You push the thought away

What this means

Of the three forms of avoidance this test scores, suppression stands out for you. When an unwelcome thought, memory or feeling starts to rise, your first move is internal: you tell yourself to stop thinking about it, you cut the memory off halfway, you clamp down on the wave of sadness until it passes. Nothing outside changes. The work happens in your head.

This is the least visible form of avoidance, which is part of why it lasts. From the outside you look composed. People may describe you as calm or unbothered. From the inside it can feel like holding a door shut with your shoulder, all day, against something that keeps pushing.

Why it backfires

Research on thought suppression has found a well-known and slightly annoying result: trying not to think about something tends to make it come back, often later, when you are tired or your attention is elsewhere. Watching for a thought keeps the thought close. That is why people who suppress often find that what they pushed away all day shows up at night, in the shower, on the drive home, or in a sudden flare over something small.

The same goes for feelings. A sadness held down does not dissolve. It tends to leak out sideways, as irritability, flatness, tension in the body, or tears at a film that does not deserve them.

What it does in a relationship

Suppression makes you hard to read. Your partner sees the composed surface and assumes there is nothing underneath, then feels blindsided when something comes out weeks later in one piece. You may also find it hard to hear their feelings, because sitting with someone else's sadness can bring your own too close to the door.

This is not the same as being emotionally unavailable to a partner. Some people with high suppression are warm, open and present with others and only clamp down on their own material. If closeness itself is where you shut down, the emotional availability test looks at that.

What to do next

Swap pushing for noting. When the thought comes, say to yourself what it is, plainly: there is the thought about the job again. Then go back to what you were doing, without arguing with it. Naming a thought takes some of its pull away without feeding it.

Give the material a time and a place. Ten minutes in the evening, written down or said out loud, is often enough to stop it leaking into the rest of the day.

Tell one person one thing you have been holding down. Not all of it. One thing.

If saying it out loud is easier at first with no one across the table, Lovon is there for that.