Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We want to give comfort to the one who is in distress.
But we've trained our boys. That's shameful. And so they're running away so that you don't have the opportunity to give that 6, 7, 8 year old the comfort that they really need.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: I'm Diana Earley, and I've spent most of my life learning firsthand what privilege actually costs.
The legacy control, the family expectations, the guilt of feeling trapped in a life everyone thinks you should be grateful for. If you've ever wondered why having everything still feels like something's missing, you're in the right place.
Welcome to Pressures of Privilege.
Today's guest has spent over 30 years working with kids, parents, and couples. As a psychologist, Dr. Gloria van der Horst has a simple but surprising idea. Baby boys are actually born with a wider range of feelings than baby girls. But somewhere along the way, most boys learn to shrink that range down. They learn to hide. Dr. Vanderhorst calls this the emotional desert. And she spent her career helping parents understand how it happens and how to stop it before it sets in for good.
She's currently finishing a new book for fathers on how to raise sons who are both strong and whole. Today we're talking about where that shrinking starts, what it costs boys later in life, and what a father can do differently, starting now. Please welcome Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. I'm delighted to have a conversation with you. This is such an important topic, so I'm thrilled that you've invited me to share this with your audience.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: You've said boys are actually born with a wider range of emotions than girls.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: That's right. It's surprising, isn't it? But that's what the literature tells us. That's what the research shows. And if you think about is adaptive. All right, Everything that we are as human beings has a purpose to it. And so you have to ask yourself, all right, well, what's the purpose of that? Right? Why would boys. Why would males need a broader range of emotional expression?
And in my mind, I can trace that back to the caveman, right? Because we've had this brain.
And so if you are living in a cave and the woman is taking care of children, you want your man to have extreme courage.
You don't want him to be shy or backward, right? You don't want him to be afraid. You want him to pick up his spear and. And head out of that cave to kill something to keep everybody alive. So he has to have kind of a stronger sense of courage and purpose in order to overcome that fear, which would be normal and natural. You know, I don't want to go out and face something 10, 12 times my size.
But he did, and that's survival for the entire species. The same thing is true in modern days, right? We put boots on the ground and historically that has been all male.
Right. They've had to do exactly the same thing. They've had to leave the comfort of the camp and pick up their spears, pick up their weapons and head out to fight for their country.
Now you have to have some force that enables you to do that. To run up the beach, to run across the field.
You have to tap into some very deep sense of courage.
So it's normal, it's natural to think that.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Yep.
All right.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Little boys are born with that broader range of emotion so that they can do these things that we assign them to do to protect the rest of us.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: So what do you mean by range?
[00:04:47] Speaker A: So I mean, they have to be able to tap into emotion that goes beyond what I have to tap into. In terms of courage, in terms of anger.
All right. In terms of force.
And it is true, all right. Just in terms of interactions. I mean, think of it. Our jails are full of men because of that acting out force, because of that anger force.
If women had that same range, our jails would also be full of women, but they're not.
Our jails are full of men for a couple of reasons. One is because men do have access to kind of a stronger intensity of anger and irritation. But the other is that we do not allow them to learn how to process their own feeling states. We deny them that learning when they are toddlers. Honestly, we stop their emotional growth when they are toddlers.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: So the range applies to the intensity of the emotions, not the types of emotions?
[00:06:12] Speaker A: Well, both type and intensity, but obviously on the irritation, anger, fury range, right? We're talking about more intense ability to tap into anger.
And that's the courage that we value when we put boots on the ground.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: Is it possible to have courage without anger?
[00:06:38] Speaker A: I doubt it.
I think those two things come along. Yes. Is it possible to have courage without extreme anger? Yes.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: Right. You read about people who do these remarkable feats. What I'm thinking of is a story I heard out of the paper, oh, decades ago, right. Of a guy whose child gets trapped under a car and he lifts up this car, right. This is strength that he does not have have on a day to day basis. Right. But his child has just been rolled over by this car and he just lifts up that car so the child can be pulled out from under.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: We do find strength in times of peril that we don't have access to on a day to day basis.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Wouldn't fear be underlying the anger?
[00:07:46] Speaker A: That's a good question. Fear is the base, right? I don't want to be killed. I want to kill my enemy, all right? I don't want my child to die. I want to save my child.
