Our Patriarchal culture has a host of expectations of men and their emotional lives. Young boys are socialized from a very early age to hide from others, and even from themselves, whatever they are feeling. Letting someone else know what you’re feeling-whether that emotion is sadness, tenderness, fear, etc.- is thought of as feminine, something men are not supposed to do.
When men deviate from these expected norms and do openly show emotion we call that “breaking down,” as if something in them was broken. It’s not really the expression of emotion we object to, but the vulnerability we see in men when they are emotional. The only emotion we’re OK within men is anger because men can be angry without making themselves vulnerable, so men feeling angry still seem masculine to us.
Much has been written on this site and elsewhere about the extensive costs of men living with this kind of emotional suppression; a profound life-long sense of loneliness, unhappiness, depression, substance abuse and often a sense of not having lived a meaningful life.
While the outward facing concerns of many men are of being seen as too emotional, their private concerns are often more about not being emotional enough. I was very close to my father who died when I was a young man, and one of my biggest fears through the process of his dying was that in his death I would be finally and irrevocably exposed as a cold-hearted son of a bitch who was fundamentally lacking in human feelings and could never be redeemed. Sobbing as I gave his eulogy was one of the moments of greatest relief in my entire life.
Research suggests that young boys as early as four months old are socialized by their parents and other to not feel, which means that many men never get much of a chance to learn about themselves as emotional people.
Most of these young men live in a world with women, so they can see their mothers and their sisters and maybe later their girlfriends being freely and openly emotional. While their male peers and perhaps their fathers reassure them by being either covertly or explicitly derisive of these women’s emotional lives, it does little to extinguish the internal concerns of young men that there may be something fundamentally wrong with them, something important lacking.
On some level, they do remember as children when they were openly and unembarrassedly emotional. They probably retain some early memories of sobbing and then feeling soothed by their mothers. As those young boys grow into manhood they must wonder, what happened to that person? When was the last time I had feelings of that depth and strength? More disturbingly, if I don’t have feelings like that anymore, or if I can’t allow myself to let anyone know about them, how will I ever again have that enveloping delicious feeling of being soothed by someone the way I felt when my mother comforted me?
Avrum G. Weiss, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who sees individuals and couples for psychotherapy online. Dr. Weiss is recognized nationally for his pioneering work on the process of change in individuals and organizations. He is the author of three books and hundreds of articles, published here on The Good Men Project, Psychology Today, and elsewhere.
Dr. Avrum Weiss is represented by LMB Agency, LLC, and is available for speaking engagements. Click to see his speaker sheet: https://bit.ly/AvrumWeissSpeaker
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When men deviate from these expected norms and do openly show emotion we call that “breaking down,” as if something in them was broken. It’s not really the expression of emotion we object to, but the vulnerability we see in men when they are emotional. The only emotion we’re OK within men is anger because men can be angry without making themselves vulnerable, so men feeling angry still seem masculine to us.
