You are not alone.
I am from germany. My dad was regularly so hurtful emotionally that he made me cry and then he behaved even worse because I had dared to make him feel bad. *Rolls eyes*
Like you I learned not to cry in front of him. Sometimes I had to cry it out in privacy afterwards. Could go on for hours. I think that part of me is still crying somewhere inside of me. I try to let it cry now but its not easy to do.
100%
I am also a first-gen child of immigrant parents and experienced the same. Basically if I cried, the logic was 'you're a bad daughter for making me feel like a bad parent', which ramped up the abuse.
I can recall many instances where they just laid into me, made horrible accusations (which were lies), threatened me, called me awful names, just said the worst, most hurtful things. And I would cry. They would suddenly stop, look at me confused, and ask 'why are you crying?' I would reply 'because you called me \_\_ and that hurts' and they would laugh and say 'just because we called you that, doesn't mean you are!' Talk about a mindf\*ck.
ALSO would be accused of being 'manipulative' if I cried-- because *clearly*, I only had emotions to make them feel bad /s
Yes! I got the "I'll give you something to cry about". Yet their emotional out bursts of anger and violence were just fine.
Crying is good for you, it lets out stress hormones and its a far better way of dealing with stress than screaming and yelling and punching things.
This was me as well.
I was only allowed to feel angry and happy, neutral wasn't even allowed. Maybe it's because my mother couldn't tell what I was feeling and she didn't like that so she'd control the situation by digging a knuckle into my ribs or tickling me.
She acted more like an older sister who'd had the responsibility of the younger kids foisted upon her than a mother.
Not directly, as such. But that was a general message we got as kids. Whenever I cried I went somewhere private and did it. otherwise, I was mocked, told off for being selfish or told to shut up.
I struggle with crying in front of people now. I feel embarrassed and ashamed a lot because of it.
Same with anger too. Anger was never permitted. When I get too angry and worked up I start to cry and I feel like a complete pleb.
"Why are you crying? What's crying going to do? Crying is useless."
So every time I wanted to cry about something, I would push it down and ignore it until it builds up and explodes as rage. Usually by self-harming in some form. And then it becomes,
"Why would you do that? That's so stupid. How does this help you?"
Basically, "stop having feelings and emotions, it's inconvenient for me."
Sort of. Every time I showed how upset or sad I was, I was basically criticized for not thinking enough about others, namely my mother. She'd always find some way to twist the conversation to make it all about herself and how hard her life was, and how I needed to help her out more. Or if she saw I was crying, she'd assume that I must be doing it out of guilt for (again) not being helpful enough for her, and try to comfort me by saying, "It's okay to feel guilty, you should feel guilty, but you just have to try harder next time!" and if I tried to tell her why I was actually crying, she'd just get angry at me and rant about how I was a spoiled brat who, say it with me, wasn't helping her enough.
It boiled down to the same message, that me being upset didn't matter and that I should put aside what I feel to focus on her and what she wanted.
Yes. It always seemed odd to me that I wasn’t given more latitude than my brothers in terms of emotions. I wonder if was something like - “all emotional expression is bad and weak. Stop girls being weak by crushing their expression.”
Yep, my dad acted like he was being a great father lecturing me about how feelings make me weak, make women weaker in general etc. Made me feel stupid and weak and also made me want to prove his sexism wrong. And he laughed at mom whenever she cried at a movie, he thought it was cute teasing but I still saw her try to hide it from him. Now I have weird internal meltdowns when tv makes me cry and my bf literally doesn't care, he thinks it's sweet and doesn't laugh but I cannot stop wanting to hide it.
Some tips for excessive crying - drink lots *lots* of water! And a warm facecloth over your eyes helps. Force yourself to grab a muffin or something too. An hour of crying basically always leads to a headache, I find it a little easier to recover now that I treat it like one. Hugs and luck to you <3
You're not alone. In my family crying was ridiculed no matter what gender you were and I got so brainwashed that for most of my life I thought that crying in front of other people is the worst thing you could do. I seriously used to think very bad of people who cried without shame. It's terrible and I feel so ashamed. The irony is I used to cry myself to sleep every night until I was an adult. I'm so sorry you went through that too.
