Endlessly talking about your tough times may be bad for you, a growing number of scientists are starting to believe.
I have had more than my fair share of therapy. I’ve had numerous therapists, I’ve tried all the main therapeutic models, and still to this day I periodically kick myself for not starting sooner. So, I’m firmly pro-therapy. I heartily recommend it. It’s a glorious and effective thing.
And it did rather hurt my little feelings when recently my current therapist sat me down and tried to break up with me.
I put up a valiant fight (“Not you too! What about my abandonment complex!”) but we’re no longer doing any useful clinical work, he argued. Therapy, he said, is meant to be about learning new behavioral skills to cope with the demands of life. Once those have been learned and implemented, you’re done.
He might be right. Too much talking about our troubles could be making us ill, a new study from scientists at the University of Cambridge suggests.
“We’re all familiar with the Freudian idea,” Michael Anderson, Ph.D., a professor of psychology, said in a statement, “that if we suppress our feelings or thoughts, then these thoughts remain in our unconscious, influencing our behavior and wellbeing perniciously.”
But, according to his study, a stiff upper lip might actually be the better approach. People who suppress negative thoughts, he found, are almost always happier for it. “Although more work will be needed to confirm the findings,” Anderson said, “it seems like it is possible and could even be potentially beneficial to actively suppress our fearful thoughts.”
Stop talking about it!
It is a terrible personal blow. Therapy in its Philip Roth guise — see your analyst thrice weekly for a decade, lie on the chaise longue, and talk your heart out (the analyst, invariably, will rarely speak) — is falling out of fashion, and in the view of some clinicians, was never especially helpful in the first place.
So I have skin in the game, and I wanted to find out more about what the researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit led by Anderson had done exactly.
It is, as studies go, larger than many, involving 120 volunteers across 16 countries, and they worked with these people to test whether it is (a) possible and (b) beneficial for people to practice suppressing painful thoughts.
Each participant was asked to think of a number of scenarios that might plausibly occur in their lives over the next two years: 20 negatives (like a bereavement), 20 positives (like a wedding), and 36 neutrals (like a trip to the dentist). For each scenario, they were to provide a cue word and a key detail, and they were asked to rate each event on several points including likelihood of occurrence and emotional intensity.
Then, each participant completed daily training exercises, 20 minutes a day for three consecutive days. Using their cue words and their key details, they were asked to imagine 12 events as vividly as possible, and they were asked to block all thoughts associated with another 12. It sounds like hard work, not least because, for these “no-imagine trials,” participants had to stare directly at the cue word as they set about blocking any images thoughts, or feelings that the reminder evoked.
But, as an exercise, it seems to have worked tremendously. Following the training — both immediately and after three months — the vast majority of participants reported that their “suppressed” events had become less vivid and less fearful. They also found themselves thinking about these events less.
The diminishing returns of rumination?
“It was very clear that those events that participants practiced suppressing were less vivid, less emotionally anxiety-inducing, than the other events and that overall, participants improved in terms of their mental health,” said Zulkayda Mamat, PhD, another of the scientists leading the study.
Interestingly, suppressing thoughts even improved mental health amongst participants with post-traumatic stress disorder, the study found. And, in general, people with worse mental health symptoms at the outset of the study improved more after training their minds to suppress their fears.
It has the potential to be a bit of a game-changer. It certainly flies in the face of current mental health dogma that, when it comes to negative life experiences, it’s better to say it out loud and to talk about it for as long as you need.
However, it’s worth bearing in mind that you can use therapy to help train your mind to achieve a similar effect to what those who participated in the study achieved. “I didn’t think that what they did was that different to what happens in some types of therapy anyway,” Abigael San, PhD, a clinical psychologist and spokesperson for the British Psychological Society, told Medical News Today. She said this was likely because participants had been encouraged to confront the negative thought and then encouraged not to ruminate on it, which is known to cause problems.
Or you can use a different type of therapy to approach the problem of rumination from a completely different angle. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), for example, helps people accept negative thoughts, “observing them, not rejecting them, not trying to remove them; just letting them pass, letting them flow, but at the same time getting on with our life and keeping on doing what we have to do, without paying any more attention to these thoughts,” said Luis Valero Aguayo, a professor of psychology at the University of Malaga who was not involved in the research. “Together with other thought change techniques, this ‘acceptance’ has been shown to be very effective in decreasing discomfort, so that it eventually disappears or becomes unimportant to the individual.”
Stiff upper lip, come back, all is forgiven!
The stiff upper lip got canceled a long time ago, and it does carry with it certain class connotations of yesteryear, but is it due to a comeback? Is wearing our problems like a badge of pride making us any happier? Are we doing ourselves more harm than good? And what would our ancestors make of our cultural course correction? If we could reincarnate them, would they laugh at our self-obsession? Would they consider us objects of pity?
If I’m being honest with myself, sometimes I’ve found therapy a bit boring. Not always — sometimes it has been extremely hard work, and emotionally very taxing — but at other times I’ve found myself thinking: “Oh not this again, for God’s sake. Can’t we just talk about the weather?”
But running alongside that, I do really like the idea of having therapy forever. Why must it end? There’s something very civilized and sophisticated, I thought and still sometimes think about the ongoing examination of a life in motion. I’m a writer. If I don’t think that, I’m in the wrong job. But if my therapist gets his way, one of the expressions of that life philosophy is about to change.
And it’s forcing me to confront some difficult truths. Therapy isn’t meant to be a talking shop, wallowing in the past and ruminating. It is good to talk, but it’s not necessarily good to talk on repeat. It is important to be open and honest about our feelings, but there is something to be said for not giving in to them too easily, either. And there’s a fine line between embracing our negative feelings to rob them of the power they might otherwise have over us, and endlessly ruminating on all the stuff that maybe didn’t even matter all that much in the first place.
Michael J McCluskey 