Emily Gould’s essay in The Cut begins on a couch, watching the Never Have I Ever finale with her 11-year-old son, her husband’s eyes red beside her, and her own eyes dry. Not a clench in her chest, not a pang, not the incipient burning behind the eye sockets that precedes a cry. By that point she had not cried in more than three years.
The absence had first registered at the memorial service of a childhood friend, where she sat through a rabbi’s sobbing and felt something worse than nothing — “a calcified layer around where feeling should have been.” It recurred at a late-night fight with her husband, at a fifth-grade graduation where the valedictorian thanked the teachers who supported her through chemo, at Pixar films and Call the Midwife. She was not, she was fairly sure, a monster. She wanted back the physical aftermath of crying: sinuses that felt like she had been swimming in the ocean, the boneless relief of being drained and finally able to rest. She had had access to that for the first 41 years of her life.
Emotional blunting is a known cost, not a mystery
The essay’s most useful contribution is to treat the condition as ordinary. Being unable to cry is common, Gould writes, and the causes are largely understood: patients who lower doses of serotonin-altering drugs sometimes start crying again, and patients who withdraw from them completely always do. The remaining causes — emotional trauma, avoidant personality style, depression, and the social stigma around showing emotion — are the ones that resist a fix.
The prevalence figures she collects are self-reported and messy: women report crying about four times a month, men from once every two months to about once a month, with wide variation and little data beyond a binary gender split. When she asked the people around her, women almost always remembered crying that day or that week. Most men could not remember at all. On Reddit, strangers who have not cried in years trade tearjerkers — Cat Stevens, covers of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a playlist of Phoebe Bridgers and Sufjan Stevens — and someone eventually replies: “If none of these work, then maybe you don’t really need to cry?”
Six months of trying
Because Gould had been diagnosed with bipolar I at 41 and was on a regimen that kept her between mania and a depression she describes as “livable,” the project required permission. She calls it getting “the blessings” of her psychiatrist, B., and her therapist, L., both of whom knew what “going sideways” would mean — they had first met her three years earlier, at the nadir of her worst depression, when she could barely move a facial muscle on Zoom. The plan was to reduce the dose of Pristiq, an SNRI that causes some patients to stop crying.
The depression did not return. She felt dizzy for two days, then nothing, maybe “the tiniest bit more tender,” as if the casing around her feelings had softened just slightly. L. pushed on the premise rather than the plan, asking what crying would actually mean — and observing that Gould had no thesis beyond “I haven’t cried, and I want to,” because she had understood crying “as a goal and also something to write about.”
Then came the unorthodox layer, which the essay declines to mock or defend: yin yoga for the hips that store emotions, a psychic who suggested asking ancestors for help (they did not oblige), and a shaman in a Tribeca office who arranged twigs, shells, bones and polished crystals on Gould’s stomach and chest while hovering her hands and making whoosh-whoosh sounds. Gould felt an invisible hand grip her lower abdomen, press into her diaphragm, force the air out of her lungs and travel up through the crown of her head. She went home sore and was advised to drink water. She did not cry that day, or the next.
The near-miss, and what it exposed
Three days later, in couples therapy, she almost got there. The usual fight about whether to buy an apartment collided with a professional rival’s instant bestseller, and Gould talked until she ran out of words — that she had failed her family financially, that her husband should have left her when he had the chance, that she deserved nothing. She buried her face in her hands and dry-sobbed. Her husband closed the laptop: “Are you okay? Did you almost cry?” Then: “I didn’t know you felt that way.” She told him, honestly, that she hadn’t known either.
One consequence she names without flattering herself: crying had been “my biggest weapon, my get out of jail free card,” a way to end any fight by forcing him to console her. Without it, they were left to work things out in words.
EMDR, and the ending that isn’t one
By spring, B. and L. agreed she had reduced the antidepressant as far as was safe, and that Pristiq was probably making crying harder without being the main culprit. Gould’s attention turned to the possibility of capital-T Trauma, and to EMDR — a therapy that involves recounting the worst moments while the brain is stimulated bilaterally with eye movements, tapping or tones. The psychiatrists she has asked are ambivalent about whether it works neurologically while conceding that it helps, which she compares to how some physicians regard acupuncture.
She found a therapist on Zocdoc within a mile of her office, then discovered that the first eight sessions were intake. Two months of “speedrunning everything bad that has ever happened to me, and every bad thing I’ve ever done,” followed by Tuesday-night tacos: No wonder I can’t cry; where would I find the time? Her therapist eventually handed her a sheet mapping her issues into six networks, ending with “Vulnerability/Emotional Control,” which Gould identifies as the final boss.
The essay does not end with the crying scene she had imagined, and that is the point. She is no longer in a rush: “I’m beginning to come to terms with the idea that my body — and my brain, which is not separate from my body — is protecting me from something I’m not ready to feel and that the medication I’m on is keeping me safe.” She expects recurrence — mania followed by depression “the way a high tide is followed by a low tide” — and notes that next time she will at least know what is happening. Her friend K., a therapist who found her own suicidal ideation during a traumatic birth to be simply an unbearable pain she wanted stopped, supplied the last word: “You’ll cry again when you believe that once you start, you’ll be able to stop.”
Content note: the essay describes a suicide attempt, a psychiatric hospitalization and a manic episode in explicit detail. Gould’s medication changes were made under clinical supervision; nothing here is guidance for anyone else’s.
Read the full story at The Cut.