Briefly Noted: Men and Emotions

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that emotional granularity can appear trait-like, but really it’s something we can all improve with practice.

With most men I tend to start in one of two places. One is more somatic: helping them notice what’s happening in the body: the constant flow of interoceptions and affect related to whatever situation they have in mind. Then we look at the narrative their mind has developed about that situation. Those two elements, the physical and the conceptual, are the raw ingredients of emotion. And once you have those elements in hand, the question simply becomes: what emotion is this?

The other entry point is conceptual. With men, anger is often the easiest place to start. If I ask how many words he has for anger—frustration, irritation, resentment, disappointment—that emotional domain becomes salient, and we can talk through the meaning of each word. Then during the week he can notice if those states show up and what they feel like physically, and write them down so we can build out the topography. “These sensations plus this concept equals that emotion.” After that, anger becomes a model for mapping other emotional domains that may be less well developed, like sadness, fear, or even joy.

If therapy assumes people already have access to emotional awareness, granularity, or vocabulary, some clients will struggle. But when the work includes building those capacities, the process can become much more meaningful. In that sense, with almost any client, part of the work usually involves remediating some degree of alexithymia.