← ESSAYS

Stop Asking Men How They Feel

What becomes possible when we understand someone before asking them to see themselves differently

I have been thinking about something that I am not sure I have completely right, but the more I sit with it the more I wonder if we have been asking men the wrong question. We consistently tell men they need to get in touch with their feelings, share their feelings, learn how to name their emotions, become more vulnerable, and somehow find a way to communicate what is happening inside of them. I understand why. I am a therapist and spend a significant amount of my life helping people understand their internal experience, so I am certainly not arguing that feelings do not matter or that men do not need emotional language. I think emotional vocabulary is incredibly important because it gives us language to describe what is happening inside of us. What I am beginning to question is whether asking men to share their feelings is actually the best way to help them become more emotionally available.

That sounds like a small distinction, but I am beginning to think it might be a significant one. If a man starts telling me about something that happened at work, his relationship with his father, the end of his marriage, a mistake he made ten years ago, or why he has been miserable for the last six months, I am not sure the most helpful thing I can do is interrupt the story and ask, “How did that make you feel?” Maybe what he needs first is for me to actually hear what happened. Not because the feeling underneath the story is unimportant, but because the story might be the way he eventually gets there.

i.

Tell me what happened

I think people often begin telling their stories without much coherence at all. They jump around. They leave things out. They explain one event without recognizing how it connects to another. They might spend twenty minutes describing what another person did while barely noticing where they themselves were in the experience. They may contradict themselves or have pieces of the story that have never been placed next to one another long enough to notice that they belong together. I do not think that means they are bad at telling their story. I think that may actually be how coherence develops. We tell the story, someone receives it, we tell it again, we remember something we forgot, we notice something that no longer fits, and slowly the pieces begin connecting in a way that allows us to understand how we arrived where we are.

Sometimes therapy is just getting the story straight.

I do not mean getting the facts right in some objective courtroom sense, as though there is a single perfect narrative waiting to be uncovered if we ask enough questions. I mean getting the story coherent enough that the person can begin to understand what happened, what mattered, what they wanted, what they feared, what they did, what the other person did, and why all of those things together have made the present moment so difficult.

I think that matters because it is hard to move on from a story you do not yet understand.

We sometimes get impatient with people who keep telling the same story. We think they are stuck. We wonder why they cannot let it go. We may even say something like, “You already know what happened,” as though knowing the sequence of events is the same thing as comprehending the experience. But maybe repeated telling is sometimes part of how the story becomes understandable enough to eventually live beyond. Each telling can place another piece next to another piece until something begins to take shape that the person can finally stand on.

That is probably what I mean when I use the word coherence.

I do not mean that someone has a perfectly organized explanation for their life. I mean that they can begin connecting the dots of their experience enough to understand how one thing led to another and how they themselves existed inside of it.

ii.

Sometimes therapy is just getting the story straight

I keep thinking about coherence like concrete.

At first there may not be enough there to stand on. The story is still wet. The person is trying to understand what happened, what mattered, why one experience seems connected to another, and what all of it means now. Eventually there may be enough structure that they can stand on the story with another person and allow difference to show up without the whole thing collapsing. And sometimes it is the difference itself that helps the story become stronger. Someone hears what we are saying, offers something we had not considered, and we discover whether it fits. If it does, the story changes. If it does not, having to say why can help us understand our own experience more clearly.

I think we introduce difference too quickly.

A man tells his wife something difficult that happened at work and she asks how it made him feel. A man tells a friend about the relationship he had with his father and the friend immediately wonders if that is why he has trouble trusting people. Someone begins telling a therapist about his marriage and within a few minutes he is being asked what role he thinks he played in creating the problem.

Those may all eventually become useful questions, and I make a living asking questions very similar to them, but I am beginning to think timing matters far more than we realize. If there is not yet enough of the story underneath us to stand on together, then even a well intended question can feel like I am adding something to the story that the person is not ready to hold.

We are often so anxious to offer difference that we stop listening to the story that is actually being told.

There is so much judgment available to us that it can become surprisingly difficult to simply remain with another person long enough to understand why their life feels hard from where they are standing.

iii.

