Men: The Hidden Cost Of Not Feeling Your Emotions

Why is it so important to feel your emotions? This talk explores how emotional awareness transforms every area of life—from relationships and love to confidence, peace, and genuine happiness. You'll discover why disconnecting from painful emotions also limits your ability to feel love, joy, closeness, and aliveness. You'll learn how emotional healing helps you receive love more deeply, create stronger relationships, reduce stress and anxiety, build lasting self-confidence, and experience greater fulfillment. Ideal for analytical men who struggle to access their feelings and want to reconnect with themselves without losing their strength or clarity.

Transcript

Is it really hard for you to feel emotions? As a wife or girlfriend ever told you that you should feel your emotions. You need to feel your feelings But yet even if you try you can't The journey to be able to feel your emotions can be quite difficult. And in order for you to want to go on that journey, You need to understand why it's important to feel your emotions. Because the goal of feeling your emotions isn't so that you feel the pain of grief, Sadness, Hurt, Loneliness, And all these things. The goal of feeling your emotions is to increase your capacity to feel love and closeness and aliveness and joy and many other positive experiences. And the point of this video is to break down all the benefits from feeling your emotions, All the reasons why it's important to be able to feel your emotions. I'm Noah Elkrief and I've been coaching smart analytical men for over 15 years. And without further ado, Here are the reasons. You So the first five reasons are all about relationships and love. Number one is, Even though you love your wife or girlfriend, It's very, Very difficult to feel that love. It's something totally different to have love and to feel love. You might know you love her, But can you look at her and just feel that love, Feel that warmth towards her? Our capacity to feel love is directly proportional to how much protection we have over our heart. So every time that we're hurt by a woman that we love, We close off a little bit to protect ourselves from getting hurt in the future. So if she's mean to you or harsh to you and you felt hurt, Rejected, Abandoned in some way, A part of you closes because you don't want to feel hurt again. And the more your heart is open, The more it hurts when you get rejected or abandoned. And the way to open our heart back up, You know, To feel more and more love for our wife or girlfriend is to feel the pain. To feel and process and unravel the hurt, The grief, The abandonment, The rejection from this partner and previous partners and maybe even from our childhood. That as long as we can't feel our emotions, We can't unravel them, Which means there's going to be layers on top of our heart our heart from pain, Which means it's really hard to feel love even though we really do love the woman in front of us. The second reason is We can't let in love Yeah, So your wife or girlfriend might love you more than anyone else in the world But can you feel it? Can you let it in? When she says I love you Where does that land? Does that land intellectually? Does it feel good for you saying yay? I'm great. She loves me or can you feel that warmth that like oh Yeah, That feels so nice that she loves me and our capacity to to receive love, It's the same issue as our capacity to give love. That in the past, If we receive love, If a woman told us she loves us, Whether that's this partner, A previous partner, Or even our mother, If she tells us she loves us and then she hurts us, Then we learn that receiving love afterwards comes pain and danger, Right? Emotional pain is kind of danger. And so we close off because we don't want to feel that hurt. We don't want to feel that abandonment. We don't want to feel that rejection. And of course we don't want to feel it. It's painful, But it's important to understand that When you really feel a painful emotion, It should be gone within seconds or minutes. All right, Unless it's been built up for so long. When I feel an emotion, It doesn't take hours. You know, Sometimes I feel like men, You know, From movies or from watching their wife or girlfriend think to be emotional means you're endlessly expressing emotion. But when I feel and process an emotion, It's usually 30 seconds, Something like that. Of course, When it's something bigger, It might take a few minutes or if it's something from our childhood, It could even take Hours to get really to the roots of it perhaps When we don't allow ourselves to feel the hurt, The rejection, The pain of when someone who said they love us or showed us love was then mean to us, It blocks our capacity to receive love. And receiving love from our wife or girlfriend is a big part of what makes it enjoyable to be in a loving relationship. So the third reason is a little bit more nuanced or complicated and that is When you can't meet your own emotions, Then you can't really meet your wife's emotions And if you can't meet her in her emotions, She's gonna feel alone And when she feels alone, She's gonna get more distant Feel more unhappy with you be more likely to be resentful or make you feel like you're not enough Yeah, So i'm gonna break that down a little bit If she says I feel so sad If we don't know how to be with sadness within ourself And when she says she feels so sad, We don't know what to do. So we might just want to get away from her. Oh, She's sad, Like she's being dramatic or like if we have a resistance to that feeling within ourself, We're going to have a resistance to that feeling in her. And if she feels us wanting to get away from her, She's going to feel rejected. Or we might view sadness is just like a bad emotion, A negative emotion and try to fix it and solve it. But if we're listening to her sadness, Trying to fix it or solve it, She's going to feel rejected or alone. Or if we're just saying the right words, Like, I hear you. Yeah, You know, I understand. But we don't understand her feelings emotionally. She's going to feel not understood, Even if we say all the right words. And this is what, You know, It's the slow eroding of the warmth and affection in a relationship comes when the woman doesn't feel heard, Listened to, Understood and feels alone, Even when we're right next to her. And no matter how much you intellectually