For Men Only: How to Improve Your Relationships Through Feelings

Many adult men find it difficult to know what they are feeling. Psychologists call this normative male alexithymia.

Boys are born with similar emotional capacities as girls. However, social and cultural influences discourage emotional fluency as they grow older.

Men can re-learn and reclaim their feelings through a mix of self-confrontation and help from a trusted partner.

It is always hard for men to know what they are feeling. Those in therapy are encouraged to observe their behaviour and try to deduct what was happening inside them. This difficulty might have played a role in some persons’ choice to be a therapist. Clinical training has taught them first-hand how to recognize better, own, and verbalize their feelings. Subsequently, they urge their male clients to do the same.

Therapists at Hope Trust have reported meeting with hundreds of men struggling to feel their feelings over the years. They have also met hundreds of their partners, feeling lonely, frustrated, and lacking companionship because of their emotionally unavailable mates.

Covert Male Depression

To understand this phenomenon, perhaps the best source is psychotherapist Terry Real‘s ground-breaking book, “I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression”. It explains how boys undergo “relational loss” —being forced to separate from their mothers and feelings to become “men.” They also learn to turn away from their fathers and their pain toward work, money, success, sex, drugs, and other distractions. They covertly experience depression, primarily as numbness, boredom, apathy, limited emotional expression, and cynicism.

Their partners see them as emotionally handicapped, stoic, and cold-hearted. When I begin talking to such men about covert depression, they initially display surprise at the idea of depression but then quickly feel validated and understood. Their partner’s eyes light up as a new empathic discourse emerges. Normalizing the emotional struggle of men helps the partners join forces to heal the hidden depression.

In short, they are disconnected from their genuine emotions and seek connections outside, which are temporary and ultimately unfulfilling.

Permission to Feel

Accompanying the covert depression is normative male alexithymia – a crucial phenomenon that impacts men’s personalities, emotional wellbeing and relationships. The American Psychological Association defines it as” 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.”

Most men suffer from the inability to feel, identify or describe emotions—considered normative among men. The fact that it’s normative doesn’t mean that it’s natural or good. Boys are born just as sensitive as girls. But through the socialization process, boys lose permission to feel and become disconnected from their core.

When a man suffers from covert depression and normative male alexithymia, he essentially is surviving and not living. Therefore, he is not experiencing the whole emotional range and experiences the world as complicated, dull, and boring. Over time, his partner forms the impression that he is stoic, boring, and uninterested. Feeling unloved and alone, the partners often become bitter and look elsewhere for emotional companionship.

Therapists mostly witness changes in such couples by reconnecting men to their feelings, expanding their emotional range, and subsequently their passionate eloquence. Hope and newfound animation begin to spread through our clinic.

You Want to Feel?

Feelings are natural. All humans, even animals, experience feelings. We are born with it. But disconnection from feelings is often enforced on boys.

Want to overcome the imposed emotional handicap? Here are some valuable suggestions:

• Understand that feelings are what make us what we are. Otherwise, all of us are the same – everyone has one nose, two ears and two hands and legs. What makes us unique is how we feel predominantly – kindness, humility, love, caring, compassion. Or angry, bitter, resentful, lonely. Therefore, if you want to enjoy life to its fullest, you must dare to feel the good, the bad, and the ugly. Be a good, complete human.
• Expand the range of your emotions. The more wide-ranging your emotional spectrum, the livelier you’ll be. You will experience life in all its shades and hues.
• The key to joy in life is in your pain. Identify and experience pain. Open the doors to the darker shades of emotions, apart from the lighter ones.
• Joy is a verb. It is a flowing emotion. You must practice feeling joy by consciously rewiring your brain and engraving it in your life.

If you do all this, you’ll feel free with new energy in your relationships. After all, love is to feel free.

Our therapists encourage our couples counselling clients to open up and share their fears, vulnerabilities, and strains with their partners. Then they stop running away and confront their past, pain, and wants. The men begin to return to their whole selves, and their relationships flourish.

So how do you feel?

If you need to deepen your relationship with your partner, click here to book a couples counselling session with one of our therapists.