When Talking About It Makes Things Worse
You have probably watched your son shut down when pressed to open up. You may also have watched your daughter spend two hours on her phone with a close friend about the same problem she discussed yesterday, and the day before, and leave the call more distressed than she began it. Both children are telling you something. The question is whether you know how to read it.
The advice now given to parents, and to young people themselves, points in one direction. Express your feelings. Share your problems. Be vulnerable with your friends. Your son’s reluctance is treated as the pathology; your daughter’s willingness to talk as the model. More talking is presented as the cure. The evidence is considerably more complicated than that.
Therapy helps. Professional support for serious distress is not in dispute here. The argument is narrower: peer-level problem talk has been elevated into a cultural virtue, independent of whether it actually works. For many young people, it doesn’t. For some, it makes things measurably worse.
Start with the terminology, because the distinctions matter. Venting is the unstructured expression of frustration or distress to a peer, without any expectation of change. Co-rumination is something more specific: repeatedly discussing and revisiting the same problem, speculating about causes, dwelling on the feelings attached to it. Neither is the same as help-seeking properly understood, which involves talking to a professional or trusted figure with the aim of reaching new understanding or a course of action. Much of what passes for emotional openness in the present therapeutic climate is co-rumination dressed as support.
The psychologist Amanda Rose first identified and named co-rumination in 2002, and the finding at the heart of her work is worth thinking about. Co-rumination simultaneously predicts two things: closer, higher-quality friendships and increased symptoms of anxiety and depression. It feels like intimacy because in one sense it is. Two people revisiting the same problem are sharing something real, and the closeness that results is real. The cost is that the emotional distress attached to the problem deepens rather than resolves. Subsequent research has replicated this pattern. A longitudinal study found that co-rumination predicted increases in depressive and anxiety symptoms over time, not merely correlating with them. The increased problem-talk comes first. The worsening follows.
Girls co-ruminate considerably more than boys, and this divergence widens through adolescence. Girls also tend to have closer, more emotionally disclosing friendships than boys. Yet despite this apparent advantage, they remain more vulnerable to anxiety and depression. The mechanism meant to provide support becomes, at a certain pitch of repetition, a driver of the problem. A parent watching her daughter’s close friendship group and feeling reassured that the girls are talking to each other may be watching something rather different from what she imagines.
Young men are now being encouraged to adopt co-rumination as a corrective to supposed emotional illiteracy. The problem is that they are being urged to copy a pattern that already makes girls more vulnerable. Young women, meanwhile, are receiving almost no encouragement to do anything different. The therapeutic ideal is presented as universal when the evidence suggests it has a ceiling. For girls who are already emotionally disclosing, that ceiling is low.
This well-intentioned encouragement taps into a much older and equally persistent cultural belief: the catharsis model of emotion.
The therapeutic turn in Western culture, which accelerated sharply after World War 2 and reached its current dominance in the post-pandemic years, rests on that model. Emotions are like pressure in a system, and expressing them releases the pressure. It feels intuitively right. It is also largely unsupported by evidence. Research on anger expression consistently finds that venting tends to maintain or increase it rather than discharge it. The psychologist Brad Bushman’s work showed that people who vented after provocation remained more hostile than those who did nothing. Expressing an emotion keeps it cognitively active. You are not releasing it; you are rehearsing it.
That model has hardened, in recent years, into something more coercive. Online venting, trauma language, and the pathologising of non-disclosure have reframed silence as repression. Young people who process difficulty through action, or who keep their own counsel, are characterised as emotionally stunted rather than as people who have found a different and sometimes superior channel. The mental health lobby, whose intentions are often good, has promoted one model of emotional processing as though it were universal. In doing so it has left parents without the vocabulary to recognise when talking is making things worse.
What the older tradition actually provided was a different mechanism for emotional processing, available to both sexes. Physical exertion discharges arousal more reliably than talking does. Exercise consistently outperforms venting in reducing anger and agitation. Manual work and craft absorb attention in a way that interrupts rumination rather than feeding it. Prayer and solitude give distress a form without requiring its constant narration to others. Duty and purpose offer something else again: the experience of absorbing difficulty into purposeful action, of showing up regardless of internal weather.
None of this is repression. The young man who trains hard after a difficult day is not pretending the difficulty did not happen. He is metabolising it through a channel that tends to leave him calmer and more capable than an hour spent rehearsing grievances on his smartphone. The same applies to the girl who paints, runs, or does yoga rather than texting her friendship group for the third time about the same problem. She is not being avoidant. She may be doing something considerably more effective.
The older tradition broke down when it became a prohibition: when alternative mechanisms hardened into a ban on any disclosure, when men were shamed for seeking help with serious illness. That failure is real. It does not vindicate the opposite error.
If you are a parent watching this from the outside, here is something practical. After a difficult conversation with your son or daughter, notice what follows. Does your child seem lighter, clearer, more settled? Or more agitated, more certain of the grievance, cycling the same loop? The former is processing. The latter is co-rumination, and if it is the latter, the conversation has not helped, whatever the intentions behind it.
For your daughter, the question worth asking is whether her closest friendships are actually supportive or whether they have become a closed circuit of shared distress. Girls who co-ruminate together become closer; they also become more symptomatic. The friendship feels like a lifeline. It may also be an anchor. You will not help her by discouraging the friendship; you will help her by introducing other channels: physical activity, creative work, solitude. Resist the assumption that more talking is always the answer.
For your son, the question is different: whether the adults around him are treating his preference for action over talking as a deficit rather than a different kind of capacity. A son who digs the garden and, once the agitation has settled, finds words for what was troubling him is doing two things well. What is worth resisting is the assumption that the words must always come first, that silence is inherently dangerous and talking inherently curative.
For serious suffering (depression, grief, crisis) professional support is in a different category and should not be confused with peer venting. The distinction matters. The GP, the therapist, the trusted mentor: these are not the same as the friendship group, however well-meaning.
Not every feeling needs a conversation. Some need a task, a run, or a long silence. That is a form of emotional intelligence that has largely lost its name. Your son may already know this. Your daughter may need someone to give her permission to know it too.
The question for both of them is whether the adults in their lives will let them trust what actually works.
I write about family formation and cultural analysis at Happy Family Better World. My new family advisory site is at richardmorrissey.org. ForgeHub (theforge-hub.com) serves as my writing platform for men seeking practical wisdom, developing authentic skills, and reflecting on how to live purposefully in a complex world. My political writing can be found at Medium.