A Foot in Both Worlds
As your children, romantic partners, friends and even coworkers connect with their feelings and tend to their emotional needs, you’ve been left behind. They want validation you never received and you can’t give what you didn’t get.
Your expertise is in minimizing, avoiding and numbing out feelings. You are happy to teach them how to do this but instead you find yourself ghosted, blocked and alone.
I like to joke that I was born before feelings were invented. I was told what to do and think and how I felt about it was completely irrelevant.
If my feelings conflicted with what I was told to do or think, I was talking back or disrespectful.
If I was sad I was a crybaby or feeling sorry for myself.
If I was bubbly or joyful I was hyper or showing off.
If I was lonely and clingy I needed to get lost.
If I felt a connection with beauty and love I was being a sissy.
If I was tired or didn’t feel comfortable doing something I was lazy.
If I felt left out or like I needed things or opportunities I was spoiled or a brat.
If I protested I was throwing a fit.
I wasn’t singled out, the whole world was like this. Everyone I knew growing up aggressively suppressed and denied feelings in themselves and others.
That world was simple, everything was black and white. You ignored your feelings and did what you were supposed to until you were exhausted and then you did it all again the next day.
The suppressed and denied feelings were held in the body as anxiety, and we all walked around with a ball of unaknowledged anxiety in our guts that we added to every day.
We got good at it. We learned how to live in spite of our feelings and find outward material satisfaction and achievement, even if the ball of anxiety inside continued to grow. We learned to sooth it with alcohol, overeating, television and acquiring things and experiences.
As we aged society began to realize that we were ignoring the richest part of life. We were paying a huge price for suppressing our feelings and that there was no world war or industrial revolution to justify such a sacrifice. In the span of a few decades everything changed. Feelings became increasingly relevant with each new generation and for today’s youth mental health and how we feel is the most important aspect of existence.
We’re a bridge generation. Those of older generations will pound diet cokes and watch fox news while grousing about how stupid it is that everyone gets a trophy. They can afford to die without processing their feelings. The younger generations in their 20s and 30s grew up in a world where feelings mattered at least a little. The anxious ball of unfelt feelings they carry is often smaller if not completely absent. If you’re in your 40s you’re stuck in the middle. Too young to coast the rest of your life, too old to have grown up in a world that believed in feelings.
You owe it to yourself to traverse these worlds and connect with your feelings. It’s what you need and what the world needs.
It’s like today’s world is in color, and when we were kids it was black and white. But now, if we go this journey and begin feeling our feelings, not only does our world turn color but so does our memories.
As we remember our childhood in color, we begin to feel how we really felt during all those times. We have to grieve the losses and acknowledge our unexpressed dreams that it’s now too late to pursue. We have to meet aspects of our personality that we’ve suppressed our entire lives. We have to feel remorse for those we harmed and grieve when we were harmed.
Situations that were simple back in the black and white times are suddenly remembered in a whole new light. Moving through all this can take years and may require professional support.
People who can feel their feelings expect you to connect with and validate their feelings in order to have a meaningful relationship with them. They expect you to reciprocate and share your feelings so they can also support you, which of course requires that you can feel your feelings. This is authentic connection.
Today people want you to hear how they feel, resonate with their feelings in your body, and validate what they are going through. The challenge is that you’ve lived through similar situations in the past and you did not process the feelings, so you don’t know how to be with those feelings now.
When something hard happened when you were a kid you sucked it up and moved forward. That was the only option for you, and everyone around you. Today if your son comes to you with a similar situation and you try to engage with his feelings, support him through the grief and encourage him to cry, yell, shake or do whatever he needs to to process while you support him with validation and comfort, the young boy in you will rise up and yell “What?! This was an option?! Is an option?”
The decades old floodgates may begin to fail and you find yourself in the impossible situation of trying to be with and attune to and support your son’s feelings while at the same time trying to be with your inner child. And your inner child usually went through something much worse and had NO ONE. If you haven’t processed what happened to you your system will shut down into numbness, switch into intellectual minimizing or flip into rage rather than connect with what they are feeling.
This is why I think men in their 40s have it the hardest. The older generations are far enough along they can ignore this shift if they wish (although it’s never too late to make this journey) and the younger generations are getting emotional support from multiple directions and usually have gotten some from early childhood. We are the ones who have to go back and feel all of our feelings in order to remain relevant and connected the rest of our lives.
If you’re a man in your 40s, you were likely raised in a world where feelings didn’t exist and that completely changed in your lifetime.
Now being highly in touch with your own feelings and those of others is a pre-requisite to nearly all relationships, especially with your kids and romantic partner.
You were raised to suppress, disown and invalidate your feelings, to deny their existence. You pushed down painful events and were taught you didn’t need the connection and empathy part of you yearned for.
The path forward is through. You have to take a painful look at the inner walls that separate you from your feelings, and you have to let yourself feel everything that comes up. Once you have felt your feelings, you’ll be able to feel other’s feelings, and that will allow you to connect.
There’s pure gold here, the parts of you behind those walls carry your purest energy, your reckless love and carefree childlike spirit. It may be relationships with others that motivates you to start this work, but it will be the emerging relationships within yourself that will inspire you to finish it.
Do you want your father’s relationships? Me neither. Cross over into feelings land.