Some people are fortunate to be born into loving, supportive families in which emotions are validated, worked through, and supported. They aren’t just taught that their feelings are important, but also how to regulate what they feel and express them in healthy ways.
Others are not so lucky and were raised in environments where emotions weren’t discussed at all. In fact, in some cases, even expressing them might have been met with disapproval. If the latter was your experience rather than the former, it’s likely that the behaviors below have followed you well into adulthood.
1. Invalidating or diminishing the things you feel.
If you grew up in an environment where any time you expressed emotion, you were told you were being dramatic, or informed that you didn’t know what real pain/fear/anger felt like, then you were essentially programmed to believe that your emotions were invalid. In fact, you might have been praised when you brushed off anything troubling you as “no big deal.”
In adulthood, you may continue that behavior by diminishing or invalidating your own emotions whenever they arise. If something scares or upsets you, you’ll tell yourself that you’re being ridiculous rather than acknowledging the emotion and determining where it’s coming from. It’s as though the only feelings you allow yourself to acknowledge are the positive ones, or those that others won’t find uncomfortable or annoying.
2. Avoiding discussions or situations that get emotional.
One thing that often happens in toxic family dynamics is that parents refuse to speak to children who are being “too emotional.” They don’t want to deal with the annoyance of their kids’ tears or heightened emotions, or find it triggering, so they tell them to go away and come back when they’re ready to discuss things calmly.
Though it’s hard to sit with a child’s big feelings, it’s incredibly unfair to young people who haven’t learned proper emotional regulation yet, and it can teach them that they’re only worthy of being spoken to if they (or the subject matter) doesn’t cause feelings to swell.
As an adult, this may manifest as you avoiding discussions or situations when they start to get emotional for one of two reasons:
- You feel that the situation will get shut down if you express your feelings.
- You’re repeating learned patterns and will inform those around you that you’re unwilling to discuss things unless they get their emotions under control.
Either way, you’ll either avoid or walk away from anything that may involve feelings you don’t want to deal with — yours, or anyone else’s.
3. Being productive instead of dealing with what’s bothering you.
My partner always knows when I’m upset or angry about something because the house looks immaculate, or tasks that have been languishing for a while are suddenly being done. For example, the last time something really upset me, I re-grouted the bathroom floor.
You may have also learned this behavior from those around you when you were growing up, either because they told you to go do something productive instead of griping (even about very valid feelings), or you learned by their example.
Maybe one of your parents scrubbed the kitchen with a toothbrush whenever they were upset. Or you were told to go clean your room if you were crying about something that hurt you, since that behavior implied to them that you had too much time on your hands. As such, even if you’re not consciously aware of it, you may still believe that expressing emotion is a ridiculous indulgence compared to doing something productive with your energy.
4. Numbing out.
Numbing yourself may not be a conscious behavior on your part, but rather an automatic reaction that happens whenever your emotions rise above a threshold that you learned was acceptable. You may want to feel different things, but something inside you created a failsafe to protect you from the repercussions of doing so, and now you don’t know how to turn it off.
Alternatively, you may choose to shut down and numb out when difficulties arise. It’s probably a technique that has helped you get through intense challenges in the past, and you find it effective to disassociate from what you’re feeling so you can keep on going when things get rough.
5. Walking away from situations instead of dealing with them.
If your other coping mechanisms don’t work — or if you haven’t really developed any — then you may simply avoid or walk away from any situation you find difficult or upsetting. Since you don’t know how to deal with the issue effectively, you find it more effective and less personally taxing to simply leave, so you don’t have to deal with it.
Those who have experienced trauma in the past, including emotional neglect, gaslighting, or abuse, can also develop extreme demand avoidance. Though demand avoidance is most commonly linked to neurodivergence, it’s worth noting that neurodivergent people are also more likely to experience trauma, and as such, the difficulty can be compounded.
You may find that if there’s a demand or expectation placed upon you, you avoid it at all costs, even though you don’t consciously want to. In fact, you may want to handle whatever comes your way, but your nervous system literally doesn’t allow you to do so.
6. Keeping strong walls up with those close to you.
Have any of your friends or partners told you that you were emotionally unavailable? Or that they felt like they didn’t really know you, even though you’ve been interacting with one another for several years?
It’s not uncommon for people who never discussed emotions when they were growing up to keep others at a distance, just like people who never learned how to swim or cook often choose to avoid situations where they’ll be expected to do so.
Furthermore, they’ll come up with ways to avoid discussing why they can’t, or find excuses that explain away their lack of capability. Those who never learned how to express their own emotions (or deal with those of others) do the same: they keep relationships superficial, so their lack of capability in that regard is never revealed.
7. Bottling things up until they explode (one way or another).
Contents under pressure inevitably find some way of escaping their containers. This is why people who grew up without discussing emotions at home often end up having frequent meltdowns or explosions of one type or another in adulthood. How these eruptions manifest will depend greatly on whether they internalize or externalize the energy they try so hard to repress.
For example, you may keep your anger or upset fiercely hidden behind cold, seemingly stoic walls, and then cry in the shower later until the water runs cold. Or you may refuse to acknowledge that you feel anything at all until you finally see red and punch a hole in the bathroom wall, or yell at someone close to you for breathing too loudly (only to regret that action immediately afterwards).
8. Catastrophic thinking.
People who grew up in homes where emotions were never discussed didn’t get the reassurance they needed when things were difficult, nor were they given guidance on how to navigate life’s challenges as they unfolded. This left them stewing in their own anxieties, which often leads to catastrophizing and anticipatory feelings.
This involves imagining all the things that could potentially go wrong, feeling intense fear or grief about them, and trying to figure out what they would do in every potential outcome.
If you’re prone to this behavior, you likely know that things rarely (if ever) turn out the way you had imagined, yet you still struggle to control it. All the anxiety, grief, and stress you’ve felt about the difficult situations you’ve anticipated have been in your imagination, where you’ve fought countless battles that have left you feeling emotionally spent, for no good reason.
9. A wide range of coping mechanisms that may not be completely healthy.
When young people aren’t allowed to express or work through their emotions, they learn to channel the energy from what they’re feeling into different directions in order to cope with it. Some self-soothe with food (or by not eating), with alcohol, or other substances, while others exercise obsessively, focus all their time and energy on work, and engage in obsessive rumination (worrying constantly over the same group of thoughts).
If you were taught that expressing emotions was weak, or that nobody wanted to hear what you were going through, then it’s no surprise that you’ve had to find your own ways of dealing with the things that hurt or upset you. The key thing to do now is to determine whether these coping mechanisms are actively helping or harming you further.
Final thoughts…
A major part of healing generational trauma is to recognize which of your predecessors’ behaviors you do and don’t want to continue perpetuating. You can choose to embrace your emotions and learn how to work with them in a healthy manner — either with self-help resources or with the guidance of a trained therapist.
Furthermore, you can teach your own children (if you have them) what you learn, so they won’t struggle with emotional avoidance or repression the way you were forced to. It’s not easy, but change begins with the choice to make it happen.
