Someone asked me how I was doing last March - not a stranger, not a cashier, but a close friend sitting across from me at a restaurant - and I said “I’m good, honestly” with such steady warmth in my voice that she moved on to another topic.

I wasn’t lying. That’s the part that still unsettles me.

I genuinely believed I was fine. My voice was calm. My face was relaxed. My answer came so quickly and so smoothly that there was no gap for either of us to question it. Three hours later, I was sitting in my car in a grocery store parking lot with tears running down my face and absolutely no idea why.

I called my sister. She asked what happened. And I said the truest thing I’d said all day: “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

It took me months to connect that moment to a phrase I must have heard a thousand times growing up. A phrase delivered with love, with a warm hand on my back, with genuine parental confidence. A phrase that was never meant to hurt me and did anyway.

“You’re fine. Get up. You’re okay.”

If any of this sounds familiar, I want to walk through what I’ve learned about how those words - spoken with nothing but good intention - can quietly disconnect a person from themselves for decades.

1. The original scene is always smaller than you’d expect

Picture a child - maybe four, maybe six - who trips on a sidewalk. The knees hit concrete. The palms sting. The tears start, not dramatically but genuinely, the way a small body processes sudden pain.

Before the child has even had time to decide whether this hurts or not, a parent is there. Smiling. Scooping. Brushing off the gravel with quick hands and saying, “You’re fine, you’re fine, get up, you’re okay.”

The parent is not angry. The parent is not cold. The tone is bright and reassuring, and the child is on their feet again within seconds, blinking, swallowing whatever was rising in their throat.

This is not a trauma scene. Nobody would film this and call it harmful. It looks like good parenting - attentive, swift, optimistic. The child stops crying. The parent feels effective. And a tiny, almost imperceptible lesson lands in the child’s nervous system: what you were about to feel was unnecessary.

2. It was never cruelty - it was a generation’s definition of love

This is important to say clearly, because the people who grew up this way often resist examining it. It feels disloyal. It feels ungrateful.

Your parent was not trying to silence you. They were trying to protect you from what they believed was an overreaction. They grew up in a world where resilience meant not dwelling, where emotional sturdiness was the highest compliment a person could receive, where “she never complains” was said at funerals like a badge of honor.

They handed you a coping strategy that had worked for them - or at least appeared to. Brush it off. Keep moving. Don’t let it become a thing.

A 2019 study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry found that well-meaning emotional dismissal - even when delivered with warmth - can disrupt a child’s developing capacity for interoceptive awareness, which is the ability to accurately read internal body signals like hunger, fatigue, and emotional distress. The researchers noted that the impact was not about parental intent but about the pattern’s repetition.

Your parents loved you. And the way they loved you taught you to abandon yourself. Both of these things are true at the same time.

3. The child learns to override their own signals

Here is what happens when “you’re fine” is repeated enough times during the years when your brain is still learning how to interpret its own data.

The body sends a signal: this hurts. The brain - trained by a thousand cheerful corrections - responds: no, it doesn’t. And after enough repetitions, the brain wins. Not occasionally. Permanently.

You stop registering the hurt in real time. The signal still fires, but the part of you that would have received it, processed it, and said “I need something right now” goes quiet. Not because it’s broken. Because it learned that speaking up would be met with a gentle but firm correction.

Dr. Gabor Mate has written extensively about how children who learn to suppress emotional responses in order to maintain attachment with their caregivers develop what he calls a disconnection from the self. The child is not choosing to ignore their feelings. The child is adapting to survive a relationship they cannot afford to lose. By the time they are old enough to have a choice, the override is automatic.

4. The adult version is so smooth that nobody questions it

You know this woman. You might be this woman.

She answers “how are you?” before the question mark has fully landed. “Good! Busy, but good.” Her voice is warm. Her smile is real - or real enough that it doesn’t matter. She is so practiced at being fine that she has no tells.

Ask her to go deeper. Say, “No, really - how are you?” Watch what happens. There is a flicker. A half-second where something crosses her face that she cannot name and does not understand. Then the smile returns, a little wider, and she says, “Honestly, I’m great. A little tired, but great.”

She is not lying to you. She is telling you exactly what her system is reporting. The dashboard says everything is normal. The dashboard has been miscalibrated since 1983.