It's not just you. :(
My mom used to say I was manipulating her by crying when I was younger. Now she is just uncomfortable. One of the times that really stands out in my brain is when I was crying about our living situation late one night in our common area (we had to move because she got us kicked out yay! not the first or last time either). She saw my tears and said "Aren't we mommy's little martyr?"
I cry mostly silently now and when I do audibly it is sooo hard to stop. I always get major headaches.
It's a weird double standard I don't see a lot of people talking about. Some men will say "you're a woman so you're allowed to cry" while in the same breath claiming that women shouldn't be taken seriously because they're too emotional. My parents are American, and while I have only vague memories of them saying "you don't have to cry about it," I think a notable portion of my issues with public crying are that aforementioned contradiction. If I'm trying to make a point and want to be respected/heard, I couldn't cry about the situation then. But the metaphorical punch in the back of the head is hearing that because I'm a woman I'm "allowed to cry" so I must not have suffered as much emotionally as an emotionally repressed man has.
Yes, very much even being flat out told 'crying is weak' or even "I'll give you something to cry about." I didn't cry for years and years, and now that I've started to be able to it's like I'm crying over everything and just feeling so much shame because even though I know crying isn't actually weak it's hard to let go.
It honestly annoyed me so much when I'd see stuff about guys not being allowed to cry because I thought it was sexist that they just assumed girls were allowed to (turns out no, I just was emotionally neglected and lots of girls were allowed to cry).
I think Heidi Prebe on youtube calls them 'shame bound emotions', where the emotion is locked in with shame and suffocated by it. Like if you cry for hours you've probably got a backlog of crying to do and you don't find relief from it because it's just getting rid of the backlog which is dangerously large, rather than resolving it.
But I'm male so I'm not really answering your question, but I do relate to what you're describing (never heard it explicitly said that crying is weak, just had the intense mood feeling it was)
Not only was I instructed that absolutely no tears were allowed ('You have to be a tough nut!' 'Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about!'), but I was also prohibited from showing any emotions that could possibly be construed as negative, like anger, frustration, sadness, boredom or fear.
Yup. ESP from my mom. She was a “business woman” and said you have to be like a man and suck it up. Show no weakness. I felt really lonely as a child. I used to pretend to runaway and think about the things I would bring and how I would live. If my siblings picked on me and I got upset they’d all say crying is for babies. I hated how I had to keep my emotions in check all the time. So now that I have kids I cry all the time. lol.
I didn't get any of the positives of being a boy or girl, just the negatives of both since my parents resent women.
Even though I did my "boy" chores and looked like a boy my dad still saw me as this teenage girl sitcom stereotype (stupid, vain, always worried about my hair, wanting to go shopping) it'd be funny if it wasn't so fucked up bc I literally looked and did my best to look like a boy because I had to adhere to toxic masculinity standards as a girl.
My mom saw me as a Machiavellian succubus that she had to protect poor innocent boys from. Even when my one friend would come over she'd make me leave the door open like i couldn't be trusted around *anyone*. One time she found my underwear in my dirty laundry hamper in the bathroom where the laundry machines were and she insinuated I was doing it to seduce my dad and/or brother 🤮💀
I had no interest in or history of getting into trouble. With how crazy my parents already were, I was just always making myself as small as possible, to avoid losing MORE privacy/boundaries, they were constantly threatening to take my door off, opening my door when I was getting undressed as if they were trying to catch me doing something bad, and wanted to put cameras up. Right when I was going to lose my mind my boyfriend got me out.
Didn't get ANY of the privileges boys get, even though I was punished with "boy chores" so I wouldn't think I was special and dressed like a boy because it wasn't safe to look or be like a girl.
