The internal monologue of every man trying to stay strong.
Okay this has been sitting with me for a couple hours and I want to actually write it down before the clarity fades into just another thing I nodded at and moved past.
Had a rough conversation today, the kind where the old script kicks in automatically, keep your voice level, don't let it show, get through it, deal with the actual feeling later, alone, if at all. Did that. Got through it looking completely fine, nobody in the room would have guessed anything was off. Felt worse afterward than the conversation itself probably warranted, and it took me a while tonight to actually figure out why instead of just chalking it up to a bad day.
Been reading about research on emotional suppression, the actual physiological kind, not just "bottling it up" as a phrase. Psychologists Gross and Levenson found that suppressing an emotional reaction doesn't reduce the emotion internally at all, it just hides the outward expression of it while the physiological stress response, elevated heart rate, cortisol, keeps running underneath, sometimes for longer than if the feeling had just been expressed in the moment instead of managed. The strength was never actually neutralizing anything. It was just moving the cost somewhere less visible, to be paid later, alone, usually at night.
There's a specific term for the pattern I've been running, restrictive emotionality, researcher Ronald Levant's work on what he calls normative male alexithymia describes a learned difficulty identifying and expressing emotion that isn't a personal failing or a character trait, it's a trained response to years of "stay strong" being the only acceptable setting available. Not broken. Trained, which is a completely different thing to fix, because trained things can actually be retrained with enough repetition in the other direction.
The part that actually landed just now: the internal monologue running under "staying strong" isn't calm. It's a constant, low-grade management project, suppress this, redirect that, look fine, check if it's working, and that management itself is the actual exhausting part, not whatever the original feeling underneath it was. The calm exterior and the calm interior are not the same thing, and I'd been treating them as identical for years without ever actually checking.
I know "let yourself feel things" is not exactly a groundbreaking sentence. What's different tonight is having an actual mechanism for why the strong version felt so much heavier than it should have, instead of just a vague sense that something about it wasn't working.
Not trying to overcorrect into performing vulnerability either, that's its own kind of management project. Just trying to let the internal monologue drop the constant supervision for a bit and see what's actually there underneath it.
Anyway. Might be obvious to plenty of people who already do this well. First time it's actually clicked for me instead of being a thing I agreed with and quietly kept doing anyway.
Edit: didn't expect this to resonate with as many people as it has, thank you for the comments. Several of you asked what's actually changing day to day, will update if it holds.
Edit: UPDATE, a couple weeks in. Been trying to name the actual feeling out loud to one person instead of managing it silently and reporting "I'm fine" afterward like a status update. Started jotting the actual word for the feeling in Apple Notes before it gets managed away, just a single word most nights. Also started using BeFreed on the walk after anything that stirred something up, mostly to actually sit with research on this instead of another motivational quote about strength, matched to the specific pattern I'm working on, naming things instead of managing them. Feels less like performing calm and more like actually getting there, eventually, some days better than others.
Anyone else finally get language for something you'd been doing on autopilot for years, and did it actually change the doing, or just the understanding of it?