Frog Smile, noun, a wide, flat smile (i.e. like a frog’s mouth)
WTF is a frog smile?
I’m glad you asked. A “frog smile” is a wide, flat smile (i.e. like a frog’s mouth). There’s no upward curl to the lips, so it’s not a display of happiness, more an automatic display of politeness. Lacking that authentic inner feeling of joy, there is no glint in the eye, no wrinkling of the crow’s feet. So while the mouth smiles (sort of), the eyes do not.
The best place to spot a frog smile is on passing strangers, or perhaps a colleague who is having a bad day. It will usually appear suddenly, the frog smile, as soon as the smiler has twigged your presence, but will fade once you have crossed paths.
Despite society's growing acceptance of mental health, we can still be pretty naff at dealing with emotions when we’re in the trenches and someone is in actual need.
The frog smiler will most likely have their eyes averted or down-turned. If they catch your gaze, it will often be reluctantly and briefly so. On the surface, it bears some similarities to the coquettish “smile, look away, look back” routine. But they couldn’t be more different. The frog smiler will not look back. And the flirty smiler will be smiling with their whole face.
Why do we frog smile?
On bad days, I’m a frog smiler. I never really noticed it before. But recently, passing a colleague in the corridor, I noticed the sad pull in my cheeks and the sheer discomfort of trying to meet their gaze. Now I can’t help but notice it every time.
It’s gotten to the point where I intentionally try not to frog smile. But try as I might, something takes over at the last moment and my face stretches mechanically.
So why do we do it? I can’t say for everyone, of course. But these are the things that I’ve noticed when observing my own actions and feelings.
1. We’re concealing a pain
When released, emotions can be turbulent, messy. We’d be forgiven for not wanting them to pour out of us whilst doing the big shop or picking up our child from school. This is why we adopt the frog smile. It is a mask that says to the world, “I’m not okay. But please, for the love of god, don’t ask me about it here!”
It is that courage to express our feelings that will ultimately lead us back to ourselves.
Despite society's growing acceptance of mental health, we can still be pretty naff at dealing with emotions when we’re in the trenches and someone is in actual need. It’s not our fault. We’re bombarded by theoretical and manicured displays of emotion on the old world wide web. Emotions that, while they may begin as authentic, inevitably turn into some sort of performance for likes and shares on social media.
These media displays of emotion are also misleadingly short. Someone being vulnerable for a thirty-second reel or a five minute interview promoting their autobiography is not the same as crying on a friend’s shoulder for forty-five minutes until their T-shirt is warm, soggy and in need of changing.
Catharsis, the act of opening the shaken soda can of our emotions, is messy… really messy… and just like being drenched in metaphorical soda, we’re likely to get wet (from tears) and sticky (from bogies) doing it.
For this reason, we adopt the frog smile. Some instinctive part of us has assessed, sometimes accurately so, that our current environment isn’t safe for such chaotic vulnerability.
2. We’re “Good” Boys and Girls
“Good” boys and girls are polite and quiet. They certainly don’t bother grown ups when they’re busy. After all, grown ups have got lots of important big person stuff to do and it would only make things harder if they troubled them with their silly kid problems.
As children, we are often praised for not being difficult, criticised for being needy. Even incredibly well meaning parents and carers can become fed up with the daily grind of adulting and struggle to be fully present with their child’s (sometimes irrational) emotional needs.
In this scenario, the child may grow up with the understanding that their being vulnerable is only ever inconvenient to other people. Just as they learned to protect their carer from the sadness and anger they felt within, they believe it is now up to them to shield the world from their negative emotions out of a misplaced sense of “goodness”.
This is further compounded by that quintessentially British notion of the stiff upper lip, of keeping calm and carrying on. While yes it is sometimes necessary and noble to shoulder a burden for distances longer than can be reasonably expected, if we are not able to share our burden every now and again with a therapist or close friend we might find that our stiff upper lip begins to stretch sideways into a frog smile.
3. We are in exile from our true selves
All this emotional repression in the name of being “good” can lead us to forget our true selves. We bury them and we bury them deep.
We can’t pick and choose the emotions that buffet us throughout the day. There’s no emotional thermostat on the side of our heads that allows us to turn down the cold, painful emotions and turn up the warm, feelgood ones.
When we try to repress specific negative emotions, often we end up repressing all of our emotions. If we do this for long enough, we can forget where we buried ourselves. Cue the frog smile; the mask of emotional neutrality.
So how do we stop frog smiling?
To free our faces from the froggiest of smiles we need to do the thing we least want to do… Communicate.
When we try to repress specific negative emotions, often we end up repressing all of our emotions.
We need to take a leap of faith and confide in someone we know to be a good listener. Someone who, rather than insisting we do this or that, instead gives us the space and gentle prompting to allow us to answer our own questions. Someone who stands with us as we gaze at the ground and when we say, “I think I buried myself here,” they pick up a shovel and dig with us.
We’ll need to make sure we can conduct this search for our true selves in a place we are able to be our most vulnerable: sipping tea in bean bag chairs, or on a quiet country path banked by buttercups and foxgloves.
At first we may not know what to say. But a good listener will allow us to ramble, to stray, to criss-cross back over points already made. They’ll reflect back at us what we have just said so that we can get a sense of whether it is in fact what we truly mean.
In time, that poor inner child once so concerned with not burdening others will come to realise that, to quote The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse, “Being honest is always interesting.” It is that courage to express our feelings that will ultimately lead us back to ourselves.
Rick x
If this article resonated with you, I’d recommend checking out When Journalling Fails, Write Stories Instead, for tips on how writing stories can help you get to know yourself on a deeper level.