**🔼 Up:** [[Defence Mechanisms]] **\#️⃣ Tags:** #Psychology #DefenceMechanism > **🌱 Planted:** Fri 3 January 2025 --- ***Suppression is the conscious act of setting feelings and emotions aside.*** > [!quote] > "Suppression is the conscious analog of [[Publish/Elements/Dictionary/Repression|Repression]]." — Anna Freud Suppression is a [[Defence Mechanisms|❍ Defence Mechanism]] where someone intentionally and consciously decides to set aside (suppress) their emotions or feelings to focus on the task at hand or maintain control in a challenging situation. Unlike [[Publish/Elements/Dictionary/Repression|Repression]], suppression involves awareness—the person knows what they are feeling or thinking but chooses not to dwell on it at the moment. Suppression is a deliberate process often used to cope with overwhelming emotions or thoughts in situations where addressing them immediately isn’t appropriate or safe. For example, someone might feel sadness and want to cry, but because they're at work and in a professional setting they would not like to cry in front of their colleagues, so they suppress their sadness and tears with the intention to process it later on in a safer context, so they can avoid any attention being brought on them while at work. Whilst it can be a helpful short-term strategy in certain situations, it is essentially the self-denial of a right to feel or express oneself. On top of that, it can become a habitual pattern if someone is suppressing the same feeling or emotion continuously, later becoming unconscious rather than conscious (i.e. [[Publish/Elements/Dictionary/Repression|Repression]]). --- **➡️ Next:** [[]]