Analytical Men: This Is Why You Feel Emotionally Numb

If you're highly analytical but struggle to know what you're feeling, you're not alone. In this talk, you'll discover 11 common reasons why analytical men become disconnected from their emotions and why this pattern is not a fixed personality trait. You'll explore how childhood experiences, family dynamics, emotional conditioning, survival strategies, and identity can gradually block access to your emotional world. Understanding these deeper causes can help you reconnect with your feelings, build deeper relationships, and experience greater fulfillment and inner peace.

Transcript

If you're an analytical man, You're probably great at solving problems and understanding things intellectually. But if someone asks you, What are you feeling right now? Your mind might go blank. You may be able to feel stress, Anxiety, Anger, Frustration, Or excitement, But there's a whole range of emotions that are probably much harder to access. And over time, This can create problems in your relationship, Make it difficult to access certain types of love and connection, And it can leave your life feeling more empty or dull than you know it could. And I'm here to tell you that this isn't a personality trait. It's not something stuck in stone. There's always a logical reason for why someone disconnects from emotions. And if you can understand whatever reason that is, Then you can begin to unravel it. I'm Noah Elkrief, And I've been coaching smart analytical men for over 15 years. And in this video, I'm going to explain 11 reasons why analytical men become disconnected from their emotions. The first reason is a lack of emotional attunement in the first few years of your life. So basically, When we're an infant or a young toddler, Every time that we share an emotion, We're basically asking, Is this okay? Am I allowed to feel this? Will this get me connection or distance, Coldness, Disconnection? So if we share fear, For example, Do they show understanding? Love? Do they hold us? Or do our parents like try to fix it or get away from it? Does our fear make them uncomfortable or make them connect to love? If we share sadness, If we share some sort of pain, Does it make them feel frustrated? Does it make them want to get away? Does it make them want to fix us immediately and make it better? Does it make them judge us? Or does it make them softer? And in our first few years of life Every tiny little response when we get from that we get from our parents Is educating us of what is safe and what is not safe And if sharing emotion doesn't get us love and connection doesn't get us feeling understood seen accepted We're going to block access to those emotions and block expressing them Yeah, It might be hard for you to remember, But you might be able to sense whether that was true. The second reason is about modeling our parents. So for many of us, We had a father who was analytical and disconnected from emotion. And, You know, When we're in our first few years of life, We're trying to learn how to survive, Right, Biologically. So everything we watch our parents do, We're learning how how to live how to survive how to belong in the family in order to stay safe And if our father doesn't show us emotion or he only shows fear or he only shows frustration or stress It's teaching us. That's how to survive. That's how to live. That's how to belong in the family And we pick this all up obviously subconsciously You know, It's not like strategically consciously, But it's strategically in order to survive in the This world our father's showing us how to live and how to belong right the third reason is Overwhelming emotion so when we're young Anytime we feel in emotion. It is so much more intense than as an adult right, So if we're in our room and we hear a loud sound or There's a weird smell or it's cold and we're scared and we cried, That fear is really intense for our little body. Yeah, Or if we're if our parents don't come when we cry the sadness the pain the danger. It's very strong And if we don't have someone there to hold us in it, We can't contain our emotions by ourselves We can't hold our emotions by ourselves and this goes You know even until teenage years that anytime we have a strong emotion whether that's loneliness or grief or sadness or fear Or even anger it's too much for our little bodies And we need to be held in it that if we're scared we need mommy or daddy to come and hold us in our fear And then we're sort of co-regulating. It's like their nervous system, Their touch, Their presence is helping that emotion to calm down, Helping for that emotion to be contained. But when it's too much for us, We sort of disconnect from the pathway to emotion because it's too intense. We can't handle it. It's too dangerous to be so overtaken by emotion. It's too much pain to be overtaken by emotion. And it might seem really foreign to you that you could have had overwhelming emotion as a child if you can barely access emotion now. But in the first few years of life, Until five or six, It might be hard for you to remember, But it might have happened. A strong sadness, A strong fear, A strong loneliness that was just too much. Number four is nobody was curious about your emotions. Your parents might have cared about how you're doing, Whether you're safe, Whether you're physically healthy and comfortable, But were they curious about how you feel? Because if we don't feel that our emotions are wanted, That our parents want to really know how we feel emotionally, That they really care how we feel, Then we're not gonna share it, We're not gonna express our feelings. And the less we express our feelings, The more that pathway gets sort of blocked and hard to access. You know, We need our parents to really pull out our emotions. If they don't attune to us, If there's different reasons why we blocked access to our emotions, Then if they're not curious, Then our emotions won't get pulled out. So even if they ask sometimes, Like, How was your day? Or how are you feeling? We can intuitively know as a child, Do they really care? Do they really have patience to hear? Will they really give me love in my feelings? So if they're not curious, That's another reason why we lose access to our feelings. And number five is. . . Basically to get our father's love we're willing to do anything and If our father didn't show love for our emotions, Then we're going to not express it, Right? We're going to stop expressing emotions that make us lose his love and so this might be overt how he Showed us that he doesn't love our emotions He might say, You know, Like you're being weak if you show emotion you're being illogical you're being dramatic. Or he might have shown it more subtly That you just kind of feel a little disdain or a little distance or he doesn't know how to handle us when we show emotion You know, He retracts or feels like a failure or or feels like he doesn't know what he's doing And if us showing and sharing emotion Makes father's love go a little cold or distant or turned off. Of course. We're not going to show him emotion of course, We're not going to express emotion and the The less we express the motion, The more hard it is to access it. In addition, If we access emotion, It becomes a threat we might express it, So therefore we're incentivized to even block access to it. It might also be that your father or your mother Emphasized being logical being smart