Last Thursday evening, Camille and I were cleaning up after dinner — Julien in the high chair smearing sweet potato across the tray like it was finger paint, Elise drawing at the kitchen table — and I dropped a bowl. It shattered across the floor, and before I could even register what I was feeling, I heard myself say, out loud, to no one in particular: “That’s fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
Camille looked at me. Not with concern. More like recognition. “You always do that,” she said quietly, stepping around the ceramic pieces. “You skip straight to fine.”
She wasn’t talking about the bowl. She was talking about something I’ve been circling for a long time — this reflex I have, almost physical, where the moment something uncomfortable rises up in me, some internal mechanism immediately translates it into something palatable. Frustration becomes “I just need a minute.” Sadness becomes “I’m just tired.” Anger becomes “It’s not a big deal.” I don’t suppress the emotion exactly. I convert it. Before it even has a name.
And for most of my life, I thought that made me easygoing. Mature, even. Turns out it might mean something else entirely.
When “Positive” Becomes a Pattern
There’s a concept in emotion research called alexithymia — a term coined by psychotherapist Peter Sifneos in the 1970s — that describes a difficulty identifying, describing, and processing one’s own emotions. It’s not that people with alexithymic traits don’t have feelings. They feel everything. They just can’t find the feeling in their body and give it a name. A 2018 review published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research estimated that around 10% of the general population experiences clinically significant levels of alexithymia, and it’s even more common in people who experienced emotional invalidation during childhood.
What’s striking — and what got me thinking — is that emotional invalidation doesn’t always look like dismissal. It doesn’t always come from a harsh parent saying “stop crying” or “you’re being dramatic.” Sometimes it comes from the gentlest possible place. Sometimes it comes from a parent who loved you so much they couldn’t bear to let you sit in pain for even a moment.
“You didn’t make the team? That’s okay — you’re great at so many other things.”
“Your friend was mean to you? Well, maybe she’s having a bad day. Let’s think about how we can be kind back.”
“You’re scared? There’s nothing to be scared of. You’re brave!”
Every one of those responses comes from love. Every one is trying to help. And every one teaches the child, slowly, imperceptibly, that the feeling they’re having is something to move past — not something to stay with.
The Architecture of Emotional Bypassing
My mother wasn’t harsh. She wasn’t cold. She grew up in a house where affection was communicated through acts — meals cooked, drives to practice, the quiet labor of showing up. When I came to her upset, she did what she knew how to do: she tried to fix it. She tried to make me feel better, immediately. And I learned, without anyone intending to teach me, that feeling bad was a problem to be solved in under thirty seconds.
There’s a reason this pattern gets overlooked. It doesn’t look like damage. It looks like resilience. It looks like optimism. Research from the University of Toronto, published in Clinical Psychological Science in 2021, found that people who habitually reappraise negative emotions — reframing them as positive before fully processing them — often appear highly functional in the short term but struggle significantly with emotional granularity over time. They can tell you they’re “fine” or “stressed” but can’t distinguish between grief and frustration, between loneliness and boredom, between resentment and exhaustion.
That’s the thing. It’s not that these adults are emotionally immature. It’s that they were trained, by people who loved them deeply, to exit their emotions before arriving.
What It Looks Like in Adulthood
I notice it in specific ways now that I’m paying attention. Camille asks me how I’m feeling about something — a disagreement we had, a hard week, something with the kids — and I give a thought instead of a feeling. “I think we should probably just move on.” “I think it’s not worth being upset about.” “I think we’re fine.”
Think. Think. Think. Never feel.
And when I try to drop below that layer — when I try to actually locate the emotion in my chest or my gut — there’s a kind of blankness. Not numbness. More like static. Like the signal is there, but I never learned the frequency.
I’ve noticed this pattern in conversations with other parents too — especially in the parenting forums I spend time in. Someone will describe a moment of real anger toward their child and then immediately qualify it: “But I know it’s not their fault.” “But I know I should be more patient.” The feeling gets reframed before it even finishes forming. If you grew up hearing that certain things weren’t discussed in your family, you know exactly what I’m describing — the way silence becomes a skill you didn’t know you were mastering.
