My father doesn’t talk about his feelings. Not because he doesn’t have them. I’ve seen them cross his face in moments he thinks nobody is watching. But the moment you ask him directly how he’s doing, really doing, the shutters come down. “Fine, mate. All good.”
He grew up in Australia in the 1960s. His father was the same. And his father before him. Three generations of men who loved their families deeply and had almost no language for expressing it.
Psychologist Ronald Levant studied how this emotional suppression developed. He called it normative male alexithymia: a difficulty in identifying, describing, and expressing emotions from gender-based socialization. Boys start out more emotionally expressive than girls as infants but fall behind by age two, as society teaches them to be stoic.
The 1960s generation received the most concentrated version of this training. Emotions were treated as a liability, something that slowed you down. The result was a population skilled at enduring hardship but incapable of articulating what that hardship does to them.
This isn’t just about men. Women of that era were expected to absorb others' emotions while muting their own. Research shows this led to anxiety, low self-esteem, and social difficulties in adulthood.
Their children, raised in the 1980s and 1990s, had a vocabulary their parents never had. Now they see their parents as emotionally unavailable, not because they don’t care, but because they were trained to keep everything behind closed doors.
Breaking this chain requires presence, not solutions. It’s about being willing to sit with someone’s feelings without needing them to change. Small moments of openness can be acts of extraordinary courage.