Emotional Unavailability in Men
Defining terms like emotional unavailability – much less working with it in therapy – can be a tall order. Sitting down to write this blog post I noticed myself slower to unpack this concept compared to other topics I’ve covered, and I’ve been training and practicing as a counselor for five years. Even expert emotion scientists from the Yales and Harvards admit how elusive it can be to understand and frame emotions.
Based on my clinical and personal experience, I think the gist of emotional unavailability is that it’s challenging to recognize, understand, name, and communicate emotions. I’ve worked with hundreds of men who don’t understand how they feel. Just as often, they are afraid to feel.
Men suppressing emotions can be conscious of feeling emotional numbness, but are unclear on how to create a life richer in emotional awareness and expression. Many of the men who come see me in therapy feel frustrated that opening up feels so foreign to them. They want to feel the feelings but don’t know how.
When asked how they’re feeling, for example, many men respond with “good, fine, okay, not bad’. Alternatively, some men will say what they’re thinking rather than talk about their feelings. “I don’t really feel much at all” is another common response. The first encounters with intentionally and deeply exploring our inner worlds can be discouraging and confusing.
When Avoiding Emotions Make Sense, and When They Don’t
My intent here is to do more normalizing than pathologizing of emotional avoidance. There's good reason for suppressing emotions under certain conditions. Could you imagine if you were always feeling your feelings? It’s probably best if a surgeon doesn’t check their feelings wheel every few minutes when operating on a patient.
Thinking in evolutionary terms, emotional avoidance helps us cope with overwhelming feelings – like unbounded sadness after losing a loved one– by giving us reprieve from the intensity of these feelings and allowing us to be more flexible in our attentions. Yes, we need to sit with and tend to our emotional wounds for a time. But eventually life moves on, and so must we. So, in some instances, it’s healthy to compartmentalize our emotions so we can focus on other tasks.
Emotional unavailability is not helpful when we can’t draw on our emotions in situations where it would benefit us. Most of the time, we’re probably in positions where we need some level of emotional intelligence. Emotionally intelligent men recognize cognitive abilities alone aren’t enough to be successful professionally, or live and love well in their personal lives.
Play with the idea that your emotions are like one of your five senses. Losing the ability to smell, taste, or touch can make life much harder. Men emotional maturity have all five senses sharpened.
Why Men Often Struggle with Emotional Intelligence
No shame if you don’t have confidence in your emotional intelligence. We didn’t have ‘feel your feelings’ 101 class growing up. Men have feelings too but we likely didn’t have healthy emotional intelligence modeled to us by fathers, even if they were loving and caring. The inheritance many sons get from their dads is a lower degree of emotional availability.
Perhaps you’ve always known this about yourself or men in your life. I think I had a fuzzy, intellectual sense of this since my own youth. Yet there are multiple levels of awareness, and I developed a more visceral sense of this after participating in a weekly male therapist group where we process what’s coming up for us in our lives.
I never heard a group of men talk with such a strong, nuanced command of their very active emotional worlds. That was definitely not the conversations I had with my friends, family members, or teachers. If anything it was the opposite of messaging I received of ‘just let it go’ or nudges to solve problems rather than sit with feelings. Being in this environment at times riddled with me fear and anxiety because I never was so vulnerable in front of so many people, and it was also empowering and alivening when I put everything on the table.
So again, for most of us, we weren’t invited by adults to engage with our emotions so please don’t get demoralized during this process. Now as an adult you have an opportunity to develop your emotional skills in the way you’ve built other life skills. Think of it like you’re learning Chinese or any other second language. You have the innate ability to learn a language, to recognize and use new sounds. You just need to put in the time to practice these skills without giving up. Quitting is the only way you lose here.
How to Improve Emotional Intelligence
Just reading articles like this can spark a greater awareness about your emotional life. If you want more resources on emotional intelligence, I highly recommend checking out Tara Brach’s ‘RAIN’ model. That said, there’s so many tools, frameworks and practices to go over that it can be overwhelming. Where I recommend you start is with practicing scanning yourself for emotions.
Try and tune into what you’re feeling once or twice a day. Notice physical sensations in your body (like warmth, tension/looseness, lightness/heaviness); the content of your thoughts; and any images or words that come to mind. Using all of this information you just collected, give it your best shot at labeling the emotion - are you feeling sad, curious, calm, content, anxious, excited? Perhaps you’re feeling two disparate things at once ( ie frustration and optimism), or you’re having an emotion about an emotion (ie I’m guilty that I feel happy). It doesn’t have to be this huge emotion; it can be just a small one. And if you’re not detecting any emotion at all, that’s okay too. What’s important is you’re getting in the practice of checking in with yourself.
Men's counseling can also be a great place for you to learn more about your emotional world. As a male therapist, I know that many men feel more comfortable sharing their feelings (or apprehension about opening up) with other men. I’d be happy to support you in this process of self-discovery and please reach out if you’d like to learn more about working together. And if we’re not the best match, there are so many therapists in Arlington who you’d be in good hands with and I’m happy to brainstorm options. In any case, I’m glad you read this and wish you well on wherever your journey into your inner world takes you.
