with something else. You were feeling the panic and the urge to run, you kept pushing those down and chose to walk instead.
The way you did that was probably by trying to not think about the tiger or the urge to run and to instead focus on maintaining a steady walking pace - making the feeling of panic less salient in your consciousness, and therefore also having a weaker effect on your behavior. Yet the panic kept being strong enough that you couldn’t make it go away completely, so even when you were repeatedly looking away from it, it stayed in your consciousness.
Awareness suppression (full or partial) is a general strategy for impulse suppression. Some of the children in the marshmallow experiment did things like covering their eyes so as not to see the marshmallow, therefore suppressing their impulse to grab it and eat it.
And there are many situations where you will want to do this! Maybe you’re feeling stressed about a job interview, a date, dealing with an unpleasant customer, or just wouldn’t want to go to work in the morning. In each case, while it’s nothing as strong as the urge to bolt from a tiger, you might still be experiencing some slight degree of a flight or freeze reaction (or possibly fight or fawn), and it’s valuable to be able to choose differently.
But importantly, this kind of emotional suppression does not make the underlying response any different. On the jungle path, the panic response was still running in the background and activating stress responses in your body. If those stress responses never get wound down after you arrived safely in the other village (or after you fled back to your home village), they might make it hard for you to sleep well or to digest your food properly.
Likewise, if you only keep suppressing your stressful reactions and never relaxing them, then that is likely to have all kinds of negative consequences. This is where self-soothing comes in - it’s the act of not just choosing to act despite the feeling and possibly blocking awareness of it, but actually winding down the response. It’s more like telling yourself “hey, I’m safely in the village, there’s no risk of the tiger now”.
Generally, anything that brings you out of your body or brings up intense opposed bodily feelings, narrows your attention so as to make the feeling go away, or generally brings you out of contact with the feeling is more likely to be suppression. Computer games and social media scrolling are my go-to suppressive responses when I’m anxious and don’t know why.
Many of the conventional vices - alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, and so forth - are also frequently used to suppress emotions. Part of why people use them compulsively is because they do little to change the bad feeling in the long term, so the only way to consistently escape the feeling is to continue engaging in those activities.
Meanwhile, something like talking to a friend about the feeling, or letting myself feel the feeling but also consciously regulating my breath so I can stay reasonably calm without losing track of the feeling, is more soothing-flavored. Staying with the emotion and either looking at it and listening to it, or just generally hanging out with it and letting it know that things are okay now, until it gradually fades or transforms. You can even do something that brings in more positive feelings into your body, as long as those positive feelings then share the space with the unpleasant feeling rather than pushing it away.
If you have no idea of what’s meant by “listening to an emotion”, Gendlin’s Focusing is one systematization of the skill; I recommend this article as an intro, as well as the book “The Power of Focusing”.
A test of “is this self-soothing or suppression” might be, after you engage in the activity, do you feel genuinely better so that you don’t need to continue doing the activity to keep the unpleasant feeling away? “I thought about it and came to a conclusion and now I feel physically better and it doesn’t bother me anymore” is more likely to be soothing, while “I have a compulsive need to keep playing this computer game all day” is more likely to be suppression.
Naturally, some stressors are going to come up again. It may be hard to genuinely self-soothe over dealing with nasty customers or a nasty boss if you know that tomorrow, you’ll be at work with them again. Or even if you do manage it, you might feel stressed the next day again. One possible move is to clearly communicate to yourself that yes, later you’ll need to face the tiger again, but right now you are safely in the village and can unwind for a bit.
Another situation where the difference between self-soothing and suppression gets a little blurry is with feelings that are already on their way out. Attending to a feeling may make it weaken, but a negative feeling can also cause looping thoughts that refocus attention on it and cause it to strengthen. If it was already weakening - if you’d survived the tiger attack and your system genuinely knew there was no more threat - then moving your awareness away from it might serve to cut any remaining self-reinforcing loops and let it fade out naturally.
A possible way to look at it is that self-regulation works analogously to other-regulation. Suppose that a tiger does attack me on the way, and I freak out and flee. Then when I reach the other village, I’m still afraid that a tiger will attack me. Someone there asks me to share what I’m upset about, listens to my explanation, and then calmly says that tiger attacks are indeed really dangerous and it would be terrible for one to attack the village, but tigers very rarely do and the village is well-defended if that were to happen.