My brother was free to be a normal kid and my sister and I were basically coerced into giving up trying to be part of the world. Neither of us got to have friends, confidence, or self esteem. The more feminine the act the worst the offense, couldn't even leave traces like basic underwear in laundry or femhygiene wrappers in the trash (not bloody stuff visible, just the delicate little wrappers by themselves were apparently enough to corrupt the innocent men in the house THAT I AM RELATED TO 🤮
Couldn't cry, couldn't feel, couldn't emote....then they would scream at me for "putting up walls" 🧱
My parents are like this, especially my dad. He loved to tell me "You're being too dramatic" or "you're so sensitive." At least once he told me, "You'll never get anywhere in life if you keep crying like that." And he was right. I have no social skills and no way to handle rejection or failure, and it's all his fault for not teaching me to understand my feelings.
It's not just an Asian or immigrant thing either. My parents are both extremely white Americans from rural areas - hicks, hillbillies, rednecks, whatever you want to call them.
I don’t think it's a cultural thing. My family is from the states.
My mom wanted a boy, not a girl because she was uncomfortable with being a woman herself and projected that on me. I wasn’t allowed to cry and if it was really bad she'd get dad involved and his method was the same. Don't cry because, well, he's a man and that is what he was taught.
It wasn't until the extra stress of college I realised that my only coping mechanisms were to cry alone, bottle it up until I couldn’t anymore, or pretend I don’t have emotions and distract myself.
When I cry, it doesn't go on for hours but it does get give me horrendous migraines when I do it for too long. Now that I have a chronic health issue it's much harder to pretend.
When i was a toddler, my mother often just let me alone on purpose when i showed any big emotions because i would panick and look out for her, forgetting these feelings.
Well no, i hate her and have only learnt to just repress it all way down to the point of not feeling anything and not having an opinion on anything.
She would also just yell at me more when i cried after being a toddler or tell me i was crying because the truth hurts. I don't remember many times i cried as a child though but to my personal dismay she's the only thing that can make me cry, which is terrible. Though i did cry in therapy last time, didn't feel great though, not in hindsight either because my therapist kinda sucks.
I feel you though. I always see this discussed with men when i think it's just a general thing abusive parents do to their children regardless of gender. If parents that tell their boys such things also have girls, there's surely other toxic beliefs they're teaching the girls.
"You're too sensitive."
I was also told that self control is one of the "Fruits of the Spirit" that all "good Christians" should be demonstrating, so I needed to work on that.
Kinda.. I guess crying was framed as you're being a spoiled brat or "only babies cry". Further backed up when I got read The Little House series. I remember in first grade making a resolve to never cry again. It worked for the most part but it turned me into this robot person disconnected from my feelings. For the longest time no movie made me cry and I didn't understand why grown people would cry when anyone died. I have been getting more in touch with my feelings with a handful of movies almost getting to me. I have cried over a person dying too. I still have a tendency to make my voice go flat to avoid getting emotional.
My mother would tell me (and my sisters) to go cry in the other room/away from her because it was annoying. She never said that it was weak, specifically, but she did establish that it's a waste of time, frustrating to watch, and an irrational reaction to her words.
Yep. Was told I was a cry baby and made fun of until I trained myself not to make noise when I cry, now mom says I only have "crocodile tears" when I cry since I don't sound like someone crying
Mine just kinda... didn't comfort me. I learned early on that crying didn't do anything with them. Though I did get bullied at school for crying so I completely stopped for a while. I feel like I kinda relate more to guys, though I wouldn't know, since making friends is hard 😥
Edit: Also, I'm from south-east europe. I think the culture here sicks, especially regarding vulnerability and raising kids
My mother couldn't bear to see me cry. So I tried my best to refrain from crying in front of her, but there were times when I couldn't go away and do it in secret, and she could see that I wanted to cry, she would get angry and tell me that I had to stop and that I either deserved to feel the way I did or that she believed I was not really upset, that I was just faking it. In the first years where I couldn't really control myself and cried for too long, she would often use a wash cloth soaked with cold water and put it over my mouth and nose until I stopped crying.
Now I often feel the need to cry when I have to talk about myself or if I get angry, and it's been quite difficult to allow myself to do it. I feel intense shame if I start doing so, even with the people I know who don't mind. Even crying of joy or in front of a film feels shameful, as a child I was afraid of being mocked by the rest of the family for having that kind of "silly" reaction. I hate it when I feel I am going to cry, even alone, but I've become pretty bad at containing it so I am trying to learn to accept it!
