Why Men Process Emotions Differently Than Women

Why Men Process Emotions Differently Than Women

This morning I sat down to eat my oatmeal and I flipped on the TV and the first video in my feed was this thumbnail that had this attractive middle-aged woman sitting in a dark room with shadow across her face. And across the thumbnail it read, “Men feel everything.” And I think the title had something to do with men shutting down. Like men and their emotions and why they shut down. And I thought, “All right, this has got to be good. Let’s check it out.” Well, I didn’t get more than a couple minutes into this thing before it became apparent very quickly that this woman was taking whatever her interpretation of male experience was and pushing it through the strainer, the filter if you will, that is emotional female interpretation. like she was squeezing it through this idea or this version of female emotionality. And of course, it didn’t conform to what she believed should be true. And so she immediately came to the conclusion that the way men handle emotions is wrong, that it’s toxic, that it is uh society is, you know, doing this terrible thing to men by preventing them from feeling their emotions the right way. and that men are broken. Well, I’m not broken, lady. I am a man. The way we deal with emotions is different. And it’s intentional. And it’s always been that way. And quite frankly, you wouldn’t exist right now if we didn’t. This is life 2.0. Let’s talk about it. For those of you who are new to the channel, going to bring you up to speed really quick. In previous videos, we have covered the fact that men and women are different. News flash. I’m being a little sarcastic here, but only because it feels like if men don’t behave like women, then there’s something wrong with them. Evolutionarily we have evolved to be different from women. And it was necessary for our survival for men and women to have two different roles in our lives and two ways of managing our lives. Men needed to be able to compartmentalize emotions because if we are defending the tribe, for example, from another tribe and we’ve got to bash in somebody’s skull with a rock, well, we don’t need to have an emotional breakdown in that moment. We need to find another skull to crash. If we stop and have a reflective moment over the poor fellow that we just killed, well, we ourselves might be killed and that could result in the rest of the tribe being killed as well. So, compartmentalizing emotion is something that we do and it’s something that we’ve always done. It does not mean we’re broken. It just means that we’re men. Now, on the other hand, women needed to be emotional. They needed to be very in tune with emotions because they were vulnerable. So, they can pick up on emotions very quickly. They live in a world of emotion. Um, they interpret emotions. They see people and they understand where they’re coming from much better than we do. They’re in tune with babies, you know, and there’s a lot of emotion there. So, their world is all based in emotion. Our world is not. Now, that’s not to say that we don’t have emotions or that we don’t struggle sometimes in dealing with them. I’m not saying that at all. Um, I think the modern world obviously changes a lot of these dynamics, but just because we’re different doesn’t mean we’re broken. Being a man, I can only speak for other men. My personal experience with emotion is that probably the most difficult emotion for men to reconcile is shame. because shame compos composes so many um other events and emotions into one. Um shame I think more than anything captures the failure of one to live up to one’s purpose to achieve a an acceptable level of behavior or performance and it has caused pain or difficulty for people that we care about or people that we admire. So shame is the most difficult one but there’s lots and lots of emotions. I mean, obviously, I think that when you get a divorce, there’s an element of shame that goes with it. If you fail at work, there’s a little bit of shame with that. You get fired, that sort of thing. Um, you get rejected. H rejection sucks. You know, you definitely feel that one. It hits deep. Um, you know, you react in a way, do something that you’re not proud of. You know, shame definitely falls in there. So, I think that shame is a really great emotion for us to kind of focus in on here because I think for men, shame really is a uh sort of like the king of emotions. When dealing with shame or really any other emotion, there really two stages to this and each one has different steps. So, the first stage is what I like to call Stage one, that’s what I have in my notes. Stage one. Um, so the first part of it is your initial experience is one of confusion, overwhelm, disorientation, um, lack of understanding. You had this experience of sort of losing your footing, not knowing where you are in time and space briefly and how this event, whatever it may be, is going to impact you in the short term and in the long term. You’re trying to get your bearings. What just happened? Um, you feel and I’m talking about feelings here. I want to differentiate that from emotions to some degree because the feelings that you have in your body are a visceral hormonal um experience. Now, we very quickly and easily confuse emotions with feelings. And women love to conflate these two things together. So, they feel their little hearts beating fast and they think they’re, you know, they’re excited. But you can be excited and not have your heart beating fast. Do you know what I mean? Um, your heart beating fast could mean you’re scared. It could mean you’re running fast. It could mean you’re horny. It could mean all kinds of stuff. But just because your heart’s beating fast doesn’t mean that you’re um experiencing any particular emotion. That emptiness that you feel in your chest or that that tightness you feel in your throat, those are feelings that you have. There are the feelings that you’re experiencing as a result of an emotional um uh experience. And this emotional experience starts more often than not with a thought. Even though that thought might be subconscious, that thought might happen so quickly that it feels instantaneous with the feeling the the visceral the physical expression of whatever it may be. Because oftentimes when we have a uh an emotional, you know, problem, it has something to do with a subconscious or a um a uh think about childhood memory that’s been repressed that is just sort of sitting there like a ticking time bomb that suddenly gets triggered and then bam, all this stuff starts happening. this clenching of the chest or this tightness in the throat or this sweating or this sense of disorientation all hits you at one time and um then there’s this emotion that follows it and it will often times be sadness or um shame or or something along those lines where you feel um sort of unable to think anymore like in that