So, yes, fear is mixed in to that courage.
And I think that's the way we define courage, is that we have strength in the face of something that's terrifying.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: So I was thinking about the Serenity prayer. You know, a lot of people in recovery use that prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can.
So are we praying for anger there on some level?
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Yes, because I have to tap into that feeling state in order to do the courageous thing.
And we train boys to be more in touch with anger and irritation than with tenderness, love, comfort, even relationship, right? The bond that happens between boys at every level, boys to men, is a bond that typically is based on action, not necessarily relationship.
Right? We are doing the same activity together, and that action bonds the males together.
Whether it's playing a game like chess or basically basketball or working on a project, right? Like rebuilding a car engine.
They're bound together through activity.
And that's different for women.
Women are bound together through relationship through sharing emotion with each other. And men are bound together through sharing activity with each other. And that's because we train our males at a very young age to shut off access to their feeling states.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: It's funny, in karate, in our dojo, we have a code of morals. And our fifth code is beware of hot blooded courage. Well, being a thug. Yeah.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: Just overpowering others for the sake of power, right?
So it isn't that that I'm really talking about when I talk about denying men access to the full range of feelings. It is a power for power's sake.
It also includes tenderness, right? And empathy and the ability to come alongside of someone and really understand and care about their feelings. States, we give girls permission to be tender, all right? To be loving.
We do not give boys permission to be tender or loving. We make up nasty words for that, right? We call them sissies.
We make fun of them if they have tender emotions and tender reactions. I mean, think of it just in terms of play in a preschool.
We don't want boys in the doll corner, right? Yet when they grow up, we Expect that they will have loving feelings towards babies.
Right. That they'll be interested in changing diapers and walking the floor with a fussy baby. But do we give them any practice in that preschool corner? No.
Right. We give girls that practice in the preschool corner so they're comfortable with it. When their baby is fussy and they have to walk the floor or change a diaper, they're comfortable with it. They're more than willing to do it. But we tell boys, no, stay out of the doll corner. Oh, and don't go to the kitchen corner either.
Even though most of our chefs are men.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: All right.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: We still don't want our little boys in the kitchen corner in preschool.
That's wrong.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: Oh, I'm so lucky. My son just cooked for me. He's 22. He cooked this first meal. It was better than I could cook.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Very good.
As I said, most chefs are male.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Maybe that's why. I don't know.
Growing up, I rejected being female because I felt that men were more valued where I took on more male characteristics. I mean, I used to idealize the woman in Indiana Jones. There's one of those where she was drinking the guys under the table.
Yeah. She was not a sissy.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: No, not. Not a sissy at all.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: I mean, even yesterday, I, I, I had a, an espresso at lunch, and somebody else had a, A decaf version. I said, wow, that's for sissies.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: So you, you were trained early to be very aware of roles for male and female, for sure. And you're right. Our culture values males. We send that message that we value males. Think of a baby reveal party. Those are so popular now, right?
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Where.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: Where people invite friends and family to learn whether they're pregnant with a boy or a girl. These are a lot elaborate parties, right? And people just go wild when the announcement is, it's a boy.
All kinds of wild things recorded in these parties.
And then it's odd that we put such limits and restrictions on the emotional development of a male that our jails are full of men.
Why do we do that?
Why do we do that?
A divorce is 50% or more.
Right now. The statisticians will tell you the divorce rate is dropping.
That's a lie.
People are not getting officially married.
All right? There is no documentation that these two people are legally married. So when they decide to split up and go separate ways, there's no record of it. Right. And people live together now, have children together.
Right. And then five years later, 10 years later, they'll decide, nope, not for us. Anymore. We just don't feel the same way about each other. Then they separate. They go different directions. Their kids start moving back and forth between two households, but it's never recorded as a divorce.
So there is no drop in the divorce rate. If anything, is continuing to escalate.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: I think also the new generation, instead of saying, once they start being intimate, they. It used to be, that's my boyfriend, that's my girlfriend, or I'm dating her. Now there's a separate. Dating just means I'm just testing the person out, I'm not committing.
And boyfriend, girlfriend means I'm on marriage track.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: Right? But people in the generation that has been raised in divorce are not dating, all right? They are not interested in relationship.
