Our emotional model is a feminine model
For thousands of years we all lived in tribes where the family and community were always with us. Both men and women raised the children. Then 10,000 years ago we left the tribe for the farm with the men more often in the fields than home. Then 200 years ago, men left the farm for the factory; 30 years ago men and then women left the factories for the office, which now has become the ever-present smart phone.
At each move, men were less available to model and teach their children. Boys lost their masculine role model. Women did the best job they could of stepping in to fill the gap.
Over the centuries, with women being the default teachers of emotions, we moved our emotional needle towards the feminine. There’s no conspiracy here, just necessity.
We gradually accepted a feminized version of emotionality as the norm. It became the water we all swim in every day.
A new model of emotions for men
There are more similarities between men’s and women’s emotions than differences. And with the help of both men and women, we are making distinctions in what it means to be a man with emotional intelligence.
Yet the distinctions that do exist when not expressed can sabotage a man and his relationships. For years in our groups we have seen men struggle in relationships only to learn that the emotions they had were right on, it was just how they were expressing them that was getting them in trouble. Anger is a valid emotion; putting a fist through a wall to express that emotion is not acceptable.
When a man finds his natural expression for his emotions, he and his partner relax. The struggle shifts to attraction. He feels fully, and expresses fully, while his partner feels fully heard.
When a man receives the models and direction he never had, he is able to express his emotions as if he’s just being himself. Emotional expression is taken out of the realm of being a “woman’s thing” into being “a human thing.”