by Paul Elam

Created on: February 09, 2009

Why don't men express their feelings as easily as women? The short, accurate answer to this is that they don't need to.

This perfunctory answer cannot be fully understood unless we first acknowledge that there are fundamental differences in the socialization and psychology men and women. And in all reality the question posed lends itself to ignoring this from the beginning.

There has been a paradigm in the last twenty-five years or so that compares the emotional worlds of men and women as though the female was the standard of mental health and that men would benefit for adopting women's "skills" at identifying and verbalizing feelings.

While the chronic repression of emotions is not healthy in either gender, it is erroneous to conclude that men should process and express emotions in the same way women do. It should also be said that the fixation on and over-valuing of emotions can cause a great many problems for those so disposed. Emotions without the guiding, containing influence of intellect often results in neurosis.

Men are problem solvers by nature and by socialization. It is not that men ignore emotions as much as it is that once emotions have serve their real purpose, to identify a problem, then any further indulgence in them is a distraction from solving that problem. And the fact is that for most men, this works.

It isn't a deficiency or a product of machismo, it is a way of operating that uses emotions in the proper context for the individual.

As a mental health professional I spent years watching fads come and go in my line of work. The model of trying to squeeze men into the emotional mold of a woman was one of them. I watched, sometimes in horror, as clinicians who bought into this fad all but tried to force male clients to express themselves in the same way that women do. They often sent messages that their clients were not doing well because they weren't wired to immerse themselves in emotional expression to handle grief or other emotional events.

One way to see this with a little better understanding is that many men, when in grief over death, divorce or other loss, can get needed support for healing by spending ten hours in a bass boat, fishing with a close friend, without ten words passing between them the whole time.

For many men, this is much better than group hugs and boxes of Kleenex.

Should men be afforded the opportunity to express emotions, cry and unload what they feel without shame? Of course they should, and we would be well advised to think about this when raising our sons and daughters.

But should we compare men to women and view them as deficient because they supposedly don't measure up in the feelings department?

The answer is clearly no.

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