Crying Doesn’t Make You Weak: Unlearning Emotional Dismissiveness as Asian Americans

I still remember crying in the living room of my childhood home after being teased by my extended family members during holidays for being fat and ugly. My mother looked at me and said, “Don’t cry. How are you going to survive this harsh world if you cry every time someone says something unpleasant about you?”

If you’re a Millennial or Gen Z Asian American, chances are you've lived through some version of this: being told to toughen up, not to be so sensitive, or that other people “have it worse.” These weren’t just passing comments — there were the emotional framework many of us were raised in.

In Asian households shaped by survival, emotions weren’t always welcomed. Instead, they were treated like distractions, weakness, or worse — luxuries we couldn’t afford.

When Vulnerability Is Treated Like a Flaw

For many of us, crying wasn’t discouraged — it was almost punished. Have you ever heard, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”? And you had to silence your emotions to stay out of trouble. If you showed sadness, you were met with silence or dismissiveness. If you showed anger, you were scolded for being disrespectful or talking back to your parents. If you asked for comfort, you were told to stop being so sensitive.

Over time, the chronic exposure to this kind of emotional dismissiveness does a lot to a young person. You learn to mute your emotions. You anticipate emotional rejection before it even happens. You begin to believe that having emotions makes you weak, and needing others makes you a burden.

This patten, called emotional dismissiveness, does not end when childhood does. It stays with you.

It’s the reason why, even now, you might struggle to say, “I’m not okay.” Why you instinctively pull away when someone offers help. Why you keep people at arm’s length — not because you don’t crave connection, but because you were never taught how to feel safe in it.

How Emotional Dismissiveness Shows Up Later in Life

Let’s say you’re in a relationship. You get hurt by something your partner says. Nothing huge—maybe they brushed off something important to you. Instead of telling them, you convince yourself it’s not worth bringing up. You stew. You try to “get over it.” A week later, something small sets you off—and now you’re in a full-blown argument you didn’t see coming.

Sound familiar?

This isn’t immaturity. This is emotional suppression doing what it does: silencing things until they burst.

Or maybe it’s your friendships. You notice yourself pulling away when someone starts to show concern. You appreciate their check-ins, but they make you uncomfortable. You were raised to manage everything on your own—so letting someone in feels like failure, not relief.

And at work? You work hard. You’re competent. But when conflict arises, you freeze. You’re not sure how to assert yourself without either collapsing into guilt or spiraling into over-apologizing.

These patterns aren’t random. They’re what happens when emotions were never named, held, or modeled for you growing up.

The Long Shadow of “Tough Love” Parenting

For many of our parents, they were raised in environments shaped by war, colonization, political unrest, poverty, and immigration trauma. Vulnerability wasn’t useful in those environments—compliance and control were. So for them, emotional numbness became a survival skill that was eventually passed down to us as misguided love.

My grandmother grew up under Japanese rule on the Korean Peninsula throughout her formative years, and she lived through the Korean War as a young woman. About seven years after the war ended, my mother was born—the first-born daughter of six siblings—into extreme poverty.

My mother used to tell me how often her father (my grandfather) beat her growing up. She told me stories of being forced to walk two hours through the snow to get to school—even when the school was closed. My mother had to toughen up to survive the harshness of her own parents.

And she tried to teach me that same toughness—the kind she believed would protect me from the world. When I cried after being called fat and ugly by my uncles and aunts, she told me to toughen up—not out of malice, but out of fear. Out of misguided love. She hoped I wouldn’t be broken by a world that, in her eyes, was built to judge girls like me harshly.

Like me, many of my clients learned to self-soothe by silencing their emotions. When our sadness was compared to others’ suffering—cue the classic: “Children in Africa are starving. What are you complaining about?”—we learned not to trust our own emotional experiences. When anger was punished, we learned to internalize instead of speak up.

And now? That buried grief, anger, and loneliness—born out of silence—lives not just in our bodies, but in all of our relationships.

Unlearning Emotional Suppression is Slow — and Worth It

One client I worked with shared that her partner wanted her to open up more about her feelings. But during conflict, sharing her emotions felt nearly impossible—she would freeze, unable to process what she was feeling. Through our deeper work together, we uncovered why: in her family, uncomfortable feelings and conflicts were never acknowledged. They were swept under the rug. Talking about emotions simply wasn’t an option growing up.

Healing from chronic emotional dismissiveness doesn’t have to mean cutting ties with your parents. What it does mean is learning to recognize and name when internalized emotional avoidance shows up in your current relationships—and choosing not to silence yourself this time.

Sometimes, it’s as simple as not apologizing for crying or feeling emotional.

It looks like letting yourself say, “This hurt me,” without feeling guilty for “breaking” the relational peace—especially when that peace depended on you ignoring your own boundaries.

It’s pausing when you notice yourself shutting down and instead saying, “I’m overwhelmed. I need a moment.”

And healing continues when you begin to surround yourself with people—friends, coworkers, partners, or therapists—who make space for the parts of you that were never allowed to exist before.

You don’t have to be more put-together or less emotional to ask for support. You can reach out for help exactly as you are.

Dr. Wonbin Jung, LMFT

Ready to Start Healing from Chronic Emotional Dismissiveness?

At Center for Asian American Trauma, we offer individual and family therapy to help individuals and families heal from chronic emotional dismissiveness.

Keywords: Asian Mental Health; Emotional Dismissiveness