The Missing Step Many Boomers Never Got: Why Witnessing Matters More Than Grit
Boomers love the idea of toughness. They came from a world where you solved everything with grit, suppression, and “just handle it.” Emotional language wasn’t taught; internal experience wasn’t discussed. You didn’t name your feelings — you outworked them, ignored them, or buried them under a sarcastic one-liner.
Recently I watched a Dennis Prager clip on Instagram. While I don’t agree with everything he says, but I do respect his blunt common sense in a culture where we bend over backwards to appease the loudest 1% and call every discomfort existential harm. Prager — born in 1948, firmly a Boomer — argues that therapy today reinforces narcissism and victimhood, that therapists coddle people and keep them emotionally soft instead of helping them grow. He noted “everyone is hurt by their parents…you need to grow up.”
He’s not entirely wrong.
Some therapists absolutely keep clients stuck (he’s probably not wrong in his assessment that this is 2/3 of therapists, unfortunately) — especially the ones trying to do trauma work without any depth or nuance. If all you have in your toolkit is a grounding script and a TherapistAid worksheet, you’re not doing trauma therapy. You’re managing symptoms.
But where Prager’s generation misses the mark is this:
You cannot “grow up” from a wound that was never witnessed.
You don’t out-think trauma.
You don’t out-stoic it (and Stoicism is my daily practice, so this isn’t anti-Stoicism).
You don’t “be a man” your way out of something that was never acknowledged.
Witnessing is the step many Boomers never got.
And because they never got it, they often can’t tolerate it.
My Dad: Brilliant, Analytical, and Emotionally Underbuilt
My dad was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known — a brilliant scientist whose analytical brain was so sharp it often worked against him. I inherited a lot of that “being my own worst enemy” wiring: the overthinking, the self-critique, the instinct to muscle through instead of feel.
One day, his boat lift malfunctioned — a pure electrical failure. Nothing I caused. His immediate reaction was:
“You really fucked this up.”
No pause, no checking facts — just the reflexive Boomer blame reflex. You touched it last, so you’re responsible. And part of that wasn’t emotional at all; it was professional conditioning. In his former life as a corporate leader in a Fortune 500 company, his job was literally to find the weak link whenever something went wrong. Blame was procedural, not personal.
But that wiring doesn’t translate well to family life. Everything becomes a “you problem.”
So I finally used his own language — the only thing he could hear in the moment:
“Dad, I didn’t ‘fuck anything up’. There’s an electrical malfunction I didn’t cause. I want to figure it out with you, but you’ll need to speak to me respectfully — otherwise you can call an electrician.”
Everything shifted. His anger dropped. He went quiet — embarrassed, almost small. Not because he lacked intelligence, but because the power dynamic changed. He knew how to evaluate. He didn’t know how to be evaluated. He could correct, but being corrected hit a part of him he didn’t have the tools to manage.
Boomers are often externally tough and internally fragile — not by choice, but by conditioning.
Why That Generation Struggles When the Focus Turns Inward
The Boomer emotional rulebook is simple:
Don’t cry.
Don’t complain.
Don’t ask for help.
Don’t be weak.
Don’t burden anyone.
Just deal with it.
This created adults who can survive almost anything — layoffs, recessions, medical crises — and show up to work the next day.
But the moment someone says:
“That hurt me.”
“What was your intention when you said that?”
“I deserve to be spoken to respectfully.”
Everything falls apart.
Because that’s not survival.
That’s reflection — and reflection wasn’t part of their skill set.
When the emotional spotlight turns inward, many Boomers hit territory they were never taught to navigate. They respond with defensiveness, irritation, blame-shifting, or shutdown — not because they’re bad, but because they were never equipped for internal work.
This Isn’t About Blame — It’s About Naming Reality
Boomers did the best they could with the tools and emotional shaping they had — often very little. And they still have the capacity to grow if they choose. Being shaped by a generation isn’t the same as being trapped by it.
Boomers didn’t choose emotional avoidance.
They inherited it.
But our generation isn’t satisfied with suppression.
We want awareness, mutual respect, and accountability — not just from others, but from ourselves.
Boomers weren’t emotionally fragile.
They were emotionally underbuilt.
What You Are Responsible For
Understanding all this doesn’t mean you wait around for your parents to change. They might, but many won’t.
Your job is noticing how these patterns show up in your own life — and refusing to recreate them.
And here’s the part people skip:
Many families repeat the same emotional patterns.
Others overcorrect and create new ones.
Boomers avoided emotion.
So some younger parents go too far in the opposite direction — no boundaries, no structure, wanting to be their child’s “best friend.”
I see it constantly. Parents who:
smoke weed with their kids
trauma-dump on them
talk about their sex lives
rely on them for emotional support
avoid conflict to stay “close”
never create boundaries because they’re afraid of being like their own parents
Different shape, same burden:
kids carrying emotional weight that was never theirs to hold.
You can repeat the pattern
or
you can invert it so hard you create a new one.
Neither is “growth.”
Breaking the cycle means taking what worked, dropping what didn’t, and not handing your kids the parts that broke you.
Where This Leaves Us
Boomers built themselves on grit.
We built ourselves on insight.
Neither is complete without the other.
The work now is simple:
use grit where it belongs, and use emotional awareness where it’s needed.
Not one or the other — both.
Witnessing isn’t coddling.
Grit isn’t cruelty.
They’re two halves of the same skill set.
The next generation benefits when we learn how to hold both.
