Fathers who only provide financially to their family but have limited emotional connection to their children will often create a woundedness that can last for a lifetime.

In sons in particular, boys who grow up without a significant emotional attachment to their fathers can be left with a deep lack of self-trust and real confusion about what it means to express their masculine side.

Emotional absence is as real and damaging as physical absence. The father who sits silently through dinner, who responds to your excitement with a grunt, who treats family life like a job to be managed rather than a relationship to be lived—that creates a wound. – Asher Miles

The Disengaged Father

The father wound is a psychic wounding that impacts children’s ability to make sense of themselves in relationship to their fathers and create a healthy, flexible integrated selfhood. It is a result of a father not being available emotionally. Often these types of fathers are stoic, show little emotion, work often and don’t engage their children beyond superficial directions. They will tell their sons to clean their rooms but they are not spending time with their sons catching a ball or wrestling. This really limits the child’s ability to understand themselves in relationship to their fathers.

For sons this is even more critical because it forces the child to imitate these types of behaviors do not allow the son’s full psychological experience. For example, stoicism is a lack of emotional expression that disallows a person to express what they are feeling. For many men, being stoic is in the face of pain. When pain arises, emotional or physical, the response is as if nothing happened. Men are often enculturated in our society to show no signs of weakness. For a boy growing up with a dad who is not allowed to show any pain the boy quickly learns that any expression of pain is not allowed. This forces the boy to limit access to any signals in his body that would give him a different sense of pain. Boys learn to not pay attention to their pain as well as not feel their pain.

As adult men boys who exhibit this kind of emotional control struggle in their relational life. They are not able to speak to relational issues that cause them to feel uncomfortable. In a professional relationship with a superior this man may feel dismissed, demeaned or even worse. Without the ability to speak to this and try to create a workable relationship a man with a father wound will often say nothing while hating his work life. This leads to resentment and pent-up emotional energy. The danger here is eventually this energy must release and it does in the form of rage and/or violence.

Earned vs. Borrowed Masculinity

When masculinity is constructed from fragments rather than developed through relationship, it creates what psychologists recognize as a “false self”—a persona that earns social acceptance while leaving the person feeling fundamentally unknown, even to himself. – Asher Miles

In order for a boy to develop a sense of being a man they need to imitate their dads. When the dad is not involved in any relational experience this transmission of what it means to be a man gets blocked. Boys are not learning what masculinity is through relationship but through their own construction based on guesses from what their dads and other men do. This leads to a constructed selfhood that is ultimately false. A false self creates a number of mental health issues. When you live in a false self you never feel like you know who you are or feel a connection to your life force. Instead you often feel as if you are just going through the motions without any real meaning or purpose.

The difference here for young boys is the difference between earned and borrowed masculinity.

Borrowed masculinity is a false masculinity that boys acquire out of their own experience. It is often a distorted masculinity because they are not clear about what it means to be a man and the values and expectations that come a long with that. When a man inherits his masculine understanding in this way he is often rigid in how he does things, lacks a clear sense of himself and looks externally for validation. This leads to defensiveness and an inability to work through relational issues.

Earned masculinity on the other hand comes through the father imparting on the son a sense of values, culture and clarity of what it means to be a man. When a son learns this from their father they are able to have a clear sense of who they are. This leads to a man being flexible because he feels a clarity between his internal integrity meeting his external expression. This is a man who knows who he is and is living out his values. Often men with earned masculinity have access to all of their emotions.

Boys who grow up with disengaged fathers lack the clarity of what it means to be a masculine being. Instead they are guessing at who their dad is or pushing their dad away. With nobody to imitate, as a way to understand who they are, boys are left to create a masculinity that is not grounded in authenticity.

This lack of attention from the father results in the son’s inability to identify with his father as a means of establishing his own masculine identity. – Guy Corneau

The Wounding Of Shame

For men who grow up without their fathers’ nourishment and direction they develop a sense that something is wrong with them. This is the shame that is foundational to the father wound. Sons need to feel their father’s approval and delight in who they are. When sons don’t get this they feel a longing in themselves and a sense that somehow they must be the reason their father is not bonding to them. Children, in the first 10 years of development, don’t have the cognitive awareness to see how limited their parents may be in relating to them. Children are, as the famous French psychologist said, “cognitive aliens.” Children cannot make sense of the nuances of life. Things are good or bad, up or down, there is no in between. A child will thus focus the pain of feeling separated onto themselves and assume that their father’s lack of relating to them is because they are unworthy.

This shame carries into adulthood and is, for many men, a foundation of their way of interacting with the world. Men with this shame wound will be in a constant fight to prove their worthiness through external expressions like work, physical strength, sexual prowess and many more. Men who carry the father wound rely on the crumbs of external approval because they are not getting the internal proof that they are good enough.

When fathers are emotionally unavailable, boys learn to mute their needs to avoid disappointment. The boy stops sharing excitement when Dad doesn’t look up from his phone. He stops asking questions when every question is met with “Not now.” Slowly, he internalizes the message: my inner world doesn’t matter. – Asher Miles

Healing The Father Wound

To heal this wound men must learn to engage their wounded child and re-father this part of them. This means learning how to access our hurt parts and developing a relationship with them. In this relationship we can begin to help the parts understand that they do matter and that the adult self can now be the father that these younger parts never had.

This may sound a bit strange to some wondering about inner child work. One way to think about it is to understand that psychically we never move out of our developmental stage completely. We physically grow up but psychologically we often have younger parts that still need to mature. This is what inner child work tries to address. It is a healing and maturing of the developmentally stunted parts of ourselves.

An example would be the child that was neglected by his parents. When a parent cannot attune to a child’s emotional needs a child’s authentic self is rejected and the child must create a false self in order to survive. The false self that is created leads a man to struggle in his relationship to himself and everyone else.

When I work with the father wound I support my client in building a relationship with the wounded part. Often clients can visualize that part and a memory of what was hard at an early age. Clients then enter into this memory and offer the part what the younger part never got as a child. It could be affection, compassion, understanding and other necessary emotionally attuned characteristics. We then work on the limiting beliefs that inevitably occur from the wounding. These beliefs are actively removed from the part and new beliefs and helpful qualities are brought in. A new belief might be “I can get the love that I need.” A new quality might be the ability to express vulnerability by asking for this love.

To heal the father wound, you have to be willing to feel what the anger is guarding so carefully. You have to risk the very vulnerability you’ve spent decades protecting against. You have to trust that being seen in your woundedness won’t automatically lead to abandonment—it might actually lead to the deeper connection you’ve been seeking all along. – Asher Miles

How This Shows Up In My Life

In many ways I’m luckier than most. My father was more engaged than fathers of the 70s and 80s. However, he had his own emotional limitations. My dad didn’t know how to be vulnerable and express his emotions consistently with my mom, me, or my siblings. He struggled to talk about things which led to explosive emotional outbursts.

I have discovered my own emotional limitations occur when things get heated in relationship. I often shut down and pull away. This is a learned response from my dad. What I needed as a child was some clarity around a better way of relating with people. My hope is that I can provide my sons more of what I didn’t get as a young boy.

In my own journey I have used inner child work as a way to understand these younger parts and build healthier and more supportive relationships with them. The part that shuts down is only trying to protect me from the pain of feeling hurt and misunderstood. Underneath this part is a more vulnerable part that carries the wound of shame. This part believes I’m not good enough.

Although I’m not healed I feel a much deeper sense of my own Self and who I am. I don’t seek external validation like I used to but feel a sense of safety within myself. This has led to greater flexibility and a depth of relationship that I’m truly grateful for with my loved ones.

If you struggle with the father wound or know someone who does please reach out.

Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

References:

Corneau, Guy (1991). Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search For Masculine Identity. Shambhala Publications, Berkeley, CA.

Miles, Asher (2025). The Absent Father Affect on Sons: How To Heal The Father Wound and Rebuild The Man Within. Self-published.