moment it’s very hard for you to to think the sympathetic nervous system is turned on to some degree. So, you’re in this fight or flight, but there’s nowhere to run and there’s nowhere to hide. You’re just stuck in this moment and there’s nothing you can do and it can feel repressive in that moment. The next step in this thing is the reaction where you’re going to have some kind of a reaction to this experience. You’re going to start thinking briefly. It’s not going to be like you’re spending a lot of time thinking about this, but because your fight orflight mechanism has turned on, it’s not uncommon for guys to suddenly get really defensive and reactive to this emotional experience. And um it makes us want to lash out because this emotion is triggering our defense mechanisms and lashing out feels healthy and natural. But of course, in today’s world, you can’t do that. You can’t just punch someone who made you feel bad, especially if it’s a woman. That will that will not work out for you in the long run. So, you got to find another way to deal with it. Um, if you do react in a physical way, then obviously the shame hits you really, really hard because now not only you ashamed of whatever happened that caused this experience, but now you’re ashamed of the way you reacted to it. So, yeah, you can double down on the shame really, really fast in this situation. Um, before I wrote this video, I was going to call it why I lift. And that’s where I kind of get into stage two and how to manage emotions. The big difference between men and women when it comes to the way we manage emotions has a lot to do with our physicality, our our uh physiology, um our hormones. there’s so much more going on here. And so for her in this video that she made to simplify it the way she did felt very I don’t know disingenuous like she hadn’t really given a lot of thought. As a man it has been my experience that being physical allows me to work through emotions in a healthy way. So when I was having trouble in my marriage before I started walking the dogs, I would go into the gym and I would lift. I got into some really good shape during those years, man, that’s the one good thing about having marital strife is I lifted all the time. I got my body fat down real low. I mean, my bench press went through the roof. I was squatting near 400 lb. I was killing it in the gym. Killing it. But uh um it helped me take time away from the world and focus on one thing. And when you’re lifting, it does become kind of a meditative state because you must focus purely on the actions that you’re involved in which allows your mind to clear. So in a state of meditation, in transcendental meditation is all about trying to clear your mind of thought. And people struggle with this because they have that monkey mind going all the time. But when you’re doing something that requires an enormous amount of intensity, you focus your mind on that. Um, and even if it’s not a ton of intensity, that’s what works for me is the lifting. But even throwing a ball, I remember as a kid, um, I was a pitcher and if I was doing pitching practice, I was not thinking about any of my problems in the world. I was thinking about how to throw the ball better, how to throw it harder, how to work on my um how I could get a a slider, how I could work on my curve ball. All of those things absorbed my my thoughts. There was no time or space for anything else. It helped me clear my mind of all that emotional monkey mind stuff. Walking in the woods with the dogs. Oh, I see a deer crossing the stream. I hope Debboo doesn’t see him. But um walking the with the dogs had a very similar effect except I could just focus on nature and how beautiful it was out here and just breathing in the air and seeing like the deer and the stream and all this cool stuff. It allowed me to move away from the reality of my life in that moment and just appreciate the experience of being alive and having this experience here. So that’s the way I have gotten through it. It’s always involved some kind of physical experience and whether it be lifting or walking or throwing a ball or um running. You know, I used to do some running. Um, all of those things require enough of my mental capacity that they allow me to block out that um, emotion, whatever it may be. When I say block it out, I don’t mean like I’m not going to deal with it. I just mean to bring down the energy of it to a point where it’s no longer wrapped up in emotion. Because once you remove the emotion from the experience, you can evaluate it from a rational perspective. And that’s the other thing that women don’t get is that men think. We don’t feel. Now, in the moment, we feel in the moment when something happens, we feel. But we like to be able to think our way through problems. In other videos and in my book, I talk about the whole divorce recovery process about acceptance, appreciation, dealing with attachments, and um moving on, setting a vision for your life. This is kind of the same process you have to go through when dealing with strong emotions. You’ve got to come to terms with what’s happened here. You know, whatever it may be, you’ve got to get to a place where you can separate yourself from the experience and you’ve got to accept that this has happened. But it doesn’t mean this defines you. It just means this is something that has happened. You have to get into that level of all right, this is where I’m at. And then from there, what are you going to do? Um, appreciating that you’re still here to talk about it or that it didn’t get any worse than it did or that you still have options available to you or that you can at least take some time to work your way through it, you know, with the dogs walking or working out in the gym or whatever. But find something to appreciate so you can get your mind away from getting deeper and deeper into that hole of despair. And then taking a look at why is this causing you so much pain? What is your attachment to this experience? What’s happened here that’s really the touchstone of your pain? Is it someone’s opinion of you? Are you attached to that? And because that person’s opinion of you has changed and your um attachment to them having a feeling about you has changed has caused you this pain. You got to really work it through and figure out what is your emotional attachment that’s causing you to experience this pain. Because once you can get clear about what the emotional attachment is, you can, you know, dismantle it. Um and then moving on, you know, saying okay, what’s the next thing? What’s the vision for my life? I need to get back on track. You know, you fall off the horse, you just got to get up and get back on. And now, I know that a lot of women will say, well, it’s like, uh, walk it off. You know, you’re just telling them to walk it off. Yeah, to a certain extent, that’s basically it, because there really is no benefit to men. More often than not, I’m