You may be familiar with Gary Chapman’s book The Five Languages of Love, which outlines how we express and experience love. This book helped popularise the notion that we each have a love language.
In the last blog, “Who cares? Men Care”, we discussed five ways men demonstrate their care for family and friends:
While these ways of demonstrating care are essential, it is equally important for men to extend their language of care by learning to express their emotions. Many men feel constrained by society’s norms from displaying emotions or vulnerability. This difficulty in being vulnerable and identifying, naming, and expressing what they are feeling can impact a man’s mental wellbeing and the health of his interpersonal relationships.
Men are often criticised and judged for not expressing emotions or vulnerability. However for many, the ability to identify, name, and express what they are feeling is a skill that has to be relearned after years of suppressing and hiding it to enable them to survive in a world where feelings are equated with weakness.
Hence, the question is how do we provide men with safe places where they can relearn the skills of naming, identifying and expressing their emotions?
When we can’t name our feelings, knowing how to change them is challenging. For example, many men report feeling grey, bland, flat, tired, heavy, and disinterested. These sensations and descriptions can describe many things, from boredom to starting to feel burnt out to depression.
Resolving a sense of boredom in our lives is very different to treating underlying depression. It isn’t easy to deal with it if we don’t have the emotional literacy to know and accurately name what we are feeling.
If we don’t understand what we are going through, it becomes very challenging to understand what another person is going through, which often leads to relationship conflict because our partners or children feel misunderstood and what they feel is invalidated.
So, how do we improve our skills and ability to care, particularly our emotional literacy?
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that for many men, learning emotional literacy is more about remembering an early language than learning an entirely new language. Growing up, many boys were emotionally literate, but this literacy was gradually forgotten as we were socialised into a world where emotional expression by men was viewed with suspicion and as evidence of a lack of strength.
However, the good news is that learning or relearning how to be emotionally literate is possible. Like learning any language, it takes time and practice.
We can do several things to assist us in relearning emotional literacy.
Often, men think of their emotions as right or wrong, emotions we can feel and emotions we can’t feel. For example, anger is usually permissible because it hides fear, which we have learnt to hide. Feeling weak or vulnerable is wrong and so denied.
However, emotions are like waves that come and go rather than fixed states that we should or shouldn’t feel. Being curious lets us notice what we feel and where we feel a particular emotion. For example, when stressed, we may hold tension in our jawline, clenching our teeth together. Or we may hold tension in our stomachs.
Anger is a good emotion to get curious about. Often, we are unaware of our anger until it explodes out of us, and then we blame the other person or the situation for making us angry. Becoming curious about the feeling of anger and where we are feeling it in our body allows us to take action to begin self-regulating our anger and managing it in a helpful way.
As men, we often use “you” statements, such as “You made me…” or “You did this.” These statements are used when we want to blame the other person or deflect attention away from ourselves.
We assert our authority and responsibility when we use “I” statements. For example, “I am feeling …” clearly honours our emotions at a particular time. The ability to say “I feel concerned that you are upset” is also a powerful verbal demonstration of your care.
If you are learning a new language, you accept you will make mistakes. You will mispronounce words or use the wrong words in a sentence. You don’t give up learning the language because you make a mistake. You keep learning, persevering and correcting your mistakes.
The same is true with learning emotional literacy. You will make mistakes and misname what you or another person is feeling. You will feel uncomfortable and, at times, stupid, just as you would if you were learning a new language.
It is crucial at these times to show yourself some compassion and be your own cheerleader. When dealing with emotions, we never get it right one hundred per cent of the time. The issue is not getting it right. What is important is that we are trying to learn and demonstrate new ways of caring.
At The Men’s Table, men can learn, practise and develop their emotional literacy skills. The Table provides a safe environment where men can practise using “I” statements when they talk about their life experiences.
Why is learning and practising our emotional literacy with other men at The Men’s Table important?
As boys and young men, we learned it wasn’t safe to be emotionally literate or express our emotions around men.
We closed off our emotions, shut down when around other men and learned to play masculine roles that kept us safe. Reclaiming and expressing our emotional literacy among trusted men assists in healing the distrust we learned as young men.
We are more likely to embrace emotional openness when we see other men at the Table doing the same. It builds our confidence that it is possible, and seeing it modelled for us gives us practical ideas for expressing our emotions meaningfully.
Unlike emotional sharing with women, which often places men in a passive receiving role, emotional vulnerability with male friends fosters mutual support. It allows men to realise that their struggles are not unique and that they are not alone.
A study from the University of British Columbia (Seidler et al., 2019) found that men who discuss emotions within male friendships experience greater life satisfaction and resilience than those who rely solely on female emotional support.
While learning emotional literacy and the confidence to identify and express our emotions is undoubtedly beneficial for men’s mental wellbeing and can improve the quality of their relationships, it is essential to keep in mind the challenges that men who are neurodivergent can have with identifying and expressing emotions.
Like all men, men who are neurodivergent experience deep emotions. They have developed unique ways to process and communicate their emotions, which may not be understood by other men. It is essential in such situations that men who are neurodivergent can navigate emotional expression in ways that feel authentic and effective to them.
Hence, not only does The Men’s Table provide a safe place for men to develop their confidence and ability to share what they are feeling, it is also an opportunity for men to demonstrate their care towards men who are neurodivergent and may need validation or additional support to express their emotions in authentic and validating ways.
~ David Kernohan
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