How We Feel and How We Father

Getting In Touch With Our Emotions

Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

The first time I saw my father cry, I was about 14. He was sobbing. Wailing, in fact.  

We were in Tarutung, a town in North Sumatra, Indonesia, making a pilgrimage to the family burial site. My grandparents, and the oldest of their fourteen children, were buried there. In between chest heaves, my father yelled at my Amangtua (meaning senior uncle in Batak, my father’s ethnic language). Amangtua was trying to console him, or maybe just calm him down. 

My father never taught me Batak, so a sonic wall of indecipherable meaning separated us. Despite not understanding what was happening, I recognized that I was witnessing an eruption. Something was seeing the light of day for the first time. Grief? Regret? Lament? I couldn’t know for sure. I wondered if even he knew. 

Amangtua was the most fluent in English out of all of my relatives, so when he approached my mom, my sister, and me, I was hoping for an explanation. Instead, he put his arm around us and started leading us away from the scene.

It’s alright. Nothing is wrong. Everything will fine.

That’s all we got. My dad never shared what happened that day. Just as telling, I still haven’t asked.

***

To me, that memory demonstrates how men often relate to their emotions. We ignore or repress them. Inevitably, they burst forth in destabilizing ways, desperate to get our attention. But even then, we walk away. Nothing is wrong. Everything will be fine.

Many cultures, including ours, condition this aversion to emotions in boys and men. Just take a look at how we speak about feelings. They are soft, as in “soft skills,” elusive and abstract capacities that take less priority than “hard skills.” We warn, “Don’t be soft.” The implication is that feelings, especially of the tender kind, render the feeler weak. In fact, “don’t be soft” is less a warning and more a reprimand meant to repel any scent of vulnerability. We are encouraged to keep emotions out of our decision-making, lest they unseat the primacy of our intellectual capacities and lead us astray into bad choices. 

Stop crying, we are told. Be a man, we are told.

(Interestingly, when it comes to the emotions connected to the primal drives of survival - hunger, lust, and aggression - we are given full latitude to feel those, even to claim them as our exclusive right. Hunting, fucking, and fighting are fair game.)

It’s no wonder then that for many of us the toolbox for navigating our emotional landscape is sparse. If the feeling is pleasant, we let it abide, and perhaps, chase after it. If the feeling frightens us, pries open something we’d rather not look at, or is in any other way challenging, we flee. Or we stuff it down below the surface, drowning it in the absence of our attention, believing, incorrectly, that from underground, it has lost its power to act upon us. 

There has been progress. Emotional fluency and capacity are becoming more common. For example, it is more acceptable for men to cry in public. Recently, an NBA player with the Orlando Magic sobbed on the bench when an injury threatened to sideline his season. His teammate consoled him, and media coverage was largely positive. Also, men in the United States are accessing therapy at higher rates compared to 20 years ago. And my boys have been exposed to a social emotional learning curriculum at school to help them develop language and tools around their feelings.

Sometimes, though, these “advances” are acted upon by the force of the cultural currents they swim in, warping them into devices that reproduce more of the emotional aversion men have practiced for years. Take mindfulness, for instance. We download meditation apps, and we sit. We pursue calm. Read: control. When life gets choppy, we take that as a sign that we need to double down on mindfulness. In this way, it becomes an instrument for chasing away the challenging and unpleasant. This takes an ancient technology that is about widening one’s window of tolerance and turns it, instead, into a form of palliative self-care. 

***   

These cultural values and habits make us strangers to ourselves, and this estrangement has significant consequences. 

1) We Get Sick 

Like food, emotions need to be metabolized. When they are not, they can literally harm our physical wellbeing. For example, a quick web search surfaced a 2010 study that showed suppressing anger had a negative effect on cardiovascular health. Or take Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal work, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. It examines how trauma can get stored in the body as physical symptoms.  

Research can ring hollow sometimes, though. So, put that aside and instead investigate your own personal experiences of strong emotional states: heartbreak, anger, or fear perhaps. You’ll notice that what you label fear or anger maps to a set of palpable physical sensations in your body. For me, as an example, anxiety generates a terribly uncomfortable “electric” feeling in my chest. Now imagine an emotion acting on your body over weeks or months because it has nowhere to go. As it ricochets inside your being, it meets itself again, feeds upon itself, and gains intensity. You can imagine the health implications.  

2) We Repeat Unhelpful Patterns

I had a curious habit. Whenever one of my boys would spill something and make a mess, I would yell at them and experience an anger disproportionate to the situation. What made me aware of this behavior was actually my wife asking why I cursed to myself whenever I spilled something. Why did I get so angry? 

