Relationship Advice: Expressing Emotion

A few weeks ago, while scrolling through my Facebook feed, there was a post requesting:

Men Only: Give the ladies some relationship advice

A little Hippie, A little Hood the Remix

I replied with the following:

Please be gentle. If your man needs to let out emotions, let him, and do your best to support that. A lot of us feel the pressure to carry emotional baggage on our own, or that we have to bottle everything up. A lot of times, this makes us into an exposed nerve. That being said, flipping that around, exercise your empathic skills, particularly discernment. Learn how to tell the difference between a partner that truly needs emotional support and the narcissist that will use your good intentions against you.

Wayne Cochran

This response really seemed to hit a nerve with a lot of people (see replies on that thread here), so I wanted to share and expand upon my thoughts about men expressing emotion.

We All Experience Emotions

Society, particularly in America but also applicable all over the world in varying degrees, has set a certain expectation about how men handle their emotions. Men are typically expected to be stoic. When we do have emotions, we are expected to deal with them in private.

Holding back our emotions is harmful. Without a healthy outlet for our emotions, they can find their way out in unhealthy ways. Pent up emotions can lead to uncontrolled outbursts. Outbursts can be vocal, or even physical, depending on how you’ve been taught to deal with emotions.

Roadblocks To Handling Emotions

Lack Of A Proper Learning Environment

Many people never learn how to properly deal with their emotions. Childhood environment is a huge factor in how someone handles emotions as adults. Growing up in an abusive or neglectful home can keep a person from developing healthy ways of dealing with emotions.

Traumatic Impact

Some people grow up in homes that encourage healthy ways of dealing with emotions, but life experiences cause people to withdraw into themselves. Any trauma can cause someone to shut down emotionally. Rejection from someone you opened up to in the past can cause you to shut others out of your emotions. Victims of violent crime are often left so traumatized that they cannot open up about their experiences to others. Soldiers in war see such unspeakable horrors that they cannot bear to relive them by sharing them.

Not So Self Assured

Insecurity is a huge roadblock in handling emotions in a healthy manner. Even if you were raised in the most loving environment in the world, your own insecurities can keep you from sharing with those closest to you. If you don’t feel confident in your own emotions, how do you expect someone else to take them seriously?

Emotional Baggage Carriers

Men often feel like we are the emotional baggage carriers of the relationship. Especially in hard times, such as a job loss or a medical crisis, a lot of men feel the expectation that they need to carry the emotional burden of the couple on their own. We feel like we are a burden during tough times if we let out how we truly feel. Sometimes, men feel like if they start to let their emotions flow that it will be overwhelming and they won’t be able to stop the flow. This is a big reason why sometimes something that may seem insignificant can set someone off emotionally. Eventually, all of the bottled up feelings have to come out some way.

Be Mindful Of Emotional Manipulation

The ultimate caveat in all of this is to be aware of your partner’s intentions. Especially for those with empathic abilities, be aware of if your partner is in emotional need or if they are using emotion to manipulate you. Is their intent to build the emotional bond between you, or are they trying to tear you down to build themselves up?

Different, But The Same

Honestly, a lot of what I’ve discussed can apply to women just as much as men. But society has different expectations of women than it does of men, and sometimes it helps to realize that even though there are many differences between us, there are a lot of things common to men and women that the opposite gender tends to take for granted. We all have the need to find relationships that help us with expressing emotion.

Housekeeping: I have fixed some broken hyperlinks on Validation Arrows: Pointing Toward Our Path in Life. I also have renamed some images files that did not have file names that conformed to my site standards. This should not have broke any image links, but if you notice any broken images please let me know.

Teaser: Next time, we’ll talk about what could have been, what could be, and the many possibilities.