How to Build a Healthy Brain by Kimberley Wilson

Author:Kimberley Wilson [Wilson, Kimberley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529348514
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Published: 2020-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Emotional Inhibition

In the hugely successful musical The Book of Mormon Elder McKinley teaches the young missionaries to ‘turn it off’, to switch off unsettling thoughts or painful emotions ‘like a light switch’. While this advice makes for hilarious comedy, it is a terrible strategy for psychological well-being.

Emotional inhibition is the habitual pattern of responding to difficult emotions with deliberate attempts to suppress or avoid emotion-related thoughts, feelings or expressions. Some emotional suppression may be socially adaptive – not screaming at a colleague for a mistake on a document is considered professional behaviour and definitely makes for a more conducive working environment. However, much emotional suppression is not adaptive and hinders social interaction and our own emotional development.

Early in therapy it is very common for clients to meet their own resistance when it comes to expressing painful emotions. Often they have been told that showing their feelings is a sign of weakness. It is also likely that, as children, many of them made the sad discovery that their emotional needs were too much for their parents and resolved, consciously or unconsciously, to try to put their emotions aside. When these people get to therapy, they have often rationalised this emotional rejection as the ‘logical’ belief that ‘there’s no point in feeling sad’. They are, though, very wrong.

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