The post The Father Wound appeared first on BrassBalls TenderHeart.

“Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.”

Bruce Lee

It sucks when we are called to acknowledge a failure. And, it’s embarrassing and painful to see how we screwed up. It is in these moments when we truly own our power as men. We can shrink away in defensiveness or blame…or we can step up into integrity and authenticity and own it. This is the place men must get better at if they struggle to take responsibility. The outcomes are so important.

“Our wives don’t lose faith in us because we do something stupid or selfish. We all do! We all blow it! We’re all a work in progress! No, our wives lose faith in us because we do something stupid or selfish and never acknowledge it. Never own it.”

Jeff Borkoski

It happens all the time. We have an intention to do something and we forget. Our partner or our kids tell us they were hurt or feel angry about our mistake. Facing the shame of this moment is so challenging.

Sometimes, instead of stepping into our power we step away from it, making excuses and putting the blame back on the people we hurt.

As men we lose credibility at this moment. We lose that deep respect that we may have tried to cultivate for years. The people who love us are now lost. How can they trust us and believe in us if we can’t admit to our mistakes?

I want to say that when my wife calls me out, even in the most graceful, caring way, I still feel the deep impulse to run…to find a way out of that internal shame. It feels so bad to see her confused and hurt expression. I don’t want to feel this. Defense seems like the only way out.

I want to acknowledge how painful this is when the masculine protector is being outed as someone who is not holding up their end of the bargain. Maybe you overstepped and unleashed an angry aggressive burst on your partner or kids. Or, maybe you got caught looking at porn by someone who made you feel ashamed of doing this. Maybe you blew money gambling and you have put your family at risk. There are so many ways we can fail.

But failure is inevitable. We cannot get through life with these moments of not handling our lives right. We have to learn how to deal with these moments better.

What Feels At Risk With Owning Your Mistakes?

When I think about these moments I feel like my good standing is on the line. I feel like I’m going to lose something so precious.

Over a year ago I was at a cub scouts meeting with my twin boys. As we were leaving my son had found a stick (a big one) that he wanted to take home. He was standing outside and said he wanted to bring this home with us. I was in one of those “I’m tired I don’t want to deal with this just get in the car” kind of moods. I told my son that I didn’t want any more of his sticks in our house. To my credit the kid has a pile of sticks outside that could run a fireplace for an entire day.

I can still recall the hurt and confused look on his face that he couldn’t bring the stick. “Why Daddy?” I didn’t have a good reason. My other son was pleading with me as well, “just let him have the stick.” I didn’t let him have it. On our drive home he was crying and upset that I had put my foot down on this.

I didn’t soften or admit that maybe, possibly I had made a mistake and I should have allowed him to have the stick. I doubled down and said in a grumpy voice that he had so many sticks taking up space in our lives and he didn’t need another one.

Now I don’t think that point of view is wrong in terms of space and number of sticks. What is wrong is that I’m holding this point over what is more important: my son’s broken heart. The rest of the evening I didn’t waver, I kept reiterating that he had enough sticks.

This wasn’t about sticks. I wanted it to be about sticks. I wanted to explain that the pile of sticks outside wasn’t acceptable. My son was looking at with his facial expression and saying, “but Daddy, can you see me? Can you see that the stick is about my adventurous spirit and I need you to respect that?”

My answer was, “take your adventurous spirit and shove it.” What was I protecting my son from? Too many sticks in our house? No, I was protecting myself from the pain he was feeling and my own shame. I had to keep holding on to my wimpy point of view.

I was afraid that if I admitted my mistake I would be seen as a failure and then everyone would know that I’m a shitty dad.

Owning It Brings Us Back To Hero Status

No matter how many times I shutdown or get defensive (which is a lot) my family is waiting to welcome me back with open arms.

How do I get back?

I Own It.

My sons and my wife want me to be the hero they love. They are okay with mistakes…being a hero is not about perfection. It’s about the ability to flow with our ups and downs.

The next day after crushing my son’s heart I woke up and realized what a shit I had been. I realized that this was not the man I wanted to be.

So I fixed it.

I drove to the school where we have our cub scout gatherings and I found the stick. Next, I brought it home and as my son was coming upstairs I pulled him close and I apologized. I said, “I messed up yesterday and I’m really sorry.”

His brother was upstairs and saw the stick. He knew right away what happened. “It’s your stick from last night.” My son realized what I did. He looked at me with tender eyes and he buried his head in my chest. “Thanks Daddy.” That was an unforgettable moment.

Hero Status Recovered.

I can imagine situations where this is trickier, especially with my wife. I used this example because I really believe that our ability to take responsibility for our failures is one of the most important things we can do as men. As men, we have more physical power in the family. When we are out of integrity it creates a lack of safety. Everyone is on guard.

And then we admit it. We say, “sorry everyone, that was my bad.” The safety is restored and everyone can go back to playing and enjoying life.

This is the power men have in their relational lives. I don’t think my kids or my wife feel afraid for their personal safety in these moments. I just know how it feels when I’m defending myself, trying to convince everyone that what I did was not a failure and how it feels when I own it. It’s like the moment when the record scratches and stops. Everyone looks up to me and implores me to accept my masculine power. When I do, everyone relaxes and the music keeps playing. If I don’t there is a feeling that everyone needs to head for the exits.

As I say in these posts often, I’m not special. I don’t have some “own it” superpower. Every man out there can do this. It takes a relaxing of our egos, an acknowledgement of the shame we feel and a desire to get back into connection with the people we love.

Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

References:

Borkoski, Jeff (2022). Better Man, Better Marriage: Awaken Your Inner Hero and Move from Passive to Powerful in Your Most Important Relationship. Self-published.

The post Own It! A Man’s Guide to Owning Your Mistakes appeared first on BrassBalls TenderHeart.

“Humans excel at stress-induced displacement aggression – consider how economic downturns increase rates of spousal and child abuse. Or consider a study of family violence and pro football. If the local team unexpectedly loses spousal/partner violence by men increases soon afterward.”

– Robert Sapolsky

Nobody wants to hurt the people they love. That is obvious. However, there are certain elements in our biological responses that tend to increase the tendency for this to happen. We must bring awareness to this neurobiological response to stress in order to overcome our tendency towards it.

“I don’t know, I was upset and then I just screamed at my wife. She didn’t really have anything to do with what was happening but it was almost like I had to get the frustration out of my body. It happened before I could even think about it. I’m ashamed to admit that yelling at her did make me feel better.”

~Male Client talking about a recent outburst with his partner

Displacement Aggression

We’ve all done it. We felt stressed, or cornered, and lashed out at someone that wasn’t the culprit. Why do we do this?

The answer is that it actually reduces the stress load we are feeling in the moment.

In his book, “Behave: The Biology Of Humans At Our Best And Worst,” Robert Sapolsky explains the idea of displacement aggression.

“There’s an additional depressing reason why stress fosters aggression—because it reduces stress. Shock a rat and its glucocorticoid levels and blood pressure rise; with enough shocks, it’s at risk for a “stress” ulcer. Various things can buffer the rat during shocks—running on a running wheel, eating, gnawing on wood in frustration. But a particularly effective buffer is for the rat to bite another rat. Stress-induced (aka frustration-induced) displacement aggression is ubiquitous in various species.” (Sapolsky, 2018).

Displacement aggression is moving the discomfort we are feeling on to others. Sapolsky believes we do this to reduce the level of CRH (corticotropin release hormone). This hormone is excreted by our hypothalamus as a response to stress.

When we feel all of these neuropeptides building up in our system we want to move things to a different place. Sapolsky has a theory as to why we do this:

Little is known concerning the neurobiology of displacement aggression blunting the stress response. I’d guess that lashing out activates dopaminergic reward pathways, a surefire way to inhibit CRH release. Far too often, giving an ulcer helps avoid getting one (Sapolsky, 2018).

