Suppression (Defense Mechanism)

Definition

Suppression is the defense mechanism by which individuals cope with distressing mental contents by voluntarily making efforts to put them out of conscious awareness until there is an opportunity to cope adaptively with those stressors.

Introduction

Suppression shares similarities with the defense mechanism of repression, but in the latter, distressing mental contents do not become easily accessible to consciousness, as individuals more or less involuntarily make efforts for that not to happen. In contrast, suppression does not disturb self-awareness. At a cognitive-behavioral level, suppression should be clearly differentiated from experiential avoidance, a coping strategy characterized by active efforts to avoid unpleasant mental contents (thus, overlapping conceptually with the psychodynamic concept of repression) (Chawla and Ostafin 2007), but unlike in suppression, not with the aim of facing the stressors in a constructive manner, when the opportunity arrives.

Suppression...