Three years into retirement, I still catch myself doing it. Someone delivers difficult news, and my face stays perfectly still. My breathing doesn’t change. My hands rest where they were. Twenty-two years on the bench in Atlanta trained this into me so thoroughly that even now, sitting in my kitchen in Decatur with no one to perform composure for, the stillness comes first. The feeling comes later, sometimes hours later, when I’m walking the dog or staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. I am not, by any measure, a person who doesn’t care. I am a person who learned, in the most high-stakes environment imaginable, that showing it could compromise everything.
This confusion between calm and indifference follows millions of people through their lives, shaping how they are perceived in relationships, workplaces, and families. The quiet ones, the composed ones, the people who don’t flinch. They are often the most deeply feeling people in any room. And the distance between what they show and what they carry is wider than most people imagine.
The Misreading of Stillness
We tend to trust our eyes when it comes to emotion. If someone cries, they must be hurting. If someone rages, they must be angry. If someone is still, they must not feel much. This is a deeply flawed heuristic, but it governs how we interpret nearly everyone around us.
The psychological literature on emotion regulation reveals a far more complicated picture. As one analysis in Psychology Today explores, emotion regulation is often profoundly misunderstood. Research identifies two primary strategies: cognitive reappraisal (reframing how we think about a situation) and expressive suppression (inhibiting the outward display of emotion). These are fundamentally different processes, yet to an observer, they can look identical. The still face. The even voice. The steady hands.
Expressive suppression, in particular, does not mean the emotion is absent. It means the person has learned, for any number of reasons, not to let it show. The feeling is fully present, often intensely so. It simply has no outward expression.
Where the Habit Forms
I think about a woman who stood in my courtroom years ago, a defendant in a domestic violence case where she was the victim-turned-accused. The prosecution argued she had retaliated with excessive force. She stood through the entire proceeding with an expression you might describe as blank. Flat. The jurors watched her face and I could see some of them drawing conclusions from it. She doesn’t seem upset. She doesn’t seem scared. She doesn’t seem like a woman who was beaten for six years.
But I had seen that face before. Hundreds of times. It belongs to people who grew up in environments where displaying emotion was dangerous. Where crying earned you more punishment. Where flinching made things worse. Where the safest thing to do when the world was falling apart was to become very, very still.
This is not a rare adaptation. Children raised in volatile homes, unpredictable environments, or cultures where emotional restraint is expected don’t just “hold back” their feelings temporarily. They develop deeply ingrained neurological and behavioral patterns around emotional display. A comprehensive review published in Frontiers in Psychology examining cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression confirmed what I witnessed for two decades on the bench: suppression, while effective at masking outward emotional expression, does not actually reduce the intensity of internal emotional experience. The suppression becomes automatic, a reflex rather than a choice. The emotion persists. The body registers it. The person simply doesn’t show you.
The Cost of Composure
There is a price for this kind of stillness, and it compounds over time.
A groundbreaking neuroimaging study published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging found something that stopped me cold when I read it. Researchers at Columbia University, led by J. John Mann, MD, studied 82 participants with major depressive disorder. They discovered that depressed individuals who reflexively engaged emotion regulation when confronted with negative memories experienced greater increases in suicidal thoughts during day-to-day stressful events. The very mechanism that was supposed to protect them was, in some circumstances, making things worse.
Co-first author Noam Schneck, PhD, noted that the use of neural decoding allowed the research team to identify spontaneous emotion regulation, a mental process that had previously been elusive to capture. The implication is striking: when suppression becomes automatic, when it fires without conscious choice, it can actually reduce a person’s tolerance for distress rather than increase it.
This is the paradox that people who confuse calm with indifference rarely grasp. The calm person may not be handling things better. They may be handling things in the only way they ever learned, and that way may be quietly eroding them.
What Others See Versus What Is Real
I watched a man once sit perfectly composed while I sentenced him to ten years. His face betrayed nothing. His posture was upright. His voice, when he addressed the court, was measured. Several people in the gallery later described him as cold. A reporter wrote that he “showed no remorse.”
I will never know what that man was feeling. But I know what composure under that kind of pressure looks like from the inside, because I have spoken to enough people in post-sentencing conferences and legal clinics to understand that stillness under extreme duress is rarely a sign of emptiness. It is often a sign of overwhelming feeling that has nowhere safe to go.
The social consequences of this misreading are significant. When we see someone who doesn’t react, we often withdraw our empathy. We offer less support. We assume they’re fine. In relationships, partners of emotionally suppressive individuals frequently report feeling shut out, disconnected, unseen. But the suppressive partner often experiences the opposite: they feel everything, they simply can’t bridge the gap between internal experience and outward expression.
This dynamic has been explored in depth in relation to social performance, where the loneliest people in a room are sometimes the most socially skilled because they learned to perform connection rather than feel it. The skill of appearing fine, of reading the room, of saying the right thing, can coexist perfectly with profound internal isolation.