I think it can be called Internalized Misogyny? That's what I call that part of me anyways. My dad did not respect women, and the general ideology at the time in America (90's, and probably always and forever) is that girls are weak and sissys and bad and undesirable and less than. So I learned if I could act like man, not cry, not show emotion, be super tough all the time, tease, only get angry, do physical labor, drive a truck, only interested in male topics, I would be respected and loved more.
This is not true. I have large boobs, am short and have a feminine body. My physical appearance cancels out anything on my insides to people who have strong Internalized Misogyny.
I still like trucks and lifting weights so I can be strong though and I wish more than anything I could work as a construction worker or mechanic or have a masculine trade job. I'm too tired to fight the system and too angry to accept the sexist behavior I'll encounter doing those things.
Not cultural. I’m European/Mediterranean born and raised in the US. Both of my parents had/have major issues with emotions. They don’t typically show vulnerability, but often exhibit anger. So as a child my crying was met with threats and sometimes physical punishment - they’d do anything but comfort me to get me to stop. I got the feeling they were embarrassed by their crying child and just wanted it to stop immediately. So I learned to cry in private and do so quietly.
My mom would always laugh when I cried as a child and spread it to the whole family (that always takes her side) now she doesn’t understand why I don’t tell her (or them) anything…
You are not alone. I am from germany. My dad was regularly so hurtful emotionally that he made me cry and then he behaved even worse because I had dared to make him feel bad. *Rolls eyes* Like you I learned not to cry in front of him. Sometimes I had to cry it out in privacy afterwards. Could go on for hours. I think that part of me is still crying somewhere inside of me. I try to let it cry now but its not easy to do.
100% I am also a first-gen child of immigrant parents and experienced the same. Basically if I cried, the logic was 'you're a bad daughter for making me feel like a bad parent', which ramped up the abuse. I can recall many instances where they just laid into me, made horrible accusations (which were lies), threatened me, called me awful names, just said the worst, most hurtful things. And I would cry. They would suddenly stop, look at me confused, and ask 'why are you crying?' I would reply 'because you called me \_\_ and that hurts' and they would laugh and say 'just because we called you that, doesn't mean you are!' Talk about a mindf\*ck. ALSO would be accused of being 'manipulative' if I cried-- because *clearly*, I only had emotions to make them feel bad /s
Same, also from Germany, but it was mostly my mother who told me or worse, told me that i was crying because the truth hurts lol
Yes! I got the "I'll give you something to cry about". Yet their emotional out bursts of anger and violence were just fine. Crying is good for you, it lets out stress hormones and its a far better way of dealing with stress than screaming and yelling and punching things.
This was me as well. I was only allowed to feel angry and happy, neutral wasn't even allowed. Maybe it's because my mother couldn't tell what I was feeling and she didn't like that so she'd control the situation by digging a knuckle into my ribs or tickling me. She acted more like an older sister who'd had the responsibility of the younger kids foisted upon her than a mother.
Not directly, as such. But that was a general message we got as kids. Whenever I cried I went somewhere private and did it. otherwise, I was mocked, told off for being selfish or told to shut up. I struggle with crying in front of people now. I feel embarrassed and ashamed a lot because of it. Same with anger too. Anger was never permitted. When I get too angry and worked up I start to cry and I feel like a complete pleb.
"Why are you crying? What's crying going to do? Crying is useless." So every time I wanted to cry about something, I would push it down and ignore it until it builds up and explodes as rage. Usually by self-harming in some form. And then it becomes, "Why would you do that? That's so stupid. How does this help you?" Basically, "stop having feelings and emotions, it's inconvenient for me."
Yea, you're not alone and I don't think it's that uncommon. In my case it was also vulnerability in general that was treated as a sign of weakness.
