#137 Why You Cry Too Much or Feel Nothing | Trauma Responses#137 Why You Cry Too Much or Feel Nothing | Trauma Responses
The Trauma Recovery School
Bonita Ackerman du Preez explains how crying too much or feeling emotionally numb can both be signs of a narrowed window of tolerance caused by trauma. She outlines the neuroscience behind this and describes how structured trauma recovery work can widen emotional capacity and ease overwhelm.
4:28•26 Oct 2026
Why You Either Cry at Everything or Feel Nothing: Trauma Responses Explained
Episode Overview
- Crying at everything or feeling nothing can both be trauma responses rooted in the nervous system losing its ability to modulate emotional intensity.
- The window of tolerance describes the emotional range where feelings can be experienced without being flooded or shutting down, and trauma can dramatically narrow this window.
- When the window is narrow, the amygdala fires too easily, the prefrontal cortex is compromised by chronic stress, and the vagal system struggles to calm the body.
- Early recovery often brings a backlog of previously suppressed emotions, so current tears may relate to past grief and anger that were never processed.
- Structured trauma recovery work aims to widen the window of tolerance by building emotional capacity, reprocessing old emotions, and teaching tools such as the three D’s of trauma and naming emotions.
“It's not that you've broken, it's that your window has been squeezed for years and it needs to be widened.”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? This conversation with trauma recovery specialist Bonita Ackerman du Preez shows how much that strength is tied to the nervous system, especially if you either cry at everything or feel totally numb. Bonita talks about these two extremes as two sides of the same trauma coin. She explains the "window of tolerance", a term from Dan Siegel, as the emotional range where feelings can be experienced, processed and then pass.
Trauma, she says, can squeeze that window "sometimes almost to nothing", leaving someone either overwhelmed and tearful or shut down and disconnected. With a mix of clear neuroscience and everyday language, Bonita walks through what happens when the window is too narrow: "your amygdala fires too readily", the prefrontal cortex is affected by chronic stress, and the vagal system struggles to bring things back down.
For anyone in recovery who’s ever thought, "Why am I crying so much now that I’ve stopped numbing out?", her explanation of emotional backlog hits hard. Many of the tears in early recovery, she notes, aren’t about today at all, but about "everything that has never been allowed to flow".
She also outlines how her trauma recovery method focuses on widening that window in stages: first reprocessing old emotions, then rebuilding emotional capacity with a structured toolkit, including her "three D’s of trauma" and naming emotions as they arise. As capacity grows, relationships, parenting and tough conversations start to feel more manageable again.
If you’ve ever felt broken for being “too much” or “too little”, this episode offers a different frame: maybe nothing is wrong with you – maybe your nervous system just needs more room. How wide is your window of tolerance right now, and what might happen if it grew even a little?
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