Eventually, I remembered that my mom yelled at me as a kid when I made messes. I must have internalized that voice and its message: “Don’t make a mistake or you’ll make a mess that is, at the very least, a huge inconvenience and headache for others.” I was scolding myself, and now, my sons, out of reflex.

Left unexamined, feelings are invisible hands that shape your interactions. Knowing and understanding your baggage gives you a choice about what you want, or don’t want, to do.

3) We Lose Out on Valuable Information

Feelings are messengers. They signal when someone has trespassed a boundary. They point to opportunity or danger. They let us know when we are stuck or when there is pain that needs tending to. They stir us into realizing what nourishes us. They reveal what truly matters to us. 

But we lose out on all of this information if we aren’t practiced in knowing when a feeling arises and then spending time exploring what it might mean. I wonder how much we limit our potential contributions as men and fathers by lacking practice in noticing our emotions and learning from them. 

4) We Pass on What We Model

Ultimately, our most influential instruction is not what we say but what we do. Our kids witness our behavior, and with enough exposure, they internalize it. 

I see this starkly in one of my sons. He has become acutely anxious about being late to things. I suspect that’s because I feel turmoil if I worry I might be late to something. I didn’t mean to teach him this. In fact, I tried to have the opposite effect by reassuring him that, in most instances, the perceived lateness wouldn’t cause any harm or negative impact. But the words didn’t matter. He still discerns threat in the possibility of being late because he’s witnessed time and time again how frayed my nervous system gets when I’m behind schedule. There must be something there if dad is always freaking out about it. 

So how we relate to our own emotions has a big impact on how our children will relate to theirs, whether we intend it to or not.

***

All this to say, our level of emotional awareness and skill influences greatly how we feel and how we father. 

Having the capacity to explore our emotional terrain, to engage with all of our emotions, to feel them fully, even the unpleasant ones, and to allow them to facilitate discovery requires ability and practice. But where are we learning these skills? Who is mentoring us in the practice? Why is this not a standard part of our formal education system, or our implicit cultural transmissions, especially for our boys and men? These are systemic questions, but we don’t need to wait for systems to change for us to deepen our emotional capacity. 

I don’t remember my dad saying the words “I love you” until I was 21. Now, everytime we end a FaceTime, he lets me know. When we leave each other, we hug. Sometimes, he tells me how he’s feeling, not just how he’s doing. Like my dad, we can all grow emotionally as men and as fathers. 

In that spirit, I want to share three practices I have found helpful in cultivating emotional fluency and capability.

Therapy

With breaks here and there, I’ve been in therapy since 2001. Now, the skeptical among you might view this as definitive proof that therapy doesn’t work! How are you not fixed yet? If you view therapy as a transactional modality through which to fix a specific problem, then perhaps, I can understand that perspective.  

However, I don’t view my therapist as a mechanic. Something hasn’t fallen apart that needs mending. Rather, I see therapy as an ongoing practice of reflective self-awareness and discovery that is stewarded by someone trained in the care of my mind. As such it doesn’t need to have an expiration date. After all, I evolve, life throws different scenarios and burdens my way, and so at any point in time, I’m wrestling with new problems and challenges.

Specifically, therapy has helped me to realize that my feelings are driving my behavior and coping mechanisms as much as, if not often more than, my thoughts. To complicate the matter, those feelings are sometimes not obvious or they are buried outright. Often, they’ve been around for a very long time. My therapist’s training, her experience with hundreds of patients, and her compassionate, nonjudgmental listening empowers her to guide me through a process that begins unlocking those closets.¹

Meditation

Meditation has taught me that thoughts and feelings are like weather. If I wait long enough and I pay attention, they change. Or dissipate. And a new thought or feeling comes in, oftentimes through no volition of my own and with no discernible rhyme or reason. Understanding this has helped me in a few ways. 

First, by giving me distance from my thoughts and feelings, I gain perspective and can cultivate choice instead of reactivity. I don’t have to yell if I feel anger arise. I can choose a different response. When I do, the grip of habit energy loosens just a bit. 

Second, when I’m in the midst of a feeling I detest, like anxiety, I can remind myself that, at some point, it will dissolve away. It isn’t permanent. Remembering this strengthens my capacity to bear it. And, when I don’t feel like I have to run away, I can get curious and investigate, what is this feeling all about? 