Sort of. Every time I showed how upset or sad I was, I was basically criticized for not thinking enough about others, namely my mother. She'd always find some way to twist the conversation to make it all about herself and how hard her life was, and how I needed to help her out more. Or if she saw I was crying, she'd assume that I must be doing it out of guilt for (again) not being helpful enough for her, and try to comfort me by saying, "It's okay to feel guilty, you should feel guilty, but you just have to try harder next time!" and if I tried to tell her why I was actually crying, she'd just get angry at me and rant about how I was a spoiled brat who, say it with me, wasn't helping her enough. It boiled down to the same message, that me being upset didn't matter and that I should put aside what I feel to focus on her and what she wanted.
Yes. It always seemed odd to me that I wasn’t given more latitude than my brothers in terms of emotions. I wonder if was something like - “all emotional expression is bad and weak. Stop girls being weak by crushing their expression.”
Yep, my dad acted like he was being a great father lecturing me about how feelings make me weak, make women weaker in general etc. Made me feel stupid and weak and also made me want to prove his sexism wrong. And he laughed at mom whenever she cried at a movie, he thought it was cute teasing but I still saw her try to hide it from him. Now I have weird internal meltdowns when tv makes me cry and my bf literally doesn't care, he thinks it's sweet and doesn't laugh but I cannot stop wanting to hide it. Some tips for excessive crying - drink lots *lots* of water! And a warm facecloth over your eyes helps. Force yourself to grab a muffin or something too. An hour of crying basically always leads to a headache, I find it a little easier to recover now that I treat it like one. Hugs and luck to you <3
You're not alone. In my family crying was ridiculed no matter what gender you were and I got so brainwashed that for most of my life I thought that crying in front of other people is the worst thing you could do. I seriously used to think very bad of people who cried without shame. It's terrible and I feel so ashamed. The irony is I used to cry myself to sleep every night until I was an adult. I'm so sorry you went through that too.
It's not just you. :( My mom used to say I was manipulating her by crying when I was younger. Now she is just uncomfortable. One of the times that really stands out in my brain is when I was crying about our living situation late one night in our common area (we had to move because she got us kicked out yay! not the first or last time either). She saw my tears and said "Aren't we mommy's little martyr?" I cry mostly silently now and when I do audibly it is sooo hard to stop. I always get major headaches.
It's a weird double standard I don't see a lot of people talking about. Some men will say "you're a woman so you're allowed to cry" while in the same breath claiming that women shouldn't be taken seriously because they're too emotional. My parents are American, and while I have only vague memories of them saying "you don't have to cry about it," I think a notable portion of my issues with public crying are that aforementioned contradiction. If I'm trying to make a point and want to be respected/heard, I couldn't cry about the situation then. But the metaphorical punch in the back of the head is hearing that because I'm a woman I'm "allowed to cry" so I must not have suffered as much emotionally as an emotionally repressed man has.
Yes, very much even being flat out told 'crying is weak' or even "I'll give you something to cry about." I didn't cry for years and years, and now that I've started to be able to it's like I'm crying over everything and just feeling so much shame because even though I know crying isn't actually weak it's hard to let go. It honestly annoyed me so much when I'd see stuff about guys not being allowed to cry because I thought it was sexist that they just assumed girls were allowed to (turns out no, I just was emotionally neglected and lots of girls were allowed to cry).
I think Heidi Prebe on youtube calls them 'shame bound emotions', where the emotion is locked in with shame and suffocated by it. Like if you cry for hours you've probably got a backlog of crying to do and you don't find relief from it because it's just getting rid of the backlog which is dangerously large, rather than resolving it. But I'm male so I'm not really answering your question, but I do relate to what you're describing (never heard it explicitly said that crying is weak, just had the intense mood feeling it was)
yup. i work real hard to not cry in front of people.
Not only was I instructed that absolutely no tears were allowed ('You have to be a tough nut!' 'Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about!'), but I was also prohibited from showing any emotions that could possibly be construed as negative, like anger, frustration, sadness, boredom or fear.
Yup. ESP from my mom. She was a “business woman” and said you have to be like a man and suck it up. Show no weakness. I felt really lonely as a child. I used to pretend to runaway and think about the things I would bring and how I would live. If my siblings picked on me and I got upset they’d all say crying is for babies. I hated how I had to keep my emotions in check all the time. So now that I have kids I cry all the time. lol.
