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A recent TEDTalk, The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage by Susan David, has nearly one million views in just a few months. That level of engagement demonstrates the interest and need around the critical topic of emotions, and we shouldn’t leave men out of the conversation.
It’s not as though women are born with a range of hundreds of emotions and men skipped that gene distribution at birth. Men have access to the same range of emotions but have grown-up in a culture where the expression of those feelings is discouraged. From a young age, they’re told, “Boys don’t cry,” and “Suck it up. Be a man.”
As a result, the only real emotions men regularly access, without making it mean they’re any less of a man, are emotions such as anger, resentment, rage, and blame. The rest of their feelings often get suppressed. But just because they’re ignored doesn’t mean they go away.
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in ten men today are taking anti-depressants. This is how they’re being encouraged by their doctors to deal with the negative emotion they experience through the course of what is normal human life: they lose someone they loved to cancer, their marriage is falling apart, or their son gets bullied in school. Life is happening to men too, as it is to women, but men are more likely to suppress or numb feelings of sadness, grief or powerlessness—which only causes more damage to themselves and their relationships. Here’s what to do instead:
Feel What You Feel
When a negative emotion arises, you have essentially two options: Suppress that feeling and spend your life running from it or feel it.
When you suppress a negative emotion and ignore it, it doesn’t just magically go away. It festers beneath the surface, causing things like high blood pressure, depression, even inflammation within the body. And because none of that feels comfortable, we want to run from it and numb the sharp edges of the negative emotion by drinking too much, spending too much, watching porn or finding comfort in the arms of other women, to name just a few. Eventually, much like a beach ball that we hold under the water, all that suppressed emotion is eventually going to come up with some force, and that’s when it looks like anger or rage.
Alternatively, you could allow yourself to feel the emotion of sadness. You could go to a quiet place, invite it in for 10-15 minutes (set your alarm on your phone), and allow yourself to feel that emotion. See what it’s there to teach you. Let the tears flow if they want to come (tears are merely the body’s release of negative emotion.) And when that time is up, you let it go and move on with your day.
If we suppress or run from negative emotion, it sticks around impacting our lives and damaging our relationships for months, years—even decades. But if we just allow ourselves to feel the sadness, looking it in the eye and calling it by name, it sticks around for only a matter of minutes. To my knowledge, no one has ever died from feeling a negative emotion for 15 minutes.
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Write it Down
Our minds can be a bit of a torture-chamber, perpetuating all the thoughts that are causing the negative emotion to begin with. We each have a small part of our brains that is responsible for keeping us safe—it’s the same place where the fight or flight response originates.
A man allowing himself to feel the negative emotions of sadness or shame, for example, clearly in our culture today will feel anything but safe. So that part of the brain is going to go into overdrive telling you over and over all the reasons why you shouldn’t feel the way you feel, reinforcing all the judgments about what constitutes masculinity and the long-held beliefs about how men should feel and behave…and how they shouldn’t. There is no “off” switch for that part of the brain, but if you leave it in the driver’s seat, it can drive you around in circles.
To get all that noise out of your head, you need to give it somewhere to land, so write it down. You can do that in a journal, on your computer or the back of cocktail napkins, but give it a place to go. Once all those painful and worrisome thoughts are captured, your mind releases the need to hold onto it for dear life; it no longer thinks you’re in danger, so the noise quiets.
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Choose Wisely
A circumstance is neither positive nor negative until you begin to believe the thoughts you’re having about it. For instance, you can feel a negative emotion and make it mean that you’re a wimp or a loser. That is just a judgment you created in your mind, and if you created it, then you can change it to something that will feel better.
For instance, you can feel the negative emotion and make it mean that even though you’re not going to shout it from the rooftops and tell all your friends, you’re also not going to run from it either and that alone takes a great deal of courage. One thought about the negative emotions you’re feeling will help you feel a bit more confident and powerful, while another will make you feel unsure and powerless. You get to choose how you think about those negative emotions, and it’s just a choice. Choose wisely.
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Life is not all sunshine and rainbows—not for women and not for men either. The very best thing we can do is learn how to better deal with life and its corresponding emotions when it throws us some challenges. When a man is willing and able to feel and express negative emotion, it doesn’t make him any less of a man; I would argue he is braver than most men in a culture that does everything it can to disconnect men from their emotions.
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