being rational being mature being strong You know being even keel And therefore we learn that emotion isn't welcome emotion won't get me love that that's not the right way To handle emotion and be in connection yeah the sixth reason is that Analytical thinking or thinking in general is a risk management tool we think To protect ourselves we think to avoid risk And so the more risk there is The more we're gonna think yeah, If you're on a on a on a beach with nobody around You can go into the water and relax about your stuff not getting stolen But if you see a couple shady characters, Then all of a sudden you have to think what do I need to do? Where do I need to be to keep me safe to keep my stuff safe and that's smart You know our mind The body is set up in an intelligent way that we have our mind as a tool to protect us. And so if we're overthinking and analytically thinking all the time, It's because a part of us doesn't feel safe. And you might think I had a great safe environment in my childhood. And it might be true that they weren't physically abusive. You had plenty of food and all this type of thing. But there are subtler ways we might not have felt emotionally safe. And that could be our parents yelled at us or insulted us, Which is an overt way, But maybe normalized so you don't think it's so bad. But we still want to avoid pain. Right. So. If our parents yelling at us or insulting us creates pain, Then we're going to use our mind to think all the time, How do I avoid pain? How can I be who they want me to be? And it might be a little bit more covert or subtle that we got more love and approval. We got hugs, We got kisses, We got attention when we performed well, When we acted how they wanted us to. So we got conditional approval, Conditional love and care. And therefore when we lost it when they didn't give us approval when they didn't give us praise It might not be that they're actively being mean or rejecting us But we feel more isolated more disconnected less loved and that can make us feel lonely and making make us feel less safe because As a child, We're so dependent on our parents the less present the less caring the less attuned the less affectionate They are the more we feel alone unsafe Unsure about ourselves that pain, We might be constantly analyzing thinking in order to be how they want us to be. And that takes us out of our emotion, Out of emotional expression, Out of what's just our natural flow of how we want to be, Whether we want to sing and dance or whatever we want to do, Because now we have to think in order to be the right way, Act the right way to get love. And that puts us in our head, Which disconnects us from our body, And eventually we lose more and more access to the pathway back down to emotion. The next thing, Number seven, Is ancestral trauma. And so basically, Whatever our parents, Grandparents, And further back went through impacts us. So if our father was in poverty, For example, Then When you're in poverty, There's no space for emotion survival is primary. There's there's very little space if any at all for emotion And so he can pass that down to us Same if our parents or grandparents or great-grandparents if they went through war if they were in the holocaust if they were in communism, Like if they were in an environment that was dangerous in one way or another if emotion wasn't allowed or too much survival was needed or if there's war where you have to you know, Uh like there's just no space for emotion that can be passed down to us making it difficult for us to access emotion right and There's so much I could say about this one category, I could make a whole video on it, Or a whole book on it. So one is to one thing to understand about ancestral trauma is that it's It impacts us and our our ancestors went through a lot, But another way to understand it is as men evolutionarily You know, We had to be the protectors. We had to go off to hunt and in order to hunt We have to be focused. There's no space for emotion in order. We had to protect our family and go to war. We have to kill There's no space for emotion if we're connected to our heart and our feelings. We can't kill we can't hunt end. So it's harder for men to access emotion because of these ancestral purposes to disconnect from emotion, Whereas it helps more evolutionarily for women to be connected to their emotions so they are attuned to the child's emotional needs and can maintain the family. Right? The next thing, Number eight, Is about things that happened in the womb while you were a fetus in your mother's belly. So if your mother was super stressed, That can have an impact. If she was disconnected from her emotions, If she was disconnected from you, All of that can have an impact. It's subtle, It's seemingly vague, But if you resonate, If you feel like or sense or ask your mother or know about things she went through while she was pregnant with you, There is a pathway to heal that. I've had to do plenty of that type of work on myself. So that's another thing. I'm not going to go into so much because it's hard to explain and for you to verify in your own direct experience without doing deeper work. Number nine, Which is a little bit further along, Is watching a mother or father, Usually the mother, In emotional chaos and pain. So if you watch your mom feeling emotion and You know as a child or even in you know 5 to 10 10 to 15 years old at any point in your childhood or teen years If you watch her feeling emotion and it's chaotic, It's painful. She's dramatic. It's too intense It's scary intense. She's aggressive Or you watch your father in any of this we learn emotion isn't safe. Like emotion is bad. I hate emotion I don't want that stuff like that drama that chaos that intensity Boom. To be in resistance to emotion. We learn that I don't want that. And maybe we also watched our father reject or judge our mother for having emotion, Drama, Intensity, Chaos, Pain. And so we learn emotion is pain or emotion is intensity and I don't want it. So then that validates and perpetuates and strengthens our resistance to and disconnection to emotion. Number 10 is emotions weren't welcome anywhere. So in school, If you had an emotion, You weren't allowed to share it. You know, I remember there was like a saying, You get what you get and you don't get upset. If we're crying, We're a nuisance. We're disturbing the class. If we're afraid, Come on, Calm down. It's not such a big deal. In any type of sports atmosphere or group of guys, Emotions just aren't welcome at all. So in school, With our friends, Of course in any sporting environment, At work, Emotions aren't welcome anywhere, Which perpetuates and strengthens the disconnection. It's good to keep a lid on it. Good to block access to emotions because that keeps me in belonging. Getting approval from others. Because if we have emotions, If we access them, Then we have to keep them down to stay safe. But if we can't even access them, It's much safer, Much less likely to be judged, Ridiculed, Or outcast. And the last thing, Number 11, Is is around the identity that we formed. So for many of us analytical men, For a large part of our life, We identify as being smart, Logical, Rational, Not dramatic, Emotional, Over-the-top, Sensitive. And the more our identity forms around being logical and rational and analytical, The more emotion is a threat to our identity. And so that makes it harder to access and express emotions.