try to understand, There's no substitute for like there's no substitute for understanding and feeling your own emotions you just you can't intellectually get it enough to be what she wants from you unless you really feel and understand and can be with your own emotions and that's super super important and then the relationship she'll keep her heart open and there can be more warmth and affection the relationship for longer term Number four is. . . You can't receive warmth and love when you can't feel your emotional struggle. And this is a different point than number two. And this is about allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and emotionally struggling. So if you're stressed or unhappy or you feel lonely or you feel sad or you feel grief, It's an opportunity to say to your wife like to share that feeling And she can say i'm here for you. Let me hold you. I'm, So sorry. What can I do for you? And and that's just a beautiful experience to feel received Loved in our pain to be taken care of and supported in it It's it's just very nourishing and nurturing to receive that but if we can't allow ourselves to feel our emotional pain, Our emotional vulnerability, And if we can't reveal it and express it, Then we're blocking ourselves from receiving love, Care and support. And then it just puts a lot of pressure on us that we have to do everything ourselves I can do it alone and I might feel strong I can do it alone, But we can never like relax And like settle down and feel at ease It is so nice and enjoyable to receive love care and support and it doesn't make us weak It makes us human and it's a very Yeah, A nourishing part of being in a relationship if we can't access our feelings. We can't have it The fifth reason is about emotional closeness. And this one is also a little tricky when you've never had it or it's been rare that you have it in your life. And so when we're in connection with another human being, There are different types of connection. And let's say one way to connect is through information. All right, So we're both talking about the weather. So I'm here and you're there, But we're talking about this data point here, The weather or politics. So we're not meeting human to human. We're meeting content to content about some separate third party information. Right. And that can be intellectually stimulating. It can be funny. It can be engaging in some way, But a layer deeper is sharing about our feelings. So if I share, I feel so sad about that, Or I feel so happy about that, Or I'm feeling so scared about this, Or I felt so touched by seeing that. Then. . . She can meet us in that or we can meet her in that and then it's just there's a deeper sense of intimacy There's a deeper sense of closeness in that that feels more rewarding. It feels more fulfilling of course, There's a place for intellectual conversation and you know all the interest and challenge of that but with our wife and girlfriend that's never going to be enough to feel fully I don't know, Rewarding. There's more aliveness and more closeness and more. I don't know joy and spark in when we start sharing our experience in the moment not to mention that we can't keep a relationship healthy unless we're sharing impact like sharing when we're hurt or rejected by something they did because otherwise everything gets buried and built up over time and then we just get more and more distant and less close So yeah, So this point is all about. . . I mean, I could call it emotional closeness, But maybe you don't care about emotional closeness. What we care about is that our relationship doesn't feel empty, Blah, Monotonous, Dull, Like, You know, It's just intellectual. We're just meeting on logistics and content rather than it feeling alive and we're meeting each other and it's growing together. So that's the fifth reason. The sixth reason is all about peace and relaxation. Nobody wants to be stressed, To live with anxiety, To feel pressure and overwhelm all the time. But how do we unravel it? How do we get rid of it? It might seem that if you're connected to your emotions, You'll have more fear, More anxiety, But it's actually the opposite. The vast majority of people who live with stress and anxiety are people who don't have access to most of their emotions. For the people who have a hard time feeling their emotions, The only emotions that they can access are stress and anger, Fight or flight. That there's so much unsafety that we can only feel frustration, Anger, Annoyance, Or anxiety, Stress, And pressure. But to feel anxiety, Stress, And pressure is like to feel tense, To feel locked up. But paradoxically or seemingly counterintuitively, The way to release it. The way to get to relaxation is to feel it deeper. So rather than, I'm anxious, I'm stressed. It's more like, I feel fear, Ah, Ah, Ah. To feel fear and let it move through is completely different than to be stuck in stress. So when we're able to really feel our fear to allow our fear to be Alive to be expressed to be felt It just moves through us. It's kind of like, You know, If we have a river and there's a current So if something happens that activates our fear it activates this strong current and if we put up a dam Then there's always this tension right on the dam because there's a current that wants to move through and we're stopping it And maybe we're stopping because it's too much like were too afraid to feel the fear. You know, Usually this starts in our childhood because the fear we feel when our mom doesn't come when we're crying or the fear we feel when our dad yells at us is too intense, So we suppress the fear. But if we don't allow ourselves to feel the fear, Express it, Then it won't release and then we're just stuck with tension and stress all the time. So, Put differently, If we can't feel the emotion of fear, We can't release the fear. And if we can't release fear, We're going to live life with stress and anxiety, Which means we can't ever feel true relaxation, Ease, And peace. The seventh reason is all about genuine confidence. Put simply, You cannot have a really deep, Solid, Genuine confidence unless you can feel your emotions. It's just not possible. So throughout our life, All of us fail sometimes. We fail whether it's an actual failure on exam or we just fail to reach our own expectations or our parents' expectations. And every time we fail, It can cause a little feeling of, I'm not good