By age four, I'd already learned to hide my feelings

If you're struggling to feel more connected in this society, it's not your fault.

Me, my mom, my parents’ dog Ginger, and my dad’s truck, in like 1986

A few weeks ago, when I was writing about how men are taught to devalue the very thing that makes great relationships, something really struck me. It was the research showing that parents tend to react to young boys being emotional in ways that “dampen their expressiveness.” By the ages of 4 to 6, boys start expressing fewer feelings than girls. They learn to do the dampening themselves.

Dampen. That’s the word that buried itself in the outer layers of my heart. It reminded me of the work I’ve been doing with my therapist to unlearn my tendency to avoid people. Work that’s reviving my social life and helping me be a more present partner, more available friend, less standoffish neighbor. Work that’s also helping me accept parts of myself that I’ve long felt shitty about.

One part of me wants to talk to every stranger I cross paths with. Even though I’m a therapist and talk to people nearly all day, this part is dying for connection. This part fantasizes about living in a different society where we all have enough time to move slow and be with each other instead of the seemingly endless hours of working and adulting capitalism requires. This part tries to really listen to people, be attentive, not dampen my feelings, and show that I really understand and get them. This version wants people to belong, so I never have to feel alone again.

But another part of me gets exhausted from all that really fast. It gets cranky and cold. It crosses the street when I see an acquaintance coming down the sidewalk. It wants to just lay around alone and watch football highlights on YouTube. If anyone tries to get in close—even my partner—it growls.

The counterintuitive thing I’ve learned in therapy is that this standoffish— or “avoidant”—part of me actually wants connection too. It just wants it a certain way. It wants someone to be super attuned to my feelings. Someone to be curious about what’s happening inside of me in a gentle, non-pushy way. Basically, the perfect parent. Basically, Jesus or the Buddha or Mother Teresa. And if someone isn’t at that level—I mean, who is?—then fuck off. Let me be with myself. Let me try to relax and soothe myself with football clips from 2016, the last year the Dallas Cowboys were any good, or yet another time through “The Sopranos” or “The Wire.”

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I’ve also discovered through therapy that when I was little, I had to try to soothe myself a lot.

My mom loves me but isn’t the best at communicating her emotions. She knows it. We’ve talked about it. My dad is a little better, but back when I was a kid, he worked a ton and wasn’t around as much as my mom. She worked too though, so I spent a lot of time at a neighbor’s house down the street. I don’t remember the neighbors much—they were a retired couple who provided daycare for a bunch of kids. But I do remember spending a lot of time by myself, playing around the trees in their backyard, watching movies laying on their furry carpet, and investigating their garden (the first time I saw gorgeous purple eggplants, which appeared to be from another planet). In other words, there weren’t many adults around who were good at understanding my feelings. Who were attuned in the way I needed to feel like I could just be myself without tensing up, going cold, and protecting myself.

I realize that outside of therapy circles, no one’s going around using the word “attunement.” But I’m beginning to think it’s everything. It’s the cheat code to the life full of connection I really want. It means being aware of and responsive to another person’s emotional needs and moods. It’s a necessary ingredient for intimacy and connection. To attune to someone, first we have to perceive what they’re feeling (or at least that they’re feeling something) and then we have to show them we get it. Much of this happens at an unconscious, nonverbal level in our nervous system, through facial expressions, voice tones, and body language. It’s why we feel relaxed and trusting around some people and on edge around others, even if we don’t know why.

When someone’s anxious, stressed, depressed, or preoccupied, they can’t attune. Our nervous system picks up on that and we guard and pull away. But when someone’s at ease and emotionally available, they can be right there with us in the feelings. Our nervous system determines there’s enough emotional safety to express the feeling—through words or the body—because the odds are, we’ll be seen and heard. We won’t be dismissed or shamed or called “too sensitive” or “soft.” We won’t have to handle the emotion alone. Someone can carry it with us.

That’s why that research really got me.

Girls definitely deal with their own onslaught of screwed up gender expectations. But to think that boys are growing up with less attunement—this essential human need—breaks my heart. I think about my four-year-old nephew and the hurtful ways the world is treating him simply because he has a boy’s body. I think of all the men out there self-soothing in self-destructive ways—drinking alone or chain-smoking cigarettes or overeating or overworking—because they aren’t being met emotionally by anyone, except for maybe their partner. I think of how parenting in capitalism is a nearly impossible shitshow. “You can have childhoods were no overt trauma occurs,” says the physician and trauma expert Gabor Maté. “But when parents are just too distracted, too stressed to provide the necessary responsiveness, that can also traumatize the child.”

And I think of that little four-year-old version of myself, picking up broken robin eggs by the trees and staring at the eggplants. No one in particular is to blame for leaving him like that. The adults existed in a society that had even more screwed up, outdated ideas about masculinity than we have today. They were busy trying to pay the bills in a political and economic system that doesn’t actually care about families. They loved me and were doing their best.

If you’re like me and tend to pull away or avoid emotional closeness, but at the same time you’re starving for more connection, it’s not your fault. If you’re a parent who’s struggling to feel like you’re doing a good enough job attuning to your kid’s emotions, it’s not your fault. It’s this society’s fault. We aren’t taught this stuff, and we’re all way too stressed and busy. But it’s not too late to start trying to do things differently with the boys in your life. I’m going to try.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments—what’s your social life like? What frustrates you about it? What has worked for you in feeling more connected with others?

— Jeremy