How can I solve your problems?
It’s a cliché that men want to solve problems while women want to talk about their feelings. But this division exists, like many gendered dichotomies, as much within individuals as between them.
There is a convenient distinction to be made between thoughts and feelings. Some psychotherapies depend upon it for their legitimacy. One approach, very popular among psychologists, posits that feelings are the spurious by-products of thoughts, which in turn allows that unwanted or unwelcome feelings can be changed by wilfully marshalling thoughts against them. An understandable conclusion, given how driven people are by their feelings and how afraid they can yet be of some of them.
Thoughts and feelings have their own sets of rules of engagement. Feelings are direct. They are not arrived at by deliberation the way thoughts, especially conclusions, can be. Deliberation is the proper context for mental conclusions, and scholarship is the pinnacle of the laborious path of stepwise reasoning from many pieces of information to an incontrovertible conclusion. Feelings just know the answer first, and they don’t know why.
Desire is notoriously free of cooperation with reason
Problematic situations ensue when either feeling or thought tries to overrun the other. Either can appear wrong when measured against the values of the other: The thinking person describes the emotional one as irrational. Which is ridiculous. To say that feelings are in some way ‘wrong’ for not being rational enough is like saying a work of art is bad for not being rational enough. It’s a misappropriation of a quality (rationality) into a criterion, as we always find in racism: A quality of one race is misidentified as a deficit in another race’s qualities. Emotions have their own rules of operation, which are not to be mistaken as a failure of the rational rules of operation.
Freud (1900) posited the majority of psychic activity to be beyond conscious awareness much less control. This bulk of our mental life was also organised by a set of principles that were available for examination but unrelated to the principles of rational (conscious) thought. The classical Freudian corpus may be considered a plan for how to follow and learn these irrational organising principles that both govern our mental life and exert hidden influence over our behaviour. Your capacity for rational thought will be useless in helping you interpret your dreams.
So why do ‘men1’ want to solve ‘women’s’ problems, when women want only to express their feelings? And why ever should the woman actively refuse the man’s offer to solve the problem that appears to generate the unpleasant feeling? It’s not about the nail. To understand this clichéd stalemate, another property of emotional life needs to be included in the discussion.
Feelings belong squarely in the category of the receptive psychical functions. They are the Yin to the Yang of mental life and cognition. The receptive faculty of emotional experience also includes both intuition (above) and desire. (Desire is notoriously free of cooperation with reason; and while reasonable people will caution you against yielding to desire, they cannot account for the wisdom of desire while they continue to overvalue reason.) The receptive faculties sense immediately when situations or people are inimical, and most children are bred to override any wisdom of their spontaneous emotional reactions and assessments, in favour of reasonable, prescribed behaviour, otherwise known as manners.
“Go and give your Uncle Lester a hug, Sweetie.”
“No. He feels yucky.”
“Don’t be silly. Uncle Lester is Daddy’s brother; he’s nice.”
When men respond to women’s emotional upset by rushing to solve an allegedly causal problem, they are not only preferring sensible rational thought over emotional turmoil. They’re not just being practical. Often, there is an additional element, that while they are discrediting the emotionality itself, they are actually scared of it.
We are all scared of some feelings. And although the mind and heart would ideally compliment each other, there are fears located in the mind, embedded in the codes of rationality, that are programmed fundamentally against emotion per se. This speaks to a game plan against giving power, legitimacy, or freedom to emotional life. And once an inner tyranny of mind over heart has been enshrined, any ‘second chance’ given to emotional expression is usually rigged, because the emotional expression by that point will not reveal the feelings in their original identify, but rather it will reveal the feelings in the form they have had to occupy in response to the experience of being delegitimised. This often serves only to reconfirm the decision to lock them back up.
There is a simple test you can apply in your own inner life: Try to catch yourself skipping past any emotions you have decided you don’t like, and see what you feel even in that very first moment of trying catch it. (You can go back later to talk to the emotion about why you have decided that it is unacceptable.) Noticing something as endemic as avoiding feelings takes diligent and patient application over a long period of time (cf. psychotherapy). It is more ingrained that any of us might expect, and it can even be found in culturally sanctioned substance use. If you are grumpy and angry before your morning coffee, maybe you are unconsciously using coffee to quell an anger you don’t legitimise.
The path to accepting and truly integrating emotional life is long, slow, and requires much patience. When emotions have been locked in the cellar for years, they won’t be ready to step out into the sunlight with joy. They will also emerge in a form that will evidence their suppression, not in a way that will reveal their fundamental nature. They will need a shower and a warm meal. I have suggested that humanity’s three century-long love affair with rationality has had a deeply negative impact on our emotional health. But it’s worth remembering that the effect of these cultural values are present but unacknowledged in childhood. For many of my patients, change was waiting on the other side of opening and sifting through an emotional box that was closed in childhood. Often, the childhood anxieties were no longer fearful to the adult. The avoided experiences were locked in a box with a sticker over the top saying, “Scary. Danger. Do not open,” written in crayon with a child’s hand. Even that scared child who wrote the note needs regathering into the benevolent understanding of the adult self.
I’m going to use men as representatives of the preference for reason and women as representatives for feelings. It’s easier to read. Please remember that both of these aspects exist in both (actual) men and women.