enough. Or I'm a piece of shit if we get rejected by a girl, Or I'm worthless, Or I'm ugly, Or I'm stupid, Or I'm boring, Or whatever. And every little one of those is a pain stuck somewhere in our bodies, Somewhere in our psyche. When we never deal with them. We spend our whole life with this pressure to prove I'm great, Which is really just a pressure to avoid feeling that I'm worthless, Inadequate, A fraud, Or something like that. Yeah, So if I failed some exam as a child or got a C and my dad got upset with me and then I feel I'm stupid, I failed, I'm no good, And it was so painful, Then all the pressure that I feel in my adult life to do well, To not fail, Is just to avoid the pain I felt as a child. And so I might succeed in everything I do and tell myself I'm great. I can prove it. You know, I got that promotion. I got into that job. I made that amount of money. I got all those clients. I can have all this proof and none of it will ever be enough to relax. No matter how many wins you get, How long does the high last for that I'm great before you have to prove it again? Because when we tell ourselves, I'm great, And we use intellectual evidence, That doesn't ever penetrate to the level of the body, To the level of feeling. No amount of proving you're great externally will remove all the layers of inadequacy, Unworthiness, I'm stupid, I'm no good, That were created throughout our life. So in order to feel genuinely confident and genuinely at ease within ourselves that I am enough, It doesn't come from more success in telling myself I'm great. It comes from being able to feel and resolve all the unworthiness. Yeah i know from my own journey i told myself i'm great in 50 different ways or 100 different ways and had all the proof But shockingly, Underneath it, I had so many layers of unworthiness and inadequacy that I had to feel. But every time I was able to feel and resolve a layer of unworthiness, What's left is more solidness. What's left is more comfort because I no longer have pressure to try to make sure I don't feel this layer or piece of unworthiness. So to feel genuinely confident, We have to feel our unworthiness, Inadequacy are not enoughness. And the eighth and final reason is about the capacity to feel positive feelings So when we're disconnected from painful emotions like sadness grief hurt unworthiness and all of this We're not just shutting down The road to negative emotions. We're shutting down the road to emotions Emotions live in our body. They live in our heart our solar plexus our belly, They live below our head. And when we numb or shut down or close off um to to negative emotions to painful feelings We're simultaneously shutting down, Desensitizing, Cutting ourselves off from positive feelings. We're making it harder to feel joy, A sense of awe. Sense of wonder to feel touched by seeing something to feel moved to feel laughter Yeah for the simple things to touch us to to feel joy goodness in in the wide variety of experiences You know that feeling when you looking at this beautiful view like the grand canyon you get the sense of awe And so basically, The more disconnected we are from our emotions, Negative emotions and positive, The more extreme the thing needs to be in front of us in order to have a positive experience, In order to really have a positive feeling. So the sense of all we see at the Grand Canyon Can I have it when I watch my child, You know, Trying to tie their shoes? Or when I'm watching the leaf blow in the wind? Or when I watch my wife laugh? Can I feel and be touched? Can I really feel the moment in all the normal, Seemingly mundane moments? And so this is really about. You may not realize it because it's been so normal throughout your life, It's all you may know, But numbing ourself to negative emotion is really numbing ourself to emotion. And if we're numbing ourselves to negative emotion, We're numbing ourselves to positive emotion. And that means we're really missing out on a wide range of experiences in life. And I'm going to throw a little bonus in here that I didn't have planned that just came to me. And that is. . . It's actually a beautiful feeling to feel emotional pain. And that might be you know, If you never had the experience, It will be hard to grasp but when I feel grief, Like if if somebody that I know got hurt or died or Or maybe I don't know. Maybe my wife just like failed to get what she wanted in some way when I feel sadness or grief It feels so warm and loving yes, It's painful But there's a warmth and a love in it that I love even for the sake of itself that I wouldn't shut that off even if shutting that off didn't shut down positive emotions and had no negative repercussions It just feels warm and loving. It feels like care, To be touched. We call it emotional pain. There's love in the pain that's also beautiful. Of course, Not when it, Like, Takes you over and it's so intense grief you can't live, But, You know, In the right dosage. So the reason I share all of this is not to make you feel bad that you're disconnected from your emotions or it's hard for you to feel emotions, But to incentivize you to go on the journey to feel emotions. I had no access to my emotions until my mid-twenties. None. And it was hard work to be able to feel emotions. But it was worth it. It was really really worth it to me My life now is so much like it's just a much more wide variety of experience like the range of Emotional experiences that I have the aliveness the nourishment the enoughness that I feel in life Is so beyond worth the pain I had to feel to get here So I hope this creates some sort of Incentive or pushing you that you know what I want to go on that journey and maybe it's hard and maybe I fail a hundred times Before I succeed on the hundred and first time or maybe every little thing you try helps like one percent But feeling more one percent helps your life permanently like every little bit of work you do To be able to access and feel your emotions is having a cumulative impact on your life You know, It's not like going dancing or eating a great meal and you have a positive emotion for a moment. When you have increasing your capacity to feel, You're changing your life cumulatively, Permanently. So I'm here to tell you it's possible I'm a living, Breathing example of it. I can feel everything. I'm super, Super sensitive in a good way. And before I had no access to feel almost anything.