They have been burned, basically, because they've grown up in a system where they move back and forth between two households, and they do it in a way that is so damaging emotionally. Now think about it.
Where you live right now, two days from now, do you want to go to another house and spend two days at that house and then come back to this one for three or four days and then move again?
Right. Two days here, two days here, three days here.
It's insane emotionally. If we set up torture for our children, that would be part of the design.
All right? Take away their comfort in terms of place, we get attached to person, place or things.
Right. Our attachment to place has been completely wiped out through the divorce system.
If you have to divorce, please do not do that. 2, 2, 5 system.
At least give your kids a full week in one place so that they're not breaking up a week into traveling to different places.
And if you can tolerate giving them longer, give them longer.
Place is a major resource for our security, and we rob a full generation of that security.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: That's great advice. Thank you, Dr. Van der Horst.
Going back to the emotional range that boys have, you say at one point it gets narrowed. And who's doing the narrowing?
[00:18:14] Speaker A: The entire culture does the narrowing, but it gets delivered by mom and dad.
All right? So little boys have a broader emotional range, so they get more intense as infants. All right? They can, you know, yell louder, get redder in the face than little girls do. Mother's reaction to that is normal and natural. Right. She will back away, all right? Or she'll scrunch up her face and go, maybe in closer. Hey, what's wrong with you? Right? Why are you doing that?
And infants are brilliant.
Their survival mechanism is. Is reading the world around them.
So if mother backs away or scrunches up her face, that infant learns immediately. Oops, that's not a gonna get me survival, right? This person just moved away from me or scrunched up their face, so I'm not going there again.
All right? I'm gonna immediately narrow down the range of expression that I use with mother so that I maintain contact, maintain her attachment to me, because I need that for survival. So it starts in infancy because mother's just not aware of the significance of doing that pullback with that range. But then we do it intentional as a culture.
Think about it. All right, Boys and girls, all right? Get on their feet. They start to walk.
And at that level, we start telling little boys not to cry, right? Stop crying.
Test it out. All right, good. Go to a playground. Go to the mall, right? Watch the interaction between parents and little girls and parents and little boys.
Little girl in line for the slide gets elbowed out of line. She starts to cry. She goes to her parents. She gets picked up. She gets asked what happened. She tells her little story, johnny shoved me. She gets comfort. She gets put back on her feet. Go back in line. You're okay. Little boy, exact same thing. Gets elbowed out of line, goes to his parents. He does not get picked up. He gets looked at, all right? And he gets asked what happened.
If he gives a good enough response, he will get some form of comfort that he will get turned around and sent back.
We treat boys and girls in terms of emotional distress that they experience in drastically different ways.
And then we directly tell our boys not to cry.
Stop crying. Boys do not cry. Don't cry. Boys don't cry.
Don't be a. Oh, we have names for them, right? Don't be a sissy. We have all kinds of derogatory names for a male that expresses emotion from the time they can walk to the time that they die.
We relate to them in this way. We cut off access to emotions. Now, where do you think those emotions go?
[00:22:05] Speaker B: They go under a rug.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: They go into their bodies, right? If we hold on to feelings, male or female, they land in our bodies, and different organ systems really start to break down. If I hold emotion, it doesn't disappear.
It impacts me. If I can express it, then it's out there, it's gone. If I hold onto it, it's in my body, right? It will affect my organs.
My heart, my stomach, my lungs. It will affect my body, and my body will change as a result.
That's why men die younger than women. On average, men die 10 years before women do, all right? Their bodies break down and their Bodies break down for this very reason.
All right? There are holding emotional states.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: So what doesn't an emotionally shut down son actually look like at 8 years old, at 15 years old and at
[00:23:24] Speaker A: 30 years old, pretty easy, all right? At 8 years old, you will. Crying is shameful, right? So you will find your 8 year old, even when injured and wanting to cry, trying to hold that in or running away, right? Running for privacy so that I can cry on my own. Now think about that, all right? Crying is a normal, natural human reaction that attracts others to us, right? We want to give comfort to the one who is in distress.
But we've trained our boys. That's shameful. And so they're running away, right? They're heading into the woods or up to their bedrooms. They're running away so that you don't have the opportunity to give that 6, 7, 8 year old the comfort that they really need. So it starts there for sure, right? And as they mature, we rob them of the ability to even describe what they're feeling.
