Once I was talking to a therapist about the trouble I had expressing my feelings, even to my wife. I had picked up one of the props he left lying about his office, just to have something to busy my hands with. It was an empty plastic one-gallon jug. Mindlessly, I turned it about as I spoke of my progress in becoming more open in talking to my wife about the feelings I was experiencing right in that moment, instead of after the fact. I was getting so much better about relaxing self-censorship, I reported.

“That’s good,” he said, “but look at your hands.” I looked down and saw my right hand tightly gripping the jug’s handle and my left firmly sealing off the open top. The well-worn metaphor was alive and well. Bottling up my feelings had become just that instinctive and unconscious, and my tense hands were directly contradicting what I was saying.

That habit was not only undermining my closest relationship, it had long kept me from recognizing the full extent of depression and trying to get help for recovery.

In the last post, I talked about growing up, like many men, learning to keep my emotions under control. Painful events in my own family life pushed me even farther than most in that direction. My strategy for survival as a kid was to wall myself off from the violent emotions rampant at home and hold back my own feelings for fear of making things even worse. Depression started early in childhood, and that dampened my emotional life even more.

By the time I got through high school, I seemed well adjusted to friends and teachers alike, if not so outgoing as people advised me to be. But there was a great pressure of held-back feeling that I had never dealt with. I was hiding not only that but also the darker feelings of depression. At the time, I had no idea about mood disorders and never thought I had an emotional problem. I was a young man showing about as much feeling as men generally were expected to show.

Of course, there were the endless migraines that could keep me in bed for a day at a time. There were those feelings of shame and low self-esteem. There were those fears that I was stupid and failing at everything, while fooling people into thinking I had talent. There were the occasional panic attacks. But all that was just part of who I was, not an ongoing illness to be treated.

So bottling up hurt, pain and any strong feeling became a powerful habit, one that I’ve struggled with ever since. Holding back feeling wasn’t hard when it came to the legacy of pain from my family life. That was all locked in a vault somewhere and out of my conscious mind altogether. But feelings of the here and now were always close to the surface, and I consciously refused to let anyone see them. I clamped down hard.

That takes work, serious muscular labor. I read recently that a person has no control over the most basic emotional expressions such as crying because they’re set off by deep parts of the brain, like those that keep you breathing and your heart beating. The body will do these basic things without giving you a chance to interfere. It takes a lot of muscle power to keep crying in check because you really are fighting your body. Over time, I got to be quite good at winning that fight. It often happened that people would be looking right at me and not suspect for a minute that I was going through an inner melt down.