Some people don’t talk about their feelings. Not because they don’t have them. You can see emotions cross their faces in moments they think nobody is watching. But the moment you ask them directly how they’re doing, really doing, the shutters come down. “Fine, mate. All good.”
Millions of people who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s carry this same pattern. Whole generations who loved their families deeply and had almost no language for expressing it.
It’s tempting to see this as a personality thing. A stubbornness, maybe. A choice. But the psychology behind it suggests it’s not a choice at all. It’s a training that went so deep it became invisible.
The emotional rules nobody wrote down
People who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s were raised inside a set of unspoken cultural rules about emotions. Boys don’t cry. Girls don’t make a fuss. You don’t burden other people with your problems. You handle it. You move on.
These weren’t suggestions. They were survival instructions, passed down by parents who had themselves been shaped by the Depression and the wars. In homes where survival had been the priority for decades, emotions were treated as a liability. Something that slowed you down. Something that made you weak.
Psychologist Ronald Levant, at the University of Akron, spent decades studying the specific mechanism by which this happens. He called it normative male alexithymia: a mild-to-moderate difficulty in identifying, describing, and expressing emotions that results from gender-based socialization influenced by the traditional masculine norm of restrictive emotionality.
Alexithymia literally means “without words for emotions.” And Levant’s research showed that it wasn’t an inherent trait. It was trained. Boys start out more emotionally expressive than girls as infants. But by the age of two, they fall behind in verbal emotional expression. By school age, the gap has widened further. The socialization is relentless: peers punish emotional expression, fathers model stoicism, and the culture reinforces the message that vulnerable feelings are a problem to be solved, not experienced.
The generation that grew up in the 1960s received the most concentrated version of this training.
What “keeping it behind closed doors” actually does to a person
The phrase “family problems stay behind closed doors” wasn’t just an expression in mid-century households. It was a governing principle. Marriages that were falling apart stayed together for appearances. Children who were struggling were told to toughen up. Mental health was not discussed. Therapy was for people who had “really” lost it.
The result, as research on normative alexithymia and relationships has shown, is a population of adults who are genuinely skilled at enduring hardship but genuinely incapable of articulating what that hardship does to them. Levant’s research found that normative male alexithymia is negatively correlated with relationship satisfaction and communication quality, and positively correlated with fear of intimacy.
That’s the quiet cost. These aren’t people who don’t feel. They feel enormously. They just never developed the wiring to translate those feelings into words. And because they can’t express what they’re experiencing, the people closest to them often interpret the silence as coldness. As indifference. As not caring.
It’s the opposite of not caring. It’s caring so much that the feelings have nowhere to go.
This isn’t just about men
While Levant’s research focused primarily on men, the emotional suppression of the 1960s wasn’t exclusively male. Women of that era were expected to absorb everyone else’s emotions while muting their own. The role of the mother was to manage the household’s emotional climate without ever acknowledging that the management was labour. Anger was unfeminine. Ambition was selfish. Sadness was self-indulgent.
Research on baby boomer mental health confirms that this generation was raised under authoritarian parenting styles that are now linked to anxiety, low self-esteem, and social difficulties in adulthood. The Silent Generation parents who raised them prioritized obedience and composure. The boomers internalized those values and carried them into their own families.
The pattern is remarkably consistent across cultures. In Australia, the emotional template was the same: you don’t complain, you don’t explain, you get on with it. That generation took it literally. They got on with it so thoroughly that they forgot there was anything underneath the getting on.
Why their adult children find them so hard to reach
This is where it gets painful. Because the generation that grew up in the 1960s often raised children in the 1980s and 1990s, a period when emotional intelligence, self-expression, and psychological awareness were starting to enter the mainstream. Their children were given a vocabulary their parents never had. And now those children look at their parents and see people who seem locked behind glass.
The disconnect isn’t about love. It’s about language. Bowlby’s attachment theory tells us that emotional responsiveness, not just physical presence, is what creates secure bonds between people. A parent can be present every day and still feel emotionally unavailable if they never learned how to meet their child in the space where feelings live.
And for people raised in the 1960s, that space was explicitly off-limits. They were taught to stay out of it. They built their entire adult lives outside of it. And now their children are asking them to walk back in, and they don’t know how.
What this means for the next generation of parents
I think about this constantly as a father. My daughter is young enough that everything is still open. She cries and I hold her. She laughs and I’m there. There’s no filter yet between what she feels and what she shows.
The job is to not install one.
That’s harder than it sounds, because the instinct to say “you’re fine” when a child is upset runs deep. It was modelled for most of us. It goes back generations. Breaking that chain requires catching the reflex before it fires and choosing a different response: “I can see you’re upset. Tell me about it.”
This connects to something I’ve been sitting with from Buddhist philosophy. The idea that presence, real presence, isn’t about fixing someone’s experience. It’s about being willing to sit in it with them without needing it to change. I wrote about this in my book, Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego. The ego wants to solve. Presence just wants to stay.
For a generation trained to solve everything and feel nothing, that kind of presence is foreign. But it’s not impossible. Many adult children report watching their parents soften over the years. Not dramatically. Not in some made-for-television way. Just small moments where they say a little more than they used to. Where the shutters stay open half a second longer.
That’s not a small thing. For someone who spent sixty years being trained to keep everything behind closed doors, leaving one slightly ajar is an act of extraordinary courage.
And if you’re the adult child standing on the other side of that door, the most useful thing you can do isn’t push. It’s wait. And let them know that whatever comes through, whenever it comes, you can hold it.
