Men are taught to devalue the very thing that makes great relationships

You can "control" your emotions, just not in the way you think.

Men feel like we have just two choices: Either keep our emotions under control, never complain, be rational, and stay cool, or if we don’t, that means we’re “too sensitive,” “hysterical,” out of control, unreliable, like a woman (which is supposedly a bad thing).

I hear it all the time from therapy clients. They say they want to “control” their feelings, stay calm, speak in a measured way, listen rationally to their partner, keep a lid on their anger.

They usually don’t tell me until a few sessions in, but they’re ashamed of times when they lost control. When they recklessly walked out on a relationship or slammed the door at work or yelled at the kids. They hate themselves for letting it happen.

They admit they have emotions. But emotions are to be kept in check, not experienced, not listened to, not exposed, and (god forbid) not communicated. It’s as if feelings have no value, and so talking about them is “unproductive,” “silly,” “trivial.”

These men come to me to figure out how to be a better partner. They’re fine with their partner—often a woman—being emotional. It might make them bored, annoyed, or angry. But “that’s just how women are.” Women lose control and cry and get scared and overwhelmed and appear to get something out of it. What that something is, these men aren’t sure. And how to react when she does it, well, that’s what they’re confused about.

They’ve tried giving advice, but that doesn’t seem to work. She wants someone to listen—really listen. They usually can keep cool for a while, but eventually they can’t hold it in anymore. They blow up and raise their voice or walk out of the room. Then the shame comes.

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I don’t try to convince them that they’re just as emotional as their partner, as much as I want to.

It took a decade of going to therapy and half that time as a therapist myself to learn that I’m a box of chocolates of emotion just as much as anyone else. Who knows what I’m feeling in any given moment? It’s usually a bunch of contradictory feelings all at once. In other words, I’ve spent a ton of time, energy, and money to learn that, even though I was socialized as a man, I am, in fact, a human being.

I don’t start there with these clients. Instead, I tell them that it is possible for them to feel a little more “control” over their feelings, even when their partner gets emotional. It is possible for them to have other choices for how to respond. They don’t have to try so hard to stay “cool, calm, and collected.” And they definitely don’t have to keep losing it and doing or saying things that make them ashamed.

The trick, I tell them, is to turn toward—not away from—the emotions, understand them, and maybe even tell someone you’re feeling them (if appropriate to the situation), rather than pretend they aren’t there, which is what allows them to take control of you. Just because you feel angry and let your partner know, doesn’t mean your partner is going to respond in the same way as if you yelled or punched the wall. The odds are they won’t.

I like how the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò puts it: “It is possible to experience emotions in their fullness and even to communicate them clearly and fully, while being guarded in the public performance of the emotions.” Táíwò calls this “emotional compression,” a form of managing emotions. Others have called it “emotional intelligence” or “emotional regulation.” I think of it as a long-lost art of being human that many men, including myself, just never learned.

Táíwò differentiates managing emotions in this way from “gendered restrictive emotionality,” how men have been taught to hide our feelings and avoid vulnerability (for economic and political reasons I won’t get into here). He cites research showing that “parents display and explain more emotion to girls than to boys at several early developmental stages, and the structure of styles of play associated with boys are more sharply hierarchical and less conducive to emotional expression than those of girls.”

This socialization teaches those of us who were raised as boys to “compartmentalize” emotions or ignore them completely. The problem is, by hiding them, the emotions tend to grow bigger and bigger until they spill out in uncontrollable ways. I don’t know why this happens, but I’ve experienced it over and over again. The more I’ve tried to ignore or escape or deny or drink away my feelings, the more intense and unpredictable the eventual explosion is. Meanwhile, while I’m holding it all in or simply not aware the unprocessed feelings are there, I’m riddled with stress, struggle to sleep well, and am grumpy to other people much of the time.

To start to unlearn this socialization, I help my clients figure out what, precisely, they are feeling when they’re partner gets emotional.

There’s often a part of them that wants to fix the problem and move on. There’s often also a distracted part of them that wants to look at their phone or turn on the TV. There’s often also the urge to be a “nice guy” and make it seem like they’re really getting it. There’s often also frustration, which can grow into anger.

We then explore how these different emotions and urges feel in their body. For example, the frustration might show up as a tense jaw or tight stomach muscles. We isolate and focus on whatever the sensation is, as though we’re having a conversation with the emotion itself. We ask it questions, like, “What are you frustrated about?” And, “What are you afraid of will happen if you don’t get frustrated?”

This is how my clients learn the origins of their emotional responses. It’s a lock that they’ve felt this sort of frustration before, maybe in a past relationship but most likely when they were a kid with their parents or other adults. They just were never taught what to do with the emotion. If they expressed it, they were likely either ignored or criticized. This taught them early on that feelings seem to have no value. That sharing how they feel seemed to have no power in getting their needs met by others.

But I’ve learned that emotions are extremely valuable and powerful. They might not pay the bills in our capitalist society, but they’re the currency of relationships. We need them—and our partner needs to know about them—to get our needs met. Otherwise, we’re left to either silently suffer and feel chronically unfulfilled or explode in anger, do or say something we don’t want to, and beat ourselves up in shame.

You have more choices, my dudes.

I’d love to hear about your relationship to emotions—what ways do you hide them or try to escape them, what’s been frustrating about that, what are you hoping will help you understand them more?

— Jeremy

📣 P.S. Want to go further with this? I’m planning a free online workshop later this month on how to navigate emotional conversations with your partner. Email me if you’re intersted and I’ll send you the link: jeremy@mohler.coach