Why Men Need To Feel Their Feelings

Why Men Need To Feel Their Feelings

I was emotionally shut down for years. Every woman I dated had to deal with my inability to identify a feeling. She would ask, “Hey is something bothering you?” I would reply, “No, I’m fine” with a hint of defensiveness.

The closest I ever came to identifying what was really going on was “I’m in a funk.” Many folks know this as feeling off somehow or my personal favorite, “I’m in a bad mood.”

Underneath such comments is an entire emotional landscape that remains largely unexplored. The metaphor I like to use is that of a lake.

When standing on the shore of a large lake, you can see ripples, colors, and reflections. If it is windy or stormy out, the surface of the lake changes and makes it even harder to see beneath the surface. Not until the storm dies down can you begin to see more clearly. When things are still, the lake's surface mirrors its surroundings.

Venture beyond the shoreline and even more possibility opens up. The lake takes on a new perspective. Looking beyond the reflection, it becomes three dimensional and you can see below the surface.

We are very similar. When we are upset, it is hard to see things clearly. The only way to see things clearly is to take some space from the upset, calm down, and gain a new perspective. Why am I mentioning this metaphor?

Because feeling helps you see clearly. And seeing clearly helps you move more freely toward what you want in your life. And when you get what you want, you are more fulfilled.

But Why Is It So Hard For Dudes to Feel?

Contrary to some big generalizations out there, men do in fact feel, but most men were trained as little boys by the “boy code” to not feel. They were trained and taught to suck it up, not cry, etc. For example, as a boy I was trained by my dad and my culture to not feel. To feel meant I would be judged as a wimp, a girl, or even gay. (As if girls or gay people are somehow bad?) So, men do feel, it’s just challenging for many men to know what they are feeling.

So, it’s understandable why many men don’t allow themselves to feel and can’t even identify a feeling. Many adult men are still very scared to feel their feelings because if they do, their fear is they will be judged as not manly, acting like a girl or being weak or gay.

So, most men never venture out beyond the shoreline and certainly don’t look below the surface. Therefore, many men remain locked up, shut down, and not free.

The Cost of Not Being Willing to Feel

1. relationship blues

Sadly, these old fears keep many men locked up around their feelings and lead to very frustrating relationships for women dating these men. Rather than dive in to the unknown waters of intimacy, men stay on the shore, where it is safe. But as any sailor will tell you, a ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for (a William Shedd quote).

Moreover, men who shut down or stuff their feelings remain emotionally constipated and have very little facility or freedom when it comes to intimacy. Then, they keep resisting actual help like couples counseling.

2. narrow bandwidth of expression.

If you never let yourself feel grief, anger, sadness and other “negative” emotions, you will have less access to the “positive” emotions such as joy, love, and happiness. The waters you are able to swim and navigate are more shallow. For example, if you avoid “negative” emotions, you might experience some happiness but the depth with which you feel it is limited.

3. you are not free.

Staying on the shore, you never really get to test if your vessel is seaworthy. Freedom is the open water of who you are, not the shore.

4. physical problems.

Most body workers, massage therapists, and good body-centered, somatic therapists know that the body holds and stores trauma and unexpressed emotion. The more you hold, the more the body has to carry the burden. Your boat begins to decay having never touched water. Stoic men who never learn to feel, are simply in pain.

5. You are less available to give and receive love.

If you shut yourself off from your own emotions and never “set sail,” you’ll never know what it is like to swim or sail. The endless terrain that is available to you will remain a distant dream. If you want to feel more love, try feeling all your feelings. Try exploring what lies below the surface farther from the shore.

For the brave who do decide to face the unknown lake of discomfort and painful emotion, what you will experience may shock you. Try it and see what happens. To me it’s something like an elixir.

But Where Do I Start?

1. Get quiet: When you are upset or “in a funk” sit down or lie down and be still. You cannot see below the surface until you are still. Meditation is a tool that can help.

