Connor Beaton (speaker) argues that when men try to cultivate emotional emptiness they often experience numbness, which he reframes as a sign of emotional fullness and overwhelm rather than absence. He explains that numbness indicates an overtaxed nervous system caused by unprocessed difficult emotions (grief, sadness, anger) and prompts listeners to identify one ‘tough’ emotion they hold.
One of the things that I talk about with men at weekends and in men's work is about practicing, emptying ourselves out.
Cultivating this sort of emptiness within us. The misconception for most men is that when they go to do that, they're like, oh, I feel empty all the time. And it's like, well, do you actually feel empty or do you feel numb? And then we dig in a little bit more, and there's actually a numbness. So numbness is a sign of fullness. Okay? Numbness equals fullness. It's not that there's nothing there. It's that there's too much there, right? It's that your nervous system, your mind, your thoughts, your emotional body, they are overwhelmed. They are overtaxed. And it is because we have not allowed ourselves permission to be with some of the hard, confrontational emotions that might be living within us. So we actually have to allow ourselves and give ourselves permission to be with some of those challenging emotions. And that might mean grief, that might mean sadness, that might mean tuning into our anger, which might feel like a threat. Whatever the case may be, it is about tuning into those tough emotions. So I want you to think about one emotion that you categorize as a tough emotion. What's a tough emotion for you?
How to Raise Strong, Unshakable Boys in Today's Culture, with Dr. Shefali Tsabary
