My friend Margie lost her husband in March, after a long illness that wasn’t a surprise and still was. She organized everything herself: the flowers, the logistics, the letters to people who couldn’t be there. I sat with her the day after the service while family moved through the house, and at some point said something that should have landed differently than it did. She looked at me with a face that was completely composed and said she was grateful everyone had been so kind. She said it in the voice of someone reporting from somewhere she couldn’t fully reach.
She wasn’t closed off. She was sealed. There’s a difference, and I’ve been thinking about it since.
There’s a specific kind of adult who grows up this way. The one who tells you, almost as a point of pride, that they don’t really cry. The one who holds other people through genuinely terrible things and remains exactly steady throughout. The one who’ll admit, in quiet moments they don’t often share, that they’d actually like to—at the funeral, at the end of the relationship, watching the movie that left everyone else wrecked—and nothing comes.
The inability isn’t absence of feeling. It isn’t stubbornness. It’s the result of very specific training that happened early, was repeated often, and was never officially canceled.
They were told, in one form or another, to stop. The body is still listening.
They didn’t learn to manage emotions; they learned to eliminate them
The phrase doesn’t say: your feelings are real and need to be handled carefully. It says: Your feelings are a problem I’m about to make worse. The child hears this not once but enough times that it becomes a fact about the world—that emotions, specifically visible ones, specifically sad ones, are provocations. Unacceptable. Something to be stopped.
They learned this. They got very good at it.
What looked like obedience from the outside was something more permanent happening internally. The child wasn’t learning to wait until they were alone, or to process things later, or to find a safe person—they were learning that the feelings themselves were the mistake, not the timing of the expression, but the feeling, and the body began to adjust accordingly. Intercepting the signal before it could become visible. Never again caught in the position of provoking consequences.
They were probably very young when they got there.
Managing emotions means learning to recognize them, understand them, delay their expression when necessary, and return to them when it’s safe. That’s the healthy version. What they learned was different: the first sign of something rising in the chest, and the system shuts it down. Not regulation. Elimination. The fire gets put out before it can become a problem, and eventually, the conditions that create the fire get altered, too.
The body did what it was told and kept doing it
Here’s what makes this wound particularly persistent: the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a threat that requires this response and a situation that no longer does. It remembers the instruction. It runs it.
Research published in Development and Psychopathology found that young people whose emotional displays were repeatedly dismissed or punished were significantly more likely to suppress or inhibit their emotional responses over time—not as a conscious decision, but as an automatic pattern. The suppression stops being a choice. It becomes how the nervous system responds before the person has had a chance to decide how they feel about the situation at all.
This is the part that’s hard to explain to people who didn’t grow up in these conditions. It isn’t stubbornness. It isn’t emotional withholding on purpose. The system is running an old program in a new context, and the person inside it often has no more access to the override than they did as a child.
The instruction was given when they were small, probably given more than once, and the body is nothing if not a good student.
What it was told: stop. What it keeps doing: stopping.
More Bolde Stories
They feel everything right up to the cry and then stop
They’re not numb. That’s the misunderstanding.
The grief is there. The loss is there. At a funeral, standing in the kitchen afterward while everyone around them is red-eyed, they feel the full weight of it—the specific pressure behind the sternum, the thing that rises and rises and then, right at the moment it would normally become tears, stops. Like a door that closes softly and won’t open again. Like something moving to the edge and pulling back.
They watch other people cry and feel something that isn’t quite envy, but is close.
Because it looks like relief, what the others have—the feeling of getting somewhere, the body finally agreeing to process what the situation calls for. They’ve stood in theaters after everyone else has collected themselves and wondered what’s wrong with them. They’ve sat in therapists’ offices and said, dry-eyed: I know I should cry about this. I want to cry about this.
Nothing is wrong with them. The mechanism is intact. The access point was changed before they knew they’d one day need it.
Crying wasn’t the only thing that got switched off
The instruction to stop crying was also functionally an instruction to stop registering what had caused the crying in the first place. If the signal gets shut down before it becomes tears, it gets shut down before it becomes fully known. They don’t just have trouble expressing sadness. They sometimes have trouble identifying it—telling it from irritation, from fatigue, from the general flatness that settles in after years of intercepting what rises and never letting it land.
This runs in both directions.
A few weeks after the service, I called to check on Margie. She asked how I was first. When I turned it back to her, she paused—not the pause of someone composing themselves, but the pause of someone actually searching. She said she kept expecting something to hit, and it hadn’t, and she didn’t know if that was grace or damage. She’d organized the flowers, written the letters, thanked everyone individually, and somewhere in all of it had lost the thread of what she was actually feeling.
Joy gets intercepted, too, sometimes. Excitement. The full unguarded experience of something being good. All of it runs through the same system, all of it subject to the same standing instruction.
They meant to stop one thing. They stopped more than they meant to.
They’ll hold anyone through anything and don’t know how to be held
Watch them in a crisis—not their own, someone else’s. They’re extraordinary, knowing exactly what to do with another person’s tears, another person’s grief arriving without warning. They create the conditions for it. They sit with the full weight of it without needing it to resolve.
When the situation reverses, they disappear.
Not literally. They’re still there, still going through it. But they deflect the care when it comes—they change the subject, they say they’re fine in a way that closes the door gently but completely. Lorenz Kick and colleagues, whose meta-analysis on adverse childhood experiences and emotional functioning has been published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, found that childhood maltreatment was significantly associated with alexithymia in adulthood—the clinical term for difficulty recognizing and naming one’s own emotional states. The people closest to them run into a wall they didn’t build and can’t explain.
Part of the difficulty is that they’ve never had a working model for what being taken care of actually looks like. They know how to take care—that part was learned early, required often, and never ran out of practice. Receiving it is foreign territory.
More Bolde Stories
There’s a word for the identity earthquake of becoming a mother — matrescence — and the rea...
Psychology says people who can spend an entire day doing nothing productive and feel genuinely at...
Psychology says people with ADHD have a far greater aptitude for creative thinking and intuitive ...
They’ve survived the conditions. They don’t have to keep surviving them.
The nervous system that learned to shut down the cry isn’t broken. It did something genuinely impressive: it kept them safe in conditions where being seen falling apart was dangerous. That’s not nothing. That’s a child responding adaptively to a real threat, developing a real skill, without any of the resources that would have allowed a different response.
What it needs now is new information.
Not an instruction to feel more, or to stop protecting themselves, or to immediately access what was closed off a long time ago. Just accumulated evidence—over months, over years—that the conditions have changed. That the person in front of them won’t punish the display. That the cry won’t be used against them. That the room is different now.
This happens slowly. It happens, when it happens, mostly through safe relationships—through the particular experience of being consistently, quietly held by someone who doesn’t flinch. It isn’t a decision made once and finished. It’s a gradual update, proof by proof.
They survived the conditions. The conditions aren’t the same anymore.
The next piece of work is teaching the nervous system that it’s allowed to notice.
