I’m trans and, until I started HRT, had very little access to my emotions. I would desperately want to cry, and just would be unable. Or I would know I was supposed to be having some kind of emotional reaction to something, and just…wouldn’t.
Very very soon after getting my hormones straightened out, I discovered that I was having emotions in sympathy with characters on tv or in movies. If I was sad I could actually cry for a bit and process the emotion rather than having to channel it into anger or physicality. It was like living in color instead of black and white, this whole arena of human experience I’d read about but hadn’t ever really felt.
I’ve heard the same from trans guys as well; they didn’t ever feel like their emotions made sense until they got on T.
My now-ex reacted to this, first with concern, then with contempt.
As a cis male, I do have trouble accessing emotions sometimes.
However movies and music can give me overwhelming emotions. I start crying from the smallest wholesome moments in anime and movies.
There are times in life I wish I could, so I sometimes use music as a tool to trigger the response in myself just so I can get the emotions out and processed.
I’m a cis guy and I also struggle with expressing my emotions, but I think that it’s more of a cultural thing. Like I’m not really “allowed” to cry from watching a TV show and it’s difficult to shake it off even when I’m alone.
I had that too. When you’re a cis male adult you’ve had decades of social conditioning telling you that’s not allowed. I’m gay but being born in Spain I was brought up in a traditional macho culture. I’d “pass” except for those with the most finely tuned gaydar, not because I tried hiding it by the time I realised but because I was conditioned to fit in the straight cis male behaviour box.
It took me a few years of unlearning trying to shake it off myself and what helped most, a loving partner who is in tune with his emotions. I have gotten immensely better at understanding and expressing my emotions, verbally or otherwise, and also doing that without channelling them into “proxy” emotions that are acceptable for macho expectations and culture.
For my it wasn’t about expressing them, it was about feeling them at all. Only the very very strongest ones could even crack through.
Of course there was also the fact that my father threatened to beat me for crying “if I didn’t have a reason”, so there are obviously confounding factors, but interventions like therapy, meditation, changing my name, presenting female all the time, etc didn’t have anywhere near as much effect on my access to emotions as a couple of weeks on HRT.
They were all helpful in different ways (sometimes enormously so), but it felt like there was an impedance mismatch between my conscious mind and the rest of my body, and the HRT fixed it.
I’m trans and, until I started HRT, had very little access to my emotions. I would desperately want to cry, and just would be unable. Or I would know I was supposed to be having some kind of emotional reaction to something, and just…wouldn’t.
Very very soon after getting my hormones straightened out, I discovered that I was having emotions in sympathy with characters on tv or in movies. If I was sad I could actually cry for a bit and process the emotion rather than having to channel it into anger or physicality. It was like living in color instead of black and white, this whole arena of human experience I’d read about but hadn’t ever really felt.
I’ve heard the same from trans guys as well; they didn’t ever feel like their emotions made sense until they got on T.
My now-ex reacted to this, first with concern, then with contempt.
This is very interesting to me.
As a cis male, I do have trouble accessing emotions sometimes.
However movies and music can give me overwhelming emotions. I start crying from the smallest wholesome moments in anime and movies.
There are times in life I wish I could, so I sometimes use music as a tool to trigger the response in myself just so I can get the emotions out and processed.
Art for catharsis. 👍🏻
I’m a cis guy and I also struggle with expressing my emotions, but I think that it’s more of a cultural thing. Like I’m not really “allowed” to cry from watching a TV show and it’s difficult to shake it off even when I’m alone.
I had that too. When you’re a cis male adult you’ve had decades of social conditioning telling you that’s not allowed. I’m gay but being born in Spain I was brought up in a traditional macho culture. I’d “pass” except for those with the most finely tuned gaydar, not because I tried hiding it by the time I realised but because I was conditioned to fit in the straight cis male behaviour box.
It took me a few years of unlearning trying to shake it off myself and what helped most, a loving partner who is in tune with his emotions. I have gotten immensely better at understanding and expressing my emotions, verbally or otherwise, and also doing that without channelling them into “proxy” emotions that are acceptable for macho expectations and culture.
For my it wasn’t about expressing them, it was about feeling them at all. Only the very very strongest ones could even crack through.
Of course there was also the fact that my father threatened to beat me for crying “if I didn’t have a reason”, so there are obviously confounding factors, but interventions like therapy, meditation, changing my name, presenting female all the time, etc didn’t have anywhere near as much effect on my access to emotions as a couple of weeks on HRT.
They were all helpful in different ways (sometimes enormously so), but it felt like there was an impedance mismatch between my conscious mind and the rest of my body, and the HRT fixed it.
There’s a great book called The Tao of Fully Feeling that helped me a ton with this.