The Importance of Doing Your Emotional Work

All right, and welcome back. On this episode, I want to talk about the importance of doing your emotional work as a man.

Now, by emotional work, first off, I mean increasing your emotional literacy. And what that really means is your ability to connect to and feel the emotions happening in your body and to name them. It's very hard to name an emotion you don't have a word for. So increasing our emotional literacy is actually increasing the amount of emotions we have access to.

Then once we can identify and feel those emotions in ourselves, the second part of that is our ability to express those emotions, both in just naming them and sharing them with others, and also in terms of just feeling them and moving that energy in some kind of appropriate emotional expression, meaning in some kind of safe way that's not directed at someone out of reactivity.

Now, one of the main reasons taking that on as a body of work is so important has to do with two things. I see pretty much every man I know struggling with, and those are stress and energy. And one way we can think about what a lot of stress actually is is that it's unprocessed emotion.

So when we're walking around feeling stressed in our lives, often that's actually tied to what we're not quite willing to feel or haven't quite processed emotionally in our lives, whether that's anger, fear, grief, shame, just to name a few of the big ones. Angel. And so the more unprocessed emotion we have in our lives, the more stressed out we're going to feel.

And this isn't just a cognitive thing I'm talking about here. There's actually a term for this. There's something called allostatic load, which is really just kind of a fancy word for all of the cumulative stress and its impact on our actual cells and how those relate to our neuroendocrine system. So the connection between our body and our brain, its ability to regulate hormones, it turns on and off.

That is all kind of summed up in this phrase of allostatic load. The higher our allostatic load, the more chronic stress has actually changed the behavior of us at a cellular level. It's really important here. And over time, increased allostatic load has major consequences on our physical and emotional health. We biologically age faster, and our immune system doesn't work as well, and we can get sicker easier.

This unprocessed emotion that so many of us carry around, that is actually our stress. When we're saying I'm stressed out about something, often what it means is there's a feeling I'm managing right now and not quite capable or willing to fully be with in this moment. And when we have a lot of those feelings and they get stacked up, we start to get edgy, stressed, tight. We get more reactive in some pretty significant ways.

And all of those emotions that we're not feeling, we're actually holding. It's the thing you got to realize here. There's no getting rid of an emotion. You can either feel it or hold it. Sometimes holding is a conscious process. Sometimes it's a very unconscious process. We're not even aware we're holding that feeling. And that's where something like shadow work can be so powerful, which is one of the many modalities.

I work with men, but when you're not feeling an emotion, you have to hold it in your body. And that, over time, impacts our musculature. There's a way we hold our shoulders, our face, our gut, even our ass can hold this kind of stress. And it has an impact on us. And when our body is tight, often our awareness is tight. And that holding of emotions just intensifies over time.

I talk to a lot of guys I work with that. As you become more sensitive to this kind of work, you can start to see in the people around you the shapes their bodies are taking, that kind of mold to the emotions they're holding in their lives, the emotions they haven't fully felt. One way we can think of these held emotions are emotional debt. Right? It's like a credit card we've charged that we haven't quite paid back.

And these little debts stack up in our body. And in fact, they'll often kind of pool together in pretty intense ways. And one of the challenges with that is these debts, they stack and they pool, and they'll intensify current emotions even more. So what I mean by that is we might be having an experience in the world where some kind of stimulus comes at us and we feel a little bit of anger.

Now, normally that might be a 2 or 3 on the scale of 10, right? But if we have this emotional debt, particularly around anger accrued in our system, let's say it's a 7, 8, or 9 of chronic anger, that 2 or 3 comes in and it's like boom. It hits that pocket of eight or nine and explodes with a lot more intensity than it might otherwise.

And we hold these kind of emotional kinks and this emotional debt in our bodies all the time. A lot of talk these days about modern society and culture is about how stress levels keep rising. Now, in some ways, you can ask yourself, is life more stressful now? Meaning, are most of us in more life and death situations on the day to day?