The Cultural Dimension
We cannot discuss this pattern honestly without acknowledging that emotional suppression is not universally maladaptive. Research has found that the social consequences of expressive suppression vary meaningfully across cultures. In contexts where emotional restraint is valued, suppression does not carry the same interpersonal costs it does in cultures that prize emotional expressiveness.
This matters because the Western therapeutic framework often treats suppression as inherently problematic. And in many cases, chronic suppression does correlate with poorer well-being. But for individuals from cultures, families, or professions where restraint is expected, the judgment that they “should” be more expressive can feel like another form of erasure. You are told your pain doesn’t count because you carry it quietly.
I saw this collide with the legal system in a way I have never forgotten. A man in his seventies, a retired mechanic from Thomasville, Georgia, came before me in a housing dispute. His landlord had illegally evicted him, changed the locks while he was at a doctor’s appointment, put his belongings on the curb in the rain. Family photographs. His late wife’s things. Forty years of a life left on a wet sidewalk. When he testified, he spoke in a steady, measured voice. He folded his hands. He said “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am.” A younger attorney on the opposing side tried to argue that the eviction hadn’t caused significant emotional distress, pointing to the man’s own demeanor as evidence. Look at him, the implication went. He’s fine.
He was not fine. I knew it because I had grown up around men like him, Black men who came of age in the Jim Crow South, who had learned before they could read that showing pain in front of white authority was not just unsafe but potentially lethal. His composure was not evidence of indifference. It was the product of a lifetime spent in a country that punished his emotions, and now that same composure was being used against him in a court of law. I ruled in his favor. But I have thought about how many times, in how many courtrooms, that quiet dignity was mistaken for absence of harm.
Regulation Versus Repression
The distinction between healthy regulation and damaging repression is crucial, and it is one that even mental health professionals sometimes blur. Healthy emotion regulation involves flexibility: being able to choose, in a given moment, whether to reappraise, suppress, express, or sit with an emotion. As Forbes has noted in examining workplace emotion dynamics, regulation builds resilience while repression creates brittleness. The person who chooses calm has options. The person who can only be calm is trapped.
A study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that mindfulness practices were significantly associated with more adaptive emotion regulation, lower depression, and reduced anxiety, suggesting that the pathway out of chronic suppression isn’t necessarily learning to be more visibly emotional. It is learning to be more aware of what you feel without reflexively shutting it down. The goal is not to become someone who weeps publicly or erupts in anger. The goal is to have the internal experience of one’s own emotions rather than to bypass it entirely. Many people who appear calm under pressure are, in fact, bypassing. The emotion registers, gets suppressed before it fully forms, and resurfaces later as insomnia, irritability, physical pain, or a kind of pervasive numbness.
Seeing the People Who Don’t Show
I spent over two decades watching people on the worst days of their lives. Defendants, victims, witnesses, family members in the gallery. I became, by necessity, unnervingly good at reading what people were trying not to show. A muscle in the jaw. A brief closing of the eyes that lasted half a second too long. Hands gripping the chair just slightly too hard.
What I learned is that the people who show the least are often carrying the most. Not always. There are, of course, people whose composure reflects genuine equanimity, a kind of peace with whatever is happening. But far more often, particularly in high-stress situations, the composed face is a mask forged in circumstances where vulnerability was punished.
The people who observe quietly without revealing themselves often share traits with the people I’m describing here: high sensitivity, deep processing, a vigilance born of early experiences that taught them the world was not safe for their emotions.
If you recognize yourself in any of this, I want you to know something. Your calm is not coldness. Your stillness is not indifference. The fact that you learned to contain yourself in order to survive is a testament to your resourcefulness, not evidence of your deficiency.
And if you recognize someone else in this description, consider adjusting your lens. The colleague who never seems rattled may be the one who needs someone to ask how they’re doing. The partner who doesn’t cry may be the one drowning. The parent who stays steady through every crisis may be the one who has never felt safe enough to fall apart.
Cameron S. Carter, MD, editor-in-chief of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, put it well when he observed that reflexively engaging emotion regulation in the face of unexpected stressors may not be helpful or effective in all circumstances. Flexibility, not rigidity, is the marker of psychological health.
The calm ones deserve to be seen. Not praised for their composure. Not admired for their unflappability. Seen. Because behind the steady face is almost always a person who once learned, in a moment that mattered terribly, that showing what they felt was not safe. And they have been honoring that lesson ever since, long past the point where it serves them.
I know this because I am one of them. And after sixty-three years, I am still learning, slowly, that the stillness I mastered in service of survival is not the same thing as peace. Some mornings now, in the kitchen in Decatur, when difficult news arrives and the old reflex locks everything down, I make myself pause. Not to perform feeling. Not to force tears. Just to sit with the fact that the courtroom is empty, that no jury is watching, that the woman who needed to be unreadable in order to be credible can finally afford to simply be. It is the hardest verdict I have ever tried to reach, and I am still deliberating.
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