The Difference Between Reframing and Feeling
I want to be clear: reframing isn’t inherently bad. Cognitive reappraisal — the ability to look at a situation from a different angle — is a genuinely useful psychological skill. The problem isn’t reframing itself. The problem is when it comes too early.
A 2020 study in the journal Emotion found that emotional processing works best when people are allowed to identify and sit with an emotion before attempting to regulate it. When reappraisal is deployed before the emotion is fully acknowledged, it actually interferes with emotional learning — the brain doesn’t get the chance to complete the full recognition-labeling-integration cycle. The researchers described it as pulling a cake out of the oven before it’s finished baking. The ingredients were all there. It just never got to become the thing it was becoming.
And this is exactly what well-meaning parents do when they rush to reframe. The child starts to feel something — disappointment, fear, anger — and before the feeling fully forms, the parent lovingly interrupts it with a silver lining.
Over years, this teaches the child a subtle but powerful lesson: your negative emotions are problems that need to be corrected, not experiences that need to be witnessed.
What I’m Trying to Do Differently
I’m not going to pretend I’ve figured this out. I haven’t. Last week Elise came home from preschool upset because a friend didn’t want to sit with her at snack time, and my first instinct — my absolute gut reflex — was to say, “That’s okay, sweetie. Maybe she’ll sit with you tomorrow.” Fix it. Brighten it. Move on.
But I caught myself. I sat down on the floor next to her and said, “That sounds like it really hurt your feelings.”
She looked at me. Her lip quivered. And then she cried. Not the dramatic, performative cry she sometimes uses when she wants a snack. A real cry. A quiet, deflating, somebody-didn’t-pick-me cry.
And I didn’t fix it. I just stayed there. It was maybe ninety seconds. It felt like twenty minutes.
When she was done, she wiped her face and said, “Can I have a juice box?” And that was it. She didn’t need me to reframe it. She needed me to let her have it — the full, unedited feeling — and then she moved through it on her own.
Dr. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson describe this in their work on whole-brain parenting as “connect before redirect” — the idea that a child’s emotional brain needs to feel heard and seen before the logical brain can even begin to process a new perspective. The connection is the regulation. Not the reframe.
This is part of why I think the rituals we build with our kids matter so much more than the big interventions. The Sunday pancakes, the bedtime songs, the small repetitions that become the architecture of trust — those are the moments where a child learns whether their full emotional range is welcome in the room.
It’s Not About Blame
I want to say this explicitly because I’ve been thinking about it a lot: this isn’t about blaming our parents. My mother did the best she could with what she had. Her parents showed love through acts, not words, and she carried that forward as best she knew how. The fact that she calls me now and says “I love you” before hanging up — something she never did when I was a kid — tells me she’s been doing her own work, in her own way, on her own timeline.
Generational patterns aren’t accusations. They’re invitations to look more closely at the invisible scripts we inherited and decide — with compassion, not judgment — which ones we want to keep running.
The truth is, I’m still learning to feel things all the way through before I convert them into something manageable. Some days I manage it. Some days Camille still catches me skipping straight to “fine.” And that’s okay — not as a reframe, but as an actual, fully-felt acceptance of where I am.
The Quiet Work
If this sounds familiar — if you’re someone who can comfort everyone around you but goes blank when someone asks what you need — I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. I think you were taught, by people who loved you, that your sadness was an emergency to be resolved, your anger was a fire to be extinguished, your fear was a mistake to be corrected. And you learned the lesson so well that you now do it to yourself automatically, before the feeling even reaches the surface.
The work isn’t dramatic. It’s not about screaming into a pillow or having a cathartic breakdown in therapy (though that’s fine too). It’s about the tiny pause. The beat between the feeling arriving and the reframe kicking in. It’s about saying to yourself what I’m trying to say to Elise: You can stay here for a second. I’m not going to rush you through this.
This is what I think about now when I’m standing in the kitchen on Sunday mornings, flipping those box-mix pancakes while Julien bangs a spoon on his tray and Elise asks me for the third time if she can pour the syrup herself. I think about how the feelings I want my kids to keep — the ones that tell them they’re safe enough to fall apart in front of me — are the very ones I was gently trained to skip past.
And I think about how the most loving thing I can do, for them and for myself, is to let the feeling land. The whole feeling. Before I try to make it better.
