“I’m not sure how effective emotion-focused therapy is for working with men since men seem to be less in touch with their emotions during therapy.”
“Yes, I wonder about that too. I was able to get my female client to talk about her emotions but when I asked my male client what he felt, he said that he didn’t know and I was stuck. I found it very difficult to proceed.”
For the past year, I was attending a series of workshops by Dr Leslie Greenberg to learn more about Emotion-Focused Therapy and most of my coursemates shared similar sentiments about the difficulty of working with the emotions of male clients. However, during the past half of decade of working with predominantly male population, I certainly had a different experience of the commonly-held belief about men’s inability to express emotions.
“I tried emotion-focused therapy with some of my male clients and they were able to emote during the sessions. I think that once the rapport is built and there is enough trust in the therapeutic relationship, they will feel comfortable about expressing their emotions and their vulnerabilities.”
Just as Una Stannard, author of “Mrs Man”, said, “Men are no more immune from emotions than women; we think women are more emotional because the culture lets them give free vent to certain feelings, “feminine” ones, that is, no anger please, but it’s okay to turn on the waterworks.”
I remember seeing a little boy playing in the playground and when he accidentally fell down, he started to cry. An adult, presumably his mother, attended to him promptly and instead of comforting him, rebuked him sternly.
“Why are you crying? Stop crying now! Boys don’t cry. Shame, shame.”
It is shameful for boys to cry, apparently. Many people believe so. Generations after generations, parents socialise their sons into believing that boys don’t cry and that it is shameful to cry. Boys should never be seen crying in school because their friends will laugh at them and ridicule them, “What a sissy! Just like a girl!” How humiliating it must be!
It must be tormenting for a male to go through life, suppressing one of the primary emotions of a human being, that is, sadness and pain. He deliberately obliterates this emotion from his vocabulary and instinctively disguises and camouflages it with a more acceptable emotion of anger. This makes him emotionally handicapped although he often perceives himself as being more in control by keeping his sadness in check. In reality, he is in great suffering.
I like the way Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (more popularly known for his book entitled “The Little Prince”) wrote in his novel, Southern Mail, “One’s suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields – even to sadness.”
Is this just a difficulty experienced by one half of the world’s population?
“Crying is a sign of weakness.”
Karen proclaimed during a recent group session. I was taken aback to hear that from her because I assumed that it is more acceptable for girls to cry. As I was very confident about my assumption, I turned to the other girls in the group, in hope that they may support me to say that they did not agree with Karen.
“What do you think about what Karen just said, that crying is a sign of weakness.”
“I agree with her,” Shuyi responded. When Karen cried in the previous session, Shuyi empathised with her sadness and she started to cry but she could not verbalise the reasons for feeling so affected by Karen’s sharing. She talked about how embarrassing it was that she cried in the previous session.
“How about the others? Do you have a different view?” I was still hoping that someone might just disagree and I will have an opportunity to intervene elegantly. What happened next was a chorus of exchanges from the girls, all in agreement with Karen and Shuyi. I was completely stumped. What next? How was I to intervene? Surely this meant something to the group – that sadness is a bad emotion and that crying is certainly a sign of weakness.
Struggling to think on my feet, I offered an observation, “Since you regard crying as a sign of weakness and that it is embarrassing, it is no wonder that you feel uncomfortable whenever anyone breaks down in tears. You found it extremely difficult to attend to Karen when she cried, just as how it was in the first session when Dee cried. Everyone looked down and was very silent.”
The group felt that they were not allowed to express their emotions and they had to put on a strong front in front of their peers and teachers. This reminded me of the little boy who cried when he fell in the playground – he was verbally chastised for doing something so shameful as to cry. The opinion and belief transcended the world of boys and entered the realm of girls as well – girls don’t cry.
You have to be strong, an outstanding performer, a top-notch achiever, and most importantly, you cannot wear your emotions on your sleeves. You have to hide and conceal your vulnerabilities because a strong person has no vulnerabilities. By revealing your vulnerabilities, you give others a chance to discover your Achilles heel and that is when you will be defeated. God forbid that you should ever shed a tear and cry!
I looked at the girls and felt a wave of sadness waft over me. They must each be carrying a carefully-packed load of emotions which they were afraid that anyone would ever notice. I needed to create a therapeutic environment, which was safe and secure so that the girls will feel safe enough to express themselves during the sessions. Safety with me as well as with each other, that they will not feel judged by each other as they attempt to be genuine and authentic in the sessions.
Mark Twain described very aptly, “Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.”
This is how I view emotions – that emotions are normal; that they are our natural responses to our moment-to-moment experiences; that they are real and they remind us of our basic humanity. Our emotions inform us of our unconscious realities, our vulnerabilities and our triggers in response to various aspects of life. I have been told that some emotions are bad and should be avoided, or better, never be expressed. There is no such thing as a good or bad emotion, contrary to what most people think. What is more important is to be able to recognise our emotions, identify them and appreciate why we feel the way we do, attend to our emotions and express them appropriately. If we view certain emotions as being bad or undesirable, we end up denying those feelings and that part of us which experiences such emotions. This means that we will be unable to acknowledge a part of who we are and what we are made up of.
The problem is that many of us are afraid of painful and difficult emotions, those of our own and of others around us. They may seem overwhelming and even overbearing so we avoid facing those emotions and sitting in the same room as those who are experiencing them. Whatever we cannot deal with, we will try to stop it, as if we can put an imaginary cap over an overflowing bottle of fluid to stop it from overflowing. We are worried that by allowing our emotions to flow, we may lose control and fall apart, into pieces.
“You have to control your emotions!”
Don’t we often hear that said to us? Or we may be the ones saying this phrase to others. But is this really possible? To control our emotions? All we will be doing is to bottle up our emotions, almost literally, bottled up – putting that imaginary cap over your bottle of overflowing fluid of emotions. Imagine what happens to you, the turmoil you will feel and the injuries you are inflicting on your body. Emotions are felt in the body and that explains the ailments that we sometimes experience when we do not feel good about what’s going on in our lives. Some people term it as psychosomatic symptoms but it does not really matter what term we use to describe our experience. When you are in touch with your bodily experience, you will be able to sense the discomfort or unsettling feeling. This is when you take a step back and reflect and ponder what your body is trying to tell you and where the discomfort is coming from. This may give you a sense of what you are experiencing and why you feel the way you do.
Every human being has a range of feelings and emotions that he or she will feel from time to time. Give yourself the permission to feel them and validate your emotions as you experience them because this is what makes you uniquely human.
“Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place.” – Judith Wright
