Why Do Arabs Repress Emotions? A Clinical Psychologist's Perspective

Updated: Jul 10

MBC1 — KALAM NAWA3EM ·

Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A., DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist, joined the ladies of Kalam Nawa3em to address a question that sits at the heart of Arab mental health: why do we, as Arabs, repress our emotions — and what does that cost us?

The conversation covered two deeply connected themes: the cultural and neurological roots of emotional suppression, and the specific — and controversial — question of how Arab men should handle emotions within their relationships.

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Where Does Arab Emotional Repression Come From?

Research consistently confirms what many Arabs feel instinctively: 62% of Arab men associate emotional expression with weakness. This is not a personality trait — it is a learned response, passed down through families and reinforced by culture across generations.

In my clinical practice, what I see again and again is that emotional repression in the Arab world has three distinct roots.

The first is upbringing. From a young age, many Arab children are raised in households where expressing difficult emotions is discouraged, redirected, or met with concern rather than curiosity. Emotions — particularly vulnerability, fear, sadness — are treated as something to manage privately rather than something to understand and share. The family unit, for all its warmth and cohesion, can inadvertently condition children to equate emotional restraint with maturity and strength.

The second is the equation of emotion with weakness. This is not unique to the Arab world, but it is particularly pronounced here. Across Arab cultures, there exists a deeply embedded belief that to feel — and especially to show that you feel — is to be weak. This belief is often gendered: boys especially are trained early to withhold, to be stoic, to absorb rather than express.

The third is generational. The Arab world has lived through extraordinary upheaval. Wars, displacement, loss, and collective trauma have shaped entire populations across generations. One of the ways communities survive such experiences is by developing a collective muscle for emotional suppression — continuing life, maintaining function, not stopping to process. This is an adaptive response in a crisis. Over generations, it becomes a default mode.

The ladies on Kalam Nawa3em recognised all of this immediately. Several said it was exactly how they had been raised.

The Contrast With the West

One of the most striking observations I make when working with Arab clients — particularly those who consume Western media — is the contrast in how emotions are portrayed and valued.

In Western culture, emotional expression is modelled everywhere: in films, in television, in public discourse, in the language people use to talk about their relationships. Characters cry, break down, seek therapy, name their feelings with precision. This is not weakness in the Western cultural frame — it is depth, authenticity, self-awareness.

This is a genuine cultural difference, not a hierarchy. But it does create a particular challenge for Arabs navigating both worlds: the internal culture that trained them to suppress, and an external culture that increasingly valorises expression. The result, for many, is confusion — and for some, a growing sense that something is missing.

What Emotional Repression Does to the Brain

This is where the clinical picture becomes particularly important — because emotional repression is not just psychological. It is physiological.

We have a right brain and a left brain, and they serve fundamentally different functions. The right hemisphere is the seat of emotional experience, body awareness, relational attunement, and the capacity to sense what we are feeling and communicate it to others. The left hemisphere is more engaged with goal-directed thinking, planning, analysis, and execution.

When we learn to repress emotions — when we systematically suppress the signals the right brain sends — we are not simply choosing not to feel. We are physiologically reducing activity in the right hemisphere. The left brain becomes dominant, sometimes overactive. And like any capacity that goes unused, the right brain's functions weaken over time.

Think of it like a muscle that is never trained. The emotional and relational capabilities housed in the right hemisphere — the ability to know what you feel, to read what others feel, to connect — become underdeveloped. Not absent, but weakened.

This is why people who have spent decades repressing emotions often struggle, later in life, to identify what they are feeling at all — a clinical phenomenon known as alexithymia.It is also why emotional repression correlates strongly with depression. According to the Arab Barometer's 2020 regional survey — the most comprehensive study of mental health prevalence in the MENA region to date — approximately 29% of people across the Arab world report suffering from depression, with rates reaching 43% in some countries. Arab men are significantly affected, yet remain among the least likely demographic to seek professional help — a gap driven directly by this cultural equation between emotion and weakness (Arab Barometer, 2020).

When Should You See a Therapist?

When the hosts asked me this question, I said: last year.

They laughed — but I meant it.

We tend to think of therapy as a last resort, something you pursue when things have broken down completely. But this framing misses the point of what therapy actually is. We are living through a period of radical cultural change. The values, relational scripts, and coping strategies we were handed by our families — built for a different era, a different pace of life — are often missing the updates needed to navigate today's world.

Therapy is not an admission that something is wrong with you. It is the recognition that what you were taught, as good as it was in its time, may not fully equip you for the complexity of life now. We need to normalise seeking professional support the way we normalise seeing a doctor, a personal trainer, a financial advisor — before things break, as an investment in functioning well.

The Controversial Truth About Arab Men and Emotions in Relationships

This is where the conversation on Kalam Nawa3em became most interesting — and where I said something I knew would provoke.

The hosts asked: how do you work with Arab men who repress their emotions? How do you get them to open up?

My answer: let him.

They laughed. But I was serious.

The prevailing cultural message — particularly in media and modern therapeutic discourse — is that men need to learn to express their emotions more, to be more vulnerable, to open up at home. This is presented as unambiguously good. But I want to offer a more nuanced clinical perspective.

The balance of masculine and feminine energy within a relationship is a real and important dynamic. When men are consistently pushed to adopt modes of expression that sit outside their natural register — vulnerability, emotional processing, relational disclosure — within the home, something shifts in the relational dynamic that is not always beneficial.

Arab men — and men more broadly — have a specific role to play in the family: as the provider, the anchor, the stable presence. This is not a limitation. It is a function. And it requires a particular emotional posture — groundedness, steadiness, a certain containment — that is undermined when men are expected to process and express in the same way women do, in the same space.

This does not mean men should not process their emotions. They absolutely should — and those who don't pay a significant psychological price for it. But the channel matters. Men thrive emotionally when they process with other men: with friends, with peers, in spaces built for that kind of exchange. Not necessarily at home, with their wives, as the primary emotional processing ground.

When this boundary blurs — when the home becomes the space where men are expected to be as emotionally expressive and disclosing as women — it creates problems in the marriage. Attraction diminishes. The polarity that sustains intimacy flattens. Women, even unconsciously, can begin to feel less anchored. The dynamic becomes less complementary and more symmetrical — and symmetry, while intellectually appealing, is not always what sustains long-term intimacy.

This is a controversial position. But it is what I observe clinically, and it connects directly to what I have seen drive marital dissatisfaction in many of the Arab couples I work with.

What Balance Actually Looks Like

The goal is not for Arabs — men or women — to suppress all emotion. That is not balance; that is shutdown.

The goal is to develop what the right brain makes possible: the capacity to know what you feel, to regulate it, to express it appropriately, and to connect genuinely with the people you love. This does not require becoming someone your culture did not raise you to be. It requires integrating what your culture gave you with what modern life demands of you.

For men, this means finding the right channels. For women, this means developing the emotional vocabulary that many were never given. For both, it often means starting therapy — not when the crisis arrives, but before it does.

About Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi

Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A. is a DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist (License No. DHA-75083705) based in Dubai, UAE Director of the Transcendental Meditation Organization, and founder of the online courses Anxiety 101 (Level 1) and Master Yourself (Level 2).

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