Because having feeling states gets labeled in a very negative way, right? You're a sissy, you're a pussy, right? I could go on, right?
[00:25:15] Speaker B: I always follow up on lady, like when I expressed anger.
[00:25:17] Speaker A: So there's this whole list of derogatory terms that we deliver to the male. And particularly preteens do this to each other. They love to call each other names anyway and tease each other. They're kind of of bunch bumping for priority, right? And they use their bodies to bump for priority. They use their language to bump for priority. And so as they do that, they all learn that boy, right? I need to contain, right? I can't even my best buddy, I cannot share with my best friend.
And that's why frequently middle school, early high school, you will find guys bonding with girls not to date them, not as a sexual experience, but as a comforting friend, right?
In middle school, if a guy has a girl that is his friend, it's for emotional support and emotional reasons. It's not sexual or essential, right? It is. This is a person I can talk to.
She listens to me, she doesn't make fun of me, she doesn't call me names. And I can tell her anything.
And it will be contained.
She won't go talking to her friends about it. It won't travel any other place, right? There's this bond that takes place for lots of guys in that middle school range when they have a female as their confidant and that's healthy for them to do that, but it's also tragic, right, that we have trained them in this way, that your emotions, your tender feelings, your needy feelings are to be so private, right, so quiet that you can't talk openly about the things that you really experiencing.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: Plus, isn't there a lot of enmeshment going on in society where with these divorced families, the mothers are alone and they overshare with their children what's going on in their lives? And so the little boys feel like the replacement spouse and they're like the little hero taking care of mom.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: It happens a lot, right? Because we train our girls that it's okay to share your emotions, right? And so when you're this divorced mother, but you really, first of all, in the course of divorce, right, everybody, male and female, husband and wife, are going to lose friends, right? You had friends and you had friends as a couple, and they're going to be uncomfortable. They're going to think that this is like a disease that they could catch, right? So they back away. Even your very best friend will back away for some period of time because they really do treat this like, you know, you're getting divorced. This could happen to me. This is a disease I don't want to catch.
And so you lose relationship. Both male and female lose relationships when they go through a divorce. And you have to work to reestablish some of those you can reestablish. Some of them you will never reestablish. And then you're in this place where you have to find new friends, right? So you find new friends. And often those new friends are bound to you because they've been through the same experience, right?
You go to a group where other divorced people are there to talk about their pain and their experience.
So you're losing friends, establishing new friends, but the new friends are typically ones who are going through the same experience that you're going through. And then, voila, you have these kids at home, all right? And suddenly those kids become your confidant. You put them in this place of understanding what you're experiencing emotionally and identifying with your feeling states. I've seen it so many times that the children align with mother, take care of mother, reject father, and then when they get college age, they get curious about father, right? They reestablish relationship with father. They get a bigger picture of what happened to their parents when they were much younger. And suddenly they're rejecting mother, all right, because mother was overly attached to them, all right, and kind of poisoned them in their relationship with father.
So this whole system of divorce is Doing incredible damage to the next generation.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: So what does an emotionally shut down son look like at 30?
[00:31:25] Speaker A: Oh, at 30, probably of competent. Right, because you, you take what you can't get in relationship and you pour it into yourself in a different way.
All right, so you become competent in something. It might be something intellectual, it might be something athletic, it might be something social, but that 30 year old looks competent, functions in a competent way, but is either not that interested in relationship or is cautious about relationship.
And so that's a person who's difficult to connect with for both men and women.
And we have a lot of folks in our society, young people in their late 20s, early 30s, who are thinking, you know, maybe I will never get married. What's the point?
[00:32:42] Speaker B: Right?
[00:32:43] Speaker A: It's just gonna end eventually anyway, so why invest myself in that and then pay the price later?
I don't want to do that. So we have a lot of singles out there that historically we didn't have, and that's going to have an impact on the society as a whole.
[00:33:06] Speaker B: Are you seeing more substance use disorder in men now than before?
[00:33:14] Speaker A: I think the substance use is just really holding steady.
You know, we've been invaded by drug cartels and it starts at a very young age, starts in middle school, that people get hooked on a variety of different substances and your body is responsive.
