This article is in response to a great question from Ani on a previous article called:
STOP BEING EMOTIONAL!
http://ecstaticman.com/stop-being-emotional/
A reminder before we begin. There’s a HUGE difference between experiencing an emotion when your dog dies vs. BEING EMOTIONAL! The word emotion originally meant “agitation”. No one trusts an agitated man.
Here’s Ani’s comment:
Wow I really like this article. I have been facing this issue. I am too emotional. I have no control on any of my emotions. I am 24 and I desperately need to stop this. I want to stop completely. I must grow up but I fail every time I try. I have failed in relations due to this. It must stop now.
I applaud you for looking this right in the eye, like staring down a dragon, and powerfully realizing what being emotional has cost you. Pain is often necessary to create great change. The monkey brain inside is a conditioned monkey and it doesn’t like change.
I’ll tell you personally, I ruined a lot of relationships with women because I was raised to think I was supposed to be emotional. First, we attract the wrong kind of woman for us. Second, she’ll end up hating that “nice” guy that just isn’t the ROCK she’s always dreamed of. Don’t believe me. Ask women what they really want, not what movies tell them they want.
There are many different ways to dissolve men’s emotional behavior. Many things can be on the list. I hope people will add to it in the comments section!As a life coach, I’ll offer a few pointers that I know really work.
- We MUST heal and make amends with our father! Many men today, and women of course, see fathers as bad, wrong, and basically not a good nurturing woman. When you see that your father was a man, flawed like any human, but just a man, and can thank him for being hard on you, unemotional, simple, you will have permission to BE a man yourself. Father was often unemotional, which was a great quality.
- It’s time to separate from mother. She’s a nice lady, but we’re supposed to separate at around 13 years old and become our own man. Treat mom kindly, like you would any woman, but stop being her “little boy”. We’re often keeping our emotionality to keep her approval. Let her approve of our success, not our tears and ability to be taken out by a squirrel.
- When did you first decide it was OK, maybe even good, to be emotional? Once we clean up with parents, we trace the first moment of the wrong decision. How young was that first time and what do you get out of being emotional? We use emotions to get our way and manipulate others. Watch children! Soon it becomes an indulgence. Many boys decided early on that being emotional is how there were going to get a girl. It’s a DECISION not a mental condition! Take responsibility. You must decide that emotions don’t serve you. In fact, they can get you killed because you’re stuck in your animal mind. Awareness of the first moment we decided it was good to be emotional can often have us GROW UP and stop doing what that little boy decided.
- Get around men that will not tolerate your emotions unless you’re are actually wounded. We’re talking about something big, like the loss of a loved one. Big loss. But anything less, they won’t stand for. I told a man that I really cared about, I was going to punch him in the arm once when he started to get emotional, tear up, over a little thing. Men can be like great coaches and help condition new winning behaviors into us. The fastest way to correct behavior is physically. You conditioned yourself to be emotional. You can condition yourself to be conscious and powerful.
- Have another man be your mentor. Manhood comes from training. When little girls have their first period they are welcomed by the other women and shown the way to womanhood. Boys get a car and drink at some random moment. That’s not training. Our father is NOT the man who can teach us about manhood because we naturally resent him too much because of our competitive ego. This is why we need to stop complaining about father and realize we were a jerk to him. It’s just two male egos clashing. Find good men today and train. There are several organizations out there that do training. There are man books like “Iron John” to remind you of the honor and legacy of being a male. There are also coaches & teachers. Men have mentors. That’s how we become successful. You can also contact me personally. I’m happy to share what I’ve learned so men can serve the world better!
A way to sum these tips up is to say: Be proud of being a man and celebrate the differences between men and women. We each have our own unique qualities and the polarity between them creates sparks.