not gonna say not always, but men generally do not gravitate to sitting around and rehashing our feelings with other people. Partly because from that evolutionary state, we are told to compartmentalize that. And so, we put those feelings in a box and we don’t like to open them up, especially in front of other people. But that doesn’t mean we don’t deal with them ourselves. Because once we remove the intensity of the emotion through physical activity and through some kind of meditation, we’re able to revisit that experience and think it through rationally and see what the meaning of it is. What is the real meaning I’m giving this situation and why is it causing me so much pain? And that’s where the attachments come in. And then it’s just about deciding for yourself that there’s nothing you can do about something that’s happened in the past and um coming to the conclusion that you’re going to sort of uh rewrite the narrative of this in your mind so that you can see it as a stepping stone towards something better rather than seeing it as a wound that will never heal. It just becomes this event that is now a catapult that’s pushing you on to bigger and better things. And then you use that fuel to achieve whatever it is that you want. Life is hard. There is no two ways about it. There is nobody on this planet who is skating through without some kind of difficulty. Part of that is going to involve dealing with emotions. Emotions are our feedback system. They tell us what’s going on in our world. They are not what defines us. They are how we uh interpret what’s happening in our lives. When you feel a negative emotion, you can assume there’s something in your life that’s going on that probably is out of sorts. Turning these emotions into something more than that gives them a life they don’t deserve. When we go down this path, we create the monsters that we’re trying to avoid. Changing how you feel about something, about an event does not require an enormous amount of um regurgitation. Um divorce is a good one to use because that’s one that we deal with on a regular basis. What leads to a divorce frequently happens over years. It’s not something that happens over a weekend. It could happen over a weekend. Depends on what you did, but we I’m not going to go down that path. But usually over years, the relationship erodess a little at a time and more often than not, both people contributed to the divorce. Two people are in the marriage, two people in the divorce. It just happens. There are myriad reasons why divorces can happen. Chose the wrong girl, you know, wasn’t the right guy at the time. Um, wasn’t mature enough, you know, we struggled with money. There’s there just, you know, hundreds and hundreds of reasons. When the divorce happens, it hurts. There’s pain. There’s emotion that happens with that because you’ve invested time, energy, money, you know, dreams into this relationship and now it’s falling apart. And it is a hard thing for anyone to deal with. Male or female, doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Dealing with the initial emotion that is associated with the experience of separation and divorce is really different than unraveling what happened in that marriage. These are two separate events. Dealing with the emotion, the sadness that you feel, the visceral tightness in your chest, the tightness in your throat is something that um you can do in a relatively short period of time. Over the course of a couple of weeks, maybe even a month, you can really reduce the impact of that visceral experience of pain, of sadness, of loss. Um it will it will depreciate. It will go down over time. If you give yourself the opportunity through walking, lifting, throwing, exercise, being active, meditation, um if you give yourself that opportunity to clear your mind and allow that emotion to just fade, you can go back and open up that box of events that occurred and you can start to rationally sort through it and see what’s in there, what happened, and you can be honest with yourself and you can determine what was your role, what was her role. How do you feel about it? What do you want to do differently? What’s what’s the future hold for you? You know, you can start to pull it down and pull it apart and see what was actually going on. You don’t need um to regurgitate all of this stuff in front of another person and relive these experiences because as you go through the he said, she said, you know, events that occurred in the marriage that led to the failure, the eventual failure, well, eyewitness testimony is terrible, you know. I mean, we all see the world through our own lenses and your interpretation of what happened in hers are completely different. So, there’s no real objective truth. It’s all subjective. So, really, the only thing that you can do is bring that emotion down. Allow it to dissipate. Accept where you are. Accept what has happened. Accept that this is how life is in this moment. Appreciate what you have left. Appreciate that you’re still alive. that you’re healthy, that you have options available to you, that you have learned something from this experience, that you even appreciate the fact that it didn’t just continue. Cuz so many guys, so many people just end up in relationships that just won’t end. That you’re just in this, you know, terrible um trap with each other, this purgatory of a marriage that just won’t end. And that’s the worst kind of relationship. Take a look at your attachments. Why do you feel pain? The pain comes from something that you’re attached to that you think you need that is validating you in some way. And because that validation has been taken away, you feel pain. So look at it. Look at that external validation. That’s what’s causing you to pain. And then finally decide where you’re going from here. Create a vision for your life. This is the way that you solve emotional problems. This is the way you resolve your divorce. This is the way you get through the loss of a job. This is the way you get through um the loss of a loved one, you know, from someone passing away. The process is the same. As men, we process it differently. It’s not that we don’t process it. Seeing her thumbnail saying that men feel everything like it was some kind of a revelation, I thought, really? We’re human? Who who knew? Who knew? you know, um, you know, it’s just fascinating to me that these women just don’t get us at all. They they just don’t understand at all. And I guess we don’t understand them either, so it’s fair. Anyway, Doo wants to give me a hug, so I need to go. But, uh, that’s all I got for you today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. If you have, please like and subscribe. If you know someone who’s having some trouble with their emotions, pass this along. Maybe it’ll give them some insights as to how they can manage it. In the meantime, like and subscribe, stay healthy, and if you can, stay single.

