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.
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John, I like this post. It could have been me telling the same story. All those years and years of it never being safe to express how you felt and, if you just couldn't help it and did, getting punished for it. And I wasn't even a male! In our family, nobody was allowed to display anything except the parents. I think you're a good example for guys, especially, in talking about this. You even mention the physical energy it takes to keep it all under cover. I told my first psychiatrist that I just couldn't feel anything and he told me that what was really happening was that the emotions were just under the surface and I was working really hard at keeping them at bay. It is so liberating to let it all go! I consider therapy a safe haven where I can explore all my ingrained beliefs about myself and figure out how I'm going to change them.
Thanks so much for sharing this, I enjoy all your writing.
Thank you, Judy -
That is such a brutal way to grow up, not allowed to let feelings just be, especially for a child, who needs the emotional exchange so much. I keep wondering where this suppression of emotion comes from in our culture - it's so pervasive. People like to think parental attitudes have changed, but the effect is often the same. It is such a relief, I agree, to finally be able to stop holding onto everything.
I'm so glad you were able to make that breakthrough!
John