GeistHaus

Defenses

Suppression

Suppression is deciding not to deal with something right now, knowing you will come back to it. You notice the worry, the grief, or the temptation, and you set it aside so you can do what the moment requires. Unlike forgetting, it stays within reach.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by voluntarily avoiding thinking about disturbing problems, wishes, feelings, or experiences temporarily” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). It can mean putting things out of mind until the right time to deal with them: “it is postponing not procrastinating.” Nothing is lost. The person “can call the suppressed material back to conscious attention readily, since it is not forgotten.”

Suppression lets you function when feelings would get in the way: in an emergency, at work, or while someone else needs you. In the DMRS’s words, “distressing feelings are acknowledged but dealing with them is postponed until the subject feels more able or the timing is more appropriate.” The cost is modest. Some anticipatory anxiety may linger until the problem is finally faced.

Where It Sits

Suppression belongs to Level 7, the High-Adaptive Defense Level, within the Mature Defensive Category. At this level, stressors are “fully perceived without distortion,” and the person takes responsibility for adapting to them. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale places suppression at the same high adaptive level, alongside affiliation, altruism, anticipation, humor, self-assertion, self-observation, and sublimation.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify suppression:

Examples

Forty feet underwater

In Adaptation to Life, George Vaillant reported on men followed by the Grant Study, which began with Harvard undergraduates. One of them described a navy diving accident during World War II. He was forty feet underwater, his air valve was jammed, his radio did not work, and he knew he had only eight minutes of air left in his helmet. “I didn’t pray. I merely sat, very much like an old cow, and waited for help — very unhappy.” Vaillant’s comment: “He knew his feelings; he knew they would not help, and so he kept them inside until he was rescued.”

George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (1977)

Elinor Dashwood’s four months

In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Elinor learns in confidence that Edward, the man she loves, is secretly engaged to Lucy Steele. Bound by her promise, she keeps the secret for four months, all the while caring for her sister Marianne through Marianne’s own heartbreak. When she finally tells her, Marianne asks how she stayed “So calm! so cheerful!” Elinor explains that her composure was “the effect of constant and painful exertion,” and that she can now “think and speak of it with little emotion.” She knew what she felt, chose when to face it, and returned to it when she could. The fictional portrait is a clear example of suppression as the DMRS describes it.

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), chs. 22–23 and 37

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Repression
In repression, the disturbing idea is kept out of awareness without the person choosing it, and it can’t simply be recalled. Suppression is voluntary and reversible. The DMRS notes that with suppression, neurotic anxiety is minimized “since the material is not repressed.”
Denial
Denial refuses to acknowledge something that would be apparent to others. Suppression acknowledges the problem fully and only postpones dealing with it.
Procrastination
The DMRS draws this line itself: suppression “is postponing not procrastinating.” The suppressed matter has a time and is returned to. Chronic putting-off that quietly frustrates other people is closer to passive aggression, which the DMRS says can show up as “stubborn, inept, procrastinating, and forgetful behavior.”
Thought suppression and emotional suppression
Experimental psychologists use “suppression” for different things. In thought suppression studies, people told not to think of a white bear had trouble doing so, and once they were allowed to think about it again, the thought came back unusually often (Wegner et al., 1987). In emotion research, “expressive suppression” means hiding the outward signs of a feeling, and people who habitually do so report more negative emotion and worse relationships and well-being (Gross & John, 2003). The defense is different: it is temporary, the feeling is acknowledged, and it is returned to later.

History

As a 1992 guide to defense research edited by George Vaillant puts it, suppression “can hardly be considered original to Freud.” Still, in an 1894 paper Freud described patients faced with a distressing idea who “decided to forget about it” because they had no confidence they could resolve it by thinking. The guide calls this “a fairly modern definition of suppression.” Modern definitions draw a sharp line between the two: repression works outside awareness, while suppression is a choice the person knows they are making.

In Adaptation to Life (1977), reporting on the Grant Study, Vaillant made the case for suppression. He wrote that, unlike anticipation, suppression “is regarded by psychiatrists as a vice, not a virtue,” and called it “the clumsy DC-3, the dun workhorse, the mundane Volkswagen of the defenses.” Yet in his sample suppression “was the defensive style most closely associated with successful adaptation,” and of all the coping mechanisms in his book, it “alters the world the least and best accepts the terms life offers.”

Suppression was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) at the high adaptive level, and it is one of the 30 defenses in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, whose Q-sort version describes it with five items (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021).

Research using the DMRS has linked suppression to other markers of good functioning. In a small study of 28 depressed patients, Tanzilli and colleagues (2021) found that reflective functioning, the capacity to make sense of one’s own and others’ mental states, was significantly and positively correlated with suppression, as well as with self-assertion, affiliation, and undoing.

Sources