In my forty-five years of work in ministry I have found that most people, and men especially, have trouble recognizing, acknowledging, and engaging their feelings. When asked how they are feeling, many men can only name “hungry”, “tired”, or “fine”. These are not emotions. They are physical sensations. Meanwhile, under the surface, there is a spectrum of emotions often being ignored and suppressed that are triggering many unhelpful actions and reactions that negatively affect our everyday lives. This is personal for me. I remember being with my wife at a “Marriage Encounter” weekend. In one exercise, we were asked to do a “dialogue” with our partner. This was to help us communicate our deepest emotions with each other. We were to use a simile (a figure of speech comparing two things to describe something, like “mad like crashing waves”, or “sad like a wet blanket”) to express how we were feeling. All I could think of was, “I feel good … like I know that I should.” My wife was a little disappointed. And so was I.
Realizing that I did not have the insight, nor the vocabulary, to understand and express what was going on for me emotionally left me and my loved ones disengaged from that rich part of me, and it left us hostages to the triggers that affected my relationships, work life, motivations, and general enjoyment of life. Canadian psychologist and researcher Hillary McBride says I am not alone. She writes,
“We usually have trouble feeling emotions for a number of reasons: We were discouraged from feeling through shame, punishment, rejection, isolation, or the sense that our feelings would overwhelm the person we were hoping would help us. When we did feel, it was unbearable. We didn't know how to feel, how to soothe ourselves, or how to get through to the other side. Or we had to do it alone, but it was overwhelming and terrifying. We learned that feeling wasn't allowed for our particular identity or context.” *
Many men I know cannot name an emotion, let alone clearly articulate what they are feeling. Meanwhile, too many women have a frustratingly unmet longing to connect deeply with their male partners emotionally. But their male partners just can’t do it. My wife has been a clinical therapist for over twenty years. She says this is at the core of most unhappy marriages. My newest book, "Five Invitations" is an attempt to help.
* Hillary McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection Through Embodied Living (HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, Toronto, ON, 2021), p.115