If Sapolsky is correct then the reason we lash out at our loved ones is that we get a helpful surge of dopamine to cancel the stress hormones in our body. Thus, it feels good to be shitty to our loved ones.

Are we screwed?

Does this show that we are biologically predisposed to being assholes? I’m going to go with…no. Let me explain that my two twin boys are currently learning how to go potty in the toilet. They don’t know how to do this naturally. Naturally or biologically they just poop or pee when the sensation comes along. However, over time, they are learning (through a lot of parental nudging) to hold it in and wait till they get to the potty.

I’m not saying that our ability to manage our aggression is the same as not pooping in our pants…but there is a similarity. Just like potty training we can train ourselves to be aware of incoming aggression or stress overload and to develop regulating responses.

Awareness, awareness, awareness.

I find I’m a bit of a broken record with my clients but the answer to most problems in my opinion is our level of awareness (or consciousness or whatever cliché spiritual word you want to use this week).

The truth is we can only change what we are aware of in the moment. If we are focused on the problem of our partner, child or colleague and not on our own biological intensity, we will most likely fail to regulate and then…presto, lots of displacement aggression.

However, through the power of mindful awareness we can start to slow down, bring our attention to what is happening in our bodies, and start to regulate our nervous system down. This allows us to bring our prefrontal cortexes back on-line and we can manage the stress response that is happening.

How this shows up in my life.

It’s kind of like this. I’m helping my wife with dinner and as I’m doing this she snaps at me. It isn’t a big thing at all, just a simple retort to a question or a slight annoyance she is having. This triggers in me stuff from past relationships and my body goes into a stress response. My body starts getting tight and my mind starts quickly into a narrative about how rude, annoying and unreasonable my wife is. This line of thinking increases the stress and I start to get more and more stressed releasing more of the hormones that are causing me to be upset.

Suddenly, without warning, like a superhero, my awareness kicks in. I start to notice the thinking in my mind and the tightness in my body. I notice what is happening and I also notice that I’m noticing (that’s a lot of noticing). As this happens my stress level starts to subside, my human brain comes back on-line and I start to realize the craziness of all these thoughts.

As my body regulates I feel myself slowing down, like a carnival ride before it comes to a complete stop. Eventually, I’m back to a more neutral regulated place.

My wife, sensing my discomfort, looks up, asks if I’m okay. I smile and say I’m okay. She says she’s sorry she snapped at me but she was struggling with one of our boys. I tell her I appreciate her apology and there is no harm done. She smiles back. I open my arms and we hug. We are back in connection.

What could have been a few hours of disconnection and upset is moved through in a much easier way. This is the power of emotion regulation.

This ain’t easy.

Learning how to regulate ourselves is hard work. I’ve done a ton of awareness work in my life. My example is not to dismiss the challenge but only to say that, if I can do it, you can do it.

It takes a commitment to paying more attention to ourselves and working hard to show up in our relationships as our best selves.

Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

References:

Sapolsky, Robert. (2017). Behave: The Biology Of Humans At Our Best And Worst. Penguin Books. New York City, NY.

The post Displacement Aggression: Why Hurting Others Feels Good appeared first on BrassBalls TenderHeart.

“AI cannot replace compassion, empathy, or love. These are the domains of human relationships – our ultimate strength.”

Kai-Fung Lee

(AI expert, former president of Google China)The coming AI revolution will change our world in ways that most people can’t imagine.

What are the skills that will still matter? The relationship skills that we use in our work and the people we love.

This is the future of our world whether we want it to be or not. Our Virtual Men’s Group is committed to teaching the important skills of being in your relationships.

Are you a man navigating challenges in your romantic relationship? Join our Men’s Group for Healthier Relationships.

We are bringing a group of men together to challenge them in their relationship beliefs and help them to develop new skills and tools that will benefit them in all their relational challenges. The group will bring the masculine and feminine into the online experience to help the group understand those important dynamics. The goal of the group is to help men find a way to fully embrace their power and leadership in their lives while also finding the tenderness and care that they want to bring to the people they love. You can embrace your greatness as well as your gentleness.

Men’s Group (Online)

Strengthen Your Relationships

Wednesdays | Every Two Weeks at 2pm Mountain Standard Time

Learn how to:

• Regulate your nervous system
• Repair issues that come up
• Work with the feminine
• Express your needs better
• Communicate in a way that your partner can hear it
• Lead the relationship back into connection
• Show up with clarity and presence
• Learn how to build emotional intelligence

For more information, click here: https://brassballstenderheart.com/denver-mens-issues-support-group/

To join,  or ask a question, Email me at bryce@brassballstenderheart.com or Text me at 720-935-2706

In an age of machines and speed, what becomes sacred again is human presence. Deep attunement is our medicine.

 

Thomas Hübl

(Spiritual Teacher and Author of Attuned)

Technology makes the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy. But only real relationships teach empathy.

 

Sherry Turkle

(MIT sociologists & Author of Alone Together)

The post In The Age Of AI – Relationships Are Critical! appeared first on BrassBalls TenderHeart.

The deep social expectation that women will shoulder the exhausting mental and emotional work at home—a type of labor that goes largely unnoticed by those it benefits most—has made it all too easy for such insidious expectations to follow us into the world, as we step gingerly through a culture that has left us little choice in the matter.”

Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

Mankeeping describes how in relationships the more feminine partner takes on more of the emotional load. The emotional load is the invisible work of managing emotional dynamics. This isn’t out of laziness or entitlement. It happens out of a lack of emotional awareness and emotional regulation on the part of men. Many women are no longer willing to do this work in their relationships. Women who are currently in marriages and younger women hoping to find a long-term partner don’t want to to take care of their partner’s emotional and social well-being.

In this online men’s group we are teaching men how to manage, regulate and create more tenderness for their internal world. We want to break through the limitations we as men are conditioned through our culture to not engage in our inner life of emotions and bodily sensations. Our hope is to help group members find more wholeness and flexibility in moving into their emotional expression and awareness.

Are you a man navigating challenges in your romantic relationship? Join our Men’s Group for Healthier Relationships.

We are bringing a group of men together to challenge them in their relationship beliefs and help them to develop new skills and tools that will benefit them in all their relational challenges. The group will bring the masculine and feminine into the online experience to help the group understand those important dynamics. The goal of the group is to help men find a way to fully embrace their power and leadership in their lives while also finding the tenderness and care that they want to bring to the people they love. You can embrace your greatness as well as your gentleness.

Learn how to:

• Regulate your nervous system
• Repair issues that come up
• Work with the feminine
• Express your needs better
• Communicate in a way that your partner can hear it
• Lead the relationship back into connection
• Show up with clarity and presence.
• Learn how to build emotional intelligence

More information here: https://brassballstenderheart.com/denver-mens-issues-support-group/

Email me at bryce@brassballstenderheart.com or Text me at 720-935-2706

Women are taught to be emotional caregivers, to bear the weight of others’ feelings, and to prioritize relationships over personal well-being.”
— Bell Hooks

Women don’t get credit for emotional labor because it’s often invisible. It’s assumed that they just know how to do it and that they will do it, because they’re supposed to.”
— Sheryl Sandberg

Emotional labor is about making the effort to be emotionally attuned to the needs of others, but it’s exhausting when it is unbalanced and unreciprocated.”
— Dr. Jessica McCabe

The post What Is Mankeeping? appeared first on BrassBalls TenderHeart.

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When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms.

– Francis Weller

Grief is a normal and important part of human experience. For many men growing up in a world where we are often taught that emotional expression is a sign of weakness, grief becomes a very difficult undertaking. The pain of loss in a man’s life may lead to the forced action of concealing one’s pain due to the cultural messages we men receive. It is so important that men begin to work through these societal constraints so that we can move through the difficulties of loss and to the renewal and freedom of having come out on the other side of our grief.

