Because men has been socially conditioned and controlled to project overly mental or intellectualized states of being, it is common for males to reject their inner trauma and deep feeling experiences. Unfortunately, men are socially programmed to reject their inner trauma and shut off deep feelings and emotional processing. Often, they are still penalized if they show too much emotion. As a result, they can numb their feelings and start to externalize them to manage them (through addictions, perversions, workoholism etc.).

Society infuses us with a belief that a man is strong and emotions are a sign of weakness. That expressing emotions make you vulnerable. According to society standards, emotions make you less able to fulfill your roles as a protector and a provider. They mean that someone might be called upon to take care of you, instead of you being self-reliant and self-sufficient and independent the way men are supposed to be. However, the opposite is truth and this is just a misconception. Emotions are like compass points that help you to orient yourself and find direction. They inform you about what is important to you and your well-being. As such, they EMPOWER you.

By supressing them, you loose touch with yourself and the information contained within. You become like a cruise ship that has lost its captain, wandering around without a meaningful direction, that might eventually hit an iceburg just to remind itself the fatal importance of a functioning navigation.

If you feel angry, it might be because somebody overstepped your boundaries. However if you supress the anger and you pretend like nothing happened, you lie to yourself and by doing that you violate your needs. Because you don’t send out the message that something hurt you, people will not understand that they did something painful to you and will not get a chance to correct their behaviour. As a result, they might continue overstepping your boundaries in the future until you provide them a clear feedback. People can only hurt you if you let them (by not setting your boundaries etc.).

To succeed in hiding your feelings from others also requires hiding them from yourself, either by ignoring or denying their existence. As a result, masculinity often means not being comfortable with your emotions and having less self-awareness about your own mental functioning. But what else should we expect when boys learn that “real men” are supposed to cover up their feelings?

If you do not have a healthy output for your emotions and you are told there is something wrong or inadequate about expressing them, you automaticaly suppress your emotions to cope with them. Males (obviously this comes true for everyone) that cannot process negative emotions or cannot find a healthy outlet for inner trauma or tension, involve themselves in addictions and destructive situations. This perpetuates the destructive cycle. Suppressed emotions are like abandoned hungry children begging for your help. They will not stop until they get your attention and until you feed – ackowledge and release them.

Because of that men who suppress their emotions keep attracting the same type of situations over again that always leave them with the same feelings (you might replace situations with partners, jobs etc.). They might be thinking something about bad karma. However the turmoil is caused by them extrernalizing the feelings, not feeling through them inside. As a result they manifest them in outside circumstances. Each situation then becomes an opportunity to cope with their emotions and get to their core, to their origin (What is the last time you felt like that? When did you feel like this for the first time?). That is how they are healed.

What is the solution? The solutions is to shed light on your supressed emotions. To identify them, ask yourself: Which situations keep repeating in my life? How do I usually end up feeling?

I am holding space for the men on the path of self-development searching for further guidance and I will be glad to welcome more of them in my Coaching practise.

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