Right. It really does get a dependence on a substance and then you lose agency yourself, so you can't do that on your own. Once again, it takes a village to facilitate a change.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: It might have been alcohol in the old days, but they're going more to marijuana and psychedelics and mdma. But your book is mainly for fathers.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: I'm writing a book for fathers to help them first to look at their own histories.
So I have been educated by the boys, teens and men that have trusted me with their emotional lives, and they really have taught me what they need at this point in time in order to uncover their natural emotional state.
Reidentify with the feelings that they were born with and the feeling range that they can express and then take the risk of actually doing that with their family. Right. With the people that they're closest to and then broadening that to their friends and their colleagues as well.
So I had been really privileged to watch boys, teens, men grow emotionally and to re educate themselves and regain access to the full range of feelings and learn how to accept that they have that capability and that talent and how to share it with the people that are significant that really mean the most to them. Their own children, their Spouses, the parents.
And so the book is kind of a guide, but it is a guide from the men that I've worked with, and they're educating other men as well. So I'm the conduit to just kind of pass that along on the two other men.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: Well, that's wonderful. It's the idea that if you get the father to get in touch with his feelings, he'll be able to then teach that to his son.
[00:36:29] Speaker A: Right. And really appreciate that you're born with a broad range of emotion, and you should keep hold of all of it. You should own all of it. And you're healthier when you own all of it. I'll tell you a story about one guy that was referred to me by his physician. And in fact, his physician referred him multiple times before he really did it.
Right. And the reason that he brought himself into therapy is that he collapsed in a public presentation thinking that he had some kind of stomach trouble. Now, this was not the first time that he had collapsed in that way.
Taken to the emergency room, Right.
Evaluated. Nothing wrong with a guy.
Nothing wrong with a guy, right? And his physician finally said, you know, you will see Gloria or I will never see you again.
Right? So the guy put himself into therapy, and his gut kept telling him that he was not comfortable in the role that he had chosen for himself as an adult.
And so his body just kept collapsing in critical moments.
His body would just double him over, right? And off you go to the er. Nothing wrong with you.
This is not physical. This is psychological.
And he had the courage to finally do the work to figure out why his body kept sending him this message that you've put yourself in the wrong role as an adult.
Right? You put yourself there because your father said, you will do this, all right? You will go to this college. You will become this professional. You will do this for a living. Nowhere close to what the guy had the talent for, the interest for. And so no wonder his body kept going. No, no.
[00:38:56] Speaker B: Right.
[00:38:57] Speaker A: His body just kept undermining him until he was able to face that history and realize this is not the professional path that satisfies me. It's not really what I want to do with my life. And so, you know, your body does this for you. That's an extreme example.
That's an extreme example. But, you know, Dessel van der Kolk has this book called the Body Keeps the Score.
Right? Wonderful, wonderful message.
Because it's really true, right? Your body will give you information about comfort, about focus, about where to put your energy if you just pay attention to your body. It will guide you and help you and facilitate growth and interest and attachment to the right things.
And once you pay attention to your body and really hear the message that it's sending you, it is incredibly freeing.
Right? It's just incredibly freeing. So it's a beautiful experience to pay attention to your body and learn the message that it's sending you.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: So the message is the emotion, correct?
[00:40:31] Speaker A: Yes.
Yeah. The emotion is like an alarm, right? The emotion says, something's wrong here. Something's wrong here. Take time to figure this out. Reflect.
Go back through your history.
Ask yourself questions. Why am I on this. This path? What other paths are possible for me? Why am I feeling this way every time I get up to go to work?
Right. Where do I actually belong? And, you know, history, typically, will give us pretty good guidance. I have my own story about guidance, Right. I wanted to be a math teacher. I love math.
It was easy for me. And so I thought, hey, I'll be a high school math teacher. That'll be a great life. All right? I have the summers off to do whatever I want, and I can travel and, you know, it'll be fun to teach high school kids.
And math is easy.
So I was a math major until my junior year when I ran into calculus two and learned, ooh, I don't understand math at all that level. And up. No way. Right. So I just immediately switched my major, my minor, and my minor was psychology, because it was fun, right? It was interesting. It was a relief from the rigors of math, but it was where I belong.
That switch just was immediate, kind of opening up of a pathway that I really belonged and never looked back.