And then I see that they are taking in the information and staying calm, but that the information is not destabilizing them. It seems like they are familiar with tigers and taking my encounter seriously, but also not feeling like there’s any threat we need to be concerned about. Also, they’re still alive and haven’t been eaten by a tiger despite being so calm. This is a signal for my nervous system that I’m probably safe too, and can calm down now.
“Someone being calm when I’m not” is also the most primitive and visceral signal we have: infant expresses distress, caregiver shows up and is soothing and isn’t in distress themselves because they know they just need to feed the infant and there’s no emergency, infant picks up the caregiver’s calm and is soothed.
And then the ideal form of self-soothing is something like… a part of you is in a panic, while the rest of you is calm. Then the calm part of you can listen to the panicking part and be to it like the villager that calmed you, or the caregiver that calms the infant. The combination of calm and genuine listening and taking-seriously is intrinsically calming by itself.[2]
Of course, this may require you to take the upset seriously and possibly do something about its cause rather than trying to just soothe the upset into being quiet, analogous to how the caregiver does actually feed the infant rather than only being like “there there” and expecting that to be enough.
If you are anxious because you have ongoing financial troubles, for example, you may not be able to fully self-soothe before you’ve done something about them - which may be a good thing, since you shouldn’t ignore a risk you can do something about. Of course, not all stressors are something you can deal with, in which case suppression may be the best you can do. (If someone is living in abject poverty, they probably need money first and therapy later.)
Suppression may also be necessary for coping with anxiety that doesn’t have any clear cause you could do something about. This is the reason I have spent a combined 400+ hours playing Slay the Spire I & II - it doesn’t feel great, but it’s probably still better than drinking the anxiety away.
I’m told that tigers typically avoid humans and something like a swarm of aggressive insects is a more likely threat in a jungle, but tigers are cool. If you want to maximize the realism of your thought experiments, substitute “a swarm of bees” for “tiger”.
Internal Family Systems therapy suggests that there is an additional component: the part of you that is panicking may believe that it is identical to your self, and doesn’t realize that there are other parts or a higher self around that might be available to help it. Since this sounds a little mysterious and woo-y, let me unpack it in more mechanistic terms.
When you are in an upset state, due to state-dependent memory, it may be hard to recall what it would be like to face this problem in a calm state. Your global workspace - the network in the brain whose contents roughly correspond to those of your consciousness - may be largely flooded with anxious outputs from “the panicking part”, a subnetwork associated with anxious and helpless feelings and thoughts. In terms of subjective experience, it will feel like the anxiety and helplessness is all there is, because that is everything that your consciousness holds at the moment. This may then become a self-reinforcing dynamic, because feeling helplessness may prevent you from doing anything to help yourself, which then confirms the belief that you really are helpless to do anything and strengthens the feeling.
What IFS calls “a part becoming aware that it is not the Self”, could be modeled as something like feelings of calm interfacing with and reconsolidating some of the beliefs of the panicking part, so that an awareness of positive resources enters it and its experience is no longer that of being helpless and having to fend alone. This may not solve all the need for soothing by itself, but it may help with the specific property where feeling helpless and alone keeps reinforcing itself.
You’ve probably heard people say that emotional suppression is bad, and self-soothing is good. But how do you know which one is which?
I don’t actually think that suppression is all bad. To understand why, and to answer the question of how to distinguish them, I’ll start with a few words on why I think we’ve evolved the ability for emotional suppression in the first place. Why have a system of possibly intense feelings combined with a system for suppressing them, as opposed to just having less intense feelings in the first place?
I think the answer is that the system we have affords more flexibility - intense feelings lead to behavioral responses like fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, each of which may be an adaptive response in a particular situation.
Suppose there’s a particular route you often need to take, where you might also be ambushed by an animal in a way that makes running away the right response. Say it’s a jungle path between two villages, and there are tigers around.[1]
If this happens to you, then just the thought of taking the path might make you nervous and twitchy. When you’re on it, you may need to suppress your desire to run away. We might say that a sense of panic and flight response has become associated with the path.
