The High Cost of Hiding Your True Emotions | (#041) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Most people get emotional strength dead wrong. They think it’s being able to muscle through anything, keep it all together, push the feelings down, chin up, eyes forward, march on, like some kind of emotional robot tank. But that kind of emotional strength, it’s just a suit of armor, and if you wear it long enough, you forget what it’s like to feel anything inside.

In this new series, I want to offer something different, a way of being that most people never experience, because it’s hard and tough and terrifying at first, but it’s real and authentic, and it leads to a life that’s actually worth living. This is what I call open—not open, like spilling your secrets or trauma dumping on strangers, not open like hugging it out and sharing your childhood with your boss. I mean open like staying with the deepest parts of yourself, the grief, the rage, the shame, the loneliness, not flinching from them, not covering them up with work or porn, or podcasts or performance. [01:18.0]

Open means holding all of it, letting it be there, and letting you be there, and this kind of openness is not a weakness and it is not softness. It’s the beginning of real power, because here’s what happens when you don’t stay open—you lose the full spectrum of your emotional life. You lose the ability to love deeply. You disconnect from people. You live on autopilot, safe, sure, but numb, and eventually, that numbness starts to rot you from the inside.

But if you do stay open, if you learn how to hold that internal storm, then love becomes possible, real connection, joy that hits you in the chest, even leadership that inspires instead of intimidates. So, let’s walk into the storm, because it’s not the avoidance of pain that makes you strong. It’s your ability to stay with it and stay you all the way through. [02:14.2]

I’m David Tian. For over the past almost two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and success in their personal and professional lives. I’ve got three points in this episode, and here’s the first—avoiding vulnerability might look like strength on the outside, stable, tough, dependable, but it’s actually self-protection, and the cost is brutal.

Let me tell you about a client of mine. Let’s call him Sam. Sam’s a senior executive at a big firm, well-respected, doing really well at work, maybe making more in a quarter than most people would ever make in a year, and on paper, he was definitely winning, but emotionally, he was running on fumes. [02:53.2]

He came to me after his third relationship in a row ended the exact same way, same story, different woman. It would start off great, chemistry, attraction, laughs, but a few months or several months in, things got really heavy for him and that’s when Sam would pull back. He never yelled. He never argued. He was too cool-headed for that. He’d just start hiding behind logic, explanations. He’d explain away her concerns with spreadsheets in his own mind. He’d shut down anything that felt too messy or too raw, too human.

Why? Because deep down, Sam believed that opening up, especially with this sort of stuff that he thinks is scary, was a burden. He thought if he shared the loneliness or admitted that he felt like a fraud sometimes, or let her see the anxiety gnawing at him at 2:00 a.m. when he couldn’t sleep, then she would pull away, or worse, she’d pity him, and that, to Sam, felt unbearable, worse than death. So, instead, he smiled and he grinned through it, and he said, “I’m good.” He gave her great advice. He offered her solutions. He listened more than he talked and then he’d wonder why she left saying she felt alone all the time. [04:10.4]

This guy could run a billion-dollar operation, but he couldn’t feel safe enough to let someone see his sadness. Ironically, that’s what kept him from the one thing he wanted most, true intimacy, because here’s the truth—you can’t connect from behind a wall and you can’t connect with people that you’re not willing to be real with.

Of course, I get it, the prospect of connecting like that, real, raw, authentic, is terrifying to many achievers. Vulnerability means taking the armor off, putting your shield down. That’s not just hard. It can feel impossible, especially if you’ve spent your entire life earning respect by being the guy who got it all handled. But what was the cost? And that’s the question I asked Sam, because if you look strong on the outside but feel hollow and alone on the inside, is that really strength? [05:10.4]

If you’ve trained yourself to stay logical but lost access to joy or grief or awe, what’s the point of all that control? The deeper cost is emotional numbness. You stop feeling the hard stuff, yeah, but you also lose the good stuff, the belly laughs, the tears that come from being truly seen, the spark when someone says, “I feel that, too.”

