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Many of you have heard that encouraging boys to express emotions is “healthy,” but you may be left wondering about the nuts and bolts of how to support boys in emotional states. I hope that this guide will give you some insight and strategies on how to improve the emotional lives of the boys and young men you care for.
You feel, I feel
When we see someone express an emotion, the first thing that usually happens is an arising set of sensations/feelings in our own bodies. Through mirror neurons, we may feel an analog of what’s happening in the other person. Call this emotional resonance, empathy, attunement, or whatever, but it’s an innate process that helps humans connect and communicate.
Next, we react to that feeling inside us according to our own conditioning. If I don’t allow sadness in myself, I may not want to feel it arise in me when I see someone else feeling sad. For example, if I see a friend in sadness, I could feel an urge to fix them, give advice, distract, or any number of responses I’m conditioned to, but what I’m truly doing is managing my own internal experience by trying to change their experience.
In other words, I’m not comfortable with the sensations, anxiety, and emotions arising in me as I witness them emote sadness, and so I react in a way to influence them and thereby mitigate my own discomfort.
Please Don’t Feel That
A classic example of this process is when we watch a character embarrass himself in a movie. Most of us will “feel his pain,” cringe against it, and desperately want him to escape the situation. Because we can’t welcome the feeling of embarrassment as it arises in our own bodies, we feel an urgent desire to banish it. We tighten against our arising internal sensory experience. We shut it down.
Another example is the “caretaker,” who rushes around caring for others’ needs as if she was putting out fires. Caretakers don’t want to feel their own sensations of need, nor that of anyone else, so their anxiety drives them to banish need in others through “care.” When people receive their care-taking, they will often resist the caretaker because of their unseen motivation, which is to manage her own internal experience through the guise of generosity.
So what?
For every emotional state, desire, or need that we haven’t learned to “hold,” we risk passing along the message that the other person’s experience is NOT OK and thereby exclude it in them.
What do I mean by “hold”? It means being present with an experience in a nonjudgmental, welcoming way without trying to change it. Giving it space, room to breathe.
Many of us walk around with the feeling like their emotions would burden our friends, family, or romantic partners. How’d we learn that? Most likely we had the experience of being “too much” for people who were important to us. In other words, they couldn’t “hold” our experience without trying to change it or fix it, and in the process, we learned that our emotions were not ok. When we learn that our emotions are uncomfortable for others, it’s natural that we adapt and learn to hide, suppress, or medicate them.
How This Plays Out With Boys
Imagine this scene: While attending a birthday party, a father watches his 7-year-old boy panic at the sight of a clown. The father feels immediate shame and discomfort arise when witnessing his son express fear, something he may have learned from his own father’s reactions. If he’s not aware, he will transfer this onto his son and shame him, saying something like “Don’t be a baby, it’s just a clown.” The words are less important than the shaming tone, or disapproving facial expression, which convey the lesson that fear is unwelcome, a sign of weakness or immaturity.
What’s a skillful dad to do in this situation? He can model how to “hold” fear by demonstrating presence (i.e., mindful attention, or willingness to be with what’s happening in the present moment without resistance). He can invite his son to notice what fear feels like on the inside (“You seem afraid, what’s that like right now?” or “I’m here with you, can you tell me what your fear feels like?”).
These questions invite a child to be with their experience rather than react to it and encourage resilience in the face of an unpleasant internal experience. He can also empathize with his son’s desire to run away (which is a natural, biological urge), and support that if necessary and process the feeling of fear afterward.
Most parents want their sons to have “courage,” the willingness to act even in the face of fear. Yet often what they convey is shame or disappointment in the face of their sons’ fear, which pushes that fear underground. Developing courage, though, requires a person be able to manage and experience fear while acting in opposition to it. Numbing, suppressing, avoiding … none of that will help our sons develop courage because it’s necessary to feel the fear.
Swimming in Invalidation Soup
Like the example above, boys receive constant feedback from their family and peer environments that their natural, arising experiences are unwelcome. They learn to adapt to the threat of belittling, shaming, and teasing by screening out the expression of what’s happening inside them and developing emotional masks to ensure no one can see their vulnerability and hurt them for it. Over time, they block out contact with their arising internal sensory experiences (emotions, desires, needs) and live in their heads, behind guards.
The cost of this is immense. When we deaden our emotions, we lose connection to the experience of aliveness, of vibrancy, because our aliveness comes directly from our contact with internal sensory experiences: the flutter of joy in our chests, the electricity in our skin during excited anticipation, the warm glow in our hearts when we feel love.
How can we feel alive without feeling? Countless American boys and young men feel numbed to the experience of life. Writing this, right now, I feel sadness and hurt in my chest while reflecting on this reality. Welcoming that in, I feel a strong desire to do something about it.
The Gift of Welcoming Attention
So what’s the alternative? First, let’s acknowledge that we aren’t perfect at welcoming all emotions in others or our sons. And those skills are not always perfectly correlated, either. Perhaps I can feel compassion while my boy is crying in front of me, but I medicate my own sadness with alcohol.
For many of us, anger is the most challenging emotion to feel, but for others, it may be the most comfortable. Discover which feelings are the most challenging for you to welcome in yourself, and then compare that to your list of which emotions are hard to welcome in your son. Now you know what your practice is.
An immense gift we can give our boys and young men is the willingness and openness to be with their arising emotional experiences and to meet those emotions with curiosity, welcoming attention, and love. Developing mindfulness (welcoming presence) is one of the best ways to improve emotional regulation of yourself and your children.
There are countless ways to train, in person or online. The idea here is that you’re training your mind to fully welcome arising experience just as it is, without judgment, and in that process, you can soothe your emotions and those of people around you.
This “accepting awareness” can be utilized when you’re supporting your son in his emotional states. Mindful presence has a “holding” quality to it, and he will really be able to feel your presence, attention, and commitment to being with him.
Sharing Impact
Also, one of the most honest and impactful skills in connection with another’s emotion is to listen to what you are feeling and then sharing that. For instance, if my son comes to me and shares his sadness, I may naturally feel love and tenderness. If I share my true impact in that moment (e.g., “I see you’re sad, and I feel lots of love for you”), then he learns that his emotions are met with welcoming love and care.
It’s really that simple. A bonus to this practice is that you don’t have to search for the “right” thing to say, which can come across forced or stilted. Instead, you can be liberated by simply sharing what’s true for you without any need to create a perfect verbal intervention.
You can practice this skill by using the “Noticing Game,” which is a mindfulness game you can play on your own or with others. Simply state “I notice …” and finish with what’s arising in you, whether it’s a physical sensation, emotion, thought, or sensory experience (e.g., “I notice joy arise when I look at you). This can be vulnerable to share with others, but also extremely powerful and connecting.
Difficult Emotions
Let’s be honest, there will be times when we don’t feel rosy when our children come to us with emotions. If you feel unable to generate the presence required to be with your son in his emotion, then you have at least a few good options.
One, you can share honestly where you’re at, “Mommy’s really tired, and I want to be with you right now, can we just sit here quietly together?” or “I notice when you’re yelling, I feel a bit overwhelmed…can you put your feelings into calmer words?”
Alternatively, just sharing what you notice about your child can help a lot. “You seem really angry; I notice your fists are balled up, and your face is red.” Then, you can invite them into their experience more. “What does your body feel like on the inside?” All of this will help them regulate their emotion and build their resiliency and ability to “hold” it.
More to Come…
This scratches the surface of the complexity of how to guide our sons in their emotions lives, so stay tuned to this column for more practical tips on how to bring a more “Mindful Masculinity” into our world.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
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