With all these reasons to dislike grief, what is the best way to deal with it? This way: by letting it into your life. Why? Because grief has an important purpose. It helps you heal. And, it allows you, in time, to feel better. It shows you how you can grow from your loss rather than just be diminished by it. The fact is, it’s only by grieving that you can heal. If in one way or another you do not grieve, you will not move forward.

(Golden and Miller, 2010).

What Grief Does For Us

Part of the human experience is our capacity to make meaning out of our lives. We are all compelled to understand what is happening to us and around us all the time. When something is lost it is imperative that we begin to make meaning out of that event. A loss could be another person, a pet, a job or something else is important to us. Grief is the process that we make meaning out of that loss.

In doing this we must allow the grief to work its painful magic through us. This means we must allow the grief to be felt in our bodies and understood in our minds. When we make meaning we create a narrative of what happened. If we do this without any conscious awareness the narrative that arises may not be in our best interest.

For example, when someone we love dies we may be angry and feel the deep injustice of this loss. We may start to blame a higher power, the person who died, or even ourselves. These types of narratives are understandable but they are not in our best interest. Blame doesn’t help us move to a place of resolution and completion. What I mean by these words is that the narrative is something that can help us feel an “okayness” with what happened. If our narrative ends in blame it often doesn’t feel okay, it feels incomplete.

Men And Emotions

If you’re like many, you were encouraged from the time you were very small to downplay or hide any hurt or pain you felt. You were told “big boys don’t cry,” if not verbally, then non verbally.

(Golden and Miller, 2010).

For many men the struggle of grief is the struggle of being engaged with our inner, emotional lives. For most of us we have a hard time allowing ourselves to be tuned into what is happening at a feeling level (sensations) and emotional level (the meaning we make out of sensations).

The cultural development of men is to ensure that men follow a script that they will do what is asked of them. This script has many components but one clear message most boys get growing up is that noticing and expressing emotions is what girls do. In order to be a strong, tough boy it is important to not feel or express emotions. If a boy does this he is often shamed into believing he is weak and thus less masculine.

As a result of this men struggle to engage their grief in the way that helps them to get through the pain of their loss.

.

Sadness is often a big part of the grief process. For men (myself included) it is much easier to express anger about what has happened.

It is a way not to engage the despair of the loss but instead to feel the more active energy of anger. Our culture often portrays men in a way that isn’t expressing real pain. Maybe in a movie or in the arena of sports is true emotional pain allowed. This taboo against men’s emotional struggle is one of the challenges men face when they lose a loved one.

Men’s pain has become a taboo in our culture. Many people don’t want to see it, think about it, or talk about it.

(Golden and Miller, 2010).

The Painful Outcomes Of Unexpressed Grief

When grief is not expressed there are many things that can happen to a person’s mental and physical health. This can mean turning to substances or behavioral addictions to manage the pain one is feeling after loss. It can also lead to self-harm.

More often it is the mental health that suffers the most. An increase in anxiety and depressive symptoms start to emerge for someone who has not dealt with the loss of something important.

Buried grief can give rise to chronic anxiety and depression. And intolerable despair can lead to suicide or homicide. When we can’t tolerate the energy of a primary dark emotion, it is unable to move and so isolates rather than connects us.

(Greenspan, 2004)

It often seems like avoiding the inner discomfort of the emotional realm is the easiest path. In reality it leads to long-term consequences that can really impact our health. However, in feeling through the grief the body moves not just to a release of the painful emotions but it often can lead to a higher level of integration and the feeling of wholeness.

How To Allow Grief To Heal Us

I want to first say that every man may deal with grief in a different way. There is no one right way. It is important for the people who love a grieving person (women included) to accept their way of dealing with things. We all must open ourselves up to the process that a man needs to go through.

For any man that right now is in the anguish of grief my heart goes out to you. I know this pain and I care for how you’re feeling. My goal here is to give you some thoughts of how to make this easier not to judge you for how it is going.

Trust your need to be alone. Many men want to have the safety of space and separation in order to experience their emotions. This is okay and doesn’t feel like you have to express your feelings in a social or relational context. If you need to take time for yourself do this. Ask the people who want you to do it differently to respect your needs.

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Be patient with yourself. Grief is a journey and it often takes longer than we think or want it to take.

I often think that the amount of grief I feel is relational to the amount of love I feel for the person that I lost. This gives me some understanding of why it takes time to work through a loss.

Go at your pace. Sometimes there is a desire by more feminine beings to feel and express everything that is going on inside themselves. Take the time you need to get through this in the way that works for you. Taking little chunks of grief slowly may be a better way for your experience. This is your grief and you get to do this the way you want.

Listen to your body. When you feel sad or you feel a longing for the person lost, trust that this is not something wrong but actually an important signal from your body. Your body has a lot of wisdom to share and being tuned in to it can bring relief to the pain.

How This Shows Up In My Life

Going through grief for me has been a process of many different strategies. When my great grandma died when I was 8 years old I don’t think I really felt a lot about this. She was 94 and it made sense that it was her time. I mostly was watching how others were feeling about the loss as a way to make sense of my own loss.

When my grandma died about 12 years ago I allowed myself to feel more of the sadness. She too was dying after a long life. I still felt the pain of her loss. I noticed a longing to have spent more time with her and to wish I had prioritized our relationship more. When she was no longer available I wanted to have more time.

About five years ago my father-in-law passed away. He was a very dear man and I had a lot of respect for how he lived his life.

I felt like our relationship was just starting to get more intimate when he passed away. It felt unfair that he left at an age when he should have been enjoying his grandkids. I felt the loss in a much deeper way. It was also my wife’s loss and I noticed much of my grief was tied to supporting her through her grief.

I suspect that the masculine and the feminine experience grieve differently. When I was in my feminine energy I wanted to express the feelings inside me and to relate to those around me. When I was in my masculine energy I wanted to have solitude and consider the loss more in my thoughts than in my body. What I noticed about my father-in-law’s passing was how my masculine was so tied to supporting my wife’s grief and not so much to my own grief. I wanted to be the stable force in her life so that she could express the deep pain she felt through all of it. In some ways this wasn’t so much a limitation of my grief but a way that I accessed my pain as well.

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As I look back on that experience I realize that I can engage my grief in multiple numbers of ways. I can be in my more expressive feminine energy or in the more internal thoughtfulness of my masculine.

I think men need to be allowed to explore their grief in the way that best suits them. It is important to know that grief is dealt with differently by everyone and that we, as the ones attending to someone in grief, can support the person going through it how they want to do that. No pressure, no timelines, just loving supportive witnessing.

Another important way you can help a man who’s grieving is to beware of trying too hard to help him. There are many things he can do only for himself. He must feel his own emotions. He must go through his own ups and downs as he adapts to his loss. And he must learn from his own experiences as he moves forward in life. No matter how well-intentioned your motives, you ought not do for a man what is his alone to do.

(Golden and Miller, 2010)

Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

References:

Greenspan, Miriam. (2004). Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair. Boulder, CO. Shambhala Publications.

Golden, Thomas & Miller, James E. (1998). When a Man Faces Grief / A Man You Know Is Grieving. Fort Wayne, IN. Willowgreen Publishing.

Hans, SL. (2024). The Unspoken Grief of Men: A Companion Guide for Grieving Men from the Loss of a Loved One. Self Published.

Weller, Francis. (2015). The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. Berkeley, CA. North Atlantic Books.

The post Men and Grief: from a Men’s Therapist Perspective appeared first on BrassBalls TenderHeart.

“Interoception helps us ‘feel’ the inside of our body. It is the sensory system that gives us important clues about how we feel, both physically and emotionally.”

– Kelly Mahler

Interoception: Feeling Our Bodies

The ability to feel what’s happening inside our bodies is one of the more important biological functions for surviving. Unfortunately, in this hyper-cognitive time, many people lose this instinctive of body awareness. This can lead to less satisfaction in life because we are not able to naturally regulate our nervous systems with our awareness. Learning how to recognize what is happening inside us can lead to better decision making, less anxiety, and deeper connections with the people around us.