Avoiding vulnerability doesn’t just keep out the pain, it keeps out all the good stuff, and the longer you stay armored up, the more you start to forget who you actually are underneath. Your whole sense of self gets wrapped around performance or some ideal of perfection. But it gets even worse—eventually, the people closest to you stop trying to reach you and they start walking on eggshells around you, and you don’t even know it, or they just walk away. [06:06.7]

So, if you’re feeling chronically alone, even in a room full of people, if your relationships keep plateauing or breaking down the moment they get too real or raw, if your partner says they can’t feel you anymore, then chances are your armor has become a cage.

It’s not just in romantic relationships. It bleeds into friendships and family relationships, even how you relate to yourself. You start coaching yourself instead of feeling and being with yourself. You analyze instead of listen-and this is what I call emotional dissociation, masked as maturity. But true maturity isn’t control. True maturity is presence, the ability to stay in the room with your emotions without flinching, the ability to stay open when every part of you wants to bolt. [07:03.9]

Now, get clear on this, I’m not saying you need to cry on cue or start trauma dumping at meetings. That’s performative vulnerability. That’s still a kind of control, just in disguise. What I’m talking about is internal. It’s the quiet courage to be with whatever is real inside you without rushing to fix it, explain it, edit it or handle it. It’s saying, “Yes, this sadness is here, and I’m still here, too.”

That’s what Sam had to learn, that being a true leader wasn’t about never needing help. It was about being brave enough to need it and not run from it, and when he finally let himself be truly seen, not by everyone, but by the right people, the people he chose, something amazing changed. His nervous system settled. His partner started leaning in again. Conversations got deeper. The sex got better, and he started feeling alive again, not just competent. [08:07.2]

So, if you’ve spent your whole life proving how strong you are, maybe now is the time to feel how strong you actually are underneath the armor, and that starts with staying open, not flinching, not running, but just breathing deeply and being with whatever is there.

Here’s the second point: most people have no clue what true vulnerability actually means. They think it’s crying in front of someone or trauma, dumping on a first date, or blurting out your insecurities like it’s some badge of honor and unconsciously and subtly asking the other person to caretake your feelings. That’s not vulnerability. That’s reactivity. That’s messiness without true presence. That’s trying to get rid of your feelings by throwing them at someone else. [08:58.4]

True vulnerability is far quieter or harder and far more powerful. Here’s the simplest way I define it. Vulnerability is staying open while feeling something that you usually run from. This could be anger or fear or shame, or grief, intense sadness, not exploding, not shutting down and not disappearing into the intellect, just staying there with it, breathing through it, letting it move through you and not needing to fix it, not needing anyone else to fix it, either. This is true presence.

Emotional presence isn’t flashy. It’s not emotional chaos and it’s not some dramatic display. It’s strength, the kind most people will never access because it requires you to feel without defending yourself, and that’s really tough, because when sadness arises, the instinct is to just collapse you. When anger comes up, the instincts to attack or shut off, and when shame appears, instincts to hide or numb or distract. But vulnerability is saying, “This is what I’m feeling, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying with it.” [10:16.0]

It’s like in the gym, anyone can throw weights around when they’re fresh, but real strength shows up when the bar feels really heavy, when your legs are shaking, when your mind is screaming to just drop it, but you stay with it. You don’t escape the burn. You meet it. Emotional vulnerability is the same way. You stay present with the burn of your sadness or the heat of your anger, or the squeeze of shame in your chest. You don’t collapse. You don’t fight it.You just hold, and that’s what makes you strong and stronger. Emotional power doesn’t come from control. It comes from capacity and capacity starts with openness. [10:57.0]

Many high-achievers struggle when it comes to managing their emotions or navigating their relationships, and they hit a wall when it comes to emotional mastery. Maybe you’ve noticed that stress, frustration or anger is seeping into your personal or professional life, or you feel disconnected from those you care about.

