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One of the main reasons that people seek help with their communication skills is to improve their relationships.

These might be personal romantic relationships or work relationships or family relationships.

But especially for men, and especially in the context of romantic relationships, one of the main problems is being emotionally available.

Emotional Availability and Masculinity

A few weeks ago, I was reading Reddit and there was a long and interesting discussion about emotional availability. In the context of that discussion, there were many interesting comments and lots of sad stories about men who said that their marriages ended or that their relationships ended because the person they were with said that they were not emotionally available.

What is emotional availability? I don't think there's a strict or perfect definition. To me, it means the ability and the willingness to engage in a conversation where emotions are the topic of conversation. The ability to recognize emotions in other people and in yourself, the ability to have a dialogue about the meaning and the origin of emotions, the ability to soothe and comfort other people about their difficult emotions – I think all of these come under the general umbrella of emotional availability. Availability really just implies this willingness or openness to engage in an interpersonal relationship about feelings.

I know about 80% of the viewers on YouTube are men, and I know that most of the viewers of my videos are men. I think this advice about emotional availability is especially relevant for men. Because of the way gender roles are constructed, women and girls are sort of given more permission to talk about their emotions, to be in touch with their emotions, and to be emotional. Our notions of masculinity suggests for men that we shouldn't show emotions, that maybe we shouldn't even feel emotions, and then we shouldn't talk about emotions because it's not manly. It's not masculine and therefore we should avoid it.

As a result, a lot of men, myself included at times in my life and probably still, are a little bit stilted and disabled in their ability to be in touch with their own emotions. It can be difficult for men to talk to other people about their own emotions and to understand emotions. They are sometimes unwilling to even engage in a conversation about emotions because it might imply that they're not masculine.

I think these ideas about what it means to be a man and about masculinity are damaging to men, both because it cuts them off from their own emotional, inner life and because it makes them emotionally unavailable in interpersonal relationships.

As I saw on Reddit, and as I think many of you could probably relate to, this can cost us our families. It can cost us our relationships because whoever we're into men or women, the people that were romantically connected to are not going to want to be in relationships with us if we can't ever process or deal with or talk about our emotions, if we can’t be emotionally available.

10 Steps to Increase Your Emotional Availability

We are all emotional creatures. We are all endowed with the ability to feel the full range of emotions, to experience the full range of emotions, and to perceive the full range of emotions in other people. Now, of course, there's a bell curve in our ability to do all these things. We're not all perfectly equally able to do all these. But generally speaking, as normal human beings, we have the ability to feel and experience and perceive emotions in ourselves and other people. There's no reason we ought to deny that aspect of our own humanity.

So I tried to come up with some advice about being emotionally available. As with most things I talk about on this blog and on the YouTube channel, I am not holding out myself as a paragon of emotional availability. I think I'm more emotionally available than I was when I was younger, but I'm sure I have a long way to go in being more emotionally available. These are lessons that I myself learned in my own struggle to become more emotionally available to the people in my life that I care about, both at home, at work and in my personal relationships. Ultimately, I came up with 10 steps and I want to tell you about each of them in turn.

 

1. Allow emotions to be a topic of conversation and ask about them.

This is a really simple step. To be emotionally available means that we have to give permission for our partners and the people in our lives to talk about emotions. We can't shut down as soon as the topic of emotion comes up. We can't refuse to participate in conversations about emotions. We have to acknowledge that emotions are a valid topic of conversation, especially so in a close interpersonal relationship. So, step number one: allow emotions to be a topic of conversation, even ask about them.

 

2. Expand your vocabulary of emotion words.

I'll link to a previous video where I talked about the need to increase our interpersonal cognitive complexity, which is the number of dimensions that we have in our head for representing the social world and other people. In that video, I said that we need more words in our head to describe other people.

In this particular case, I think we need to learn more emotion words. I'll link to a website which gives you long lists of emotion words. You have to begin to learn these words and try to then to connect these words to your own inner states and to the way other people might be feeling. So step number two is to increase the size of your vocabulary of emotion words.

I think too many men just only have a very, very small vocabulary of emotion words; rage, joy, horniness, or words like that. They don't have many other ways of talking about their emotions and we need a much more fine grain and elaborate vocabulary for thinking and talking about emotions.

 

3. Learn to focus on your own bodily sensations and name the emotion that goes along with them.

Emotions really originate as bodily sensations and we have to be able to sort of look inward, identify a feeling in some part of our body. It might be a heaviness in our chest or a feeling in the pit of our stomach or a tingling in our fingers. Whatever it is, we have to be able to look inward and then be able to identify bodily sensations as emotions. This is becoming alert and aware and alive to our own internal, emotional experience. There's a great book called Focusing that you can check out by clicking the link on our Recommended Reading page.