We’re not talking about macho B.S., which is just soft men trying to look tough. It’s saying to a good man, “I want to correct a bad habit. If you see me get emotional, not being present, give me a sock in the arm. Wake me up.” The goal is to snap to presence rapidly, not to be “tough”. When you’re present, there are no “emotions” (i.e. agitation). Emotions are residue from your past. In the present moment, you just “feel”. You feel things like the air on your skin, a few moments of the hurt of loss, the joy of your first born, or what it feels like to win. When there is real loss, we men F-E-E-L it, very deeply. “Emotions” are the mental chatter about what we feel. That chatter is just our past. It sucks life force out when we listen to the chatter in our head, no matter what sex we were born as.
I understand too that the inner feminist in most of us today won’t like what I just suggested. We’ve been conditioned to think we’re all “equal” which implies there are no differences at all. Unfortunately, this came to imply that everyone should have feminine emotions, if they are “human”, but the male brain is just not evolved to handle emotions as female brains do. When we try to do emotions, our brain gets overloaded. We’re designed to have an emotion and take immediate positive action. That’s how we’re designed. It’s just putting the wrong chemicals into our body and now millions of men are having trouble keeping a job, focusing on success, or handling something little like losing a job. Keeping emotional chemicals away is like keeping alcohol away. Some brains and bodies just aren’t designed for it, period!
If you agree, or disagree, flame on in the comments section. Oorah!
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here. However I don’t believe that accomplishing the level of emotional resolve involves resisting emotions or trying to contain them in any way. I believe as men we need to face our feelings, accept them, embrace them, and learn to cooperate with them. If I am at odds with my emotions they sabotage me, if I accept them and embrace them they support me. I believe part of being a man is being able to feel while still maintaining the level of resolve necessary to be the rock that a man often needs to be.
I agree, this is a provocative subject. We’ve been conditioned by pop culture (word on the street, TV, etc.) that men are “supposed to be emotional” and “boys should cry”. But, let’s question how everyone “knows” that men are supposed to be as “emotional” as women. There’s lots of strange beliefs in the world, like “you have to work hard for money”, that keep people in suffering but they never question where the idea came from.
First, we’re talking about “emotional” men, not whether there’s the potential to have an emotion. Big difference! The man in the picture says it all. Let’s test that by asking men and women how they really feel about an emotional man, letting go of the Politically Correct programming to just go along with it.
The first question might be, are men and women identical? When we look at neuro-biology, and just naked bodies, there’s some massive differences we’ve forgotten. Female humans have a larger limbic brain. They have evolved to process the chemicals of emotions more frequently and in a better way. They can watch a movie where people are dying, laughing, all sorts of emotions, and they really look forward to it for a release. It actually heals them to exercise their emotions. However, most males don’t look forward to these movies as a release. It’s not macho bias, it’s just that the male brain didn’t suddenly evolve after the 1960s. Evolution takes thousands, maybe millions of years, just as males rely on testosterone and females on estrogen.
We’re reminded by Candice Pert, in Molecules of Emotions, that emotions are chemicals and chemicals are addictive. When men experience emotions, they don’t have the regulation system of the female brain, so it gets out of control. DESIRING to be emotional, maybe as some way of saying “I’m alive”, becomes and addictive pattern, like any chemical. The man might as well use drugs to feel alive. The more emotions indulged, the more the man craves those chemicals. It seems males are much more prone to addiction, so we can have a real problem of a continual cycle of emotional behavior and dysfunction. Ancient men learned to just avoid emotions because it would take them out and the tiger would eat them. A hunter has little room for emotions. But, the modern couch potato can drown in chemicals. Resisting emotions is like resisting any addictive substance. Anger is a drug, just like sadness or alcohol.
This could be a whole book with many other examples. In short, it’s the difference between men and boys. Men take care of others so they process emotions quickly. When they get emotional, they confuse and hurt their children and spouse. Boys are self-centered and indulge emotions because they only need to care for themselves. Let’s just ask some women, as tough as the guy in the picture looks, “does he seem like a boy of a man?” Test it an let’s check the results.