That’s where David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program comes in. It’s based on peer-reviewed, evidence-backed therapeutic methods to help you find happiness, love and real fulfillment. Learn how to break free from the emotional roller-coaster and start thriving in every area of your life. You can find out more at DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery. That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

One of my clients was in the middle of a brutal divorce when he came to me. He built a multi-million-dollar company, had two kids, was respected by pretty much everyone who knew him, and yet, in his marriage, he told me he felt like a ghost. [12:01.4]

When they’d argue, he would just freeze or he’d intellectualize it away, or he’d walk away, and he told me, “I didn’t want to make things worse.” What he really meant was “I didn’t want to feel helpless,” and that’s the thing, so many men confuse absence with peace. They confuse emotional distance with leadership. They think if they just stay calm while everyone else loses their minds, then they’re winning. But emotional absence is not peace. It’s not connection. It’s not strength. So, I taught him to stay open instead, not to fix, not to explain, not to argue better, but just stay with the feelings and stay with himself first.

The first time he actually said, “I feel scared right now,” during a fight with his wife, she just stopped dead in her tracks, and for the first time in years, they ended up having a truly honest conversation. It wasn’t magical. It didn’t solve everything all at once, but it was real and they both felt it, and that was a huge turning point in their marriage, that’s what vulnerability does. It breaks the cycle of defensiveness. [13:13.7]

It creates a space where something new can emerge, because when you’re vulnerable in the true, real sense, not collapsing, not hiding, not self-pitying, not offloading, but actually present with your feelings and honest about them, it invites the other person to do the same. It creates safety, not fake safety, the kind where everyone tiptoes around each other, but true emotional safety, the kind that comes from knowing you’re still here with me even when it gets most challenging.

Just to be clear, vulnerability isn’t passive. It’s not a weakness. It’s not breaking down and asking someone else or expecting someone else to rescue you. It’s owning your own emotional state without blaming anyone else for it. It’s saying, “This is what I am feeling. I don’t need you to fix it, but I’m not hiding it either,” and that requires strength, the kind of strength that you don’t build intellectually in your head. [14:10.4]

You build it by staying present, moment to moment, breath to breath, especially when everything in you wants to just check out. That’s the rep. That’s the set that you don’t bail on, and over time, your capacity will grow. Suddenly, you’re able to hold more space, stay open longer, communicate more clearly, connect more deeply, lead with more courage, not because you’re trying to be impressive, but because you’ve stopped running away from it. You stay there, stay in the pocket fully with yourself first, and then if they’re lucky, with others, too. [14:53.6]

Here’s the third and final point, and this is where everything we’ve been talking about so far actually turns into change—vulnerability isn’t a one-time decision. It’s a practice. Like strength training, like meditation, like any skill worth having, staying open requires repetition and it’s not glamorous. There’s no big applause when you do it right. There’s no instant reward.

But this practice of staying open in the toughest moments is how real emotional strength gets built, because if you don’t stay open to fear, you’ll be ruled by it from the shadows. Same with sadness. Same with grief. Same with shame. The feelings don’t disappear just because you suppress them. They just find sneakier ways to control you. They twist your decisions. They show up in your tone and the way you flinch from intimacy and the way you self-sabotage when things are finally going well. [15:52.3]

So, here’s the move: learn to stay in the pocket, open. Stay present when the intense sadness comes. Stay in your body when the fear creeps up. Stay open when the impulse is to run away. It helps to understand that these feelings, these emotional surges, they’re coming from parts of you. They’re not the whole of you, though. They are not your entire identity. There are younger parts of you, wounded parts and protective parts, and your job isn’t to shove them down or to lecture them or to make them go away. Your job is to make space for them, like a strong, loving parent would.

The mistake a lot of high-achievers make is thinking that these parts make them weak, like, Why am I still getting triggered? Why do I feel this way when I should know better? The truth is, everyone has parts. The question is whether you have the capacity to hold them, because if you don’t, then they’ll end up getting exiled in your internal system and once they’re exiled, they start to numb you out. You start to lose color in your emotional life. You become more stable, but also more distant, more detached, more bored. [17:11.8]

That’s when you wake up one day and realize that nothing really excites you anymore, not relationships, not your work, not even your wins, and that’s the cost of emotional exile. Worse than that, you start repeating toxic patterns without realizing it. Every relationship ends the same way. Every new level of success feels like a rerun, because those parts are still there beneath the surface, steering the ship in ways you don’t even notice.

