“Cancer incidence was 40 times higher among people who repressed their anger than among those who did not." A deep dive into research on emotional suppression and its effects.

"People don’t suffer because they feel fear. They suffer because of how they try to escape, numb, or control it." Evidence-based teachings on working with emotions can benefit every student & client.

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Emotional Imbalance: Avoidance and Attachment

Being out of balance emotionally usually involves either not allowing yourself to experience your feelings as they evolve by avoiding or suppressing them, or being so attached to and identified with them that your feelings are all-consuming… The path toward emotional balance goes from avoidance and attachment to acceptance.

Dan Mager MSW

Emotional Suppression: Critical and Far-Reaching Influence on Health and Well-Being

Here you’ll find excerpts from our lesson on Emotional Suppression & Triggering, where we examine why people judge and suppress emotions, how this happens with and in the body, and the consequences — including overidentification, addictive behaviors, health issues and disease, and emotional triggering.

For the subject of Emotional Well-Being as a whole, get an overview and context here. The Research & Teaching Guide included there has links to full lessons, as well as Substack posts featuring selected excerpts.

Our Dysfunctional Relationship with Negative Emotions

To feel our emotions is a core trait of humanity. Emotions are natural and integral to the body’s physiology. As we learn throughout this series, they are also powerful messengers and portals to healing.

It’s not “wrong” or “bad” to feel any particular emotion. Emotions simply arise with different qualities and intensities, with a purpose and a message. Yet modern culture often frames emotions as irrational, unproductive, or signs of weakness. As a result, emotional expression may be judged as a lack of control, leading many people to suppress or criticize their own inner experience.

Impacts

• This creates a harmful disconnect, where a fundamental aspect of human functioning is treated as abnormal, often generating shame around something entirely natural. In this way, emotional suppression reflects broader societal patterns in which innate human experiences are stigmatized or deemed unacceptable.

• When emotions are consistently ignored or judged, they’re likely to be pushed out of awareness through bodily habits and tension.

• Over time, they can become repressed — held outside of conscious awareness (sometimes referred to as the “shadow”) — while continuing to influence thoughts, behavior, and overall well-being until they are consciously acknowledged and processed. [Candace B. Pert PhD]

Learned Suppression, Prioritizing Other’s Needs

When a person has difficulty saying no and a tendency to prioritize others’ needs, opinions, or happiness over their own, this may be exhibit as:

• People-pleasing

• Perfectionism, overachieving, strong focus on preventing criticism or rejection, and maintaining external approval

• Hypervigilance

• Fear of disappointing others

• Feeling obligated to help

• Taking on caregiving roles or being “the strong one,” while struggling to ask for help

These traits are likely to involve emotional suppression, such as not recognizing or expressing anger, or internalizing stress rather than releasing it. This internalization may keep the body in a chronic stress response without conscious awareness that this is the case.

A key practice is using emotional awareness techniques to become conscious of feelings and allow them to move through rather than be suppressed. The aim is to reduce patterns of self-abandonment by prioritizing self-care over external approval, which also involves learning to tolerate the discomfort of others’ disappointment.

Suppression Happens in the Body

In the following 4-minute video, Leslie Kaminoff speaks powerfully and elegantly about the physiology of emotion, highlighting how emotional suppression is something we do with our body.

“People don’t suffer because they feel fear. They suffer because of how they try to escape, numb, or control it.”

Before we were diagnosed, before we were medicated, before we learned to call it “anxiety” or “depression,” there was just the raw sensation: that primal electricity coursing through our bodies, signaling danger. This is fear in its purest form: not a disorder, not a chemical imbalance, but an ancient energy that has kept our species alive since we first walked upright. Yet somehow, in the span of a single generation, we’ve been convinced that this survival wisdom is a disease… We need to understand a radical truth: people don’t suffer because they feel fear. They suffer because of how they try to escape, numb, or control it.

Dr. Roger McFillan

Patterns & Repercussions

Suppression is conscious: To consciously push something down or hold it back, as in suppressed anger. The person may not be aware of the power of the emotions, but recognize they have feelings they aren’t allowing to move.

Repression is unconscious: To unconsciously block something from awareness, as in repressed trauma. The person is unaware of certain feelings or memories because they’ve been pushed out of conscious awareness.

Emotional repression and suppression are extremely common, but nevertheless dysfunctional.

When emotions are ignored or bypassed, their signals do not disappear, they simply become louder or more distorted.

Vera Hellerman

As we often see in children, who typically express and release emotions quickly, fully experiencing emotions allows them to resolve naturally. When this process is interrupted and emotions aren’t fully felt or processed, several patterns can emerge:

1. Repetitive emotional cycles: Avoiding or suppressing emotions can keep us trapped in repetitive emotional loops rather than moving through them, leaving us trapped in the past. [Dr. Joe Dispenza]

2. Unconscious triggers reinforce emotional patterns: Unprocessed emotions can form automatic triggers that influence reactions outside of conscious awareness. When memories tied to unprocessed emotions are triggered, the body can reproduce the same stress chemistry, as if the event is happening again in the present. [Dr. Joe Dispenza]

3. Emotion-driven behavior: Behavior is often shaped more by emotional state than by conscious intention. When thoughts conflict with feelings, emotions tend to have the stronger influence. [Benny Zhang and Alliance for Natural Health]

4. [See here to continue this list and get links to sources.]

These patterns have been associated with a range of adverse outcomes, for which supporting sources are provided below. Key outcomes include:

• Compulsion and addiction

• Heightened reactivity (triggering)

• Disease

Disease

“Cancer incidence was 40 times higher among people who repressed their anger than among those who did not”

Dr. Mark J. Doolittle of the Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine states, “Most standard medical textbooks attribute anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of all disease to stress-related origins.” The CDC estimates that 75 percent of doctor visits are due to stress… Dr. Maté’s book focuses on the stress we experience due to being unable to say no. When we’re focused on pleasing others, don’t set limits, and put ourselves last, we experience a great deal of stress. This stress is internalized—not outwardly expressed… Dr. Maté devotes sections of his book to a range of diseases, including lung, breast, prostate, and skin cancer; multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, and asthma; and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer’s disease. He presents a great deal of research showing the strong correlation between emotional repression and disease, and I’ll touch on a few interesting findings here. A study followed 1,400 people for ten years and compared the rate of disease to personality traits. Cancer incidence was 40 times higher among people who repressed their anger than among those who did not. Another study found the rate of lung cancer to be 5 times higher among men who did not express their emotions effectively.

Sarah Warren

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