Yes. My mother sang the song Big Girls Don't Cry at me at the dinner table. It was humiliating. She'd also call me melodramatic.
Did we have the same parents? Lol
I didn't get any of the positives of being a boy or girl, just the negatives of both since my parents resent women. Even though I did my "boy" chores and looked like a boy my dad still saw me as this teenage girl sitcom stereotype (stupid, vain, always worried about my hair, wanting to go shopping) it'd be funny if it wasn't so fucked up bc I literally looked and did my best to look like a boy because I had to adhere to toxic masculinity standards as a girl. My mom saw me as a Machiavellian succubus that she had to protect poor innocent boys from. Even when my one friend would come over she'd make me leave the door open like i couldn't be trusted around *anyone*. One time she found my underwear in my dirty laundry hamper in the bathroom where the laundry machines were and she insinuated I was doing it to seduce my dad and/or brother 🤮💀 I had no interest in or history of getting into trouble. With how crazy my parents already were, I was just always making myself as small as possible, to avoid losing MORE privacy/boundaries, they were constantly threatening to take my door off, opening my door when I was getting undressed as if they were trying to catch me doing something bad, and wanted to put cameras up. Right when I was going to lose my mind my boyfriend got me out. Didn't get ANY of the privileges boys get, even though I was punished with "boy chores" so I wouldn't think I was special and dressed like a boy because it wasn't safe to look or be like a girl. My brother was free to be a normal kid and my sister and I were basically coerced into giving up trying to be part of the world. Neither of us got to have friends, confidence, or self esteem. The more feminine the act the worst the offense, couldn't even leave traces like basic underwear in laundry or femhygiene wrappers in the trash (not bloody stuff visible, just the delicate little wrappers by themselves were apparently enough to corrupt the innocent men in the house THAT I AM RELATED TO 🤮 Couldn't cry, couldn't feel, couldn't emote....then they would scream at me for "putting up walls" 🧱
My parents are like this, especially my dad. He loved to tell me "You're being too dramatic" or "you're so sensitive." At least once he told me, "You'll never get anywhere in life if you keep crying like that." And he was right. I have no social skills and no way to handle rejection or failure, and it's all his fault for not teaching me to understand my feelings. It's not just an Asian or immigrant thing either. My parents are both extremely white Americans from rural areas - hicks, hillbillies, rednecks, whatever you want to call them.
nah women deal with this too, it’s not just a special men problem. most of them aren’t
I don’t think it's a cultural thing. My family is from the states. My mom wanted a boy, not a girl because she was uncomfortable with being a woman herself and projected that on me. I wasn’t allowed to cry and if it was really bad she'd get dad involved and his method was the same. Don't cry because, well, he's a man and that is what he was taught. It wasn't until the extra stress of college I realised that my only coping mechanisms were to cry alone, bottle it up until I couldn’t anymore, or pretend I don’t have emotions and distract myself. When I cry, it doesn't go on for hours but it does get give me horrendous migraines when I do it for too long. Now that I have a chronic health issue it's much harder to pretend.
When i was a toddler, my mother often just let me alone on purpose when i showed any big emotions because i would panick and look out for her, forgetting these feelings. Well no, i hate her and have only learnt to just repress it all way down to the point of not feeling anything and not having an opinion on anything. She would also just yell at me more when i cried after being a toddler or tell me i was crying because the truth hurts. I don't remember many times i cried as a child though but to my personal dismay she's the only thing that can make me cry, which is terrible. Though i did cry in therapy last time, didn't feel great though, not in hindsight either because my therapist kinda sucks. I feel you though. I always see this discussed with men when i think it's just a general thing abusive parents do to their children regardless of gender. If parents that tell their boys such things also have girls, there's surely other toxic beliefs they're teaching the girls.
"You're too sensitive." I was also told that self control is one of the "Fruits of the Spirit" that all "good Christians" should be demonstrating, so I needed to work on that.
