Written by Chuck LeBlanc
Part of my role as a therapist is to help people connect with and understand themselves better so they can grow and thrive in their life. As I mentioned in my previous article much of my work has to do with male vulnerability. Which in a very big way means helping men connect with themselves and understand what emotions they are having in any given situations.
The task of helping men to connect with their emotions can be difficult in a society where we are taught to be stoic, strong, and block those difficult emotions like sadness, hurt, and grief. When those emotions are seen as a weakness our nervous system can view them as a threat and actively try to block or redirect them because we are feeling ashamed. Most of the time the emotions we men are allowed to have is anger, frustration, and irritation so those other emotions get redirected and repackaged as one of those instead.
…we are taught to be stoic, strong, and block those difficult emotions…
But what the heck are emotions anyway? And why is so important to feel what we are feeling?
Usually when we have these kinds of conversations, we think in terms of being rational vs being emotional. This is something our society tends to promote a lot. Because we are problem solvers and fixers, we rely a lot on our ability to figure things out and think things through. Emotions are seen as things that can sometimes get in the way of seeing things clearly. The problem with that line of thinking is that we are not all heads in a jar. Read that sentence again because I meant it.
Our rational minds, that part of us that uses logic and problem solving is designed for goal setting, tactical thinking, planning, and creativity. This part of us is designed to help us navigate this complex world we find ourselves in. But it’s not the only part of us that is navigating this world. Our physical bodies including our nervous system is what is actually in the world feeling touching, tasting, seeing, literally physically experiencing everything around us. Our nervous system which is controlled by our amygdala literally keeps us alive and monitors for threats as well as measures stressors in our environment. This is where we process big emotions as well as where our survival instincts lives. Reason, logic, planning and goal setting have nothing to do with the amygdala because that’s not its job. Instead its job is to keep us alive and to make sure we survive threatening situations. Now if you want to learn more about this in depth place check out my Blog and Anxiety here, or my podcast episode here and here. So what does this all have to do with emotions?
Well our emotions are a kind of feedback system our body gives us about our environment that relays information to our prefrontal cortex about what’s going on. This is very easy when it comes to being angry or scared because when we get angry let’s say when we stub our toe on the kitchen counter, we know what we are angry about. Or when we are watching a scary movie and we get startled by a jump scare we can clearly see what’s in front of us and for many of us we know it’s a movie so aside from a few sleepless nights we can laugh it off. But it gets way more complicated when it comes to grief, hurt or sadness.
If we have spent our lives blocking feeling sad about being hurt let say but we have been allowed to feel angry, irritated or frustrated then what kind of feedback do you think we are going to have about what’s going on in our environment. Instead of expressing our hurt and demanding better treatment, or setting boundaries we may just get irritated, quiet or angry. This feedback provides little information to the people who hurt us so they have no opportunity to change their behaviors. At the same time, we may not realize we are hurt so we have no way of even asking them to.
Leslie Greenberg, the founder of Emotion -Focused therapy can be very helpful for understanding this when he explains that we have two categories of emotions. The first called primary emotions, when our bodies reaction to the situation we find ourselves in for example grief. Grief is how we actually feel over the loss of a loved one. The secondary emotion is the emotion we are expressing to the world which either aligns with how we actually feel or is the emotion we are more comfortable feeling like anger, frustration or irritability.
Emotions are not something we can control because they are part of how our bodies digest what’s happening to us and relay feedback, but we can redirect or block them as we saw above. But redirecting or blocking our emotions have consequences. The blocking either stops the flow of emotions such as squishing them down or directs it in another direction, such as the case with being hurt or grieving and feeling angry instead, we stay angry because we are not processing our grief and instead are hiding in and using the residual energy to thrash at the world which could harm our relationships or lead to feeling more alone.
Therapy is all about getting in touch with the emotions we are having instead of the ones we are presenting to the world. This way we can start to understand how to provide proper feedback to ourselves (so we can understand what we need), and to others (so they can understand what we need from them).
~Chuck LeBlanc
For more information or how to book your first appointment.
Call 613-701-7574 or email us at info@ksrc.ca
