YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Hi, call me Jay.

Technically, I can cry. But I often find myself in circumstances (especially this last year since I started experiencing prolonged sadness and persistent & show stopping negative thoughts) where I want to cry, feel it kind of welling up, but it never comes out. Instead, some hard shell forms around my emotions and nothing comes out. I'm like the fuckin' tin man here. Most disturbingly part? I've noticed it more so when interacting with my girlfriend of 10 years. Instead of empathy or sympathy ... I just shut down.

It's been so long that I don't recall what it's like to just let out a good cry nor what it's like to be happy with where I'm at in life. I feel like I've got something to offer the world but I'm afraid ... of what I'm not sure. I just started seeing a therapist for the first time in my 35 years as well. My girlfriend is considering the same thing as well as couples counseling. My biggest fear? Being a bitter old man who constantly berates himself for the choices he "should have" or "could have" made to life a more fulfilling life.

Hey Paul, I dunno if you'll see this but I wanted to say how brave I think you are for doing this. Speaking about your life so frankly and with such vulnerability and self-compassion is astounding considering where you've come from. I only discovered your show a few weeks ago and have been listening to each episode starting with the oldest. For several weeks I've been toying with the idea of doing my own podcast and you're an example to look up to.

Thanks man!

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I know what you are talking about wondering why the tears don't come. Please take care, keep the lines of communication open, you are not alone, we here are cheering for you and for your greatest today and tomorrow!

You can learn to get in touch with your feelings again and I encourage you to do so, because your feelings are as important as your thoughts, when you need to express yourself or make important decisions. If you cut feelings out of your decisions, you're removing your gut feeling/intuition and then you might make the same mistakes over and over, because you'll come to the same bad conclusions again and again.

Try to look up the purpose of emotions and maybe it will then make sense, if you're caught in cyclic thinking or having trouble getting from thinking to doing.

If keeping your emotions in an iron grip was your only way of surviving abuse/trauma, you might have to accept what happened to you and also accept, what you had to do to yourself to survive it. If you can learn to accept, that you had to shut yourself down emotionally, then maybe you wont be so hard on yourself for doing it and then maybe, you'll slowly start accepting your anger/fears as a part of you.

I used to attempt to cry in the shower, I thought, maybe when the warm water rolls down my face, I can let go and no one will even know. However I just couldn't let go, I just couldn't allow myself to go there. I don't know if I thought much beyond that, but I think unconsciously, that getting in touch with my feelings or lowering my defenses would somehow put me in jeopardy. Looking at my upbringing, it now makes perfect sense, that I can't allow myself to be vulnerable to any kind of accusation or conflict, so I learned to control my surface/appearance, while my emotions and insides were trembling with fear, anxiety or rage, but outside, I was a perfect smiley face, saying: "Have a nice day!"

By opening up, my might discover that your feelings are not as dangerous as you thought, but that's something that takes time and courage, but if you learn to accept these feelings, you might discover accessing positive feelings also becomes easier.

Welcome and remember the first step is the hardest and the next step is the next hardest!

I have the same problem. I get to the point where enough emotion wells up that a single tear will stream down my face, but then the feeling of that tear seems to inactivate the process; it's as if my crying process has a negative feedback mechanism. My opinion is that it is a conditioned response, that somewhere, consciously or unconsciously, I believe that crying is shameful, weak, etc. I know that whenever I feel that I really need to cry and try to summon all of the shame-inducing experiences and feelings I can think of to push myself into a convulsive crying fit, another battery of thoughts arise that combat my feeling sorry for myself--that there's is nothing that's that awful in my life, so I don't deserve to feel sad.

One thing that did work? Filling out a worksheet that was given to me by therapist wherein I wrote down negative thoughts I was having. I think that reifying my feelings in that way made them more difficult to ignore and run away from as they were no longer hidden away in the deep corners of my mind. Granted, it didn't give me the riveting sob session that I was looking for, but it definitely made my emotions more conscious than they've ever been. It's worth a try.

For me crying is also connected to manipulation, so if I allowed myself to cry, I'd also feel deep shame and second guess, whether I was really crying or being manipulative.