What is Interoception?

If you take a moment right now to bring your attention inward and feel the beating of your heart or the movement of your breath you are experiencing interoception. It is the awareness of our emotions and bodily experience. It is how we make sense of our emotions.

“For most people, their attention is directed towards exteroception stimulus. This is a stimulus outside of a person. Interoception is directing our attention inside and feeling a queasy stomach, a tight throat or a staticky feeling in the hands. All of this is information that the nervous system is attempting to bring attention to.”

– Emma Seppala, the author of The Happiness Track, wrote in a Psychology Today article about interoception.

Most of us prioritize externally oriented attention. When we think of attention, we often think of focusing on something outside of ourselves. We “pay attention” to work, the TV, our partner, traffic, or anything that engages our senses. However, a whole other world exists that most of us are far less aware of: an internal world, with its varied landscape of emotions, feelings, and sensations. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201212/the-brains-ability-look-within-secret-self-mastery)

When we have emotions they are not abstractions made up in our head. They are actually sensations in our bodies that indicate something is either safe or unsafe for us. We can experience a feeling of joyful elation when our body may have a warm lightness. We can also feel fear, which may show up as a furrowed brow and a holding of the breath. All of this is important information we can use to manage our lives.

How is looking inside helpful?

Interoception is important because it helps us tune into our emotional needs better. Instead of overriding our emotions and focusing attention just on thoughts we can cultivate the ability to feel what our nervous system is trying to tell us. This information can get overridden by the constant focus on thinking.

Emma Seppala speaks to this:

“Because we don’t pay as much attention to our internal world, it often takes us by surprise. We often only tune into our body when it rings an alarm bell –– that we’re extremely thirsty, hungry, exhausted or in pain. A flush of anger, a choked up feeling of sadness, or the warmth of love in our chest often appear to come out of the blue.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201212/the-brains-ability-look-within-secret-self-mastery)

Mindful Regulation

When we are aware of the sensations in our nervous system awareness we can regulate ourselves much better. The moment we tune in to our bodies and what we are sensing or feeling our nervous system will start to calm down. This is mindfulness in the bodily form. Instead of noticing our breath we may be feeling a tightness in our chest, or tension in our bellies.

This is no different than using the breath as an object of attention. In many ways I think of it as listening to what our bodies are trying to tell us. The nervous system is sending us information and hoping we will pay attention. If we don’t pay attention the body will often increase the intensity of the signal.

However, if we slow down and pay attention our nervous system can relax knowing that we got the signal and it no longer has to continue to send it.

Improving Our Connections

A racing mind makes it difficult to listen or really notice how the people around us are feeling. When we show up in our relationships feeling more centered and regulated we are able to be present and engaged with the people around us. This allows for more empathy and a better sense of how to support the people we care about.

When we are tuned into our emotional world we are better able to connect with the people around us.

In her book, It’s Not Always Depression, Hilary Jacobs Hendel, explains the importance of emotional awareness:

“When we are out of touch with emotions, we suffer loneliness, because the connections to both ourselves and the people we care about are enriched through empathy, the emotional connector.” (Hendel, 2018).

Interoception is the way that we stay tuned into our emotions. Emotional intelligence and awareness is the way that we connect with other people. I can’t feel your sadness if I have no access to my own.

How This Shows Up in My Life

In my work with clients I focus a lot of the session on helping them to be more aware of their internal bodily experience. What I have noticed is that over time, clients start to feel more regulated in all aspects of their lives. At first they struggle with this new skill. Once they start to understand how emotional awareness can help them out of anxiety or depression they are more than willing to pay more attention.

Some of my clients struggle to feel safe in their relationships. When conflict arises they get overwhelmed with emotions. Oftentimes their nervous system defaults to defensiveness and emotional shutdown. As they learn this skill of being with their experience they can take greater responsibility for their own internal experience and not blame it on their partner. Little by little they start to stay in the conflict and offer more care and empathic responses. Often this has a significant impact on the satisfaction of their relationship.

In my own life I have worked hard to learn mindful regulation as well. When the people I love get upset I also get dysregulated. The more I have practiced the more I have learned to come into a better place. It gets easier and easier. I still get really upset at times but there are lots of times when I am able to hold space for the distress of a loved one and not have to fight back. Instead I listen and validate their experience, letting them know they matter to me even though we are in conflict.

Learning this skill has allowed me to show up as my best self more often than in the past. I’m not run by the ups and downs of the people around me but instead I have more control of how I step into my relationships.

When we succeed and connect with others in enriching ways, emotions such as joy and excitement propel us to engage further, so humans grow, expand, and evolve (Hendel, 2018).

Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

References:

Hendel, Hillary Jacobs. (2018). It’s Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self. New York, NY. Random House.

Seppala, Emma. (2012, December). “The Brain’s Ability to Look Within: A Secret to Self-Mastery.” Retrieved from URL: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201212/the-brains-ability-look-within-secret-self-mastery

The post Interoception: Feeling Our Bodies appeared first on BrassBalls TenderHeart.

Our modern digital era has caused a fundamental shift in how we think and work, and in how we focus our attention and achieve fulfillment. The technology we use on an everyday basis, our cultural and social environments, and our individual human nature together make it hard to focus. We now need a new paradigm for understanding how to keep ourselves happy, productive and fulfilled.

– Gloria Mark

Managing Your Attention

We live in an age where all of the world’s information is at our fingertips. In a moment I can look up information on any possible question in my mind. This is an amazing technological feat and one that still boggles my mind. However, there is a downside. We get caught up in these rabbit holes of information searching for meaningless information while not paying attention to the people we love. It is critical in these times to be aware and conscious of how we want to use our attention towards the things that truly bring us fulfillment.

Allowing attention to be pushed around by technological distractions can lead to feeling exhausted, or worse, burned out. It is important to take control of your attention to insure that at the end of the day you have the resources you need to be in a healthy state of mind with the people you care about. So how can you work on managing your attention? Let’s look at the whole picture first.

Constant Distraction

It begins in the morning. You wake up and immediately pick up your phone, checking your texts, email and social media. You read through a complex article about major events happening in the world. You click over to the highlights of your favorite sports team. All of this in the first half hour of your day.

As the day unfolds you are responding to the stream of notifications coming from your phone via text and social media. You are in a constant state of engaging what your phone wants you to pay attention to. In this state of “chaos” managing your attention can be incredibly difficult.

At work you are being pinged via email and texts about meetings, things to do and struggling to focus on what you actually need to prepare for the day. In our world today the average person checks their email 77 times a day. This leads to our attention being pulled away every 6 minutes in an 8 hour day. People are on social media over two hours a day which is most likely a constant checking of the latest response to a post or update from a friend. People last on average about 47 seconds on a screen before they shift to another screen. As I write this I can feel the constant pull to look at something else on my laptop.

This lack of attentional focus is one of the deep challenges of the 21st century. It makes the ability to do deep work more and more difficult because we all are allowing the world around us to pull our attention away. This world of distraction that we live in leads to days where a lot of things are done but nothing gets accomplished. This means that more tasks are piled onto the next day creating more tension and stress. Often we all leave work feeling exhausted and overwhelmed knowing we will start the next day with the same amount to do. This creates a lot of dissatisfaction in how we live our lives. It doesn’t have to be like this.

We need to reengineer the information age day. This means setting up the day so that we don’t experience the cognitive overload many of us feel at the end of the day. Managing your attention and integrating cognitive breaks is a huge help.

Managing Cognitive Load

A long-standing, well-accepted theory in psychology, with over fifty years of research behind it, is that the mind has a general pool of attentional, or cognitive, resources that we use in our everyday functioning. These resources can be thought of as your attentional capacity, or rather, as the amount of attention you have available. (Mark, 2023)

Every morning you start your day with a limited amount of resources to use up in your mind. As we go through the day, in order to have a more satisfying work/life experience, it is important that we learn to manage this cognitive load. If you can work on managing your attention and do this successfully it can allow you to stay more engaged in your life.