2. Get Curious: Start with the facts before you begin to interpret or try to figure it out. Target three main areas:

a. Thoughts: When did it start? Ask yourself when this feeling started? Was it the fight with your partner last week? Was it a call with your parents? An ex-lover? Did something piss you off at work? Where are your thoughts going and what are they like?

b. Emotions: What does it feel like? Explore the feeling quality and the sensation that goes along with it. Is it hot? Cold? Tight? Humming? Vibrating? Tense? Soft, Achy? Does it have a color? A tone? Does it radiate? Is it dense? Thick?

c. Body sensations: Where in your body do you feel it? Is it in your throat? Gut? Chest? Where does it live?

3. Take responsibility for what you are feeling: Name it, begin to articulate it with a friend. For example, “Wow, for the last few days I was locked up. Now I know that it started when ____happened. I have felt tense and irritated ever since. I feel shut down and I don’t want to be around anyone.”

4. Notice what your default behavior is when you feel this way. When you find yourself “in a funk” do you numb out with TV? food? sugar? porn? masturbation? alcohol? drugs? Or do you isolate? Or both?

5. Choose to feel it until it changes. Have the balls to turn toward it. After all, what is the worst thing that could happen?

Want to feel more love and lightness in your life? Then start saying “yes” to feelings you have been saying “no” to. Invite them in and get to know them. As psychotherapist John Welwood says, befriend your emotions.

Why Is It Still A Big Deal When Boys Play With Girls' Toys ?

Why Is It Still A Big Deal When Boys Play With Girls' Toys ?

When a friend's son asked her for a pink floral bike helmet, she lied and told him they didn't have the floral ones in his size. He went home with a plain blue one instead.

"I hate myself for doing it," she tells me. "But I worry that he'll get teased."

No doubt she was also trying to avoid invasive queries. She's regularly subjected to lectures from friends and strangers about the perils of "indulging" her son by painting his nails and buying him the doll he requested for Christmas. According to these parenting experts, she's going to "turn him gay."

By contrast, when I encourage my daughter to transgress her gender role and take part in stereotypically male activities, like going to soccer lessons or playing a doctor rather than a nurse in her imagination games, I get nods of approval.

In fact, it's now cool to get your daughter to play with trucks and balls rather than, say, a Dream Barbie Rainbow-Shitting Pony. (OK, so I made that bit up; everybody knows that Barbie's pony poos pink diamonds.)

In some cases there is an active push away from letting girls be "girly," but at other times it happens by default when we praise traditional male behaviors more than female ones.

But when it comes to breaking down gender stereotypes, we're on a strictly one-way street because, by contrast, feminine behavior in boys is mostly discouraged. At best, it is tolerated.

We smile supportively at the mother who lets her son wear pink fairy wings to the library but secretly think she is courageous. Other mothers may not judge her, but they also don't actively encourage their sons to do the same.

Deviations from the script for raising boys are so unusual that when it does happen a social media sensation can ensue.

Remember when German father Nils Pickert wore a skirt in support of his dress-wearing son and the media went crazy with supporters and detractors? And when a mother let her son wear pink ballet flats to school? She got a write-up in Time magazine.

Just a couple weeks ago, a father who bought his son a princess DVD was described as "awesome" and "Father of The Year." By contrast, buying my daughter a truck is so mainstream that not one person called me a hero for my efforts.

Even the re-purposing of girl toys into boy toys, such as Hasbro’s plans for a toy oven for boys, is sufficiently revolutionary to make news. (Scientists are still trying to figure out why boys can't use a "girl" oven.)

By only half-addressing the gender stereotype problem we further instil inequality between the sexes. Privileging tropes of masculinity sends a message to our children that "male" is both natural and superior; that it is more interesting, more fun, and will make us prouder if our girls become something that they never can be—a boy.

No, I'm not suggesting that we should try to empower pink. Nor am I advocating some vacuous Girl Power. But there is a subtle, yet important, difference in encouraging our girls to be strong girls rather than second-rate boys. Otherwise, we risk our girls internalizing the belief that boys are better than girls and that, therefore, they are not entitled to the same privileges that boys and men enjoy. It's hard to fight for equality of opportunity if deep down you don't think you're good enough to deserve it.

And it's no victory for boys, either, because it continues to constrain them within the same narrow, emotionally- and creatively-stunted models of masculinity.

Traditional masculine attributes have social and economic currency so it's a no-brainer to want our children to possess them. But similarly, traditional feminine qualities such as compassion, empathy, attention to detail, and communication are worth celebrating, preserving, and encouraging in children of both sexes.