If the feeling of panic is too strong, it might prevent you from taking that path in the first place. But the fact that the response is getting activated on its own is genuinely useful - it means that you are alert to danger, and prepared to run away at the first sign of being attacked. You don’t want it to be so strong that you can’t suppress and override it, but you do want it to be there.
So for the desired behavior of “I can take the route, but on the first sight of the tiger I’ll flee”, you’ll get this with a mechanism of “have the panic active but suppressed”. Suppression here is analogous to pushing down something that’s trying to come up - the moment you stop pushing it down, it’ll come out and cause you to bolt.
Slightly more technically, we might say that there’s a flight network in your brain that’s sufficiently active to bring up physiological stress responses that prepare the body for a quick escape. It’s transmitting some degree of motor system bids to run away that are being inhibited and outcompeted by bids associated with just walking forward. The moment you see a sign of danger, quick subcortical threat pathways will fire an alarm and cause the flight impulse to win. As those pathways bypass reasoning, you’ll literally be running before you know it.
This gives us one story for what emotional suppression is: it’s the act of repeatedly ignoring a feeling or associated impulse and repeatedly choosing some activity that replaces the feeling or impulse with something else. You were feeling the panic and the urge to run, you kept pushing those down and chose to walk instead.
The way you did that was probably by trying to not think about the tiger or the urge to run and to instead focus on maintaining a steady walking pace - making the feeling of panic less salient in your consciousness, and therefore also having a weaker effect on your behavior. Yet the panic kept being strong enough that you couldn’t make it go away completely, so even when you were repeatedly looking away from it, it stayed in your consciousness.
Awareness suppression (full or partial) is a general strategy for impulse suppression. Some of the children in the marshmallow experiment did things like covering their eyes so as not to see the marshmallow, therefore suppressing their impulse to grab it and eat it.
And there are many situations where you will want to do this! Maybe you’re feeling stressed about a job interview, a date, dealing with an unpleasant customer, or just wouldn’t want to go to work in the morning. In each case, while it’s nothing as strong as the urge to bolt from a tiger, you might still be experiencing some slight degree of a flight or freeze reaction (or possibly fight or fawn), and it’s valuable to be able to choose differently.
But importantly, this kind of emotional suppression does not make the underlying response any different. On the jungle path, the panic response was still running in the background and activating stress responses in your body. If those stress responses never get wound down after you arrived safely in the other village (or after you fled back to your home village), they might make it hard for you to sleep well or to digest your food properly.
Likewise, if you only keep suppressing your stressful reactions and never relaxing them, then that is likely to have all kinds of negative consequences. This is where self-soothing comes in - it’s the act of not just choosing to act despite the feeling and possibly blocking awareness of it, but actually winding down the response. It’s more like telling yourself “hey, I’m safely in the village, there’s no risk of the tiger now”.
Generally, anything that brings you out of your body or brings up intense opposed bodily feelings, narrows your attention so as to make the feeling go away, or generally brings you out of contact with the feeling is more likely to be suppression. Computer games and social media scrolling are my go-to suppressive responses when I’m anxious and don’t know why.
Many of the conventional vices - alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, and so forth - are also frequently used to suppress emotions. Part of why people use them compulsively is because they do little to change the bad feeling in the long term, so the only way to consistently escape the feeling is to continue engaging in those activities.
Meanwhile, something like talking to a friend about the feeling, or letting myself feel the feeling but also consciously regulating my breath so I can stay reasonably calm without losing track of the feeling, is more soothing-flavored. Staying with the emotion and either looking at it and listening to it, or just generally hanging out with it and letting it know that things are okay now, until it gradually fades or transforms. You can even do something that brings in more positive feelings into your body, as long as those positive feelings then share the space with the unpleasant feeling rather than pushing it away.
If you have no idea of what’s meant by “listening to an emotion”, Gendlin’s Focusing is one systematization of the skill; I recommend this article as an intro, as well as the book “The Power of Focusing”.
A test of “is this self-soothing or suppression” might be, after you engage in the activity, do you feel genuinely better so that you don’t need to continue doing the activity to keep the unpleasant feeling away? “I thought about it and came to a conclusion and now I feel physically better and it doesn’t bother me anymore” is more likely to be soothing, while “I have a compulsive need to keep playing this computer game all day” is more likely to be suppression.
