As men, how do we get ourselves to a place that allows us to fully admit we need help? Many times us guys struggle to realize our own emotions. Some of us have been programmed to eat our emotions because they don’t matter, some of us have been programmed to show only one emotion, typically anger and still others don’t even know that we have emotions. Yeah, I said we didn’t even know we have emotions. Let’s dig in.

What do I mean when I say men don’t know we have emotions? I mean that as we’ve aged we weren’t taught to think about our own personal feelings. If you’ve been raised in a home that addiction and/or abuse was present, many times the only feelings we know are those directed at keeping the peace in the home. The same can be said for children raised in homes where one of the caregivers was a narcissist, sucking up all of the attention, love and support a child should get in order to avoid facing the narcissist’s own fears and emotions. All of these can have lasting affects on young men and once these boys become adults, they have no idea how to handle everything that’s rattling around in their brains.

We also have many men that were raised by fathers that didn’t know how to be fathers; how to lead their sons to be good men. Fatherhood is a blessing and the biggest responsibility any man will ever have. Teaching our sons how to navigate life, supporting them when they need it the most, ensuring that this isn’t transactional but out of unadulterated love. This, I believe, is why so many men struggle to accept and understand their own emotions. The men that raised us refused to engage with their emotions, many times choosing either a substance or some other type of temporary dopamine hit to cover the pain they feel.

Where does this lead men as they mature? Many times it leads us to internalize all we feel until the emotion boils over into some form of unhealthy manifestation. Drinking, womanizing, drugs, porn or any other of the litany of addictions we form to run kicking and screaming from our emotions and towards the dopamine hit we’re all searching for in this always-feel-good-society we’re living in. It doesn’t have to be this way but it does require some pain to overcome these issues.

As tough as men are, the one place I see that we need to be tougher is engaging our emotions in a healthy manner. In society today, we still see a ton of the toxic traits that cause us guys so many of the issues we don’t want, especially the “men can’t be emotional” trope that’s passed around. Guys seem to be drawn to that and I think that’s because it’s the easy way out. Maybe I’m wrong but in my experience, I’m very right. I say that because I’ve been just as guilty of avoiding emotions as many other men. Just because anger wasn’t the way I dealt with my emotions doesn’t mean I didn’t do exactly the wrong things with them. I think the difference with me is that I was one of those guys I mentioned above that didn’t know anything about my own emotions.

You read that right, I didn’t know what my own emotions were. As I’ve spoken about before, alcoholism has been a dominant theme in my life with a side of being surrounded by a few narcissists. For me, I ate all of my emotions, literally and figuratively, because I didn’t know what was happening in my noggin. Everything I buried with food stayed with me and was made faaaaaaaar worse by adding weight, which I’ve always had an issue with, to the list of crap I had to deal with. It wasn’t until I jumped headfirst into mental health, because I felt like I was having a breakdown after my mom passed, that I realized the “why” in the equation of not feeling well in the head. Once I began to learn the questions to ask myself could I begin to find the hard answers.

I know that there are guys that consume my content, whether that’s on TikTok, here on the blog or on Instagram. When I’ve asked for feedback, the number one thing I’ve heard from numerous men is that they appreciate what I have to say but they don’t want folks to know they are concerned about their mental health. This is a microcosm, in my opinion, of the overall headwinds we face in getting men more in tune with themselves. I’m vocal about mental health because I want men to see there is another way and it doesn’t make them a pansy or any less of a man. And I will say with a lot of certainty, because women have told me, that ladies absolutely appreciate a man engaged with his mental health.

Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about guys wrapped in an ascot sitting in a circle crying about all of their woes. That’s another issue we’re facing-this thought that guys talking about mental health are weak or can’t be strong. Nothing could be farther from the truth in my opinion. It takes a very, very strong man to say I need to pay better attention to how I feel so that I can be a better man for those around me. We can be manly and attentive to our own needs while leading others to better themselves.

I’ve shared my favorite quote that I got from Professor Scott Galloway before but I don’t think it’ll ever get old: Greatness is in the agency of others. That means that we can find greatness by helping others and I say we can’t effectively help others until we help ourselves.

If you found this post helpful and/or valuable, please consider sharing with someone you think could use it. I appreciate you taking the time and hope you’re having a great day. We gone!

Twitter: @onehandman

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Email: William at manvsmood dot com