That sounds hard

That is why I think one of the most meaningful things we can say is simply, “That sounds hard.”

Not because that is some therapeutic technique or because someone taught us that we should validate feelings. I mean actually hearing enough of the story that when we say “that sounds hard,” we mean it.

There is a difference between saying “that sounds hard” because someone appears sad and saying it because you have begun to understand the whole bind.

When enough of the story has been received, “that sounds hard” becomes more than validation.

It says:

I am beginning to understand what it has been like to be you inside this experience.

That is empathy.

And I think empathy does something important. It creates the conditions for more story.

The person does not have to defend the first version because the listener is not trying to knock it down. They can keep talking. They can add pieces. They can correct themselves. They can correct the listener.

Sometimes I will think I understand the story and offer a word that seems to fit. Maybe I say, “It sounds like you feel responsible.”

And the person says, “No. I do not feel responsible. I feel sympathetic. I wish I could help, but I know I cannot.”

That correction matters.

Now we know more.

The story has become stronger because the person was able to say, “No, that is not quite it,” and then find language that fits their actual experience more accurately.

That is very different from me extracting the right feeling from them.

That is how coherence develops in relationship.

The listener does not construct the story for the person. The story becomes increasingly accurate as it is told, received, tested, corrected, and told again.

That is also why I think the first job of the listener is not interpretation.

It is tracking.

Not saying those things because we are supposed to sound empathic, but because we are actually following the story closely enough to understand the connections the person is making.

iv.

Maybe the story is the doorway

I wonder if this is particularly important with men because men have often been cultivated to move through internal experience rather than remain with it. I do not necessarily think most men are consciously deciding to suppress emotion. That assumes a level of intentionality that I am not sure exists. Many men have simply spent most of their lives learning to keep moving. Go to work. Solve the problem. Take care of your family. Stop complaining. Get up. Shake it off. Finish what needs to be finished. There can be something incredibly admirable about that capacity, but eventually the body itself can become something that is simply overridden.

Then someone asks, “How do you feel?”

I am not sure why we are surprised when the answer is, “I don’t know.”

Maybe he really does not know yet.

Maybe what he knows is what happened.

Maybe what he knows is that his boss called him into the office, that he thought he was about to lose his job, that his wife had already been worried about money, that his father always told him a man should be able to provide, that he sat in his truck for twenty minutes before driving home, and that when he finally walked through the door he snapped at his kids for leaving their shoes in the hallway.

That is already a lot of story.

If I interrupt him somewhere in the middle and ask him what emotion he is feeling, I may actually pull him away from the very path that could eventually take him there.

I think women may sometimes have a particularly hard time with this because emotional conversation is often one of the ways women experience closeness. I know that is broad and certainly not universally true, but I have watched enough couples to wonder if there is something important there. A wife may ask, “How did that make you feel?” because she is trying to move closer. She wants access to his internal experience. She wants to understand him. From her perspective, the question is an invitation.

But he may already believe he is letting her in.

He is telling her the story.

Then she asks for something else.

Now it can feel like the story he was offering was not enough.

He says, “I don’t know, I was frustrated.”

She knows there is more underneath it and keeps trying to find it.

He feels increasingly interrogated.

She feels increasingly shut out.

Both of them may actually be trying to connect while using completely different doorways.

I wonder what would happen if she stayed with the doorway he had already opened.

Those statements do not prevent emotion. They give it somewhere to arrive.

v.

The body still has to come with us

Eventually the body has to come with us.

That part feels important because I do not think coherence is simply being able to recite the events of your life in the correct order. People can become incredibly practiced at telling a story without actually participating in it. They know who did what, who was wrong, what happened next, and exactly how the story ends. They can tell it for the hundredth time without anything inside of them moving at all.

That feels different from coherence.

A rehearsed story may actually be incredibly polished.

A coherent story is alive.

The person might realize something while telling it.

They might say, “I have never thought about it that way before.”

They may notice that one part carries more weight than they realized.

They may recognize that something they had always called responsibility is actually compassion, or something they had always called productivity is really the way they learned to experience their value, or something they had always called anger has grief sitting inside of it.

