Mental health: Is repression good after all?

Repression has a bad reputation. A widespread idea goes that anyone who pushes away and buries unpleasant memories, experiences or painful thoughts can harm their psyche. It was the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who coined the term repression and linked it to mental health. Freud warned: Through repression, negative experiences are moved into the unconscious and continue to plague people from there, for example in the form of dreams or thoughts that literally attack you out of nowhere. To this day, this idea plays an important role in psychodynamic therapeutic approaches, which include not only psychoanalysis but also depth psychology.

In a study, however, researchers at the University of Cambridge have now found evidence that repression is not necessarily harmful, but – on the contrary – can possibly even benefit mental health (Science Advances: Mamat & Anderson, 2023).

The scientists trained test subjects from 16 countries, including Germany, to actively forget unwanted thoughts. Apparently with success: not only did these thoughts appear less concrete and intense in the test subjects afterwards – the people also felt better than before.

Can you practice forgetting?

With 120 test subjects, the study is quite small, and its significance is therefore limited. But it joins a growing number of studies that point in a similar direction. The neuroscientist and study leader Michael Anderson has been working on the topic of active forgetting for decades. Previous studies of his have already shown that it becomes more difficult to recall memories if you consistently try to prevent them from entering consciousness.

An analysis of 25 studies published in 2021 also showed that more anxious or depressed people generally find it more difficult to suppress memories. And the less successful they were at this, the more pronounced their tendency to brood and negative thought spirals. However, it was unclear: Does mental illness hinder the ability to suppress negative thoughts? Or maybe the lack of ability to suppress also contributes to the disease?

The initial question of the current study by Michael Anderson and his co-author Zulkayda Mamat was: Can it help people who suffer from stressful thoughts to actively suppress them? Can they even practice this skill – and will it make them better?

Their study was not about events from the past, but rather about fears about the future. The subjects were asked to name situations that could occur in their lives and that they were very afraid of. One such fear scenario they mentioned was the fear that their own parents could become seriously ill with Covid-19. In addition, the researchers also asked about positive and neutral scenarios that could occur in the future. For example, the test subjects named their own sister’s wedding as a pleasant event or a visit to the optician as a neutral event. Then the participants were divided into two groups – and the experiment began.

Please suppress this thought

In 20-minute video training sessions, the test subjects practiced controlling their thoughts with the researchers for three days. Key terms played an important role. Participants were asked to identify specific terms that they associated with each of their scenarios. For the Covid fear, for example, these were the words “hospital” or “breathing”. The test subjects were confronted with these terms during training. You should look at each keyword on a screen and try not to think about the specific scenario. Without distracting themselves with other thoughts, they should practice blocking out any images or thoughts that the word triggered. As a control, there was a second group of test subjects whose screens showed the keywords for neutral scenarios such as a visit to the optician. They should also practice suppressing thoughts about it.

The thoughts fade, the fears subside

At the end of the third day and then again three months later, the test subjects were asked how intensely and vividly they could still imagine the individual scenarios, what feelings they triggered and how they were feeling psychologically. In fact, it turned out that the scenarios that the participants had actively suppressed were now perceived as less vivid and they triggered fewer strong feelings than before.

The effect occurred in both groups. “But we saw the greatest effect in the participants who were given the task of suppressing their fearful thoughts,” says co-author Zulkayda Mamat in a press release about the study. And exactly these test subjects also felt better psychologically afterwards – they reported fewer fears, negative feelings and depressive thoughts.

It was also noteworthy that participants who were particularly mentally stressed, for example suffering from pandemic-related stress or were generally very anxious, tended to benefit most from the training. And repressing the negative thoughts apparently didn’t lead to relapses: at least one of the test subjects said after three months that they had to think more about painful scenarios again.

White bears and dogmas

The result is quite surprising, as previous studies have shown that things that you consciously try not to think about tend to become more prominent afterwards. The work of the Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, for example, is legendary, when he asked his subjects in a study not to think about a white polar bear, whereupon the idea of ​​a white polar bear became even more intrusive.

The new study by Anderson and Mamat seems to contradict this. “What we found goes against the common narrative that repression can be harmful,” Anderson said in the statement. “It may even be beneficial to push away anxious thoughts.” However, further research is needed to confirm this.

Other researchers see it similarly: “Although the idea that repression is counterproductive is a dogma, this research now suggests that the reality is a little more nuanced and repression does not always have to lead to negative consequences,” said Spanish psychologist María Cantero -García at the request of the Spanish Science Media Center for classification. However, she also pointed out that the results may not be transferable to all people and therapeutic contexts. In fact, the study does not reveal for whom and for which thoughts this form of brain training could be useful.