Cognitive load is very simply the amount of thinking energy you have throughout the day. As you push yourself into complex processes this amount starts to wear down. The more complex, challenging creative work we do takes away from that day’s supply.

The basics of Cognitive Load Theory is when we take things from working memory to long-term memory, which allows us to keep things stored up. However, doing this requires a lot of energetic resources and leads to a decline in our thinking resources. What is needed is a break that allows for memory integration time so we can move on to the next complex task. This is crucial for managing your attention in an efficient and energy protecting way.

We can manage this by first coming to understand that it is important to have some thinking reserves at the end of the day. Most people are aware that they have certain times of the day where they feel more sluggish or less capable. This shows how our cognitive load depletes. When we see how we are more capable at different times we can keep our most challenging work for those times. Some people are most sharp at the beginning of the day while others are night owls doing their best work in the middle of the night.

These resources can be replenished by becoming more aware of how we lose our cognitive resources and how we can gain them back.

When you use sustained attention with difficult activities, then it creates a cognitive load, and we know from laboratory studies that you can’t keep sustained focus for too long, as your performance then starts to decline. (Mark, 2023)

Rote Attention Can Replenish

My own experience is that rote activity is a way to back off and replenish, and since I started studying our attention with our devices, I realize that it does relax and calm me. (Mark, 2023)

Rote attention is highly focused attention on something really easy. Often this is something that we have done over and over again. It isn’t necessarily doing something mindlessly but actually being engaged in a task that has been done so many times in the past you don’t have to work hard at it. It’s brushing your teeth but more interesting (although I do really like making sure my teeth are clean).

It may seem strange to talk about doing less engaged work in order to do more engaged work but it appears this is helpful. It’s like going for a run and at times you slow down to a walk in order to replenish yourself and then start running again. Rote activities seem to replenish one’s cognitive ability to do the higher level tasks. This is a wonderful way to work on managing your attention.

Knowing this means that you can weave these rote experiences into your day more consciously. It seems as though people will feel overloaded and suddenly switch to playing Candy Crush on their phone (not knowing why they do this). The problem with doing this compulsively (without intention) is that it may be hard to get back to the more complex tasks that need to be done.

One can organize their day to work on complex tasks for periods of time and then pull out of them several times a day to replenish the cerebral capacity to go back into a more complex task again. By keeping this organized one can continually be getting the more difficult tasks done and not allowing the rote tasks to take up too much time.

Examples can include simple video games that are not challenging but highly engaging. Home chores like vacuuming and ironing can also be good things to do to restore your cognitive load. A card game like solitaire can also be restorative because of how easy it is to do the task. During rote activity the mind will start to integrate different pieces of information and can actually lead to sudden creative breakthroughs. Many artists, theorists and other complex thought leaders often describe their big insights coming during rote activities. The mind needs to move into a lower gear to rest so that it can come back into a higher gear.

Focused attention is a kind of resource utilization, whereas rote activity and boredom require far fewer resources. While we may think of focus as an ideal state where one can be productive and creative, rote attention (and even boredom) are just as important and play critical roles in our well-being. (Mark, 2023)

Using Mindfulness As A Way Out Of Distraction

Being in control of your attention means first of all developing a conscious awareness of how you use it. (Mark, 2023)

The other helpful resource for managing your attention is the ability to be aware of what you are doing from moment to moment. Mindfulness allows us to notice our loss of focus and to manage what we are doing in the moment. If you are able to recognize yourself doom scrolling it may be a way of restoring your cognitive resources so you can go back to more complex processing. This is a good use of time, if, and this is a big if, you are able to find your way back to the complex task. When a task is causing significant discomfort due to its complexity our subconscious processes will often push into procrastination strategies rather than short periods of brain replenishment.

When we are in a mindful state and we are procrastinating or avoiding our more difficult tasks we can ask ourselves why. Why don’t we want to do something? What are we avoiding? These are the questions that can be helpful. It does require some element of noticing where your attention is going. If you unconsciously flow from one attentional distraction to the next you can’t really notice that there is a pattern of shunning some activity or project.

How Attention Impacts Our Relationships

…it’s not just that people feel stressed when they multitask and are exhausted, but they may convey these negative emotions to others. (Mark, 2023)

One of the big challenges of cognitive depletion is being with others. When we feel drained at the end of the day it can often become difficult to manage our emotions, connect with others and be our best selves.

People will often describe this by saying “I’m done,” or “the tank is empty.” When this is the case it is necessary to move towards some kind of rote activity or to head for bed in order to rebuild your brain resources.

When we aren’t aware of how sapped we are we might become grumpy or short with people. This kind of behavior puts stress on our relationships and makes it hard for people to be around us. The lack of cognitive resources is okay but it is important to have the ability to name it and bring it to your loved ones so they understand why you are having a hard time.

One thing that can be helpful also is to take a short break. I often encourage some of my clients to just take a rest for 20 or 30 minutes when they return home. This can often feel refreshing and they are able to regroup and be more engaged with their people.

It is important to note that when our capacity to engage relationally is low we might divert ourselves with our phones or other digital distractions. This often can alienate the people we love. I can think of times where I felt this mind exhaustion and would want to get on my phone. I can recall my sons saying, “daddy get off your phone.” What I was avoiding was the complexity of my familial relationships. My phone offers an easier place to put my focus. However, I do this compulsively rather than with clear awareness. If I can recognize this behavior I can acknowledge that I need a cognitive breather.

Instead of getting to this point it is better to have a plan to take a break when you end work so that you can feel more refreshed entering the space with your loved ones.

How This Shows Up In My Life

In my personal and professional life, I find where I put my attention to be one that really affects how I feel and how connected I am to others. I love to learn new things and whenever I have a free moment I’m often plugged into some podcast, audio book or another way of taking in information. I used to think this was such a gift to have the privilege to learn so many things.

I have begun to think that this way of using my attention is not helpful. I think this constant stream of information actually does tend to tax my cognition and lead me to feeling somewhat cranky and irritable later in the day.

There is a real value to just sitting and not having some stream of knowledge coursing into my consciousness. In the sitting my mind is given the space to integrate what I just digested. This integration is important and one of the things that I don’t believe we consider as part of our capacity to stay fresh and engaged in the present moment.

It seems like the same lesson that I am continually learning: slow down, be present and pay attention to what matters most, the people in my life. When I have a plan to be resourced throughout the day it is much easier to do this.

Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

References:

Mark, Gloria. (2023) Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press. Toronto, Ontario, Canada

The post Managing Your Attention | Mental Health Tips for Men appeared first on BrassBalls TenderHeart.

“Holding space is what we do when we walk alongside a person or group on a journey through liminal space. We do this without making them feel inadequate, without trying to fix them, and without trying to impact the outcome. We open our hearts, offer unconditional support, and let go of judgment and control.” – Heather Plett

Often when our partners or loved ones need us the most we struggle to be with them in their distress. We take things personally, we get defensive and we shut down. The real healing comes in relationships when we can hold the space of the moment and let our loved ones know that they are not alone in their pain. But what does it mean to hold space? Why does this change things for the relationship? Let’s get into it.

“No one actually needs different circumstances, they only need greater support for the experiences they’re having.” (Kahn, 2022)

What Does It Mean To Hold Space?

As a therapist, my work is holding space for each client’s emotional and life challenges. I find this to be a sacred act. It is allowing another person’s truth to be given an opening for expression and then witnessed by someone with loving-kindness.

When someone is struggling we often want to change their situation, offer advice or a new way of looking at the problem. This is rarely helpful. Holding space is about a deep level of allowance that lets go of outcome and just accepts that what needs to be expressed will be expressed. We trust in the person we are holding space for by opening our hearts to their distress. I think this interpersonal relational field that emerges from held space mysteriously creates the healing that needs to happen.

