Stop crying. You’re fine. It’s not a big deal. Toughen up. Big boys don’t cry. You’re being too sensitive.
If you heard some version of these phrases growing up, you probably absorbed a lesson that felt like practical wisdom at the time: emotions are inconvenient, expressing them is weakness, and the fastest way to earn approval is to swallow whatever you’re feeling and move on.
The adults who said these things weren’t usually being cruel. Most of them genuinely believed they were preparing you for a world that wouldn’t care about your feelings. They were teaching resilience. Building character. Making you tough enough to handle real life.
Except that’s not what the research shows happened. What the research shows is something much more concerning, and much more common than most people realize.
What emotion dismissing actually does
Psychologist John Gottman spent decades studying how parents respond to their children’s emotions, and he identified a distinction that turns out to be one of the most consequential in child development.
Research on parental meta-emotion philosophy distinguishes between two fundamental orientations: emotion coaching and emotion dismissing. Parents with an emotion coaching philosophy treat a child’s negative emotions as opportunities for connection and teaching. They acknowledge the feeling, help the child name it, and guide them through it. Parents with an emotion dismissing philosophy view negative emotions as harmful or dangerous. They ignore, minimize, or quickly try to shut down the emotional expression.
The outcomes for children raised under these two philosophies are dramatically different. Compared to children of emotion-dismissing parents, children who are emotion-coached show better physiological and emotional regulation, fewer internalizing and externalizing symptoms, higher self-esteem, less physiological stress, greater social competence, and higher academic achievement.
But here’s the finding that matters most for understanding what happens in adulthood. Children of emotion-dismissing parents don’t just feel worse. They learn that their emotions are problems to be eliminated. They internalize the message that what they feel is wrong, inappropriate, or abnormal. And over time, they stop registering their own emotional signals altogether.
They don’t become tougher. They become disconnected from their own internal experience. And that disconnection has a name.
The condition nobody talks about
It’s called alexithymia. The word literally means “no words for feelings,” and it describes people who have genuine difficulty identifying, describing, and understanding their own emotions. It’s not that they don’t have emotions. It’s that the pathway between feeling something and knowing what you feel has been disrupted.
A landmark meta-analysis led by Stanford University researchers, published in Psychological Bulletin, synthesized 78 studies involving over 36,000 participants and found a significant link between childhood maltreatment and adult alexithymia. The three strongest predictors were emotional neglect, emotional abuse, and physical neglect, all forms of maltreatment characterized not by what was done to the child, but by what was withheld from them.
As lead researcher Anat Talmon explained, emotional neglect and abuse are often more devastating than other forms of maltreatment precisely because they’re harder for the child to identify. “No one is fulfilling your emotional needs, but you lack the ability to identify and recognize your emotions on your own, which increases the likelihood of developing alexithymia.”
Approximately 10% of the general population has clinically significant levels of alexithymia. For men, the rate is nearly double that of women, roughly 13% compared to 7%. This gender disparity isn’t a coincidence. It’s a direct consequence of emotion socialization patterns that disproportionately tell boys to suppress their feelings.
What this looks like in an adult life
Here’s how this plays out in practice, and if you recognize it, you’ll understand why it’s so difficult to detect from the inside.
The adult who was taught to suppress emotions as a child doesn’t walk around feeling numb. They function. They work. They maintain relationships. From the outside, they look fine. But internally, they experience a persistent disconnect between what’s happening in their body and their ability to interpret it.
They feel a tightness in their chest and don’t know if it’s anxiety, anger, sadness, or indigestion. They feel agitated and restless and can’t identify why. They know something is wrong but can’t name it, so they push through. They push through for weeks. Then months. Then years.
And then something breaks. A relationship ends. A health crisis hits. They fall apart at a moment that seems, to everyone watching, disproportionately small. But it wasn’t the small thing that broke them. It was the accumulation of everything they couldn’t name and therefore couldn’t address, reaching a volume that finally exceeded their capacity to ignore it.
This is the crisis that the title refers to. The adult who was told to stop crying as a child doesn’t become someone who never cries. They become someone who only cries when they’ve been pushed so far past their limits that the suppression mechanism finally fails. And by then, they’re not dealing with one emotion. They’re dealing with years of unprocessed ones arriving all at once.
The mechanism behind the damage
A meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Psychiatry examined alexithymia as a mediator between adverse childhood experiences and the development of psychopathology. The researchers found that emotional abuse and emotional neglect had a greater influence on the development of alexithymia than physical abuse or sexual abuse.
The explanation they offer aligns with developmental theory. Children learn to identify and process emotions through interaction with caregivers. When a child cries and a parent responds with acknowledgment and comfort, the child learns: this feeling is sadness, it’s okay to have it, and it will pass. When a child cries and a parent responds with dismissal or punishment, the child learns something entirely different: this feeling is dangerous, expressing it causes rejection, and the safest thing to do is stop feeling it.
Over time, the child doesn’t just suppress the expression of emotion. They suppress the awareness of it. The signal gets weaker. The ability to differentiate between emotional states degrades. And by adulthood, they’ve become someone who genuinely doesn’t know what they feel, not because they’re tough, but because the system that was supposed to teach them emotional literacy was never activated.
What Buddhism taught me about this
One of the first things I learned when I started studying Buddhist psychology was a concept called “vedana,” which refers to the feeling tone that accompanies every experience. Every moment of consciousness comes with a quality of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. It’s the most basic layer of emotional experience, and Buddhist practice begins by training you to notice it.
What struck me about this was how simple it sounded and how difficult it actually was. Sitting in meditation and trying to identify whether what I was feeling was pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral revealed just how disconnected I had become from my own baseline emotional experience. I could think about my feelings. I could analyze them. But actually feeling them, in real time, in my body? That was a skill I had to learn.
I think this is why mindfulness practice has been shown to help with alexithymia. Not because it teaches you to think differently about emotions, but because it teaches you to notice them before your habitual suppression kicks in. It rebuilds the pathway between sensation and awareness that emotional dismissal in childhood disrupted.
What this means for you
If you grew up being told to stop crying, stop being dramatic, stop being so sensitive, I want you to understand something about the adult you became.
You’re not tough. You’re not resilient in the way you think you are. What you are is dissociated from your own emotional needs to the point where you can only recognize them when they’ve reached crisis level. That’s not strength. That’s a system failure disguised as composure.
The tightness in your chest that you ignore? That’s information. The irritability you can’t explain? That’s information. The feeling of emptiness that descends without warning? That’s information. Your body is sending signals that your childhood taught you to override, and every time you override them, the pressure builds.
The fix isn’t to suddenly become emotional. It’s to learn to identify what you feel before it overwhelms you. To rebuild the capacity that was supposed to develop in childhood but didn’t because someone told you your tears were a problem.
Start small. The next time you feel something and your first instinct is to push past it, pause. Ask yourself: what is this? Not what should I do about it. Just: what is this? That question, asked honestly and repeatedly, is the beginning of recovering what was taken from you.
I wrote about these ideas extensively in my book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego. A significant part of the book deals with awareness, specifically the practice of actually feeling your life as it happens rather than thinking your way around it. If you grew up in a home where emotions were problems to be solved rather than experiences to be understood, that practice isn’t optional. It’s the beginning of learning who you actually are underneath the performance of being fine.
Because the child who was told to stop crying didn’t stop feeling. They stopped knowing what they felt. And that difference has been running their life ever since.
