Emotional Literacy

(originally posted Monday, March 12, 2007 )
I am often struck by the frequent observation that men are not good at expressing their feelings. The reason for my perplexity lies in this question: “In what way are men taught to express their feelings?” From infancy, girls are rewarded for being emotionally expressive, and invited to explore and comprehend their feelings. Boys are taught to “suck it up,” to “get over it,” to “be a big boy.” The underlying message is, your feelings aren’t important.
We seldom believe that we are doing this. Yet it can be shown. Researchers who have been allowed to monitor the homes of parents of newborns have found that parents take significantly longer to respond to the cries of a boy baby than to a girl baby, and invest significantly more time and effort in soothing girl infants than boy infants. Without realizing it, from birth, we expect boys to be tougher, and have fewer emotional needs, than girls.
As a result, when you ask many men about their feelings, they often don’t know how to respond. Not only don’t they have the vocabulary, they seldom have the skills to identify their feelings. They do not know what they are feeling. They’re not used to thinking about it.
I lead a therapy group for men. Part of what we teach in the group is Emotional Literacy. This is the process of identifying and articulating emotions.
It goes like this:
Step 1) Pay attention to the feeling. Often we try to distance ourselves from our feelings, or shrug them off. All too often we try to judge our feelings, trying to decide whether we should or shouldn’t feel what we are feeling. But as I wrote in a previous entry, you feel what you feel.
Step 2) Name the feeling. Identify it, give it a label that “fits.” This may take some thought, and may require you to expand your vocabulary a bit. The most basic part of this is to identify whether the feeling is good or bad, positive or negative, and how intensely you’re feeling it.
Step 3) Identify the meaning that this feeling has for you. We not only feel what we feel. We feel it for a reason. Feelings are your subconscious’s (or your body’s) way of sending you a message. What is the message here? Are you telling yourself that something isn’t right? That everything is okay. That you need something different, or more of the same? To hear the message, you need to pay attention to it and think about it.
Step 4) Decide how to act on your feeling(s).
There are, of course, a lot of dysfunctional and unhealthy ways we can act on our feelings: with violence, with hostility, by shutting down, with resentment, by numbing with distractions, drugs, or alcohol, by blaming others, by denial.
But we can also give ourselves the choice to connect with others, and with ourselves. We can take responsibility for our emotions, communicate them, and decide how and how much tom communicate. When we connect with our own emotions, we are connecting with our true selves.
So, the process is Feel, Name, Think, Act. By following this process, we become less reactive, and more authentic. We could all benefit from developing our emotional literacy more fully.
(Based in part on material from Tian Dayton, 2000. “Trauma and Addiction.”)