The Relation Among Thought Suppression, Forgetting, and Mental Health

Things are known by their opposites. If we want to dive deeper into how we remember, we must not forget about forgetting. Even after more than a decade of research on forgetting having an adaptive and active function in our lives beyond a passive role as a failed attempt to remember, it is still not widely studied in its own right. Not only can forgetting be an adaptive gateway for learning new things and regulating our emotions, but also be a critical opening for dealing with the traumas that haunt us, the worries that consume us, or the thoughts that just never seem to stop. Our ability to forget should not only be studied as a reaction – a failure to remember, a symptom in patients, or a response to unprocessed trauma. Rather, forgetting can and has been increasingly studied through its acts. At its core, this thesis is intended to put forth an appeal to urge and inspire research efforts to move beyond seeing the water in the half-full glass only after half of it is gone, but to take hold of the glass and drink from it! For instance, we passively experience decay through observing the changing colours of leaves in nature; however, this does not preclude our knowledge of a very active force behind the cycle of decay, indeed for the purposes of nothing other than renewal. Similarly, forgetting can feel passive experientially, but there could be very active forces that bring about this seeming decay, perhaps to bring out the light that shines on life. In this way, this thesis will examine one aspect of this mighty force – motivated forgetting – our capacity to actively block out distressful thoughts and render them less memorable or intrusive. Just as discipline is the root of building virtuous character, controlling our thoughts is perhaps the beginning of disciplining our minds in this arduous walk of life. Active forgetting can be a tool, which in times of difficulty can allow us to get up and step back into walking in life, rather than letting life walk all over us. Indeed, when the COVID-19 pandemic happened, it felt like life was getting out of control, and anxiety started to walk over everyone, especially the most vulnerable of us. Although decades of research have “hinted” and “suggested” that suppression “may” promote resilience in facing difficulties of life, we were all too afraid to truly affirm this with conviction because of an even longer line of work going back to Freud that engraved suppressing of thoughts as fundamentally maladaptive into the public mind. Thus, the pandemic actually presented an opportunity to put these competing theories to test and for the first time causally investigate the impact of suppression training on mental health. This research study forms the heart of this thesis and will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Of course, our conviction in the beneficial impact of suppression would not have been as strongly present if not supported by existing research as well as personal experiences of everyday people using suppression to overcome life’s challenges. With this in mind, Chapter 1 will highlight existing research that gave us the extra confidence to grab hold of that glass of water, so to say. It will also walk us through how the pandemic specially brewed so much anxiety amongst the population that in a way made everyone parched for some sort of relief. However, we must also recognize that research into motivated forgetting has been around for some time now, the resistance of its applicability is stickier than one may think. Hence, Chapter 2 is dedicated to a detailed discussion of the theories and experiments that have been proposed to showcase an ironic heightening of memory for the supposedly suppressed information, and will offer alternative explanations for why such efforts may be misdirected. Then, we will swiftly move into the suppression training study in Chapter 3 and conclude with some heart-warming reflections from many people who learned to suppress their fears and intuitively integrated the technique into their own lives in the midst of the pandemic. It seems that we have not only found water, but sweet fragrant rosewater! Having tasted its sweetness, we wanted everyone to enjoy it, moving us into Chapter 4 where we present our translation of the suppression training from a remote testing procedure into an accessible app, hoping for a future where we all taste the sweetness of relief from intrusive thoughts. This then prompts us to think: how can we find more people who know what this drink tastes like? Such a question shall lead us into Chapter 5 in which we provide a novel tool for investigating the phenomenon of selective forgetting and its relevant phenomena such as distinct suppression strategies and prevalence of recovered memories. With that, we conclude this writing, having equipped wayfarers with signposts to find out more about the quality of this precious glass of rosewater that we seem to all possess but many do not yet know how to find or drink from.Mind Science Foundatio