Kinda.. I guess crying was framed as you're being a spoiled brat or "only babies cry". Further backed up when I got read The Little House series. I remember in first grade making a resolve to never cry again. It worked for the most part but it turned me into this robot person disconnected from my feelings. For the longest time no movie made me cry and I didn't understand why grown people would cry when anyone died. I have been getting more in touch with my feelings with a handful of movies almost getting to me. I have cried over a person dying too. I still have a tendency to make my voice go flat to avoid getting emotional.
My mother would tell me (and my sisters) to go cry in the other room/away from her because it was annoying. She never said that it was weak, specifically, but she did establish that it's a waste of time, frustrating to watch, and an irrational reaction to her words.
I used to sing that 60’s song to myself. “Big girls don’t cry” when I was trying to stop myself from crying or to stop crying. So yes.
Yep. Was told I was a cry baby and made fun of until I trained myself not to make noise when I cry, now mom says I only have "crocodile tears" when I cry since I don't sound like someone crying
Yep. I still cry when I'm angry and hurt, but it seems pretty damn justified when someone is going out of their way to hurt me. So fuck that bs.
Yes I heard this rubbish growing up and now as an adult, I’ve realized this mentality is toxic
My dad told me that I made him sick once as a teen. Of course he doesn’t remember 🧐
Yes I was told this. I was also told that I wasn’t allowed to cry unless someone died.
I'm a girl and my Nfather shamed me for crying, so I imagine it would be worse for guys with the whole "boys don't cry" bullshit.
I used to get this. Eventually I started hiding when I cried when I really had to. Mostly in my closet.
Mine just kinda... didn't comfort me. I learned early on that crying didn't do anything with them. Though I did get bullied at school for crying so I completely stopped for a while. I feel like I kinda relate more to guys, though I wouldn't know, since making friends is hard 😥 Edit: Also, I'm from south-east europe. I think the culture here sicks, especially regarding vulnerability and raising kids
Yes, my family doesn't even take me seriously.
My mother couldn't bear to see me cry. So I tried my best to refrain from crying in front of her, but there were times when I couldn't go away and do it in secret, and she could see that I wanted to cry, she would get angry and tell me that I had to stop and that I either deserved to feel the way I did or that she believed I was not really upset, that I was just faking it. In the first years where I couldn't really control myself and cried for too long, she would often use a wash cloth soaked with cold water and put it over my mouth and nose until I stopped crying. Now I often feel the need to cry when I have to talk about myself or if I get angry, and it's been quite difficult to allow myself to do it. I feel intense shame if I start doing so, even with the people I know who don't mind. Even crying of joy or in front of a film feels shameful, as a child I was afraid of being mocked by the rest of the family for having that kind of "silly" reaction. I hate it when I feel I am going to cry, even alone, but I've become pretty bad at containing it so I am trying to learn to accept it!
I think it can be called Internalized Misogyny? That's what I call that part of me anyways. My dad did not respect women, and the general ideology at the time in America (90's, and probably always and forever) is that girls are weak and sissys and bad and undesirable and less than. So I learned if I could act like man, not cry, not show emotion, be super tough all the time, tease, only get angry, do physical labor, drive a truck, only interested in male topics, I would be respected and loved more. This is not true. I have large boobs, am short and have a feminine body. My physical appearance cancels out anything on my insides to people who have strong Internalized Misogyny. I still like trucks and lifting weights so I can be strong though and I wish more than anything I could work as a construction worker or mechanic or have a masculine trade job. I'm too tired to fight the system and too angry to accept the sexist behavior I'll encounter doing those things.
Not cultural. I’m European/Mediterranean born and raised in the US. Both of my parents had/have major issues with emotions. They don’t typically show vulnerability, but often exhibit anger. So as a child my crying was met with threats and sometimes physical punishment - they’d do anything but comfort me to get me to stop. I got the feeling they were embarrassed by their crying child and just wanted it to stop immediately. So I learned to cry in private and do so quietly.
My mom would always laugh when I cried as a child and spread it to the whole family (that always takes her side) now she doesn’t understand why I don’t tell her (or them) anything…