It's time that equality became a two-way street to the extent that parents encouraging sons to adopt stereotypically feminine attributes and attitudes is considered too normal and dull to provoke headlines.

The Sex Education I Wish I Had:

The Sex Education I Wish I Had:

So I have had almost zero formal sex education.

When I was 10, our teacher held the girls back at break time and solemnly informed us that we were due to start bleeding out of our vaginas any day now. If this happened while we were in school, we were to tell NO ONE but immediately locate the nearest female teacher, who would provide us with something to soak up THE SHAME OF OUR WOMB. She did not actually say that last bit, but even at 10 years old, I felt it was strongly implied. This was my first introduction to periods.

When I was fourteen, our science teacher skipped over the chapter on the reproductive system. She told us it was very unlikely to come up in our exams next year, and even if it does, you’ll have lots of questions to choose from so you can just skip it. I stared at the diagram of the penis in the book for a while. There was no diagram of the vagina, only the ovaries and uterus.

The same year, a lady from Tampax came to speak to us about periods and gave us heavily branded booklets about growing into our new bodies. At this point, I was wearing a C cup and I’d been using tampons for over two years, so it felt a bit belated. Nobody had any questions at the end of the talk.

When I was seventeen, we had 40 minutes of “Health Ed” class every two weeks. There was no syllabus, but our teacher was smart and engaged. He led a lot of interesting discussions—about drinking, drugs, smoking, bullying, about stress and good study habits, depression, body image, more drugs, more bullying—but something was notably missing from the laundry list of things 17-year-old girls typically worry about.

And that was it. I could definitely blame this on growing up in Ireland, a country so deeply steeped in Catholicism that it’s difficult to find a school where saying prayers in morning assembly is not the norm. But a friend of mine also went to an all-girls convent school, and she did have a sex ed class. Which apparently involved trying to put a condom on a banana with one hand.

I’ve started thinking about the sex education I wish I’d had. I even went as far as drafting a syllabus, because I’m obsessive like that, but I will not inflict it on the Internet because I’m not an educator and also it’s five pages long. But I will show you my wish list. Because maybe it’s just my inner Hermione Granger talking, but I do wish there’d been a class.

I wish there was a class that laid out the hard facts. All the different bits and what they do and where they can go. I wish there’d been a class that busted all the myths and laid bare all the slang, so I didn’t have to rely on furtively searching Urban Dictionary on a dial-up connection on the family PC.

I wish I’d been taught that even though the definition of sexual intercourse is a penis going into a vagina, there are lots of different ways to have sex and most people will develop their own personal definition as they get older.

I wish I’d been taught that there is nothing morally wrong with having sex. I wish I’d been taught that virginity is not something that can be “taken” or “lost” and that you still retain all your intrinsic worth as a human after you’ve had sex for the first time.
I wish there’d been a full diagram of a vagina ANYWHERE in my young teenage life. I wish someone had told me what my “clit” was so I didn’t have to use Google just to find out where the fucking thing was hiding.

I wish I’d been taught that masturbation is completely and totally normal, to the point that it’s almost banal, and also maybe been given some pointers.

I wish the boys had not been sent out of the room when we had our talk about the menstrual cycle, because one too many men have asked me, you know, what’s, like, the deal with periods? I wish women didn’t feel the need to refer to perfectly natural processes in our bodies as “Auntie Flo” or “my time of the month” or whatever other coy euphemism we use to shield the menfolk from the TERRIBLE KNOWLEDGE OF THE BLOOD MOON CULT. I’m grateful we don’t have to sit in a hut outside the village anymore, but I also wish frankly mentioning my ovulation cramps was not considered a bit risqué in polite society.

I wish there was an incredibly detailed class on the entire reproductive system and it was mandatory learning for every single person on the planet, because then maybe there wouldn’t be so many middle-aged middle-class men making bizarre statements about the things my womb can and can’t do.

I wish someone had explained the difference between gender, sex, and sexuality and why those distinctions are important. I didn’t know anything about that until I got around to reading Judith Butler as part of my degree, and the idea that gender is fluid should not have been a mind-blowing revelation for my 20-year-old self.

