How Should Men Handle Their Emotions?
As a man, how should you handle your emotions? In this article, we'll walk through what emotions are, why they're important, and some healthy ways to deal with them.
When working with your emotions, it's important to avoid two opposite ends of a common spectrum: the "Man-bot," who pretends he has no emotions and never lets himself feel them; and the guy who lets emotions own him and run his life, and conflates emotions with objective reality. Avoiding both of these extremes is one big key to mastering your emotions as a healthy masculine man.
What Are Emotions?
It's important to note that our emotions (our feelings) are not the absolute truth most of the time. Instead, they're a reflection of how we think and what we believe. Our emotions and our thoughts have a symbiotic relationship; a thought arises from our mind (consciously or unconsciously), and a corresponding emotion comes from the thought.
Why Are Emotions Important?
Emotions are also how we get to experience love, joy, and connection. You cannot experience these in the mind, only in the emotional and physical energetic bodies.
Feelings are part of our ego structure. In The Power of Now, Ekhart Tolle says that thoughts and feelings are all part of the ego. That said, emotions can be a useful barometer of our direction in life. Tolle says that, because we have an ego, if you were to decide to only trust one or the other (thoughts or emotions), it would be better to trust your emotions. Emotions are kind of like a tuning fork that you can use to be in alignment with your Self. They can help you know if you're in integrity and alignment with yourself.
If you understand the difference between a thought and a feeling, your emotions can serve as a source of direction or confirmation of direction. For example, if you're making a decision about which you feel conflicted, then your emotions (detected through the body) can guide you towards Option A or Option B. If Option A leads you to open up and feel peaceful and joyful, and Option B leads you to close down and tighten up, than it's generally a better idea to go with Option A.
Without emotions, we're only half a being. In Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope, Mark Manson tells a story of a doctor in Orange County who was very successful and loved by his family and community. He got a brain tumor, and was told that it was inoperable. He told the surgical team to try anyway, since he had nothing to lose. Within a short time after surgery, he lost everything–his family, his practice, his friendships–and ended up on the street.
What happened? While removing this man's tumor, the surgeons accidentally cut out the part of his brain that regulates emotion. He essentially lost the ability to feel emotions–including love, empathy, kindness, joy, and connection to others. Shortly thereafter, his wife left him and his kids stopped having anything to do with him.
Emotions serve several critical functions. Among others, they let us emotionally connect to other people, feel love, feel joy, and feel empathy. Without emotions, all that we have is our egos–which are not inherently empathetic.
How Should Men Handle Their Emotions?
So, given the foundational importance of emotions to the human experience and to our ability to be good husbands and fathers, how should we handle our emotions? Here are three foundational strategies:
1. Make Sure That You're Connected to Them
First, we have to make sure that we're connected to them. Many men are challenged in this respect. Men are enormously emotional, but we haven't been given permission for generations to see that as a source of potential strength. The conditioning is: if you're emotional, you must be weak.
As a necessary prerequisite to connecting to your emotions, you have to know what your emotions are. In my relationship coaching practice and men's coaching practice, I use a feelings wheel to help men identify their emotions.
We need to be able to identify our emotions, name them, and know which one is which. This is a great toolkit to help you know when your existential car is tuned up.
How can you access your emotions? Many men experience blockages in this arena of their life. The first way to access your emotions is via embodiment. In order to have a rich emotional life, you need to be connected to your body. This can also help you to understand the difference between a thought and a feeling. GS Youngblood's book The Art of Embodiment for Men is an excellent resource on this topic.
Breathwork can also help you unclog a clogged emotional pipeline. Again, Youngblood's book is an excellent primer on the topic. I also help my coaching clients and men's group clients with both of these practices; if you would like more direct support, feel free to reach out and schedule an appointment.
2. Develop the Ability to Emotionally Regulate
As humans (not just as men), it is essential to develop the skill of emotional regulation. It's important to understand that there is no bad or wrong emotion. There are only bad or wrong (and, correspondingly, right and healthy) ways of dealing with them.
Dealing With Anger
One powerful way to regulate your emotions is to first realize our feelings are just energy, to which our egos ascribe all kinds of made up meanings/interpretations that easily take us down a bunch of unnecessary and ineffective rabbit holes in our heads. When any kind of energy gets stopped up, we’re going to be affected negatively, more often than not (Imagine sticking a potato in your kitchen sink drain (& drain pipe underneath the sink) and just continuing to pour water down the drain…something’s going to burst). To prevent that, we need—especially when we’re really pissed off—to move that energy. Emotions represent an energetic charge, and can be moved through physically by moving our bodies (especially beating on a heavy bag with a solid stick of closet dowling, as one way). Anger can also be transformed into a short burst of power in order to get through something hard or frightening. Many of my clients use punching bags to help them work through and channel their anger physically.
Dealing With Fear
The best way to conquer fear, in my experience, is to do most of the things that you're afraid of. One of my clients embodies this. He grew up very scared and anxious, and at 26 years old he told me he was terrified to even go down some of the slides at Water World. He started confronting his fear, and every day he practiced doing the things that he was afraid of. A few years later, his life is utterly transformed. He's now a successful entrepreneur and he just spent a year living in Nairobi, where he didn't let the occasional bomb threats or risks of kidnapping stop him from immersing himself in the city with his fiancé.
Letting Emotions Pass
Another powerful way to deal with your emotions is to simply identify them and experience them. Challenge the ones (like fear) that hold you back, and lean into the ones (like joy, bliss, and a sense of connection to the Divine) that are desirable to you. But in both cases, recognize that the emotions are temporary. Our core is like the ocean, and our emotions are the waves on top. If we don't try to block our emotion or get caught perseverating on them, then each emotion will only last an average of 90 seconds. Often times, the problem isn't the emotion itself; it's the largely made up narrative of what they mean that gets us trapped in them.
Don't Identify With Your Emotions
A final key to regulating your emotions is to verify whether or not what you're feeling has anything to do with objective reality. For example, anxiety is all about projections onto the future. If you're feeling anxious, try asking yourself "Where's the fire?" If the answer is, "Well there's no fire YET but there COULD be," then recognize that your anxiety is grounded in fear of a possible (but not yet real) future rather than in objective reality.
If the bad thing we fear hasn't happened yet, and we don't know if it's going to happen, than we can spin out imaging scenarios where it does happen. A better approach is to recognize that our fear is completely egoically fabricated.
A related key is to know when to compartmentalize your emotions. As men, it's important that we feel our emotions, but it's equally essential that we not let them own us. We need to learn to put our emotions down when the situation requires us to do something different, and pick them up again when the situation has shifted to allow us to do so. For example, if your house is on fire, then crying, screaming, and feeling your feelings isn't going to be helpful. You have to put those feelings away and do what the moment calls for. Then, when what's called for has been adequately taken care of, you can go back and allow yourself to feel the emotions that you put aside in order to act (ex. fear, gratitude if no-one is hurt, etc).
As men, dealing with our emotions requires understanding two essential truths. First, we cannot let our emotions own us, or start to believe that they represent objective reality. Second, if we never let ourselves feel our emotions and work through them, they'll just continue to get in our way. Navigating these two truths is essential to being a healthy masculine man.