The simple straight-up answer, many aren’t raised with the tools and skills to do so. Men are taught to be strong, run lift bring home the bacon, build do more. We don’t account for the natural human emotion that runs through us all as human beings even being a factor for men.
It’s a toxic environment when we send the message that big boys don’t cry and men mustn’t cry. We proportion emotions into roles, women are trained to communicate and affect their emotions be it negatively or positively. But men are told to go play football, run it out take a cold shower.
When we are faced with statistics stating that over 76 percent of suicides are men then we are having to deal with an overwhelming amount of evidence that clearly states that men do have emotions, they do have difficulties and they clearly are not talking about it and need to.
So why don’t men talk, why are there so many concepts about men being boys, men, and their toys, men don’t and can’t connect men don’t talk, men can’t open up.
Well, when this is the narrative so many men simply get pushed into their own heads and struggle to even attempt to venture into the world of emotional responsibility, the world of feeling uncomfortable emotions often goes avoided.
Society takes a particular stance when it comes to gender roles and behaviours, women are observed as too emotional, men too cold. Women speak too much, men don’t speak at all.
From my experience as a therapist and have worked with hundreds of men over the years I have noticed that men spend a lot of time in their own heads, anxious about saying how they really feel, for fear of reprieve or how they may be interpreted and seen.
As a whole, we are people, all genders and on specific have a tendency to want to fit in, and often in doing so we lie t ourselves in an attempt to survive and not be seen as weird and different.
But can men benefit from opening up, can men bridge that gap of emotional deprivation and free themselves from their own emotional funk. Would there be a decrease in male suicides, I’d lie to see that happen and I believe that raising awareness of men’s mental health and providing the tools to support men to speak up about their emotions would help release the intense feelings that often go unoticed and ignored by men and society.
How could we do this?
I suggest a tool kit, a go-to of a therapeutic nature to direct and demonstrate how to converse and express yourself effectively as a man.
I never thought it was real or possible until I saw grown men bullied by partners, family members afraid to speak up because they didn’t know how to broach how they felt. It’s common it’s real and it does happen, the stigma of being known to be a man who faces bullying by females hits on their self-esteem, confidence, sense of self, and often rings out failure.
Men fear failing and by all the means necessary they are compelled to succeed or appear as if they are. As humans, we hate failing and many of us fake the funk, pretend we are succeeding by means of how we dress, the car we drive the house we live in. All the while facing huge debts and fearing exposure. The inability to say, I am struggling I need help hits hard from many men.
So going back to the tool kit, what am I talking about. A way to get men talking, a way for men to say hey this is my flow, this is how I feel this is what I need, or I don’t know what I need.
At present, I am in the process of creating such a plan.
