Men’s Emotion Work: 4 Ways To Begin For Your Art & Your Life
Quick story: I needed to find pictures of men working on their emotions for this blog post, so I typed in the words ‘mens emotion work’. All I got were depressing-looking men—fists to their heads, curled up on a coach, despondent, and lost-looking. I typed in ‘mens emotion positive’ and I barely found a few smiles.
When I typed in ‘women's emotion work’, I found pictures of happy women smiling, throwing up their arms into the blue sky, hands clasped with hands. And I didn't even put in the word ‘positive’.
Yes, this is a highly non-scientific and very small sample size, but I believe it shows what we’re up against as men—there are few positive examples of men and their relationship with their emotions.
It’s getting way better, don’t get me wrong. On breaks from writing this post, I’m watching the second season of Full Swing on Netflix. The third episode spotlights golfers Wyndham Clark and Joel Dahmen as they struggle with their own mental and emotional challenges and how they seek the psychological help their need to improve their games and their lives. It’s a beautiful, powerful episode.
But we have a long way to go before we can all sit around a table and hear one of our boys say “I’m wrestling with some depression right now” and for the rest of us to not be automatically ashamed or weirded out by this “serious talk”. I’ll talk more about men’s groups in another blog. For now, know that emotion work is hard work for us, but that’s not because we can’t do it.
Especially creatives. Yes, we deal with emotions in our art and I think because we do that, we give ourselves a pass by saying “art is my therapy”. Well, it's not a very effective therapy because I got more help from a therapist in two months than writing fiction for twenty years.
So here are four ways to help you identify, understand, and express your emotions to help you in your life and work.
Four ways to begin your emotion work
Being Mindful
The first step is to identify the emotion in our bodies and not as ideas in our heads. Our emotions come from the limbic system of our brain, which is one of the oldest parts. It’s at the heart of the nervous system.
When you jump away from a stick that looked like a snake, that’s your limbic system moving your body before your rational brain could even assess the situation. Our bodies, in other words, speak a language of their own, and that language is feeling.
It was in my forties when I realized I even had a body. After two decades of abusing it through drinking, drugs, sex, hunched in front of a computer for hours a day writing, gaming, and bad posture, I can now feel every day how sore and soft and lacking in flexibility and health it really is if I don’t work to maintain it.
Midlife is a great place to re-introduce yourself to your body.
No Narrative
Humans use narratives as maps to make sense of themselves and their world. If you’re a dancer, your narrative is, “I dance” and you feel good, and if you get injured, your narrative would be “I’m not dancing” and you feel sad. Body-mind connection 101.
If you’ve never played guitar, your narrative wouldn’t be “I play guitar”. It just wouldn’t make sense. So I get that we don’t work on our emotions because we haven’t. “I don’t do emotions” is a common phrase for us.
What we need to do is adopt a beginner’s mentality to this. Beginners make mistakes, beginners are curious. One great way to do that is to take the narrative away.
Being mindful is a way to be present with the environment and yourself, here and now without worrying about the storylines of our past and our future.
Try This:
Sit in a comfortable chair or a pillow. Make sure you’re alone and without any interruptions.
Take a few minutes to get comfortable, breathing in deeply through your nose and out of your mouth.
Set a timer for 10 minutes.
Feel an emotion in your body. If no emotion is coming up, that’s fine, just place your hand on your heart. This is a wonderful way to disconnect the narratives you have about your body and emotions and just be present and mindful of it.
If you are feeling something, what is it? Is it fear? Anger? What is its form? Is it jagged or soft? Where is it? Your head? Your chest? Just feel it with no narrative.
If you’re struggling with this, just go back to breathing. You’re just being present with these feelings with no judgment.
Keep feeling the emotion as it grows and as it moves. These emotions can get intense, so don’t push yourself. You’re training like you would at the gym.
Remember, don’t make a narrative of why this emotion is or what you should be doing with it. Just feel it for where it’s at and what it is.
Once you start to do this more, you can use this as emotions come up in daily life.
Sitting with an emotion without judgment is a great way to feel it and express it without needing to go to our toolbox of distractions.
You’re just learning, and that's what I want you to keep in mind as you practice this. Give yourself enough grace, patience, and compassion to keep it up.
2. Expressing emotions creatively
I think one reason that most men are hesitant to work on their emotions is that they think once they start feeling them, the emotions will overwhelm them.
While it’s true that once you work on emotions, they might feel strong and able to do that, the more I work to understand and feel my emotions, the better chance it'll be that they won't come out at the wrong times. Understanding your emotions is key to understanding yourself.
One way we can let out our emotions is in a safe, creative place, not just living vicariously through our art and denying our emotions outside of it. This is where creative emotion work comes in.
Try this:
Get some art supplies, like paint, crayons, pastel, colored pencils, and paper.
Put on some music to help you evoke emotions. For me, it’s heavy metal, like Meshuggah, for anger or The National for melancholy.
Set a timer for 30 minutes.