Naturally, some stressors are going to come up again. It may be hard to genuinely self-soothe over dealing with nasty customers or a nasty boss if you know that tomorrow, you’ll be at work with them again. Or even if you do manage it, you might feel stressed the next day again. One possible move is to clearly communicate to yourself that yes, later you’ll need to face the tiger again, but right now you are safely in the village and can unwind for a bit.
Another situation where the difference between self-soothing and suppression gets a little blurry is with feelings that are already on their way out. Attending to a feeling may make it weaken, but a negative feeling can also cause looping thoughts that refocus attention on it and cause it to strengthen. If it was already weakening - if you’d survived the tiger attack and your system genuinely knew there was no more threat - then moving your awareness away from it might serve to cut any remaining self-reinforcing loops and let it fade out naturally.
A possible way to look at it is that self-regulation works analogously to other-regulation. Suppose that a tiger does attack me on the way, and I freak out and flee. Then when I reach the other village, I’m still afraid that a tiger will attack me. Someone there asks me to share what I’m upset about, listens to my explanation, and then calmly says that tiger attacks are indeed really dangerous and it would be terrible for one to attack the village, but tigers very rarely do and the village is well-defended if that were to happen.
And then I see that they are taking in the information and staying calm, but that the information is not destabilizing them. It seems like they are familiar with tigers and taking my encounter seriously, but also not feeling like there’s any threat we need to be concerned about. Also, they’re still alive and haven’t been eaten by a tiger despite being so calm. This is a signal for my nervous system that I’m probably safe too, and can calm down now.
“Someone being calm when I’m not” is also the most primitive and visceral signal we have: infant expresses distress, caregiver shows up and is soothing and isn’t in distress themselves because they know they just need to feed the infant and there’s no emergency, infant picks up the caregiver’s calm and is soothed.
And then the ideal form of self-soothing is something like… a part of you is in a panic, while the rest of you is calm. Then the calm part of you can listen to the panicking part and be to it like the villager that calmed you, or the caregiver that calms the infant. The combination of calm and genuine listening and taking-seriously is intrinsically calming by itself.[2]
Of course, this may require you to take the upset seriously and possibly do something about its cause rather than trying to just soothe the upset into being quiet, analogous to how the caregiver does actually feed the infant rather than only being like “there there” and expecting that to be enough.
If you are anxious because you have ongoing financial troubles, for example, you may not be able to fully self-soothe before you’ve done something about them - which may be a good thing, since you shouldn’t ignore a risk you can do something about. Of course, not all stressors are something you can deal with, in which case suppression may be the best you can do. (If someone is living in abject poverty, they probably need money first and therapy later.)
Suppression may also be necessary for coping with anxiety that doesn’t have any clear cause you could do something about. This is the reason I have spent a combined 400+ hours playing Slay the Spire I & II - it doesn’t feel great, but it’s probably still better than drinking the anxiety away.
I’m told that tigers typically avoid humans and something like a swarm of aggressive insects is a more likely threat in a jungle, but tigers are cool. If you want to maximize the realism of your thought experiments, substitute “a swarm of bees” for “tiger”.
Internal Family Systems therapy suggests that there is an additional component: the part of you that is panicking may believe that it is identical to your self, and doesn’t realize that there are other parts or a higher self around that might be available to help it. Since this sounds a little mysterious and woo-y, let me unpack it in more mechanistic terms.
When you are in an upset state, due to state-dependent memory, it may be hard to recall what it would be like to face this problem in a calm state. Your global workspace - the network in the brain whose contents roughly correspond to those of your consciousness - may be largely flooded with anxious outputs from “the panicking part”, a subnetwork associated with anxious and helpless feelings and thoughts. In terms of subjective experience, it will feel like the anxiety and helplessness is all there is, because that is everything that your consciousness holds at the moment. This may then become a self-reinforcing dynamic, because feeling helplessness may prevent you from doing anything to help yourself, which then confirms the belief that you really are helpless to do anything and strengthens the feeling.
What IFS calls “a part becoming aware that it is not the Self”, could be modeled as something like feelings of calm interfacing with and reconsolidating some of the beliefs of the panicking part, so that an awareness of positive resources enters it and its experience is no longer that of being helpless and having to fend alone. This may not solve all the need for soothing by itself, but it may help with the specific property where feeling helpless and alone keeps reinforcing itself.