I would argue for a large percentage of the modern world, no. We're not as threatened in our lives day to day as as we may have been 20,000 years ago, where we were continually having to hunt, find food, warring, dying from disease. These were big things. So if life's not actually more threatening for most of us, you know, I'm not here to say that's not happening on the planet.

And for some people, it's not very rough right now. But I'm talking about those of us living in the safe bodies bubble of the kind of modern world these days. We're not living in as threatened a way. So why are we more stressed? Well, there's kind of two things here. There's either more stress out there in the world or we're processing the stress we have less effectively. And one of the things we kind of tend to lean towards in the personal growth and development world are all kinds of practices that unsurprisingly were woven in to a lot of indigenous and tribal culture that as the years have gone on and we study and understand more the brain, body connection, lo and behold, turns out a lot of these practices were ways of processing emotional experiences.

And because they were more processed, there was less stress. And so even though we don't have more external stresses right now, what has disappeared in our culture is a lot of the ways we handle that emotion, particularly on a cultural and social level. So much of our emotional experience as human beings, as I've talked about, is tied into the fact that, that we're social creatures. We have an entire nerve going right down the center of our body that's tied into our emotions, our regulations, and it's connected to others.

That's our vagal nerve. It's the connection there. And so as a lot of these rituals and places and techniques that we used to use to process emotions, thus kind of freeing ourselves up from stress and emotional debt, have disappeared. It's like we keep racking up our credit cards on a daily basis here in the modern world, but we aren't paying any of it back. The ability to pay Back some of that emotional debt and clear the decks is one of the most important things men can do these days.

In doing that, in doing your emotional work, coming to terms with what you're holding in your nervous system, in your psyche, in your heart, you're going to metabolize that energy and it's going to free you up. Body's going to be more relaxed, your awareness is going to be more relaxed, and you will often feel, feel better. I see this time and time again in the work I do with men. We finally go towards some emotion they've been avoiding.

They feel it, and on the other side, they're more alive. So doing your emotional work will bring you more energy. Holding an emotion is not a passive action. And it takes active energy to hold, right? If I told you to hold the pose, like in yoga, for 10, 20 minutes, you don't just sit there.

It's not super easy. It gets tiring the more you do it, because it takes energy to hold. And so as we process our emotions, less of our energy is having to be diverted to, to holding. And it's available for connection and moving the things we want to move forward in our lives. This is such a key thing. You have to do your emotional work as a man to thrive.

Now, most of us men were not taught to do that. We were beat out of our bodies and thus our emotions when we were young by kind of traditional masculine culture, which in a lot of ways has shamed men for being in their emotions. And when we don't know what to do with our emotions, when we don't know how to hold them or process them, they're either going to come out in aggressive ways reactively, or we're going to try to numb them.

We're going to try to not feel them actively through pornography, drugs, weed, alcohol, sex, video games, movies, you name it, we will try to numb ourselves out from that. But again, the more we actually actively turn towards our emotions, the less we have to hold there, the more energy we have, and the less we're going to be tempted to numb out to them. And here's one important thing I want to highlight here. I've been doing this work for a long time, over 20 years now, and I still constantly avoid my emotions and hold them.

And one of the most wild lessons I have to keep learning over and over and over again, and why, in a sense, this is such a terrible life strategy and energy management strategy is there is research that shows when we fully turn towards an emotion, right when we actually go towards it and feel it and directly connect to the sensations and the experience of it.

It's pretty rare for it to last more than seconds. I'm talking 90 seconds to maybe 3 minutes max when we're starting. And it gets even quicker the more we do this as a practice. When we touch an emotion completely, it starts to dissolve, it starts to move. This is the thing that is so counterintuitive when we're with it, that's when it can move through us. When we're holding it, we're actually keeping it stuck in our system.

