Applause For The Quiet Kid

Most of us were trained to mute emotion to stay safe. The work now is to let those same feelings help you see what you’ve been moving through on autopilot.

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My house trained faces.

Crying got me a stare,
a joke,
a door closing harder than it needed to.

So I learned the look
that kept adults comfortable.
Jaw set.
Eyes dry.
Hands still in my lap.

You’re so mature for your age,
they said.

They meant,
you make our life easier.

Years later,
I sit in a parking lot after work,
heart pounding through my chest,
answering “I’m good”
to a text that could have held the truth.

I feel the same old clamp come down
on my ribs,
on every word that sounds too honest.

People say I have incredible self-control.

Most days,
it just feels like I am still that kid
who never got permission
to have a face that matched his body.

“When parents ignore emotion, the child learns suppression. When suppression becomes habit, the adult calls it self-control.”

I grew up in a house where feelings were background noise. Survival sat in the foreground. An alcoholic father. Rooms that read like crime scenes after the fact. You learn fast that any emotion louder than a shrug can trigger something you can’t control. So you study faces, footsteps, the way keys hit the table, and you adjust. You become the calm one, because calm buys you time and safety. That survival pattern is what later built Healing Thoughts in the front seat of a parked car, texting strangers messages I needed just as badly as they did.

When emotion keeps getting missed or punished, the nervous system rewires itself around suppression. That’s repression disguised as discipline. Parents say things like “relax,” “stop crying,” “go to your room,” or they just go quiet and leave you alone with the storm in your chest. The kid figures out that showing anything real leads to distance, shame, or chaos. So the system finds another route. It holds everything inside. From the outside, that looks like composure. On the inside, it feels like white-knuckle living. By the time that kid becomes an adult, the habit is so old it gets praised. “You never overreact.” “You’re so strong.” No one sees the cost.

There is a difference between suppression and regulation. Suppression says, “Shove it down, no one needs to see this.” Regulation says, “This feeling is intense; let me find a way to hold it without hurting myself or anyone else.” One cuts you off from your own body. The other keeps you in it. A lot of us who grew up around addiction, violence, or emotional neglect were trained to equate flatness with strength. We came from homes where being “too much” had consequences, and cultures that prize stoic faces, quiet rooms, and people who never cause trouble. Even in places that celebrate silent endurance as a virtue, like the way Finns talk about inner grit and calm under pressure, there is a danger when that ideal gets twisted into never needing support.

As a writer, I build around this tension on purpose. The daily texts, the books, the songs, the poems, all orbit the same wound: the man who stayed quiet to survive now trying to speak without blowing his life apart. Healing Thoughts leans into steady guidance and shared community. Shadow Thoughts leans into the darker rooms where rage, numbness, and dissociation sit with their backs against the wall. I structure these pieces to hit you in the gut first, then give your mind something solid to hold. That comes from studying how emotion and story drive sharing, how a single line can move through thousands of people when it lands in the exact place they thought was private.

When parents ignore emotion, kids learn to manage the room instead of themselves. They read everyone else’s state and abandon their own. As adults, those same kids call it “being low maintenance,” “having self-control,” “never being a burden.” Underneath sits a nervous system stuck in a permanent survival stance. The work now is not to swing to the opposite extreme and spill everything without containment. The work is to slowly relearn how to hold your own emotional life in your hands, without disowning it and without drowning in it. Sometimes that looks like answering one question honestly in a journal, or laughing at a post that finally names your chaos with humor sharp enough to cut shame down to size.

You do not have to shame your younger self for calling suppression “strength.” That kid did the only thing they could. The responsibility now sits with the adult version of you. The one reading this. The one who feels their jaw tense every time someone asks, “What’s wrong?” You get to decide whether you keep repeating the old script, or start practicing a different kind of control. Not control over expression, but control over how you care for the feelings you were never allowed to have. That shift is usually quiet. No one claps. You just notice one day that you told the truth about how you felt, and nothing exploded.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for order now. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

If part of you recognized yourself in this, ask:

Where in your life do you still call emotional suppression “self-control,” and what would change if you let one person see what you actually feel?

If you’re peeling back wounds like this one,
the 365-Day Shadow Work Journals were made for moments like these.
They speak the same language you do. Truth before comfort.
Explore the journals →

Sprinkles of Healing Confetti:

🕊 New messages drop most weekdays. Quiet, but not gentle.
🔥 Paid subscribers keep the wounds lit long enough to be named.
📚 When the pain overflows, it becomes a book.
🧢 Healing wears well when stitched into something real.
☕ This newsletter runs on coffee and confession.
🖤 Shadow Thoughts carries the pieces too jagged for here.

If this hit a nerve, you’re not alone. Healing Thoughts is where I say the quiet parts loudly. If you’re not subscribed yet, now’s the time. It’s only getting rawer from here.

“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming conscious.”
— Carl Jung, Letters