For most of my career as a principal and then a superintendent, people used to compliment me on how calm I stayed under pressure. A parent screaming in my office, a board meeting going sideways, a call in the middle of the night about a student — I'd absorb it, respond evenly, and move to the next thing. I took that as a strength. It took me until my fifties to consider a less flattering explanation: I wasn't calm. I was numb. And I had gotten so good at it I couldn't always tell the difference anymore.
Here's how I've come to define the difference, after a lot of honest and uncomfortable reflection. Calm is what you feel when you've fully registered something difficult and processed your way to steadiness. Numb is what you feel when you've stopped registering it at all. Calm has access to the feeling underneath it. Numb has simply muted the channel. From the outside, in a school board meeting, they look identical. From the inside, over twenty years, they cost you completely different things.
How I Actually Found Out
My wife noticed it before I did, which is usually how these things go. She'd tell me about something painful — a friend's diagnosis, a hard conversation with one of our kids — and I'd respond with something practical and steady and, she told me once, faintly hollow. "You handle everything," she said, "but I'm not sure you feel anything anymore." I remember being defensive about it in the moment and thinking about it for years afterward.
What finally cracked it open wasn't a school crisis. It was retirement. When the job that had absorbed thirty years of adrenaline and constant problem-solving ended, I expected relief. Instead I found a strange, disorienting quiet — and underneath the quiet, feelings I hadn't fully processed in decades started surfacing with no warning. Grief about my own father that I thought I'd dealt with. Old resentments from early in my career that I thought I'd let go of. They hadn't gone anywhere. I'd just gotten remarkably efficient at not feeling them while I was busy.
"How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?" — Psalm 13:1 (NIV)
What strikes me about the Psalms now is how loud they are. David doesn't manage his emotions into a tidy, professional calm before bringing them to God. He brings the rawest version first — the accusation, the "how long," the fear — and lets the resolution come later, sometimes in the very same psalm, sometimes not until the next one. The Psalms model something I'd never learned in thirty years of school administration: that naming the feeling loudly is not the opposite of faith. It's often the beginning of it.
What the Research Calls It
There's a clinical term for a milder version of what I'm describing: alexithymia, literally "no words for emotion" — a reduced capacity to identify and describe your own internal states. It's not the same as being cold-hearted. Plenty of people with high alexithymia care deeply about others; they simply lack the internal vocabulary to locate and name what they themselves are feeling in the moment it's happening. Researchers studying high-stress professions — the military, emergency medicine, school leadership — have found that chronic occupational stress correlates with exactly this kind of emotional flattening over time. It's not a character flaw. It's closer to a callus. You develop it because the environment rewards you for not feeling things in real time, and eventually the callus doesn't come off just because the job did.
The antidote researchers point to isn't more willpower. It's what's called affect labeling — the simple, specific act of naming an emotion in words, which multiple fMRI studies show measurably reduces amygdala activity in real time. Something as small as silently saying "I feel afraid" instead of "I'm fine" changes what's happening in the brain, not just what's happening on the surface.
Let's Be Honest About the Real Cost
Here's what I don't love admitting: the numbness that made me an effective administrator for thirty years is the same numbness that made me a less present husband and father than I could have been for at least a decade of it. I wasn't a bad man. I was a well-defended one. And nobody around a well-defended man tends to say so out loud, because from the outside it looks exactly like strength.
I don't think the answer is becoming a person who falls apart at every hard thing. I've still got a job to do most days, and steadiness matters. But I've stopped confusing the ability to function through a feeling with the act of actually having felt it. Those are different disciplines now, and I practice both on purpose.
What I Actually Do Now
I name the feeling out loud before I problem-solve it. Even one sentence — "I'm angry about this" or "this scares me" — spoken or written before I move to what to do about it.
I check in with my body, not just my calendar. A tight jaw or shallow breath is often the first honest report I get, well before my mind is willing to admit anything is wrong.
I stopped treating "I'm fine" as a complete sentence — with my wife, with my kids, and in my own journal. It's a door closing, not an answer, and I try to notice myself doing it.
I spent twenty years being complimented for my calm. I'm still working out how much of it was real and how much was a well-earned callus. What I know now is that the goal was never to stop feeling things efficiently. It was to actually feel them, and still find my way to steady.
Where in your life have you been praised for staying calm, when what was actually happening was that you'd stopped letting yourself feel it at all?