why is it that I never cried?

[Infern0]

I have been through every emotion known to man,  love,  hate,  misery,  joy,  pain and everything else.

Depressed,  not able to eat or sleep,  scared,  paranoid.

I had some sort of nervous breakdown when she painted me black and viciously attacked me by text. I thought I was having a heart attack

There's been times I just wanted to break down and cry, get it all out but it's never happened.

[Loveofhislife]

Infern0:  Awesome question, and I have a couple of ideas about that.  For decades, I felt unable to really cry unless I saw a sad movie, an emotional commercial, and now--even Guardians of the Galaxy had me weeping last night :-)  Why? I have told my T that I think I'm afraid that if I start crying I won't be able to stop.  And while there may be some truth to that, she won't accept my half-baked answers.  Instead, she says it's an avoidance and denial of pain--that if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, how do we know it really happened?  If I don't cry and grieve the painful things in my life, maybe they didn't really happen?  A HUGE over simplification, because I'm trying to wrap my head around it. A lot of the way my "coping" with childhood abuse/neglect and trauma has been denial all wrapped up in something called co-dependency--it's important to me now, perhaps CRITICAL, because the stress of the r/s with exbfBPD has created some significant health issues--in addition to many of the mental health issues you have suffered.  I think by not recognizing and dealing with the pain in a healthy way (crying, grieving, walking away, etc.) we have pushed the pain into our bodies. Panic attacks may be a way our body is literally crying out to us to acknowledge and deal with the pain.  For the first time in my life, I am consciously trying to feel the pain, process the pain, and let it go instead of all the myriad and unhealthy ways I've dealt with it all my life.  And when that doesn't work, I just watch a movie and cry my eyes out :-/

[drummerboy]

Interesting because this is what I talked about with my therapist yesterday. That whenever I get in touch with my inner child I cry like a baby but I quickly leave him alone as I have a wall around him and then of course I stop crying. We are going to be working on breaking down that wall. Basically the pain that my inner child is holding has to come out and when it does it will be like a waterfall but what we are working on now is me feeling safe enough to tear down the wall and let it out.

Infern0:  Awesome question, and I have a couple of ideas about that.  For decades, I felt unable to really cry unless I saw a sad movie, an emotional commercial, and now--even Guardians of the Galaxy had me weeping last night :-)  Why? I have told my T that I think I'm afraid that if I start crying I won't be able to stop.  And while there may be some truth to that, she won't accept my half-baked answers.  Instead, she says it's an avoidance and denial of pain--that if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, how do we know it really happened?  If I don't cry and grieve the painful things in my life, maybe they didn't really happen?  A HUGE over simplification, because I'm trying to wrap my head around it. A lot of the way my "coping" with childhood abuse/neglect and trauma has been denial all wrapped up in something called co-dependency--it's important to me now, perhaps CRITICAL, because the stress of the r/s with exbfBPD has created some significant health issues--in addition to many of the mental health issues you have suffered.  I think by not recognizing and dealing with the pain in a healthy way (crying, grieving, walking away, etc.) we have pushed the pain into our bodies. Panic attacks may be a way our body is literally crying out to us to acknowledge and deal with the pain.  For the first time in my life, I am consciously trying to feel the pain, process the pain, and let it go instead of all the myriad and unhealthy ways I've dealt with it all my life.  And when that doesn't work, I just watch a movie and cry my eyes out :-/