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Men and emotions - why are we so poor? by Ian Tomlinson
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Men and emotions - why are we so poor? |
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Health,Self Improvement
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when November comes around I know I am going to grow a moustache. Bye bye November, greetings Movember! Movember is the time when men everywhere get together and raise money for research into prostate cancer. The idea was created in Australia but has now gone all over the world. It has been running for seven years now. . Yep - it's global!. In the United Kingdom around ten percent of all deaths of men are a result of prostate cancer, that's one man every sixty minutes. Breathtaking figures. The sadness is worsened when one realises that it can be handled if one catches it rapidly. The guidance is to have your prostate checked every year if you are a man over fifty. If you have a history of cancer in your family then you should move this forward to your forties. So why don't men get checked out? I'm afraid compared to women us blokes are a bit emotionally stunted. We are how we are because of the way in which we were brought up. It's not our fault. We struggle with emotions because we were taught at an early age that men are strong, do not cry, and work through situations regardless of how we feel about things. Many of us grew up with emotionally remote fathers and had little modeling of doing anything other than "being strong". Women are complicitous in this message and often support it covertly. This also serves a purpose in work and when times get challenging. It can be a very useful behaviour when things are difficult and I am not for a minute recommending that we go around crying and acting out at the slightest provocation. It's about getting the balance right. So what does being emotionally limited cost us men? * We tend to get stuck when situations with high emotions come along. Many men either go to a numb place or we express ourselves using the emotion that we have learnt is safest i.e. anger. This can alienate us from our loved ones and get us into trouble with those around us. * We tend to ignore worries or niggles until they have built up, so if we are feeling pain or discomfort we don't go to the doctors and get it checked out, we store it up until we are in agony then find out we have left it too late and done ourselves serious damage. Prostate cancer is a great example of this. We ignore the early symptoms (difficulty passing urine, increased frequency of passing urine, pain when passing urine or maybe blood in the urine) and only get it checked out when we are in great pain and it's passed into our bones too, and then we die. * We avoid talking to others about how we feel lest they think we are weak. Our difficulties mount up and we believe that the only way out is to kill ourselves. Men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women in the UK (figures from the office for national statistics). How can we put the situation right? There is no doubt that working with a good counsellor is a great way of rebuilding the balance. Counsellors come in all shapes and sizes and you will find some male therapists that ooze emotions and some women therapists that are very "thinking" in the way they do things. Go meet a few and make your decision based on who you feel secure with. Ian Tomlinson runs Manchester Psychotherapy and provides counselling in Manchester for individuals and couples.
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