The body participates in that process.

That does not necessarily mean visible emotion.

A man might not cry when he talks about his father. His voice may not shake. He may never use the word grief. But he may notice that his chest tightens every time he gets to one particular part of the story. He may suddenly want to move past something quickly. He may feel tension in his stomach or notice that he has stopped breathing as deeply. He may simply say, “This is harder to talk about than I thought.”

That is enough to tell me the story is not merely being reported.

He is in it.

I think visible emotional expression may tell us much less than we assume. Some people are simply more emotionally reactive. Their experience becomes visible quickly. Other people may have a very different temperament and experience the same internal significance without displaying much at all. I do not think one is necessarily healthier than the other.

The question for me is whether the person can remain in contact with the story and with what is happening in the body while they tell it.

Eventually emotional language becomes helpful because it gives the person a way to describe that experience. Maybe the pressure in the chest is sadness. Maybe it is fear. Maybe shame. Maybe anger. Maybe something more complicated that takes a while to understand.

I absolutely want men to develop that vocabulary.

I just do not think vocabulary has to be the doorway.

Maybe the story is.

The more the story is told, the more difficult it becomes to leave yourself out of it. You begin noticing what you wanted. You notice what frightened you. You recognize where you made choices that affected what happened next. You see where the story you have been telling for ten years no longer quite explains everything. You notice that something you had always described as anger contains grief, or that what you had always called disappointment actually carries shame.

Not because someone extracted the correct feeling from you, but because you stayed with the story long enough that more of yourself became available inside of it.

Sometimes the story changes simply because previously disconnected experiences finally get placed next to one another.

A person may spend years thinking of themselves as productive because they are constantly doing things. They work. They exercise. They care for people. They handle problems. They make meals. They help friends. They keep moving.

Then one day those same events get organized differently.

The behavior did not change.

The story did.

And when the story changes, a person can sometimes recognize something about themselves that had been present for years but had never been named accurately.

That is another reason I think coherence matters so much.

It lets the person see themselves inside their own life.

And once that begins happening, movement becomes possible.

If I understand why I am here, I have more ability to decide what I want to do next.

If I understand that I have spent years caring for people because caring is genuinely part of who I am, I no longer have to decide that the only solution is to stop caring. I may instead need to learn where caring becomes costly to me.

If I understand that I have spent my life being productive partly because productivity became intertwined with worth, I do not necessarily have to quit working. I may need to discover whether I can work because I value what I am doing rather than because stopping would threaten who I believe myself to be.

The story becomes something I can use.

That is what I mean by getting the story straight.

Understanding enough of it that I am no longer simply being carried forward by pieces of my life that have never been connected.

vi.

When the concrete can hold us

I think this is also where difference eventually becomes possible.

I spend much of my professional life offering people difference. Someone tells me how they see the world, and eventually I may see something they do not see or understand part of the story differently than they do.

But if I offer that difference before they believe I actually understand their experience, it can sound like correction.

It can feel like I am telling them they got their own life wrong.

When empathy comes first, difference can become something else.

If you know that I understand your story, then perhaps I can eventually say, “I wonder about something,” and you can actually wonder with me.

The concrete has become strong enough that both of us can stand on it.

I can move around and look from a different angle without threatening the existence of the story itself.

What matters is that the difference can now be offered and received without requiring either of us to abandon ourselves or the relationship.

Maybe that is actually one of the signs of coherence.

Can I tell my story, remain connected to what it does inside of me, and allow someone else to see something differently without losing the story or losing myself?

If so, I am beginning to wonder if this is what we should be encouraging men to do more often.

Not “Tell me how you feel.”

Tell me your story.

I want to hear it.

I just want to understand what happened.

Tell me what it has been like to be you.

Tell me enough times that you begin hearing things in the story you had never heard before. Tell me until the pieces start connecting. Tell me until you begin showing up inside the story instead of simply reporting what everyone else did. Tell me until your body is allowed to participate instead of simply being overridden. Tell me until there is enough underneath the story that you and I can stand on it together and wonder what else might be true.