“I refuse to carry the burden of having to hide my emotions.”
Victor Wembanyama is a basketball player for the San Antonio Spurs, considered one of the most exciting young players in decades. He is so talented, that many have wondered if he is going to be the greatest of all time, and the best young player since LeBron James.
Historically, however, many people have commented negatively on his openness about his mental and emotional health, referring to him as “soft.”
In an interview with journalist Maxime Aubin, the 21-year-old San Antonio Spurs center addressed the criticism directly, with a quote that resonated with those in the mental health world. He stated:
“I refuse to carry the burden of having to hide my emotions.”
This quote addresses, whether intentionally or unintentionally, a truth about mental health that many people fail to understand. Holding back your emotions, and trying to hide how you’re feeling, often makes things worse.
About the Emotional Burden of Holding it All Inside
Emotional suppression is not the same thing as emotional control. That distinction gets lost constantly, and it matters when it comes to addressing the challenges associated with suppressing how you feel.
Emotional control is the capacity to feel something and make a thoughtful choice about how and when to respond. It’s a skill, and a genuinely useful one, that helps people take control over how they feel and make decisions on how to reach and respond.
Emotional suppression is something different. Emotional suppression is the ongoing, habitual effort to prevent emotions from being felt or expressed at all. Rather than managing the emotions, the person conceals them, and tries to hold it all inside without letting it show on the outside.
The concealment is the burden, and what makes it so difficult to recognize is that it doesn’t feel like something you’re doing. After enough years of practice, it feels like who you are. The person who doesn’t get rattled. The one who keeps it together. The one everyone describes as strong.
What nobody sees is what it costs to stay that way.
Suppression Doesn’t Make Emotions Smaller
One of the most consistent findings in emotion research is that suppression doesn’t reduce the intensity of an emotion — it amplifies it. The harder you work to not feel something, the more space it takes up. Most people have experienced this directly even if they’ve never named it: the thought you can’t stop having precisely because you’re trying not to have it, the feeling that grows heavier the longer you refuse to acknowledge it.
The physiological reality is just as clear. When an emotion arises, the body responds — heart rate, cortisol, muscle tension, nervous system activation. When that emotion is suppressed, the behavioral expression stops but the physiological response does not. The body stays activated beneath the surface, running without resolution.
Over time, that accumulates in ways that are difficult to ignore:
- Elevated blood pressure and dysregulated stress hormones that don’t return to baseline the way they should.
- Sleep that doesn’t fully restore because the nervous system never fully settles.
- A persistent low-grade tension that most people have lived with long enough that they’ve stopped recognizing it as something abnormal.
- Fatigue that isn’t explained by how much someone is doing — it’s explained by how much they’re holding.
The body experiences all the challenges that the mind is trying to hide away, often in an amplified way. Because suppression keeps the emotions inside, you continue to experience these symptoms long after.
What It Does to the People Around You
The relational cost of chronic suppression is often what people feel most before they can name what’s causing it.
Closeness requires access. Not unlimited access — not sharing every thought with every person — but genuine presence. The sense that the person in front of you is actually there, that what they’re saying connects to what they’re experiencing. When suppression creates a sustained gap between inner experience and outer expression, the people closest to the suppressor often feel it as distance they can’t explain.
This comes up regularly in couples counseling. One partner feels disconnected from the other. Communication is functional, there’s no significant conflict, but the emotional intimacy isn’t there. The suppressing partner is often genuinely confused — they’ve been holding everything together, managing the household, showing up. What they haven’t been doing is letting their partner in. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where relationships quietly erode.
The same dynamic plays out in friendships that never get past a certain depth, in family relationships that feel obligatory rather than nourishing, and in the experience of moving through life without ever quite feeling known.
Where the Pattern Comes From
Nobody chooses this consciously. Suppression develops in response to environments that made it the safer or more rewarded option.
For many people it starts early — in families where emotions weren’t acknowledged, where distress was met with dismissal or discomfort, where being visibly upset created more problems than it solved. The child who learns that their feelings are too much, or simply inconvenient, learns to manage them privately. That adaptation made sense in the environment that produced it. The difficulty is that it rarely stays contained to that environment.
It gets reinforced everywhere else. Men are told throughout their lives that emotional visibility is weakness. Women are told that certain emotions — anger especially, but also grief expressed too fully, or needs stated too clearly — are unattractive, inappropriate, or destabilizing. Workplaces reward composure and treat emotional reactivity as a liability. The message arrives from enough directions, often enough, that most people stop questioning it entirely.
By the time someone is sitting across from a therapist, the suppression has usually been running for so long that it no longer feels like a coping strategy. It feels like a personality.
What Stops Working First
Suppression is a functional short-term strategy. Over the long term, what it costs tends to surface in predictable places.
- Anxiety is one of the most common — the low-level, pervasive kind that doesn’t attach clearly to any single thing. A nervous system that has been chronically activated without resolution doesn’t easily return to baseline. The anxiety that results often gets treated as its own problem, separate from the suppression that’s been feeding it for years.
- Depression is another. There is a particular kind of flatness that develops in people who have spent a long time not feeling — or performing not-feeling — that goes beyond sadness into a kind of emotional numbness. The emotions didn’t go anywhere. They just stopped being accessible.
- Relationship difficulties follow a similar pattern. Codependency, emotional unavailability, anger that surfaces in disproportionate ways — these are often downstream effects of suppression that has run without interruption for too long.
- Trauma that has been managed through suppression rather than processed tends to stay alive in the nervous system in ways that eventually demand attention. EMDR and other trauma-informed approaches work specifically with what suppression leaves behind — the stored emotional and physiological material that talking around something never reaches.
The burden can be set down. That’s not a simple process for most people, and it doesn’t happen through willpower or intention alone. Decades of practiced concealment don’t dissolve because someone decided to be more open.
What it typically requires is a relationship in which the work of lowering that guard can happen gradually and safely — where what comes up when the hiding stops can be met with something other than judgment or discomfort. That’s what therapy is built to provide.
If you’ve been carrying this for a long time — if you recognized something in Wembanyama’s words that you’ve never quite had language for — Heart in Mind Psychotherapy is here. Call (516) 430-8362 or reach out through the contact page to connect with a therapist in Melville or via telehealth anywhere on Long Island.