Create without an agenda or expectations. It'll be tough at first, but really get down to the body letting the emotion come out. Work to feel the emotion without judgment, like in the last exercise. What is that emotion making you draw? If you really let your body express itself, you’ll see your hand is moving almost independently of your brain. Get into that space.
Don’t be afraid to get emotional. If you’re angry, color with hard, violent strokes. If you’re sad, use long soft strokes. Create the way that only your emotions can.
Get out of your head and onto the page. That's why I want this to be tactile and why I want you to choose something cheap for your art supplies because most likely, you may be ripping some paper and breaking some crayons. Be totally immersed in your work.
Get into a space where you feel these things and allow these things.
Speaking of creative ways of expressing yourself…
If you haven’t signed up for your FREE 12-page guide to charging your creative midlife battery, click here. It's your key to getting more battery power for your life and your art.
3. Self-Talk
Earlier, we learned that getting away from narratives and being present is a great way to begin with emotion work. Now we look at how narratives affect us.
Self-talk is just that—how we use language to explain our world and motivate (or discipline) ourselves.There are a few ways of working on self-talk.
One way is journaling. Sitting with yourself for ten minutes and writing down what you feel and what you think.
Another way is to sit quietly for about five minutes and talking to yourself out loud to a recorded voice memo on your phone. This works in a few ways.
First, you actually hear yourself talking and therefore can hold space for compassion and empathy for that person as if you were listening to another part of yourself. Second, when you record your voice, you feel like you're being listened to.
Once we begin to do this, we can make a ritual of being open and speaking through our vulnerability, of being a little more comfortable in the uncomfortable. That's what growth is all about.
A final way that self-talk can work is by paying attention to your language as you use it in the world. An popular phrase of mine I use when I get stressed is “It's going to be one of those days".
Everyone knows this phrase—it feels like a shitty day is coming and so I better get ready for it. And that’s what it’s meant to do—to keep you safe and alert for danger.
What's so fascinating about this line is that it’s not about getting ready for an imminent danger but fabricating a possible danger to get ready for. By saying this line, I create for myself the very thing I wish to avoid.
Think of that. When something goes wrong in my day and I say “It’s going to be one of those days”, I actually use self-talk to tell my brain that it WILL be having one of those days. And THEN I get mad and sad when it happens. How messed up is that!
We do this all the time:
“I’m so stupid. Why did I do that?”
“I suck at writing and I always will.”
“I’m too old to be doing this. It’s too late for me.”
“I knew she would do something like that. She’s always hated me.”
“I knew it! I’m never going to learn this!”
What's really happening here is that we're telling ourselves a narrative to help ourselves make sense of what's going on and to ready ourselves for disappointment. This is no way to live!
Pay attention to what you're saying to yourself, especially in moments of stress. That’s when we're most emotional, and in these moments, it helps to pay particular attention to what we say to ourselves.
Now when I’m having ‘one of those days’, I try to say something positive like, “I’ve been here before. I’ll do my best.”
The point here is all about self-awareness. If we can work just a little bit on paying attention to what we say to ourselves, it’ll help immensely in working with ourselves.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
4. Talking to Another
Talking to a trusted friend, family member, or a professional is one of the best ways of understanding your emotion. But I put talking last on this list for two reasons. One, every other item on this list will help you build the confidence to one day talk more about your emotions to another. And two, I believe talking is the first thing people tell men to do more of and it's the last thing we want to hear because we don’t have the tools to understanding our emotions let alone talk about them.
There is real shame involved in not being able to do something like speaking our emotions. I know, I’ve been there. We just haven't been conditioned or raised to understand or deal with emotions, especially intense ones, and that’s okay.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. It's only when we take responsibility for our emotions as men and work on them that we can learn to talk about them and finally open up to someone.
In other words, we can't even begin to open up to other people until we open up to ourselves.
(Having said that, if you're going through something really rough and can't get out of your own head, I would highly recommend going to see a professional. Get the help that you deserve. I found my therapist through Psychology Today. Don’t just rely on reels and social posts or blogs to get you into emotion work, seek a professional! And no I’m not being paid for this; it’s just something that has saved my life.)
For too long, our default has traditionally been to suppress the emotion, muscle through it, and brush off people’s questions of “You okay?”with “I’m fine”. These ways may be new to you because the second half of your life is a new way of living.
Don’t beat yourself up for doing this or not doing this. Come at it with curiosity instead of judgment.
Using one or all of these methods, you’ll build a relationship with yourself to better understand the nature of emotions and how letting them out in healthy ways works wonders for your life, your mind-body connection, and your art.
Patience is key here. Use baby steps. Try one technique at a time for a month or so. Allow yourself to make mistakes and adapt. Find YOUR way.
P.S. I am not a therapist in any way shape or form. I simply use these methods to help me in my own ways. If you are feeling overwhelmed by your emotions, please seek the help of a therapist. I’ve been going for three years and it’s really the beginning of how I got back in touch with my own emotion work.
I want to hear from you!
Comment below on what topic you want me to cover next?
