You might feel the pressure behind your eyes.
The tightness in your throat.
The heaviness in your chest.
But the tears don’t come.
You may be asking yourself, “Why can’t I cry?” and you finally want to be able to. Here, we’ll understand why some people struggle to cry, and how psychotherapy may help open us up to let go of what we’ve been holding onto.
When Tears Don’t Come
Crying is a central way the body releases emotion. It requires a certain kind of inner permission — and a certain kind of safety.
If you can’t cry, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have emotions. It may be that you have not allowed yourself to fully feel out certain emotions, informed by your past experiences with others.
Perhaps, in your past:
· Your sadness was ignored.
· Your tears were criticized.
· You had to be the strong one.
And over time, the mind adapts. It learns and protects itself.
What looks like numbness, an ‘inability’ to cry, may be a long-standing form of self-preservation.
Often, these protective adaptations begin early in life. Our first relationships quietly shape how safe it feels to express distress. If you’re curious about how these early foundations influence us long into adulthood, you might find it helpful to explore why early relationships matter and how psychodynamic psychotherapy can help.
“I Know I’m Sad — I Just Can’t Feel It”
Many people who struggle to cry can describe their feelings clearly. They understand what happened. They can analyze it.
But they can’t access it.
Owing to certain experiences, emotions can become walled off — not erased, but held at a distance. The mind keeps them out of awareness because, at some point, they were felt to be overwhelming or unmanageable.
We may even actively avoid going into our emotional lives for several reasons. One might be the ‘fear of breakdown’ – the expectation that if I start crying, I won’t be able to stop. This may be informed by past experiences, where it felt that another was uncaring for us during emotional distress. Another may be the shame & guilt we feel for sharing our emotions – equally informed by our history, perhaps when our caregivers ridiculed or punished us for ‘getting emotional’.
So, it may be that the tears have been forced to stay contained, pent up, and prevented from finding their expression.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the mind doesn’t simply erase what overwhelms us — it finds ways to manage it. If you’d like a deeper understanding of how emotional experience is processed and sometimes “held” internally, you may appreciate Bion’s theory of thinking and how psychoanalysis shapes emotions.
Crying Requires Relationship
It is my view that, fundamentally, we learn to feel our emotions through and with another person.
When a child’s distress is met with care and comfort, emotion to them then become tolerable. When it’s met with dismissal or intrusion, emotion may well become something intolerable, frightening, and something to suppress.
Difficulty crying often isn’t about weakness. It’s telling us how your emotional life was shaped.
The body remembers what the mind has learned to manage.
If this resonates and you’re considering taking the next step, you’re welcome to book a free 20-minute consultation with Curtis.
When Therapy Helps
If you can’t cry, therapy isn’t about forcing tears.
It’s about understanding:
· What your mind has been protecting you from
· When you first had to hold everything in
· What it would look like to let yourself feel
In a steady therapeutic relationship, feelings that have been tightly controlled sometimes begin to shift — not dramatically, but gradually.
Sometimes tears are the first to come.
Sometimes it's other feelings: shame, anger, fear, confusion.
Sometimes it may be simple relief.
All of it belongs.
If you’ve been wondering why you can’t cry, it may be less about not having emotion and more about having had to be self-protective.
And importantly, in therapy, you don’t have to break open alone. With another person, your therapist, who cares about your well-being and your emotional world, we can finally feel what’s had to be long-suppressed.
If this at all speaks to you, here’s how we can start:
How to Start
I’m Curtis, a psychodynamic psychotherapist whose practice focuses on feeling and understanding the nuances of our emotional lives. Together, we’ll understand what it feels like to be you and open up avenues for you to more freely feel yourself throughout your body and mind.
I offer in-person psychodynamic psychotherapy in Vancouver, Yaletown, and online across BC.
You’re welcome to book a free 20-minute consultation so we can get to know each other and explore what working together might look like:
https://anelegantmindcounselling.janeapp.com/#/staff_member/39/treatment/201
Your emotions may be telling you necessary things about yourself if you let them. Through our therapy, we’ll understand what these are, and how to begin feeling more full and alive in your everyday. We’ll do this gradually and together.