When I am at my best when holding space, I am dropped into my body. This means that I’m not thinking my way out of what is happening. Instead, I’m noticing my inner sensational experience and also noticing the words that are coming from the person I’m holding space with. This allows me to witness whatever needs to be witnessed. I’m not trying to figure anything out. My confidence is in the power of this shared human intimacy to create something that heals. Neither I, nor the person I’m holding space for is creating this. It is our shared commitment to the space that allows the extraordinary to happen.

It is also much more difficult to hold space for a loved one that is upset with my actions. This is where the possibility for the maturation of the relationship exists. Being able to hold the container and not get pulled into the defensiveness that we often feel when someone is telling us we hurt them or did something wrong. We want to disagree, take exception to their experience and ask them to look at our perspective. When we do this we are saying, “I cannot hold this for your pain.”

When we hold space well it means we are tolerating our defensiveness and indignancy. It means not trying to force the person who is upset into some other place of attention. We hold the space by listening and not getting caught up in our ego. This means not giving into the thoughts that are saying “that’s not true, I didn’t do this.” When we give into our ego we don’t listen or accept the other’s perspective. We may not verbally say anything to the person we hurt, but our body language will tell the story.

The details of what happened is often where two people spend their time attempting to resolve who has the correct memory of what happened. “I didn’t say that,” one says. “Yes you did,” the other one counters with. Back and forth they go until they exhaust each other. This is a power struggle that resolves nothing.

When I do this well I am tolerating the angry energy in my body that wants justice. I hold this and continually move my attention to the pain that the other is feeling. The justice we often seek is to show we are not wrong. This is our ego not being able to face our human failing. If we can let go of our ego and focus instead on the other’s pain we can keep our heart open and show compassion for what they are feeling. This allows the other person to feel cared for and resolve the pain they are feeling inside. This means I have to let go of the right and wrong of what the person is saying. If I can focus on the pain of the person I can stay out of the power struggle.

“When we companion, we walk alongside the bereaved. We offer our open-hearted and gentle presence.” (Wright Glenn)

Feeling Less Alone

I believe that the outcome of holding space for someone is so that they can feel the relational connection that brings them to an inner space of communal resonance. Whatever they are going through they are now feeling less alone in that struggle. When we hold space for someone it is to let them know that you can’t change the outside circumstances…and they are not alone in the painful experiences of life.

I believe that most of my clients truly feel better because they aren’t alone in these painful life issues. This may or may not seem like a lot. However, in my experience, this is often a game changer for people. It means they are walking through this life with someone next to them. When we feel the connection and love of others we feel bolstered, held up with support, to get through whatever difficulty is emerging. For many people this is enough to get through it.

In this holding we are saying to our loved one, “I am in this with you and I can hold this pain with you.” I believe this is where the ultimate healing happens.

Sometimes all one can do to make things “all right” is to hold gentle space for the broken, painful pieces that will never be all right and will never be repaired, at least in this lifetime. (Wright Glenn)

Wanting To Help

One of the biggest challenges of holding space is the desire to help those we love. I often think about this as changing what it means to help. Have you ever gone to someone and told you their struggle and they gave you quick advice? “Just do this,” they said. I’m guessing for many of us reading this it wasn’t helpful. This kind of problem solving is what gets in the way of people actually being helpful.

To hold space means we have to believe that there is something more valuable than solutions or quick fixes. That a deep listening and heartfelt care are often more helpful than looking for “the” solution.

I do believe that when I go to solutions it isn’t for the person I’m trying to help it is to manage my own anxiety. When I see someone I love struggling I often want to get out of the pain I’m feeling and finding a solution seems like a good way to move on from what is unsettling me. The drive to fix is not one of selfless compassion but selfish concern for my own discomfort.

I also think that when we go quickly to a solution we are taking the decision making process out of the person we are trying to help. This is not helpful because in a way we are saying to this person, “you cannot figure this out so I’ll tell you what to do.” Instead of actually helping we can make this person feel incompetent. When we hold space we are providing an emotional container for the person we love to find their own solutions.

When we hold space, our task isn’t one of meaning-making. That is the work of the bereaved. That is their right. (Wright Glenn)

How This Shows Up In My Life

Traveling through life with clients who are grieving, traumatized, depressed and anxious is what I love about my work. It is hard work because I have to be fully in balance within myself in order to do this well.

It is so important in holding space for our loved ones that we let go of our own ego needs. When someone is in deep pain we must extend to them our care and compassion out of selflessness. If we come to this with our own emotional needs often people will feel more alone in their pain.

Holding space in many ways is about listening to another. However, to do it well requires that I also listen to myself. When I’m at my best I am noticing what is happening inside myself as well as validating the challenges of my client. Failure to do so can lead me to project my own pain onto them. This can come in many forms but often fixing or solving is at the top of the list.

I think the other important reality that comes up for me in the therapist role is the need for a great level of humility. As a therapist I can get caught up in the grandiose idea that I am the one who makes my clients better. This puts me in a very different space as one who is in charge of the outcome. With humility comes the recognition that I cannot solve anyone’s problems or heal them. That is their job. My job is to hold the space while they go through their process of finding relief for their pain. I’m called in those moments to liberate the person across from me to find their own deepest truth.

I don’t believe you need to be a trained mental health practitioner in order to hold space well for the people you care about. It starts with the desire to be of service for those who matter most. Once you want to be helpful you just keep trying to drop into yourself and say less and listen more. Overtime you too can be of great support for everyone in your life.

References:

Glenn Wright, Amy. (2017). Holding Space: On Loving Dying And Letting Go. Parallax Press. Berkeley, CA.

Khan, Matt. (2022). All for Love: The Transformative Power of Holding Space. Sounds True, Boulder, CO.

Plett, Heather. (2020). The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation, and Leadership. Bright Wing Books. Vancouver, BC.

The post Holding Space For Our Loved Ones appeared first on BrassBalls TenderHeart.

“A man’s friendships may be one of his most valuable—and underutilized—resources for helping him experience and learn how to be close to others.”

Robert Garfield

Prior to the pandemic I ran a men’s group for over two years. In this group setting I witnessed the power of men coming together and sharing their deep pain and regrets to other men. It amazed me how open and responsive men could be towards each other. What also struck me was how men talked with ease, while also explaining that they didn’t talk about these issues anywhere else. Rarely did these men share their vulnerable issues with their significant others. These men, and I believe, many men in our culture, are desperate for a place to let out their emotional struggles. I believe male friendship can be one of the most important elements of men’s lives. Yet it is also a time when so many men are feeling extremely isolated. Why is friendship hard for men? What needs to happen to cultivate friendship? Here are my thoughts.

Why Do Men Need Each Other?

“It is of vital importance that a man access the mature masculine archetypes through other men as well as within himself. Male bonding is a familiar idea in our culture. It is a nearly universal behavioral pattern found in the vast majority of cultures in all historical epochs.” (Moore and Douglas, 1992)

If there is one thing that I found surprising when I was running my men’s group was the willingness of men to listen to the leadership of other men. Men would talk about their professional and personal lives, providing intimate details of their failings. The other men in the group would listen with care. Afterwards the man that was receiving the care would often feel much better at having been witnessed in the masculine energy of the group. Other men would often empathize and meet the vulnerability with a clear, “you are not the only one.”

The thing that surprised me was how men would then call each other out to be better. This is not something I encouraged…it just happened. It was as if men wanted to be challenged by the group to become better in their lives.

After over a decade of listening to men struggle in their relationships with other people I have wondered why it is so much easier for men to take feedback from men who they barely know than from their intimate partners.

What I have come to conclude is that when men take feedback from women they often feel the shame of feeling like a failure. This leads men to shut down rather than step up.

When men come together in friendship they provide a space to be themselves and to playfully explore their current difficulties without the shame that shows up in relationships with women. This provides so many opportunities for men to grow and evolve. This is why men need each other.