Finally, calling back to how stuck feelings can impact physical health, meditation has helped me become aware of how feelings map inside my body. I’ve become attuned to the sensations they create and where those live. This awareness has not just helped me to investigate those feelings with more precision. I’ve learned that I can generate feelings in my body as an intentional act of love and healing. 

For example, I practice loving-kindness meditation. As I learned it, the first step is to call to mind a memory when I’ve felt the feeling of loving-kindness abide in my body. Almost always, it’s a memory involving one of my sons, perhaps a time of play and laughter or a recent unsolicited hug. Calling that memory to mind, being in that moment again, recreates the same physical sensations I experienced at the time of the event. Doing this practice and nurturing those sensations often leaves me feeling lighter, kinder, and more compassionate, enabling me to express these in my interactions with the world. ²

“Feel It To Heal It”

I’ll share a story to illustrate this practice.  

After a morning filled with miscues and mishaps, including losing my wedding ring at a local park, I felt sadness well up. It wasn’t the emotion I would have anticipated given how the morning had gone. Anger, frustration, and annoyance were the usual suspects I would have expected to encounter. And yet, there it was, intense and gripping sadness. My throat felt crowded with sobs not yet given voice. 

My knee-jerk reaction was to swallow it down and march on with my day. After all, I was on daddy-duty, taking care of my two sons while they each had a friend over for a playdate. At the same time, I remembered an aphorism from a meditation course I was taking: Feel it to heal it. I decided to practice. 

First, I gave myself some space. I set the boys and their friends up with popsicles and sent them out into the warm East Bay weather to play for a few minutes. Then, I retreated to my bedroom, closed the door, and gave myself permission to feel what I was feeling.

I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath in, and then exhaled slowly, releasing any tension I was holding in my stomach and shoulders. 

Then, tears poured out. I brought awareness to the accompanying pressure in my chest, the sensation of obstruction in my throat, like a backed-up pipe, the corners of my mouth trembling and downturned, tingling in my temples, and moisture in my eyes. 

With curiosity, I asked: What is this feeling about? I wasn’t trying to reason or rationalize as much as I was trying to discover. I realized I wasn’t just feeling sadness. I was feeling disappointment about a host of life circumstances (details of which are beyond the scope of this essay.) Losing my ring, the last in a string of things gone wrong, was just the drop that took my system from full to overflowing. Backlogged emotions brimmed to the surface and cascaded over. 

Along with the physical sensations, I also noticed stories percolating in my mind. The inner voice was vicious: My life is all wrong. Everything is wrong. I am failing. I am a failure. I noted the thoughts and then consciously let them go, one slow exhale after another.  

After a few minutes, my crying ebbed until it stopped. The volume of the sensations in my chest and throat turned way down. The stories that felt so true were now quiet. I wiped my eyes and went back to be with the boys.

I have found this practice to be a reliable avenue to catharsis and insight. I have also found it hard to do. I make the excuse that I don’t have time or space to make room for what’s bubbling to the surface. And that is usually cover for the real reason: I’m too afraid to take a closer look. But when I decide to turn towards it, the relief I feel, in my body, is a balm.

***

These are just three examples of practices for emotional exploration. There are so many more. For some of you, that may be prayer. I’ve found the Jesuit prayer, The Examen, to be a beautiful lens on emotional exploration. For others, that may be journaling, or calling a friend who’s adept at listening without trying to fix. Maybe it’s a men’s group, reading or writing poetry, or yoga.  

In the comments, I’d love to start a dialogue with you. I invite you to share your response to any or all of the following: 

• What was modeled for you regarding emotions?

• What’s a practice that has helped you become more intimate with how you feel and what that means for you, for letting emotions flow through you and out of you?

• What’s one practice you want to try out for the next week?

I’m hoping we can hear each others’ experiences, generate a list of practices we might all benefit from, and name a concrete practice we intend to try in our fathering and our broader lives. 

Let’s practice. Together. 

1. Two important notes about therapy. First, chemistry between therapist and patient matters. A lot. So, it may take time to find a good match for you. Second, it can be helpful to seek someone who understands or shares your set of identities. A Latina friend recently found herself frustrated and misunderstood when her white therapist repeatedly told her that she needed to deprioritize care for her aging mother to attend to what was most important, her toddler. That advice ignored the reality that, for my friend, caring for her aging mother was an equally important responsibility given how her culture understands the concept of family.

2. If you are curious about meditation, it really helps to have a teacher guide your practice. While apps are wonderful for accessibility, immediacy, and for developing a habit, they are prone to simplification and, as mentioned above, a misapplication of the modality. An experienced teacher can really shape the process for you.