And so a lot of men I know, one of the reasons they don't go towards their emotions is, is they're afraid they're going to get stuck in them forever. And when we have this particularly huge stack of emotional debt, these pools, these kind of tidal waves of unfelt feelings, the sense is, oh, my God, if I go there, it's never going to end. And when we have such a big backlog, it can be a little more intense at first. But the same principle applies.

By turning towards it, going straight at it in a container of safety and often community, it'll start to dissolve and it'll pass way faster than we realize. And on the other side of that, there's gonna be a lot more energy, vitality and safety. Now, two last pieces I really want to point to about why it's so important to do our emotional work as men. So I already told you about stress and energy. Now, two other big ones I see showing up for guys are first, decision making.

Right? The crazy thing is, oftentimes the best decisions we make in our life don't come from our head, they don't come from our thoughts. The way our body is set up is there are more nerve pathways going from the body to the brain than from the brain to the body. What this means is our body is an incredible antenna. It's an input source. It is gathering data constantly. And when we learn to tune into our body often there's an answer there that's a lot faster than what we might be able to think through rationally in our head.

And really great, clear decision making. It's not that it's emotionally reactive, but it comes from emotional fluidity, our ability to just tune into our felt body experience, and our willingness to feel whatever's on the other side of any decision we make. So as we increase our capacity to be with our emotions and this ability to kind of surf them, whatever they are, and not fear them, we can go straight into them.

And the more we go straight into them. The less we fear them and the less we hold them and the less we resist them. And for a lot of people, where they get into analysis, paralysis, they think, I can't make the right decision because the fear on the other side of the decision is, then I'm going to have to feel something I don't want to feel. A lot of decision problems are actually problems around feeling an emotion, not cognitive, rational decisions.

So clearing the emotional debt in our system, becoming more emotionally literate, doing our emotional work and bringing our body fully online is going to allow us to make better decisions, Something I know many men want to have the capacity to do in their lives. Now, one last piece here before I wrap. And that's also trust. So doing our emotional work increases the capacity for other people to trust us.

If we're not in touch with our emotions, which means we're not actually in contact with our direct bodily experience, it can be really hard for other people to trust us, Particularly women in feminine nervous systems, which a lot of the work I do with men is around dating and relationships. And a man who doesn't have a handle, isn't intimate with his emotions, is actually very dangerous to the feminine.

Is he gonna fly off the handle if I say no to him for not wanting to date him or not wanting to have sex with him in this moment or for getting mad with him? This stuff goes through women's minds all the time. And oftentimes what people hold back from us is because they fear what kind of emotional response we might have. But the more solid we are in our connection to ourselves and our ability to move and process emotions, the more people are going to trust us, they're going to feel safe with us.

And the more, in fact, we do that come into contact and feel okay with our own emotional experience, the more we're going to feel comfortable being with the emotional experience of others as well. So many men I know avoid going into the emotions of others because then they have to feel it themselves. Oh, my partner's cranky or sad or angry. So if I'm going to go attuned to them, that means I have to actually be willing to feel that in my nervous system as well.

And if I'm not comfortable feeling that, I am not going to be comfortable going there with them. So I'm going to try to avoid that person or move them out of their emotional experience. Right. To try to get them to feel something different than they're feeling. And if that person is a woman, it she is not going to feel very good around you. In fact, she's probably going to get quite upset with you, which many men I work with know, right? What happens when we try to fix something from our partner, which is often our way of trying to avoid the emotions and get them to feel something else.

So I cannot emphasize and stress this enough. You have to be doing your emotional work. You will get better at making decisions. You will be more trusted, you will be more attractive, and you will actually live longer. Your body will hold less stress and you will have more energy and vitality in your system. There's lots of ways I work with men around this, whether it's my program around dating and relationships or the Heart of Shadow program I run twice a year where we really dig into this stuff at the deepest level.

If you're feeling the call, definitely reach out. Until next time, if you're interested in working with me around dating, relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary men Apply.