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 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.