Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

Have you ever been to a good psych? Like in other professions, maybe 80% of clinical psychiatrists are low key bad at their job. And I’m sorry for you if you feel like you were bullied by a bad psych. I think thats probably way more common than we’d want to admit.

I promise you, good sessions just aren’t like that. My psych is amazing. We don’t talk about how “society has to change” because the pain I’ve experienced isn’t really about society any more. And the point of sessions isn’t to fix society, it’s to help me (the patient) heal and grow. I’ve never felt bullied by her - not for a second.

I’m sorry if you haven’t had a good therapist. As I say, maybe 80% of psychs are flushable. But some people are genuinely amazing and can help a great deal. They’ve certainly helped me.

I suppose it wouldn't be that surprising. Mindfulness for instance teaches you to "let go" of thoughts - which is really just a gentle form of suppression. CBT encourages you to redirect existing negative thoughts in a positive/constructive direction - ultimately steering you away from or undermining the original negative thought - but does not encourage you to do a deep dive on it. Not to mention that Freud was a quack who was more prone to speculation than to science, so if traditional psychotherapy is based on his work then it is likely built on sand.

Taken to the opposite extreme, I think it's in some sense obvious that some degree of suppression is actually good for you, precisely because ruminating for long periods of time is clearly bad for you.

From a neurological point of view, why should we see reiterating negative thoughts as any different from reinforcement learning? If we revisit these negative topics, are we not strengthening their presence in our minds?

That said this study does not sound like it proves that suppressing negative thoughts works over a long period of time. The original theory posits that these suppressed thoughts might cause problems even years later when the latest this was followed up was a period of three months. So grains of salt etc.

The trouble with suppressing negative thoughts in the long run is that, eventually, reality may force you to confront them all at once and under far more difficult conditions.

I'm a strong believer that you have to confront negative thoughts and resolve underlying issues as soon as they arise and not neglect them and tell yourself that everything is going to be OK. It's not going to be OK. Murphy's law; what can go wrong WILL go wrong. This has been shown to me over and over again. You cannot leave anything to chance.

I'd rather have a few negative thoughts from time to time and resolve them as they come than fool myself into thinking that I'm living in la-la land and then after a few years find out that it has become hell on earth due to my neglect.

It's like a garden; you need to maintain it. If you ignore the weeds, they'll eventually take over your garden. You can tell yourself that the weeds add charm and make your garden look more natural; that you're going for a "wild tropical look" or whatever, all part of the plan, but with that attitude, you're bound to fail. You'll just keep getting more of whatever it is that you neglect until it becomes unbearable.

Well, maybe or maybe not. A lot of the negative thoughts I have are somewhat fleeting, and if I revisit them the next day they seem pretty trivial and I could probably dismiss them sooner.

Others might be more meaningful, perhaps a character flaw that you don't want to think about, but without really processing it it will never get fixed and keep causing more problems.

Thinking about the fertility crisis facing most of the world has made me rethink the foundations of a 'good' society. People who have more education, income, intelligence, and secularity are simply not reproducing in anywhere even remotely near sustainable levels. So what's going to happen? These traits will naturally be removed from society, up until the point that this trend reverses.

So we will essentially be defacto empowering many of the views that you may consider undesirable. It really makes one rethink the relevance and place of sustainability. It seems that on any timescale that matters, it must be considered the most fundamentally critical value of any culture. Because in some ways society really is a sort of expanding zero-sum game. When one group declines, another group defacto rises.

It's really annoying that there seems to be little to nothing in the way of a compromise between indulgent excesses driving the death of procreation on one end, and 'trust nothing but the Book' driving successful procreation on the other. There needs be some sort of a cultural medium.