Has anyone ever said to you, “You shouldn’t feel that way?”

Did you answer with, “But I do?”

Tell a child he shouldn’t feel sad just because he doesn’t get the ice cream he was promised. Tell a wife she shouldn’t feel angry when she catches her husband in a lie.

A man hears through the office rumor mill that he’s one of three employees who might be laid off. He gets upset. He finds out the rumor was not true. A co-worker says, “See, you got yourself all worked up over nothing.” Not really. He got worked up over something that might have had serious consequences. The feeling was unavoidable.

When I was a child and I teared up, I was told, “Stop your crying.” I was in a full blown tearfest and I was supposed to shut off my eye flood like you would turn off a light.

When I was 12, I punched a kid named Bobby Warger. I tackled him in a pickup football game we played in back of the school one day, and when we got up off the ground, he elbowed me in my chin. I threw him a haymaker, and down he went again and this time he got back up with a bloody nose.

His mother called my mother and told her what I had done. “What were you thinking of when you punched him in the nose?” my mom said. “I told you I don’t want you to fight.” Of course, she made me feel guilty, but now when I look back, I could have given her this reply.

“I wasn’t thinking at all when I punched him. I was mad.”

In our house we had one bathroom, and when you flushed the toilet, you had to watch the water rise, and if it started to get near the lid, you had to grab the plunger and push it inside the toilet until the water finally went down.

I recall a time when my sister went into the bathroom. I heard the flush and then I heard her scream, “Here it comes! Here it comes!” My mother shouted, “Use the plunger!”

It was too late. My sister opened the bathroom door and out she came, toilet water and all. I ran over to the scene. She slid two steps then slipped and fell on her backside. I laughed. She cried. My mother yelled. All at once, three different feelings came out of us while we watched the toilet tide roll over the floor.

After Mom mopped the mess, she said to me, “You think this was funny, huh?” I wanted to say, “But it was.” Instead, I lowered my head and took my mother’s scolding.

A few years ago, I lost my cellphone. After looking everywhere, I was visibly upset. “Don’t be mad,” a friend said, “You can always get another one.” So now, if I lose my phone again, I’m supposed to say, “Who cares? I’ll go over to Verizon and get a new one right now.”

At a holiday family gathering, my nephew’s 10-year-old son said to her cousin, “Your hair makes you look like a clown.”

She complained to her father. He said, “That’s not worth getting upset about.” She went back to her cousin and said, “Did you borrow that nose on your face from Pinocchio?” He complained to his mother. His mother called to his cousin, “What did you say that for? You hurt his feelings.”

Roy T. Bennet, author of “Light in the Heart,” wrote, “Respect other people’s feelings. It might mean nothing to you, but it could mean everything to them.”

My father never showed his feelings through job losses and financial ruin. When he died, his cause of death was written as, “hemorrhage from ulcerated abdominal cavity.” That’s a medical explanation for a bleeding stomach ulcer.

He came from the old school where he learned that a man is not supposed to show his feelings. Stay calm when there’s a problem. Hold back your stress. Don’t tell anyone your feelings and for God’s sake, never, ever, let anyone see you cry. Stress was a major contributing factor in my father’s death. We all knew he had it, but he didn’t know how to survive it.

Anger management classes teach their students productive ways to control rage and violence. Uncontrollable anger can be the result of holding back feelings until the frustration and failure add up to so much that they explode in irrational behavior.

We all get depressed sometimes. But we rarely let anyone know. The National Institute of Mental Health estimated that 16.2 million American adults had at least one major depressive episode in 2016. Depression is most common in ages 18 to 25.

In 2017, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death overall and the second leading cause of death among people between the ages of 10 and 34 in the United States, claiming the lives of over 47,000 people.

Depression and suicide are often the result of not finding a way of releasing and recovering from extreme sadness. Showing feelings is the essence of being human and when we’re hurting, they help us cope and recover.

Poet Robert Frost put it this way. “The best way out is always through.”

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.