If you are a human of a certain age, you probably heard the phrase, “Don’t cry, or I’ll give you something to cry about” at some point in your childhood. Maybe you dropped your ice-cream cone on the ground, or your sibling got something that you wanted, and you burst into tears. Your parent uttered that infamous phrase and you tried to stifle your urge to cry the best you could, holding in your sobs, while you wiped away the tears as they flowed hotly down your little face.
Your parents weren’t trying to be mean, at least most of them were not. That phrase is usually intended to make children resilient, to teach them that there are much bigger concerns in the world than one dropped ice cream cone or whatever other thing that you wanted that seemed trivial to an adult. Raising a child to be resilient is a good thing, and an important part of parenting and raising well-adjusted citizens of the world. However, we have since learned that there are better ways to do it other than telling our kids not to react emotionally or cry.
Traditionally, crying and showing raw emotion like a child does when they are upset have not been viewed favorably in our society. We are, after all, a country built on a Puritanical work ethic, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and enduring whatever comes our way. So, you cannot send an adult out into the world and have them cry if they drop their latte in the parking lot on the way into the office, or break out in tears if their coworker gets assigned to a career-changing project that they were counting on getting. When you love your child, you want them to go out into the world and flourish, so you teach them not to cry, to suck it up and deal with it and move on. So, it just seems logical to teach them not to cry early on.
Right?
Well…
Yes, you need to send your kids out into the world able to thrive and live their best lives, to not get sidetracked by little things and to be prepared to deal with big things. But teaching them not to cry or have an emotional gut reaction can create a lack of trust in themselves, an inability to truly trust how they feel and respond to certain situations. This inability can have a far-reaching impact well beyond how they react to dropping their favorite treat in a parking lot.
Most of us have been inadvertently taught not to trust ourselves, starting at a very young age. When a child is told to calm down, stop crying, or not be so sensitive, they end up not trusting their own response to a situation. Over the course of a lifetime, from childhood through the teenage years, and into adulthood, when someone who is told that their emotional reaction to something is not appropriate, it dampens their ability to trust their intuition, their gut. The societal push to not react with too much emotion falls into the category of [hopefully] unintentional gaslighting.
According to Psychology Today, “Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves.” Not all gaslighting is intentional. Many parents have been unintentionally gaslighting their children for decades by sharing the societal norms of not crying or overreacting. It is even present in the popular Disney film, Frozen, in which Princess Elsa is told to conceal her special powers (conjuring up ice sculptures with her bare hands) so that nobody knows about them. By the time she is an adult and about to be crowned queen, she does not trust herself to be around anyone for fear of harming them. She hides away, locked up the castle, and wears gloves.
With some people I’ve met, this persistent, unintentional gaslighting shows up in everyday ways, like questioning if they should buy something or saying yes to a job promotion. In others, though, it prevents them from trusting themselves and often keeps them in relationships with toxic people, even when they think they should leave and terminate the relationship. They question if they are being too sensitive to the things the toxic person is telling them, or if they just need to toughen up and stick it out. That is, after all, the message that has been consistent throughout their life. Calm down, you’re being too sensitive.
As humans, we need to be able to trust our thinking, our emotional reaction to something. We need to be able to retain our body’s innate sense to trust ourselves, to trust our gut when we feel that something is wrong. The same way we have the fight or flight response to a physical threat, we should be able to trust our reaction to emotional threats when we know we are with somebody toxic and damaging to our sense of self and overall happiness.
Actually, we need to trust what our body is telling us so that we do know that we are with someone who is toxic and negative. Our ‘body’ or gut knows before our logical brain makes the connection. We need to be able to feel confident in who we are and who we want to be or allow into our lives. We need to trust our intuition, our mind and bodies real superpower, which by the way, we are all born with.
Fortunately, we humans are resilient and can bounce back. Like Elsa saving her sister from a frozen heart, we can learn to trust who we are and how we feel. We can learn to trust our emotional response to a relationship and make the decision to break away once we can trust that we know that someone is not good for us. We all deserve to be treated with respect, kindness, and warmth. We all deserve to be upset, hurt and even angry when we are not. We also deserve to feel ‘sensitive’ and upset when something happens in our lives that is disappointing or hurtful. We should be able to feel our emotions, even when we are having a shitty day and we do want to cry because we just dropped our ice-cream cone in the parking lot, whether we are 5 or 35, because it is, in fact, ok to cry over spilled (frozen) milk.
Listen to Laura Clay talk more about this topic with Dr. Scott Hoye on the Chicago Psychology Podcast.