The exhaustion she feels is labeled “busy.” The loneliness is labeled “independence.” The grief that surfaces at odd moments - a song on the radio, a stranger being kind to their child in a store - is labeled “being sensitive today.”

She has a name for everything she feels, and none of the names are accurate.

5. Her radar for everyone else’s pain is flawless

This is the asymmetry that will break your heart if you recognize it.

She can walk into a room and tell you within thirty seconds who is struggling. She notices the friend who laughed a beat too late. She catches the coworker whose “fine” had a different texture today. She is the one people call when they need to be seen, because she sees everyone with an almost supernatural clarity.

Everyone except herself.

Research on alexithymia - difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotions - published in a 2021 issue of Frontiers in Psychology found that individuals with high alexithymia traits often displayed above-average cognitive empathy for others. They could read the room with precision. They just couldn’t read themselves. The researchers suggested this pattern frequently traced back to early relational environments where the child’s role was to attune to the caregiver’s emotional state rather than their own.

She learned, very young, that the way to stay safe was to track other people’s feelings and manage her own by pretending they didn’t exist. She became extraordinary at the first task. She lost the ability to perform the second.

6. The feelings don’t disappear - they go underground

You cannot actually cancel an emotion. You can refuse to acknowledge it. You can reroute it. You can rename it. But the body keeps its own books.

The sadness she didn’t process at seven becomes the tension in her shoulders at thirty-five. The anger she couldn’t express at twelve becomes the migraine at forty. The grief she swallowed at twenty-two becomes the insomnia at forty-six that no supplement or sleep hygiene practice can touch.

Her body has been trying to deliver a message for decades. Every time it knocks, her brain answers the door and says, “Nobody’s home.”

Until one day, the body stops knocking and kicks the door down. That’s the parking lot. That’s the sobbing that arrives without a story attached. That’s the tears that feel like they belong to someone else, because in a way they do - they belong to the version of her who was never allowed to finish crying.

7. The parking lot is not a breakdown - it is a breakthrough

I want to be very specific about this, because if you have had that moment - the one where you are sitting in your car after buying paper towels and milk and suddenly you cannot breathe and you cannot stop crying and you cannot explain why - you probably labeled it as something going wrong.

It was something going right.

Your body overrode the instruction. After decades of being told “you’re fine” - first by a parent, then by yourself - your nervous system finally had enough stored, unprocessed feeling that it bypassed the gatekeeper entirely.

You were not falling apart. You were thawing. You were feeling, perhaps for the first time in thirty years, without editing the feeling before it reached you.

That moment in the parking lot is not the end of something. It is the very beginning of something. It is your body saying, in the only language it has left: I have been trying to reach you.

8. Learning to ask yourself the question nobody asked you

The way back is not dramatic. It is not a confrontation with your parents or a cathartic scream into a pillow, though those things have their place.

The way back is small. It is pausing before you answer “how are you?” - not for the other person’s benefit, but for your own. It is sitting with the question for two full seconds and noticing what actually comes up before your autopilot kicks in.

It is learning to ask yourself, gently and without judgment: am I fine, or am I performing fine?

You may not be able to tell the difference at first. That’s okay. The signals have been jammed for a long time, and recalibrating them is slow, unglamorous work. Some days you will check in with yourself and hear nothing. Some days you will hear everything at once and not know what to do with it.

Both of those days count. Both of those days are you rebuilding a connection that was interrupted before you had the language to protest.

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If you grew up being told you were fine before you had finished deciding whether you were, I want you to know something.

You were not too sensitive. You were not making a big deal out of nothing. You were a child, having a feeling, and the feeling was real even if the adults around you didn’t have the tools to let it be real.

The fact that you learned to override yourself so completely is not a flaw. It is proof of how adaptive you were, how brilliant your young mind was at reading what the environment required and delivering it. You became the easiest child. The low-maintenance friend. The person nobody worries about.

But someone should have worried about you. And if nobody did, you are allowed to start now.

The next time you feel tears arrive with no explanation, don’t fight them. Don’t explain them. Don’t apologize for them. Just let them be what they are - a conversation your body has been trying to have with you for a very long time.

You are not falling apart. You are finally letting yourself feel what was always there.

And that is not a breakdown. That is the bravest thing you have done in years.