I wish someone had given me the full break down on contraception—the different types available, how they work, how to use them, where to get them. I wish the first time I handled a condom was not also the first time I helped a guy put one on.

I wish there was an awareness of gay people and bisexual people and queer people and trans people and the fact that they have different experiences of sex, which are also perfectly natural and normal and valid, because then rampant homophobia would probably be less of a thing among 15-year-olds.

I wish that we’d been taught about STIs, but without the typical level of hysteria and shame that accompanies any discussion surrounding teenagers and STIs. I wish someone had explained that there is risk involved in having sex, just like there is risk involved in playing sports or driving a car. That does not mean we should never ever do these things, it just means we need to be smart and follow the rules so we can manage those risks effectively.

I wish someone had sat us all down very seriously and explained that sex is not a zero-sum game between men and women, nor is it a competition, nor is it a commodity, something that women bestow on men in exchange for dinner and flowers (and therefore women who don’t bestow in a timely manner are in breach of contract, the cock-teasing sluts)

wish that, in the same lesson, we’d been taught that a man and a woman with an identical sexual history will be treated very differently by society, and that’s not fair or OK and we should be aware of this in the way we talk about sex.

I wish I’d heard ANYTHING about the concept of consent before I started actively seeking out feminist writing. I wish we’d talked about how pressuring or manipulating someone into having sex with you is coercion. I wish that we’d been told that if someone is too drunk or high to speak in coherent sentences, walk in a straight line, stay awake, or take care of themselves, they are not able to consent and having sex with them anyway makes you a rapist. I wish there was an emphasis on the fact that sex should always be something that happens between people who are enthusiastic and comfortable and happy to be there, and that nobody should settle for anything less than that. I wish all of these things were just common knowledge and good sense, instead of constantly being dismissed as a radical feminist agenda.

Most of all, I wish I’d grown up in an environment where my peers and I felt comfortable discussing sex and asking questions, because then maybe none of the above would ever have been scary or mysterious. I wish we had classroom discussions about sex and exams on sex and reflective essays on sex and it was all as normal and interesting and important as algebra or poetry.

Now I’m a clued-in 20-something woman who talks more openly about sex than most people are comfortable with. But it took me a long time and a lot of hassle to get here

Thales

'The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself."

7 Ways to Wear White - by Pankrut Kapoor

The scorching summers call for colours that brighten up your day, but even the mention of the colour white gives you that calm soothing feeling. A colour synonymous to all seasons, white will keep you cool this summer or cosy during winters. Let’s look at some ways to include white in your wardrobe and create different looks this season.

1. All white makes Jack a happy man
A certain 70's actor comes to mind when you think of an all-white look. White pants and a white T-shirt broken down by a subtle coloured shoe or accessories can make for the perfect summer attire if carried off well.

2. White pants
Chose white cotton or linen pants for a relaxed and laidback look and team it with a printed or solid coloured shirt with rolled up sleeves. Go sockless with loafers or sandals; add a hat, and you're all set to beat the heat in style.

3. Top it up
While a white shirt will cool you down on a sunny day, team it with printed trousers in pastel colours to up your style. Avoid wearing denims when you have so many other options to choose from which are also summer-friendly.

4. White Blazer
Whether it’s an engagement brunch or a summer party in the outdoors, the white suit needs to come out in the open. Temperature rise calls for white and a white blazer is the perfect choice for a formal occasion to look smart and cool.

5. Traditional Cool
Go the traditional-modern way by wearing a plain white kurta and blue jeans for a casual day of work and play. Accessorise with shades or add some colour with a chain or sandals.

6. Accessorise
If white is a bit too plain for you and been worn throughout the week, try adding it to your outfit in the form of small accessories. Shades with a white frame have a retro feel and look super cool. White shoes too are appealing to the eyes, if kept clean of course.

7. White-ish
If you still want some colour, add it on to your whites. Wear coloured prints like stripes on your whites. White T shirts with witty one-liners on it can also be cool, of course if your humour
is good. No need to go completely white as long as the main element is white which is balanced out with some prints. Do clothes really define or change your mood? Well research says they do, so put on your white pants and keep it cool. Just remember to also keep it really clean.

Curtains (English) - Nakshatra

Confucius

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
                                                                               ― Confucius