Reducing Emotional Avoidance
Emotional repression is all about avoiding emotional suffering. It is a coping style used to hide and push away negative emotions and has been associated with ADHD outcomes in children and adults with mild to severe insecure attachment. Emotional repression can be thought of as a defence mechanism, where people defend themselves from the negatives and focus instead on the positive aspects of who they are. It is a way of regulating emotions when they are too difficult to process or if there is no space given to process and express emotion.
It differs from emotional suppression, which is a one-off act of avoiding negative emotions, rather than a habitual coping strategy. Emotional repression can occur due to growing up in an environment where little or no room was given to experience and express emotions.
Societal narratives and family myths may have dictated that emotions are wrong, shameful, or a sign of weakness. We may have been raised by primary caregivers who never expressed or displayed negative emotions. They may have intentionally or unintentionally invalidated our negative emotions through messages such as ‘get on with it,’ ‘stop crying,’ ‘be grateful,’ and ‘don’t be silly; everything is fine.’
As children, we internalize the messages we hear and learn that having negative emotions and acknowledging them is not a good thing. Furthermore, not having someone model how to express and cope with emotions may lead to the development of coping strategies that focus on avoiding and inhibiting negative emotions. We may orient our attention more toward positive emotions that are acceptable and tolerated by others.
Traumatic childhood experiences may also result in emotional repression. A child whose needs were ignored, invalidated, or neglected or who was criticized or punished for displaying and expressing feelings may be more likely to repress their emotions as an adult.
There can be a range of signs that may indicate that you repress your emotions. These signs can be grouped into particular behaviours, patterns of thinking, and patterns of relating to yourself and others.
Patterns of thinking:
You believe negative emotions are something bad, weak, or embarrassing.
You believe negative emotions should not be expressed.
You believe that you never struggle with negative emotions and describe yourself as feeling ‘fine.’
Patterns of behaving and relating to yourself:
You ignore and push away negative thoughts and emotions.
You avoid and distract from your negative thoughts and emotions by turning toward numbing and escaping behaviours such as drinking and using substances, binge eating, watching tv, playing computer games, or overworking.
You find it difficult to recognize and admit that things in your life are harming you.
You find yourself at times erupting because of built-up emotions.
You focus more on your physical well-being.
Patterns of behaving and relating to others:
You generally do not like to be asked how you feel.
You put on a positive front in front of others and do not express negative emotions.
You get along well with people but struggle with emotional intimacy and close friendships.
You feel uncomfortable with and struggle to tolerate people who are emotional and express negativity, and you try to shift focus to the positive.
If you recognize that you are someone who represses your emotions, then you have already taken a crucial first step as emotional repression is typically a semi-conscious or unconscious coping strategy (Garssen, 2007).
You can now start to ask yourself whether emotional repression is still serving you in your life.
You cannot get rid of negative emotions; however, you can learn how to cope with them without repressing them. This entails a process of courageously leaning in toward uncomfortable feelings and learning how to live with them.
Here are 10 Steps to Get You Started.
1. Understanding how you relate to your emotions
What is your relationship with your emotions? It is important to take the time to reflect on this because what you think about negative emotions will influence how you feel about them and how you behave and respond to them.
For instance, if you think that negative emotions are an inconvenience and a sign of weakness, you may feel frustrated when you or others experience them, leading you to push them away. This can become automatic and habitual, so it can help break a habit by noticing and identifying when these patterns are occurring.
2. Educating yourself about emotions
What is the point of having emotions? What are the different positive and negative emotions designed for? The Pixar movie ‘Inside Out’ is a fantastic illustration of this. It is a fun and gentle introduction to thinking about the function of different emotions in their own right. This can help challenge the harmful myths about emotions and indicate that they are important, useful, and not threatening.
3. Understanding how emotions show up in your body
To cope with emotions, you need to understand how emotions manifest in your body. Different emotions show up differently in your body, and this varies from person to person. For example, for one person, anxiety may feel like a tight sensation in their chest, sadness may feel like a pit in their stomach, and anger may feel like a hot and throbbing sensation in their head.
You can better get to know the relationship between your emotions and body by paying attention to how your body changes when you feel a particular emotion.
4. Learning the triggers of your emotions
Being in touch with our bodies can help us detect our emotions sooner and identify what may have triggered them.
Understanding the triggers can equip us to be prepared for particular emotions to show up and enable us to manage them more effectively. For example, if I know that speaking in a meeting typically makes me feel anxious, I can take a few moments to calm my anxiety by taking 10 deep breaths.
5. Learning how to live with your emotions
Trying to get rid of negative emotions is a futile exercise because we cannot control them.
When we try to push away our negative emotions, it is like trying to push a ball underwater. The ball pops back up. Instead of fighting to make the ball go away, we can let the ball float in the water around us.
Similarly, instead of using up our energy to make our negative emotions go away, we can change our relationship with our emotions by letting them be in our lives. If we don’t push our emotions away, they won’t push back, and we can live with them more easily.
6. Acknowledging your emotions
It can be helpful to learn how to acknowledge and validate your emotions. You can do this by naming them (e.g., ‘here is anger’; ‘anxiety is back’), without judging yourself or giving yourself a hard time for experiencing them.
Acknowledging your negative emotions will not make them worse or intensify. Just like clouds in the sky and waves in the ocean, emotions are not permanent. They come and go. Acknowledging them just means that you are accepting yourself more fully, with all your emotional peaks and troughs.
7. Sitting with your emotions
Sitting with negative emotions means being with them when they show up by observing them and focusing your attention inward on the body’s sensations. For example, you may focus on the butterflies in your stomach when you start to feel anxious.
As you notice the butterflies, you can imagine expanding your body to make room for them (the butterflies/anxiety). Sitting with negative emotions is not about changing or fixing them; instead, it is about learning that we can tolerate them and that they do not have to overwhelm us in the process.
8. Understanding what your emotions are communicating
When you experience a negative emotion, it can help to tune in to the message it is trying to give you. You can ask yourself these questions with gentleness and curiosity:
What triggered my emotion?
What is this emotion trying to communicate to me?
What does this emotion suggest I need right now?
Asking emotion regulation questions can help you pause and understand what your mind and body are telling you.
Simultaneously, it is vital to interpret these messages with caution. We instinctively survive and avoid hardship, so our negative emotions are hard-wired to point out the danger.
Therefore, emotions can become triggered even when there is no actual problem – like a smoke alarm that goes off when we are cooking a meal and not because there is a fire. Being aware of this can stop you from impulsively reacting and instead help you choose what action will be most helpful at the moment.
9. Choosing a helpful action
Once you understand the message, you can then choose whether you need to take action and, if you do, what action will be helpful to yourself and others.
The action will vary based on the circumstances and may include:
Finding a solution to the problem and acting on it
Tolerating the emotion until it passes if it is a false alarm
Being kind to yourself
Soothing your body through breathing
Participating fully in the activity you are doing, such as cooking, playing with your child, or exercising
Your successes and failures in managing your negative emotions can be valuable lessons that can further develop your emotional literacy, sensitivity to your own and others’ emotions, and your sense of empowerment in coping with them.
10. Practicing
Learning how to cope with negative emotions is not easy. You have had a lifetime of perfecting an avoidance coping strategy, and it will take effort to learn a different way to cope.
Like learning any other skill such as playing the piano, speaking a new language, and driving a car, it can be painful and uncomfortable, and it takes courage, commitment, perseverance, and learning from your errors. However, it becomes easier with time and can become automatic and a part of who you are.