Why Is It Hard For Men To Create Friendships?

The struggle men have to expose themselves in friendship settings is one of the painful elements of our culture. For many men expressing vulnerability in relationships is something that is taken away from them by cultural norms very early in life.

In her book Deep Secrets: Boy’s Friendships And The Crisis Of Connection, author Niobe Way has done research on how boys pull away from the intimacy of their early friendships in order to meet the expectations of the culture around them. When boys initially talk about their friends they describe them in impassioned intimate ways. It goes against any idea of boys being highly competitive and emotionally stoic.

According to Dr. Way, who has studied boy’s friendships extensively, early adolescent boys must reduce their interest in their close friends in order to fit in. This leads to a slow hollowing of the adolescent boy’s emotional range and capacity to develop intimacy in all relationships.

“In our twenty-first-century American culture, in which vulnerable emotions and same-sex intimacy are perceived as girlish and gay’, heterosexual boys are described as uninterested in having intimate male friendships, and the stereotype that boys are “only interested in one thing” is perpetuated.” (Way, 2013)

This is what happens to young boys on their way to manhood.

Their hearts are crushed as they must limit their desire for closeness with their friends. This enculturation leads boys to repress and ignore their inner world and avoid emotional intimacy. According to Dr. Way, this process starts in early adolescence (ages 14 to 15) and is fully formed by the end of adolescence in the mid-20s. By this age boys are behaving like many of the cultural stereotypes associated with acceptable male behavior.

It is only in modern era America and in countries that are heavily influenced by American culture that boys’ emotional and social skills and their intimate same-sex friendships are ignored or dismissed as female…or gay. (Way, 2013)

With this as the developmental backdrop for boys it is not hard to understand why many men find friendships to be less than supportive. Men have grown up in a world where relationships with other males is often one of competitiveness and superficial activity. Heterosexual men who desire more depth in their relationships often turn to female partnerships. As a result, many heterosexual relationships are strained by the men needing all of their emotional sustenance from their partners.

Men put too many of their (shall we say) ‘emotional eggs’ in a woman’s basket ―Daniel Ellenberg, Ph.D.

But this isn’t the answer to the problem. I believe that men truly need each other to grow and thrive. Men need to find each other in a new way through friendships that allows for greater levels of emotional intimacy.

The Challenge For Male Friendship

In understanding how boys develop we see the challenges men have in fostering the closeness they want in, not just male friendships, but in relationships in general. This is the crisis of connection that many men feel in their lives.

Men with partners and children struggle to understand how to engage with the people they love in an emotionally intimate way. This leads to shame and emotional isolation for many men who put much of their focus on the things they are good at which usually involves their professional life.

For a lot of men today, friendship is a kind of afterthought, subordinated to other life priorities. Spending time with a friend is something you might do after you complete your job duties, spend some quality time with your wife and kids, squeeze in a few regular visits to the gym, and enjoy a little time to chill with yourself. (Garfield, 2015)

Men often don’t see friendship as a critical piece of their lives. Growing up with a deficit of emotional intimacy seems normal and how men are supposed to be. This is the deep level of pain that men carry into all their relationships. A longing for deeper connection and a self-imposed cultural lid on that desire.

I believe that men want more depth in their friendships but they fear asking for this. They can’t show more vulnerability because it will expose them as weak and unmanly. I see this all around me as I walk by other men or have clumsy interactions with men in social settings. It is safer to act like you don’t give a shit rather than really engage someone you think may offer you connection.  And yet…I also sense the loneliness that comes with refusing to foster any form of affinity with someone they feel an interest in.

How To Cultivate Friendships

One of the challenges that men struggle in forming more friendships is the ability to nourish relationships in general. I’m going to be honest and say that women are just better at this than men are for lots of reasons. Our first experience with friendship is meeting someone on the playground and noticing they like to play kickball like us. After a few games they are our best friends. If it was still this easy you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

What does it mean to nourish a relationship?

First, it means making the relationship a priority. This means seeing this person on a regular basis. It doesn’t mean waiting for the other person to call or reach out. Yet it does mean letting go of your pride and leading the relationship by calling when they don’t. It also means being patient and not giving up if things don’t go right at first. Keep encouraging more connection with a new friend (or long-term friend you’ve fallen out of touch with) until it starts to become more habitual.

The second part of this is showing emotional vulnerability in the relationship. I can recall, in the men’s group I ran, I shared something vulnerable. One of the men, who was attending his second group, pointed out that my willingness to share freely allowed him to feel safe to share his struggles. There is no guarantee that you will be met with acceptance and care when you share something vulnerable. However, I will guess that if there is no sharing of this type of heartfelt connection the friendship will eventually fizzle out. It’s worth the risk.

“We can’t really be known unless we’re willing to be open. That means not that we disclose ourselves all at once, but that we don’t try to mask who we are, whether with toughness, masculinity or success. We want the real deal! Your friends want to know you, not anyone you’re pretending to be.” (Evensen, 2019)

The third area that needs to be worked on is dealing with conflict. This means that when there is a break in the relationship because one friend hurts another friend it needs to be dealt with in a reasonable time frame. I have had friends approach me about a break in our relationship that happened years before. They had just now mustered up the courage to tell me they cared about me enough to talk to me about it. On one hand I appreciate that they finally did…but years later? Come on…talk about things that didn’t go right. Maybe your friend flaked on an event that you needed him to show up for. Say “that isn’t okay…I needed you there.” A friend says some cruel things about your partner. Say, “hey man, I respect your point of view…but that feels  too harsh and I need you to talk about my partner in a more respectful way.” By not doing this you run the risk of all of these breaks in the relationship starting to erode the good will.

If you are feeling isolated in your life these three points aren’t going to magically allow you to have more supportive friendships in your life. It is a starting point to think about how you show up in your relationships right now. Consider why you don’t reach out to a friend of 10 plus years? What are you not giving or getting from the relationship? How would you like it to change? Are there other men in your life that may offer you something with more emotional depth?

How This Shows Up In My Life.

I can relate to the painful loss of closeness I felt with friends at an early age. I recall the fear of being called a wimp, sissy or fag because of my desire to be close to the brothers I called friends. This wasn’t conscious in the way that I thought it through and planned to be less affectionate or connected to my male friends. It was this slow closing off of my tenderness towards them.

Over the years I have consciously shifted to get this back with my close friends. I’m truly blessed to have a wonderful group of men in my life that are willing to open up with me and be emotionally intimate.

There have been a number of times where I have discovered friends that are struggling (often in relationships with women) and can only give me a superficial indication of what is happening. When I ask questions and create safety for them to tell me how they are feeling, our bond deepens in significant ways.

In my professional life I meet men of various backgrounds who struggle to open up emotionally. The primary reason they often cite is they are afraid to be shamed for being weak. Over several sessions they begin to show themselves in ways that they have not been able to ever show another man. This is a realization that men are not less emotional or more stoic than women. It is the reality that men are forced into this cultural trap that pushes emotion to the farthest place of awareness for many men.

It is this emotional intimacy that men must begin to call back from their pre-adolescence period, so they can find themselves and become whole again. Men must do this together in community and friendship so that we can all start to believe in a new form of male bonding that allows us  to show our tender hearts to each other.

Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

References:

Evensen, Kim. (2019). Brothers: Every man needs strong, authentic friendships. Self Published.

Garfield, Robert. (2015). Breaking the Male Code: Unlocking the Power of Friendship. Avery Publishing. New York, NY.

Goldfarb, Anna. (2024). Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections. Sounds True. Boulder, CO.

Moore, Robert L and Gillette, Douglas. (1992). The King Within: Accessing the King in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. New York, NY.

Moore, Lane. (2023). You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult. Abrams Books. New York, NY.

Vellos, Kat. (2020). We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. Self-published.

Way, Niobe. (2013). Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. Harvard University Press. Boston, MA.

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