Men, We Need You to Be More Emotionally Present. Here’s How.

It’s not your fault you were raised not to be, but now it’s time to make the change.

Photo by Sir Manuel on Unsplash

This is a quick and dirty guide to becoming more emotionally present. If you’re not sure what to do with that term, for now just know that it means becoming more self-aware, more authentic, more expressive and more empathetic. Title aside, this is definitely not just for men — every single person on this planet could stand to get better at emotional presence, myself included — but for reasons too numerous to list here, men in particular are conditioned to be divorced from their emotional experience and that of others.

If you have any illusions that emotional absence and disconnection aren’t serious issues, you need to look again at the root causes of most personal and societal ills. Between suicides, overdoses and murders — all of which would be impossible without emotional disconnection — the epidemic of emotional disconnection killed half as many Americans as Covid-19 last year.

Before you go pinning any of that on specific mental illness diagnoses from the DSM-5, I invite you to name one mental illness that does not thrive in an experience of emotional disconnection, or that isn’t profoundly ameliorated with repeated experiences of deep emotional…