Dear Men: Your Emotional Health Matters

You often think that ‘tough love’ is the way to go. You are afraid of being too indulgent or soft. “Suck it up” is a common phrase used when feeling down, frustrated, or anxious. Am I right?

I was recently watching a BBC Sports series called ‘Man Up,’ which features a roundtable of male athletes speaking candidly about their struggles with mental health and unacknowledged emotional health needs. When I look at the men in my own life, both past and present, I notice a great deal of pain beneath their strong and tough exterior. Men and boys learn that caring for one’s emotional health is a sign of weakness rather than strength.

The struggle of expressing emotions

It is no surprise that you struggle to express yourself. Growing up, you were not encouraged to do so. If all your life you’ve been told “don’t cry, be a big boy, stop whining, grow some balls” and if your father and your father’s father were all told the same thing. It’s imprinted in you to believe that the world would fall apart if you become “emotional.” A dear guy friend of mine who is going through a very difficult cancer treatment once told me, “You know, I just have to grin and bear it.” It summed it all up. 

Men push down their emotions, and in my experience, they either implode or explode. I know I’m grossly simplifying it, but it helps me make sense of things. Some men implode meaning they self harm, or resort to drugs and alcohol, or isolate and become depressed. In her article, psychologist Hanadi Beydoun describes the loneliness of self-sufficiency.

Other men explode. They tend to have tempers or be adrenaline-seeking, often getting themselves injured. As a result, they’re likely to engage in contact sports or join the military, seeking an outlet for their unresolved pain, anger, and hurt. Many men do a bit of both. 

Men are beginning to heal and break the cycle of emotional suffocation. This is thanks to the increased awareness of the importance of men's emotional health. Men and women are speaking up. Fathers and mothers want to do better by their children.

How can you heal? 

It’s not for me to say how you should improve your emotional health. But I would like to offer a few tools for the road: 

1. Feel your feelings

You can’t face yourself, your past and your emotions, if you don’t know what to do with all that comes up. You need to learn to acknowledge and name your feelings. A good book for this, I highly recommend, especially for men, is called Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett.

2. Turn back the clock

Acknowledge the pain of your past, whether it’s the pain of childhood, experiencing adverse events, or having gone through tough times. This is the hardest part, actually facing it all. I highly recommend a documentary called The Wisdom of Trauma. It will help you gain a deeper understanding of the impact of your past on your mind. 

3. Get support

Men need men in their lives who support them. I am talking about the kind of friends, brothers, fathers, uncles, spiritual mentors, coaches, AA sponsors and so on, who you know you can go to with any problem, who won’t judge you, will offer you a couch to sleep on, who won’t make you numb your pain but instead offer you love and support. 

4. Heal your body

All that pent-up anger, all those unresolved moments of grief and sadness and anxiety you faced in your past, you carry in your body, literally. Have you ever noticed gut problems, tight shoulders, a closed fist, clenched teeth at night, headaches, or low energy? After you’ve gone through a medical check-up and dealt with whatever is causing these symptoms, please remember to continue to work out what psychological experiences contributed to these symptoms in the first place. A great book I recommend is The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk.

5. Do therapy

An excellent podcast episode I recently listened to which focuses on enhancing performance and reducing anxiety which I think speaks particularly well to men is episode #521 on the Tim Ferriss show.

Please speak up, please express yourself, and please keep healing. The more you do, the better of a world it will be for the next generation of boys and men.

This blog was originally published by Aurelia Psychology under the title Dear Men. Some edits have been made to the original post.