 

4. Acknowledge to yourself and to others that you are a person with an inner emotional life.

This may seem silly and kind of obvious, but I think us as men are trained to act like we don't have any feelings, that nothing bothers us, and that we just can have this air of John Wayne or Gary Cooper, calm with no emotion. There's nothing happening beneath the surface.

If we act like that for long enough, there's sort of is nothing going on under the surface, or at least we're totally detached from it and we're not able to even understand or sense our own emotions. So you have to acknowledge you are a person with a rich inner life, including a rich, inner emotional life.

 

5. Show vulnerability.

I think vulnerability is one of the keys to emotional availability. Emotional availability and vulnerability kind of go hand in hand. If you're not comfortable ever showing vulnerability, it's going to be hard for you to be emotionally available because to talk about and acknowledge our emotions and other people's emotions requires a little bit of vulnerability.

To talk about our own emotions requires getting in touch with emotions, which may be difficult or embarrassing or shameful in some way to us, so that requires vulnerability. To connect with someone else's emotions means we also have to connect with those emotions in ourselves, which can be painful and difficult and requires vulnerability. I think there's no one better on vulnerability than Brene Brown and I'll link to some of her books here if you want to learn more about practicing vulnerability.

 

6. Get psychotherapy.

I've had a lot of psychotherapy in my life. I've benefited from it tremendously. Now, maybe some of you don't have emotional problems, life hasn't been hard for you and you don't need any help. I need a lot of help and I've benefited from a lot of help. I think psychotherapy is an amazing technology that sort of been developed in the 20th century. If you can afford it, see if you can get yourself some psychotherapy, especially if these issues around emotional vulnerability have caused damage to your relationships. It's quite likely you could benefit tremendously from psychotherapy.

 

7. Learn empathic responding.

I've done a whole bunch of videos and I'll link to the playlist on empathy, where I've tried to teach you how to do active listening and how to use empathic responding. There's a bunch of relatively simple, easily learnable techniques that will allow you to respond to other people's emotional displays and emotional expressions. yYou need to learn empathy in order to be emotionally available. So when other people express their emotions to you, you can respond in a way that's comforting, welcoming, warm, and so on.

 

8. Avoid problem solving.

So the classic thing that men are accused of doing in conversations about emotions with women is that we try to solve the problem rather than processing the emotion. There is a classic video on YouTube called, “It's Not About The Nail”. It's just so funny. It has millions of views so you probably have seen it, but if you haven't, it's well worth looking at.

The main lesson of that video is when people start to talk to you about their feelings you should try to refrain, at least initially, from solving their problems. Instead, listen to them talking about their feelings and participate in that dialogue. There may be time for problem solving later.

 

9. Address addictions that cut you off from your own emotional experience.

Addiction can be to drugs, to alcohol, to sex, to video games, to shopping, to gambling, to anything. The problem is that often, an addiction substitutes for some sort of authentic emotional experience and numbs us to our own emotional experience. One of the main kind of benefits of intoxicating substances is that they anesthetize us a little bit. They numb us to our own inner emotional state. Some of us have had very traumatic, difficult experiences in our lives and the emotions that go along with them. We thought were too difficult to process or actually experience firsthand, and so we became addicted to substances so that we could avoid feeling those feelings.

There's no way to really become genuinely, emotionally available while you're still active in some addiction because the addiction numbs you out and keeps you disconnected from your own emotions. It also keeps you hampered and hindered from connecting to any other person's emotional experience.

10. Be physically healthy to the best of your ability.

What this means really is addressing the pillars of physical and emotional health, which is sleep, nutrition, and exercise. So the last two steps mean try to deal with your addiction and then get enough sleep, get proper nutrition, get some exercise.

To be emotionally available, you have to be reasonably healthy. This means of sound mind, without an addiction, and of sound body, getting enough sleep nutrition and good exercise. To be present and ready to engage at this emotional level demands a lot of us and therefore requires that we be fit of sound, mind, and a sound body. So get good sleep, nutrition, and exercise.

 

Summary

There you have it. These are the 10 steps that you can take to improve your emotional availability and thereby hopefully improve the quality of your personal, romantic, family, and work relationships.

These are not easy steps to take. I realize that. This is a lifetime of work for most of us, especially for us men, and so I'm not minimizing the difficulty of it. But the best time to have started this is 10 years ago. The second best time to start this is today. So good luck on your journey to emotional availability.

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Thanks so much. I'm grateful for your time.