[00:42:19] Speaker B: So what signals did. Did your body have that math was no longer for you?
[00:42:25] Speaker A: Well, first of all, the very fact that I barely passed calculus two, and I was on track to graduate in three years with straight A's, so that ruined my plan for graduation.
And the psychology had just always been that fallback. Interesting. Fascinating, Right? You wanted to take a deeper dive into every piece of the subject matter.
And that's really what I've been doing. Right. I spent my life taking a deeper dive into the subject matter, and my clients have led. Led the way in that.
[00:43:11] Speaker B: So where. But where did you feel it in your body? Like, I. I would assume if you started to see calculus, too, as being difficult, you might have felt some fear or some.
[00:43:22] Speaker A: And. And it's the thing that turns your stomach.
[00:43:26] Speaker B: Okay? Your stomach?
[00:43:28] Speaker A: Yeah, it's the thing that. That turns your stomach, all right? And this fear in your chest that somehow I can't breathe in this experience.
Right. I'm not really understanding. I'm not grasping this. And no matter how many other students, you know, we meet together in groups to try to figure this out, it's just not making sense.
[00:43:54] Speaker B: Yeah, because I love, you know, Pia, Melody, are you familiar with her?
But she wrote Codependency no more or. Oh, one of those.
It's. I'm always getting her and Melody Beatty confused. But they. One of the early authors on codependency and she has an emotions chart that has where you normally would feel anger or where you would normally feel guilt is in the stomach or fear would be huge.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: That's fabulous.
[00:44:18] Speaker B: And it's a really useful chart. And. And then she's got a separate chart for carried emotions. Sometimes our parents will give us shame or their anger and. And it gets repre. And it's felt differently in the body in a different place.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. We can be past experiences of others and just carry that as a gift from, but not necessarily a positive gift from another generation.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: So by teaching fathers like to feel the emotions in their bodies.
Why only fathers and not parents? Broadly.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: Well, because women actually have this skill. We do not. We typically.
I'm not going to say it's 100%. All right. But we typically give women much more latitude with emotional expression.
All right? They can cry, they can get angry. We don't have the same limitations socially on women or girls than we do on boys.
And we're direct with our boys. We're very direct. All right? Toddlers are told, stop crying.
I'll give you a great personal example, right? Visiting with friends. All right? We have a three year old. They have a three year old girl, boy. They're playing nicely together.
My daughter keeps his favorite toy, will not tip it back. He tries. I get up, the corner of my eye, I see he's really doing a good job of trying to persuade her to give back his favorite toy. She is refusing. And so he starts to whimper. He starts to cry. He gets up, he heads towards his parents. Reasonable response. He's going to a resource that will help him.
He gets close to his father. His father backhands him in the chest, lands him on his butt and says, stop crying.
He's three, right? And that's the male attitude towards a boy crying.
I attest that if that had been a girl, the girl would not have been whacked in the chest and told to stop crying. She would have been comforted. And asked, what's going on?
And she would have gotten the resource that this little guy deserved. He deserved a resource. But we have this attitude towards our boys that if you cry, if you express emotion that isn't up and exciting, that it's demasculating you.
And I want you to be masculine.
So we train them very early on to withhold normal, natural feeling states.
And it's wrong. We shouldn't be doing that.
[00:47:31] Speaker B: In some families, it's done to women too. I remember being told, you're too emotional.
And so I decided to be more like the boys.
[00:47:42] Speaker A: Right, of course.
Normal, natural reaction, right? Because at that age, you're in concrete reasoning. You think, yes, no, right, wrong, good, bad. There isn't a nuance at all. There's not a maybe, right. It is a yes, no, right, wrong.
So if you're told not to cry, then that's global. It doesn't mean. Oh, just in this situation, it's global. All right? I need to contain my feeling states and not cry about anything.
[00:48:17] Speaker B: What I've been learning about cognitive distortions, but the concept of emotional reasoning, which is you believe something is true simply because it feels true, treating your emotions as objective facts. And sometimes I do have that problem where I. I might feel unwell emotionally one day and we all have down days, and then I'll paint my entire life with that brush. I start to then doubt my emotions or I. I try to stuff them away because I don't want to paint my whole life with that brush.
