Suppressing Emotions Creates Distance

Oftentimes, it is easier to shove your emotions down instead of expressing them. Sharing emotions requires vulnerability and puts the ball in other people’s court. Many people suppress emotions as a form of control: if others don’t know how I feel, they can’t hurt me. But suppression has a cost and takes a silent toll on your relationship over time, fostering loneliness, misunderstanding and disconnection.

What does Suppressing Your Emotions Look Like?

It can be hard to identify what suppression looks like as it is often an unconscious process. Showing our emotions puts us in a vulnerable spot: from a survival standpoint, it puts us in a position where others know our ‘weaknesses’. To protect us from this vulnerability, our brains develop suppression. Suppression can look like any of the following:

• Avoiding challenging conversations with your partner

• Saying you “don’t care” when feeling hurt

• Intellectualizing feelings

• Constant distraction

• Emotional detachment or numbness

• Constantly people pleasing

• Being passive aggressive rather than directly expressing feelings/needs

Suppression, in very small doses, can actually be healthy. When emotions are overwhelming, it is often functional for us to distract ourselves or avoid the conflict temporarily so we can calm down. But problems arise when the suppression persists, and emotions and needs are never faced or shared.

What Emotional Suppression Costs

Individually

When you repress your emotions, you often are keeping it from yourself before you are keeping it from your partner. It’s easier to keep your needs from yourself if you aren’t aware of them! Over time, suppression slowly causes you to lose touch with your personal needs and desires. This loss of awareness causes you to feel emotionally numb. When this happens, it’s hard to identify what you’re feeling: you may feel like you are more irritable, anxious, burnt out or even depressed for ‘no apparent reason’. 

Suppression also takes a toll on your body. We hold stress in our bodies, presented as fatigue, tension, headaches or digestive issues, also for ‘no apparent reason’. When we suppress, we may not be consciously aware, but our bodies send us signals.

Over time, this mental and physical stress builds up. Suppression doesn’t make emotions go away, it only puts them out of sight temporarily. 

In Your Relationship

Vulnerability is the basis of emotional closeness. Without sharing or even feeling your emotions, you create emotional distance. Emotions and in turn needs go unheard. Distance grows silently with suppression. You become emotionally unavailable. 

Even though you are not verbally sharing how you feel, your behavior and actions are communicating emotional distance and unavailability. Your partner likely senses it! This distance often feels like rejection. As time goes on, and emotions are suppressed, your relationship withers from a lack of connection.

Difference Between Emotional Regulation and Emotional Suppression

Suppression has the goal of not feeling emotions. It shoves them down so you don’t have to face them. It causes us to think “I shouldn’t be feeling this way” or “why can’t I stop feeling this way”. Suppression is a way to avoid and minimize our emotions so that we become numb to the pain they cause.

Emotional regulation on the other hand recognizes those emotions instead of ignoring them. Healthy emotional regulation allows you to feel and respond in the way that you want, rather than snapping. It welcomes how you feel and works to calm down feelings of overwhelm. Statements as simple as “I’m upset” or “I need support” are examples of recognizing emotions and sharing needs. This is what fosters emotional connection. This is what brings couples closer together.

The key to breaking the habit of suppression is honesty: both with yourself and your partner. If this process is too overwhelming for you, and you need support: we are here to help. Contact us at 416-949-9878 or info@georgetowncouplestherapy.com.