Evelyn Heffermehl is an experienced relationship therapist and coach. She is a certified emotionally focused therapist and a certified professional coach. She is the founder of Lighthouse coaching.
“I can’t keep stuffing these things down” a client might say. By that, he/she means, “I can’t keep shutting down my emotions all the time and live completely numbed out.” Why not? After all, it’s a legitimate question and don’t we all have to do it in certain aspects of our lives?
1. It works at times but for a limited amount of time
As a counselor for example, to some extent, I do have to shut part of my emotions down when I need to listen and lean into people’s experiences while I may have argued with my husband just before the session, or when one of my children has just had a meltdown (I reassure you, this doesn’t happen very often, and yes couples therapists also get stuck in their relationships). A surgeon needs to tune out his emotions to operate, a firefighter to save a life in a fire, etc… There are numerous examples where shutting down emotions can not only be helpful but where it is necessary. We all do it. It’s adaptive and functional.
2. “Stuck on repeat”
The problem is when we get “stuck on repeat”. When these punctual coping mechanisms become habitual patterns in our lives. When from being helpful strategies that may help us achieve success in one area of our life or save us from danger, they turn into harmful moves that cut us off from ourselves and others. Protection becomes a prison as the saying goes.
Here, what the research tells us, namely research by professor of clinical psychology Jim Coan, is that suppressing emotions comes at a high cost and is not sustainable long term.
As Dr Susan Johnson the founder of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy so eloquently explains, “when we suppress our emotions, we are pushing and pushing things down all the time and the effort involved in doing that actually arouses you, it agitates your nervous system; the things you miss when you are doing that are huge because you are focused on managing your fear and controlling it. It’s exhausting, so then you numb out but you feel empty. So it’s flipping between exhausted and numb. And then it rebounds after a while because you just can’t keep doing it.”
That’s when I come in as a therapist or rather when my clients come in.
3. What to do about emotional suppression?
The first step is to understand and honor the function and adaptive nature of emotional suppression. Usually emotional suppression is what we have had to do to survive a threatening environment. Honoring that is key. There is a very good reason why we do what we do and this needs to be not only understood but fully respected and valued.
Understanding the exquisite logic behind our protective tendencies helps us also have compassion for ourselves rather than judge or blame ourselves which usually keeps us stuck.
Honoring our defenses naturally opens up the door to softer parts of our experience and to the second step: going deeper into our hearts, our fears and hurts, and connecting to our longings and purpose.
But we can’t do that if our habitual coping patterns are running the show for us.
Conclusion
Our coping strategies can get us stuck on repeat. In order to defeat our negative patterns, we need to see them clearly first, they need to make sense to us and be coherent for us, and organized. This makes them less threatening, and we can then begin to talk about what happens for us in the face of triggering situations rather than just shut down or freak out chaotically and reactively.
This is the first and most important step to regaining control and agency over yourself and your life.
Evelyn Heffermehl, Relationship Therapist and Coach
Evelyn is a certified emotionally focused therapist and relationship coach. She blends cutting edge therapeutic expertise with powerful coaching. She is the CEO of Lighthouse Coaching, which is dedicated to helping people create healthy relationships both at home and at work.