🔥News Flash! Men and Women are DIFFERENT 🔥
In this video, we explore the concept that men process emotion differently, and it’s not toxic. John Griffin and other experts in personal development and relationship coaching, such as those found in Life 2.0, often discuss the importance of understanding these differences in order to improve mental health and relationships. Many men have reported that traditional therapy doesn’t work for them, which is why some are turning to alternative forms of therapy and self improvement, like those discussed by Healthy Gamer GG and Orion Taraban. Jordan Peterson has also spoken about the need for men to take care of their mental health and develop healthy habits. By examining the ways in which men process emotion, we can work to break down stigmas surrounding mens mental health and create a more supportive environment for those struggling with trauma and other issues. This video is part of a larger conversation about self help and masculine therapy, and how these approaches can be used to improve overall well-being.

Sign Up for Coaching Today https://johnsgriffin.com

Join this channel to get access to perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGeYqbpkEVeYu_sRAGWGwpQ/join

Harness Buddy dog harness as seen on Shelby and Jax: https://harnessbuddy.com/products/harnessbuddy?ref=qclugmwe

⚠️ Disclaimer: I do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred from you acting or not acting as a result of watching any of my publications. You acknowledge that you use the information I provide at your own risk. Do your research.

Copyright Notice: This video and my YouTube channel contain dialogue, music, and images that are the Intellectual Property of John Griffin, (Life 2.0) Health Coach & Personal Trainer. Please contact John Griffin if you wish to use this content in any way. Any unauthorized use of this content will be a violation of my copyright.

© John Griffin, Health Coach & Personal Trainer
www.johnsgriffin.com

00:00 “Men Feel Everything”
01:59 Im Not Broken, Im A Man
04:12 Shame
05:34 Processing Emotion For Men
08:43 Fight or Flight
10:33 The Physical Effect
14:01 This Does Not Define You
15:44 Walk It Off
17:34 Life Is Hard: Emotions Don’t Define Us

SIGN UP for Coaching Today https://johnsgriffin.com

Join this channel to get access to perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGeYqbpkEVeYu_sRAGWGwpQ/join

Harness Buddy dog harness as seen on Shelby and Jax: https://harnessbuddy.com/products/harnessbuddy?ref=qclugmwe

⚠️ Disclaimer: I do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred from you acting or not acting as a result of watching any of my publications. You acknowledge that you use the information I provide at your own risk. Do your research.

Copyright Notice: This video and my YouTube channel contain dialogue, music, and images that are the Intellectual Property of John Griffin, (Life 2.0) Health Coach & Personal Trainer. Please contact John Griffin if you wish to use this content in any way. Any unauthorized use of this content will be a violation of my copyright.

© John Griffin, Health Coach & Personal Trainer
www.johnsgriffin.com