From studying psychology, it is my understanding that the best way to suppress thoughts is a step by step cognitive-behavioral process. This can be done by doing the following:
1. Look at the thought you are trying to supporess. Think about why you have the thought. Many times, you will find that there really is no rational basis for the thought, or, what you are thinking may only be partially true. If you cannot find evidence that supports that what you are thinking is true, you can very easily dismiss the thought.
2. Once you have challenged the validity of the thought, and decided to supporess it, you need to replace it with a new thought. This thought will likely be more accurate than the other thought. So, if your bad thought is that you are not a good person, and you follow step one, hopefully you will find that this line of thinking is not leading you to an accurate conclusion about yourself.
However, that is not the only important thing here. Ask yourself, what is really more accurate, that you are a great person in every way, that you are really a horrible person, or that there are some really good things about you, and some things that you would like to change. The point of this exercise is that your original thought is likely to be flawed in some way, and you can change your thinking to reflect that.
Addtionally, it might be helpful to type the name “Aaron Beck” into a search engine. He was a theorist who used the idea that you can change how you feel to influence how you think, and vice versa. Hopefully this has been helpful to people.
