22/10/2026
TOO MUCH, OR NOT ENOUGH?
How patriarchy has taught us to turn against our humanity.
PART 3 OF 6 | WHEN HIS EMOTIONS BECOME A THREAT TO HIS IDENTITY
What happens to a boy who learns that being emotional makes him weak?
Who is told to toughen up, stop crying, get over it or be a man?
Who discovers that anger may be tolerated, but sadness, fear, tenderness and vulnerability are not?
He learns.
He learns to push things down.
To keep moving.
To solve the problem rather than sit with the feeling.
To turn pain into work, humour, silence, exercise, alcohol or withdrawal.
Not every man does this. And none of these behaviours tells us, on its own, what a man is feeling. But across my work with thousands of men and women, I have repeatedly encountered the impact of messages that teach men their emotions are something to control, conceal or fix.
For a significant period of my practice, I worked predominantly with men including returning veterans, frontline workers, miners, electricians, farmers and men from many other walks of life.
Different lives. Different histories. Different circumstances.
Yet one message surfaced again and again:
Their emotions were the problem.
They had learnt to manage them, suppress them, work through them or keep them to themselves.
But I have never met a man who was without emotion.
I have sat with men who cried.
Men who struggled to find words for what they felt.
Men who could explain what had happened to them but found it much harder to stay connected to what it had cost them.
Men who had spent years being the person everyone else relied on, without knowing how to ask for support themselves.
These men were not weak.
They were human beings navigating what they had learnt about vulnerability, safety and belonging.
When strength becomes armour
Strength can be valuable. Discipline, responsibility and the capacity to keep going can help people survive extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
But when strength becomes the only acceptable way to be, it can become a form of armour.
A man may learn to recognise anger more readily than grief.
He may withdraw when he feels ashamed.
He may become defensive when he feels inadequate.
He may struggle to ask for comfort because needing someone feels like failing.
Sometimes the emotion is there, but the language for it is not.
Sometimes the person can identify the feeling but has no experience of expressing it safely.
And sometimes silence is not a lack of care. It is a learned response to something that once felt too difficult, too exposing or too risky to share.
Understanding this does not mean excusing hurtful behaviour. Men remain responsible for how they treat others. Emotional pain does not justify intimidation, coercion or violence.
But accountability and emotional understanding do not have to compete.
We can hold men responsible for their behaviour while also making room for the experiences and social expectations that shape how they relate to themselves and others.
The cost of hiding
When people repeatedly disconnect from what they feel, it can become harder to recognise what they need, communicate distress, seek support or remain emotionally present in relationships.
Partners may experience the silence as rejection.
Men may experience their partners’ requests for connection as criticism or evidence that they are failing.
One person reaches for conversation.
The other retreats to escape the discomfort.
Both may feel alone even while desperately wanting to be understood.
This is where we need to look beyond the surface behaviour and become curious about the relational pattern.
What is happening between them?
What does each person experience in that moment?
What has each learnt about emotion, conflict and closeness?
And what would make a different response possible?
Men do not need less emotion. They need more room to be human.
We need to expand our understanding of strength.
Strength can mean staying present when a conversation is uncomfortable.
It can mean acknowledging hurt without turning it into blame.
It can mean saying, “I don’t know what I’m feeling yet, but I want to understand.”
It can mean asking for help before everything becomes unbearable.
Emotional literacy is not about making every man more expressive in the same way. It is about allowing people to develop a relationship with their emotions that supports their wellbeing, their agency and their relationships.
Men do not need to become someone else.
They need permission, opportunity and support to discover who they are beyond the rules they were taught to follow.
Because the opposite of emotional suppression is not losing control. It is developing the capacity to feel, understand and respond.
And perhaps one of the most damaging things patriarchy has taught us is that vulnerability takes something away from a man when, in reality, being able to acknowledge our humanity can bring us closer to ourselves and the people we love.
PART 3 OF 6 |When his emotions become a threat to his identity
Next: Part 4 |The emotional double bind: when neither of us feels safe to be ourselves.
Danielle Reeve
Clinical Family & Relationship Therapist | Systemic Psychotherapist | Integrative Yoga Teacher
