You Are Allowed To Feel

An Ode to the Men in my Family

Betty the Border Terrier showing us how cross she is to be in the car yet again!

I have written this for the men in my family and for anyone who recognises something in this article.

Nobody gave you permission. That is the problem. Not your dad, not your school, not the culture you grew up in. Nobody sat you down and said, "You are allowed to cry." You are allowed to be scared. You are allowed to fall apart a little, to be overwhelmed, to not know what to do next. Instead, most men received the opposite, a long, largely unspoken education in how not to feel. Or more precisely, how not to show emotion.

What gets taught, without anyone meaning to teach it

It rarely comes in the form of a direct instruction. It comes in smaller moments. The time a boy cries and someone tells him to toughen up. The time he shows fear, it is met with impatience. The time he is sad, and someone immediately tries to fix it or minimise it, because his sadness makes everyone else uncomfortable. The time anger is the only emotion that gets a real response, so he learns to route everything else through it.

Nobody means to teach a child that his feelings are a problem. But that is often what gets learned.

And so somewhere along the way, a structure gets built. A way of being in the world that keeps the uncomfortable things managed, contained, out of sight. Getting on with it. Staying busy. Becoming the person who is fine, who has it handled, who does not need much.

Cleocatra keeping an eye on me

The costs are high. Not just the feelings themselves, though those matter, but the parts of life that only become available when you can actually feel things. Genuine intimacy. Real friendship. The ability to be present with yourself and the people who love you. None of that is fully accessible when most of your emotional life is being managed rather than lived.

About crying

Crying is not a weakness. Crying is a physiological response to a significant event. It is the body doing something it is designed to do. When it gets suppressed, and many men have become expert at suppressing it, that is a biological process being overridden at a real cost. The jaw clenching, the throat closing, the eyes going still. That takes effort. It uses energy. And it teaches the nervous system that the feeling it was trying to process is something to fear.

Feelings that get suppressed do not disappear. They find other exits. Anger. Numbness. Drinking a bit too much. Working a bit too much. A low-level disconnection from everything that should matter. The cost of not crying is often paid in ways that are far more destructive than the tears would have been.

About anger

Anger is allowed too, but it helps to know whether it is honest anger or standing in for something else.

Many men are more comfortable with anger than with sadness or fear. That makes sense. Anger feels active. It does not carry the same cultural weight of weakness that tears do. So over time, some men learn to translate everything: grief, loneliness, shame, hurt, into anger, because that is the emotional expression that was tolerated as children.

If there is a tendency towards irritability or rage when life gets hard, it is worth asking what lies beneath it. Not to dismiss the anger. It may be completely legitimate, but to see whether something else has been living inside it.

Real anger, felt honestly, is not a problem. It is information. It says: something matters here. Something has gone wrong. That deserves to be heard.

About fear

Fear is one of the hardest things for many men to admit to. There is something particularly exposing about saying "I am scared." It goes against almost everything the culture says a man is supposed to be.

However, fear is rational. It is the mind identifying a threat, real or perceived. When it cannot be acknowledged, it tends to show up anyway, as control, as avoidance, as a continual need to stay one step ahead of everything just in case. Anxiety that never gets named. A watchfulness that never quite switches off.

Being afraid, of failing, of not being enough, of losing people, of not knowing what comes next, is not something to be ashamed of. It is part of being a human being who has something to lose.

About sadness

Sadness is perhaps the emotion men are given the least permission for. It sits in a cultural blind spot; it lacks the energy of anger or the motion of fear. It just hurts. And in a world that tends to reward men for fixing things and pushing through, sadness can feel like a malfunction. It is not.

Sadness is the appropriate response to loss. To disappointment. To things not going the way you had hoped. It is not a sign that something has gone wrong, it is a sign that someone is paying attention.

Grief that gets pushed down does not resolve. It accumulates. Many men reach middle age carrying decades of unfelt loss that was never properly processed because there was never a safe enough moment to process it. That weight shows up somewhere. It always does.

Betty self soothes when she's feeling lonely and we are away by climbing in one of our beds.

About being vulnerable

Vulnerability gets a bad name because it gets confused with collapse. It does not mean falling apart, or telling everyone everything, or losing your sense of yourself. It means being honest about your actual experience, including with people you trust, including in moments when you would rather not.

It means saying "I am not okay" when you are not okay. Asking for help when you need it. Letting someone else be present when things are hard, rather than disappearing until you have it sorted.

Most of the men I work with describe that, when they eventually get there, vulnerability did not make them weaker. It made everything more real. It let other people in. The armour that was supposed to protect them had mostly just been keeping the good stuff out.

You are allowed.

You are allowed to cry. You are allowed to be afraid, and to say so. You are allowed to be sad, to grieve, to not be okay for a while. You are allowed to be angry, honestly, cleanly, without it swallowing you. You are allowed to need things.

None of this makes you weak. It makes you honest. And a life lived honestly, with your actual emotional experience rather than a carefully managed version, is not a smaller life. It is a much bigger one.

The feelings are already there. They have been there all along. The only question is whether you are willing to stop spending so much energy keeping them at a distance.

If any of this has resonated and you would like a space to explore what is going on for you, I offer a free 20-minute initial session. You can find out more at counsellingwithlucy.co.uk