Why Did I Tattoo 'Feel' on My Arm?

It’s always been hard for me to know what I’m feeling. I would observe my behavior and from there try to deduct what’s going on inside me.

I believe this difficulty might have played a role in choosing to be a therapist. Clinical training has taught me firsthand how to better recognize, own and verbalize my feelings.

Over the last 12 years as a couple therapist, I’ve met hundreds of men who were struggling to feel. I’ve met hundreds of their partners, feeling alone and frustrated by their emotionally unavailable partners.

I realized that there’s a real emotional pandemic in our society and was trying to understand why is it so hard for men to feel.

Covert male depression

I first learned about covert male depression from the seminal book on this topic written by Terry Real. He describes how boys endure the ‘loss of the relational’ — being forced to separate from their feelings and their mothers, on the way to become ‘men’. They begin to run away from their father’s and their own pain toward work, money, success, sex, drugs, eating and so forth. The covert male depression manifests mostly as numbness, boredom, apathy, limited emotional range, and cynicism. For a deeper dive into male covert depression (and my experience of it), watch this video.

This concept made perfect sense to me. It was describing what I’ve been feeling all these years. So I began talking to men about their covert depression. These men were labeled by their partner as emotionally handicapped, stoic, cold-hearted and more.

Albeit their initial surprise with the title of ‘depression’, they quickly felt validated and understood. Their partner’s eyes would light up as a new empathic discourse started to emerge. I began to see how normalizing this emotional struggle, helped the partners join forces together in order to heal the covert depression.

Permission to fee

As I travelled deeper into emotional fluency, I discovered another crucial term: Normative Male Alexithymia, which is ”a subclinical form of alexithymia found in boys and men reared to conform to traditional masculine norms that emphasize toughness, teamwork, stoicism, and competition and that discourage the expression of vulnerable emotions.”

That ‘normative’ disfunction was what these men (and I) have been suffering from all these years. That was the result of the covert depression I saw in all those men.

The fact that it’s normative doesn’t mean that its natural. In fact, boys are born just as sensitive as girls. But through the socialization process, the boy loses permission to feel and becomes the soft man, as Robert Bly describes, who is not connected to his core, and is more “life-preserving but not exactly life-giving.”

When a man suffers from covert depression and normative male alexithymia, he essentially is surviving and not living. He is not experiencing the whole emotional range and therefore experiences the world as hard, dull, and boring. Overtime, his partner forms the impression that this man is stoic, boring, and uninterested. Feeling unloved and alone, these partners often become bitter and looks elsewhere for emotional companionship.

Armed with this knowledge, I continued to help myself and the men I work with to reconnect to their feelings, and expand their emotional range and subsequently their emotional eloquence. I began to witness change in these couples. Hope and newfound animation began to spread in my clinic.

How to do it?

Feeling is natural. We’re born feeling. But for some of us as we grow older it becomes harder. Here are some ideas which can give you an initial direction:

Choose to see that feelings are what make us human. The unique human essence is emotional. Therefore, if you want enjoy life to its fullest, you must dare to feel the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Expand your emotional range. The wider your emotional range, the livelier you’ll be.
Choose to believe that the key to your joy is in your pain, so start experimenting with feeling the darker shades of emotions.
Understand that Joy is a verb, and therefore must be consciously practiced in order to rewire your brain and engrain in your life.
If you do all this, you’ll feel free in your relationships, because after all, love is to feel free .

As I applied these processes with men, they began to open up and soften their imposed emotional handicap. They began to share their fears, vulnerabilities and difficulties to their partners. They bravely stopped running away, and confronted their past, their pain, and their wants. These men were returning to their full self, and their relationships began to flourish.

But why the tattoo?

I always loved mnemonics. After all, life is so busy to remember everything.

Half a year ago, my wife Galit tattooed the word “speak” on her arm to remind herself to fearlessly speak her truth. I was intimated but also inspired as I watched her get motivated every time she saw her tattoo.

I began toying with the idea that it would be great to have a constant reminder to feel. I’m so up in my head during the day, so often I forget to feel. But I was still fearful of the permanence of this act. What if I change my mind? What if I’ll want to go back to the comfortable emotional numbness?

It took me a couple of weeks to realize that I can always feel more, that the essence of life is feeling, that feeling is our unique gift that connects us to each other and helps us feel alive.

Alexithymia it might be ‘normative’, but it doesn’t mean that it’s by any way ‘normal.’

The moral of this story is simple:

Feel.

Return to it again and again.

I tattooed it on my arm.

How will you remember to feel?

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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