So, here’s a simple framework to practice with. When a difficult feeling comes up, you have three choices: fight it, flee it, or feel it. Fight, flee, or feel. Only one leads to growth. Let’s say you’re in a conversation with your spouse. Something small sets you off. Maybe they forgot something you said earlier. Maybe they brushed off a concern. Whatever it is, you feel something rising, maybe frustration, maybe hurt, maybe a wave of sadness. [18:11.8]

Now, usually, here’s what happens to most people. You either shut down and say, “It’s fine,” even though it’s not, or you lash out with some snarky comment and then start to spiral. But there’s a third option—you ground yourself in the moment. You notice that there’s a part of you that’s hurt. You don’t push that part away. You breathe with it. You feel your feet on the floor and you stay with it, and maybe you say something like, “I’m noticing a wave of sadness coming up and I want to stay with it before I react.”

Okay, I get that this might sound really weird to most people. It might even sound impossible, but this naming it, this is emotional power. Staying open doesn’t mean you lose control. It means you stay connected to yourself and to the people who matter most to you. When you stay open, you stop operating from your defenses and you start leading from your presence. [19:08.3]

Yes, it will feel awkward at first, just like any other skill that you’re learning at the beginning. It will feel unnatural. It might not go perfectly, but over time, it will rewire your nervous system. You’ll start to notice your patterns earlier. You’ll start to create space between the trigger and the reaction, and you’ll start choosing responses that are true instead of just automatic.

The more you do this, the more others will feel it. Your spouse will feel safer with you. Your team will respect you more. Your friends will feel more connected, not because you’ve learned some new trick, but because you’re actually truly there. Vulnerability practiced in this way builds this kind of inner strength that doesn’t need to prove itself. It just is and that’s what makes it so rare, because most people never practice it. They keep fighting or fleeing, or numbing, another kind of fleeing. But you can choose something different: feel. [20:14.1]

The next time a hard emotion rises up, don’t flinch from it. Breathe deeply. Stay with it, and then name what’s real and let that moment be the rep, not because it solves everything, but because every rep adds up and you will build your capacity, and that capacity becomes your edge, not just in relationships, but in how you lead, how you love, how fully you live.

Okay, so let’s pull all this together. We started with this idea that avoiding vulnerability, numbing out, staying in control, being the strong one, always comes with a price, and for most people, that price is hidden from them. It’s the slow disconnection, the chronic loneliness, the feeling of being stuck in your head intellectually, even when you’re surrounded by people. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve achieved or how together your life looks from the outside; if you’re walled off from your own emotions, you’re walled off from the things that matter most to us. [21:15.6]

Then we looked at what vulnerability actually is. It’s not venting. It’s not chaos, but presence, staying open while you’re feeling the challenging stuff, holding space without running away, without collapsing and without blaming others or anything else. That’s where real strength begins, not in having no feelings, but in being able to be fully with them without getting swept away.

Finally, we talked about practice that vulnerability is a rep, one that you build over time, one that you can come back to in real-life moments, especially the messy emotional ones, because that’s the stuff that makes up a full, meaningful life, not the wins that you post on your Instagram, but the moments when you’re able to stay in it in the pocket, staying you and staying truly real. [22:08.8]

So, here’s my challenge to you—what would it look like to stay open to that emotion that you’ve been avoiding, the one that creeps in late at night when no one’s around, the one you talk yourself out of before it fully hits you, the one that you’ve labeled as weak or pointless or distraction? Could you instead breathe with it, stay in the room with it, stay in the pocket with it? Not to perform and not to fix, just to be with it as it is. That is the turning point.

If this episode stirred something in you, maybe a part of you felt exposed or curious or weirdly relieved, then make sure to stick around for the next episode because we’re going to go even deeper into how to build that emotional strength in real life. [22:57.7]

Thank you so much for listening. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it. If you liked it, hit a like or give a good rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. If you have any comments whatsoever, I’d love to get them. Leave a comment. Send me an email. I’d love to see it.

Thank you so much again for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [23:16.1]