So, you know, and I'm thinking about boys who are told not to feel. Maybe it's to prevent them from having these cognitive distortions.
[00:48:59] Speaker A: Well, I think when you tell a boy not to cry, not to have feelings on that end of the range, that is a cognitive distortion, right? You are distorting reality for that boy. And that's what we've done to all of our boys, all right? We have distorted reality. So they're not. Not good at emotional problem solving, all right? They get into fights with each other rather than discussions with each other. They're not using their words to process, they're using their bodies to process.
And you know, that's got its own consequence if all you're going to do is use your body to process conflicts.
[00:49:50] Speaker B: I have some male friends who have said girls get spiteful and resentful and they hold grudges and they're mean to each other too, emotionally. But boys will get into a fight, they'll punch each other out and go, okay, we're Done. Bye.
[00:50:02] Speaker A: And then it's over.
[00:50:03] Speaker B: It's done. It's over. It's over.
[00:50:05] Speaker A: And they can reconnect. They're absolutely right. All right. Girls get into this extended experience of distancing emotionally.
Boys punch each other and then shake hands.
[00:50:17] Speaker B: I know it's probably not healthy. I don't know. Is it healthy?
[00:50:20] Speaker A: Well, it's definitely got a downside, right? It's got a downside in terms of family context. Right. Because our divorce rate is 50% or more. That's got an impact on the children because now the children have to declare allegiance to one parent or the other.
It is rare to find a divorced couple who support each other as individuals and allow the children to like each of them and develop close relationships with each of them. It does happen, right? I've seen it happen, and it's beautiful when it does happen. But it's extremely rare that children of divorce end up having that kind of emotional acceptance as their normal day to day functioning. It's usually alignment. Align with me or align with the other that you can't have relationship with each one of us.
Yeah.
[00:51:30] Speaker B: So a child will align with one. What percentage of cases do they align with both?
[00:51:36] Speaker A: Oh, I think that's incredibly rare. I don't have that stat. I don't know if anyone has done that research. But in my practical experience in working with families, that's incredibly rare. I would say probably no more than 5% of the families that I've worked with have that kind of system in place where they are really accepting of the children's attachment to each person and value the children's attachment to each person.
[00:52:08] Speaker B: So if a man realizes at 45 years old that he was raised in that emotional desert that you talk about, is there a way back?
[00:52:15] Speaker A: Oh, there's always a way back. That's the brilliant part about your brain, right, Is that your brain holds on to these pieces of history.
All right? So you can go back and kind of open boxes that have been sealed up in your attic of your brain and you can re experience and reformulate pieces of history.
And suddenly there's a freedom that you experience because you don't have to follow the way that you were trained. I tell this story about a woman who's cooking a ham, all right, for a family celebration. And she cuts the ends off of the ham, puts it in the pan, and her friend asked her, why do you cut the ends off? And she said, my mother taught me that this is the way to bake a ham. And they say, let's Go talk to your mother. All right? So they go talk to mother, why do you cut the ends off to bake a ham? And she says, oh, my mother taught me that that's the best way to bake a ham. So they go to grandma, right? Why do you cut the ends off to bake a ham? She said, I only had one pan.
[00:53:42] Speaker B: Oh, my God.
[00:53:44] Speaker A: And so that's what happens to us in families emotionally, right? We just pass from one generation to the next. And emotional ideas and attitudes that we just have to keep functioning in this way because this is the way that I was taught to view the world and to experience the world and to respond to the world until I take a deeper dive into myself and just ask that question, why do I do it that way, right? Why do I feel this when I walk into a party, Right? Why do I suddenly feel smaller, right? I didn't feel smaller in the car, but when I walk into this party, suddenly I feel smaller. I say less, right? I back away.
What's that about?
That's not about the current party, right? That's about a piece of your history somewhere.
And when you can follow the breadcrumbs to the beginning part and discover, when did you get shamed, embarrassed, called out in a way that made it very clear to you that you are not to function this way in a group, right? Now, that happened to you somewhere in childhood. When you're thinking concretely, you're thinking, right? Wrong, good, bad, right. You got shamed somewhere back there or frightened. It doesn't have to be shame.
You got frightened in a social situation, and from then on, you had this idea in your head that you've got to be smaller.
You got to be quieter in social situations so that you won't get hurt.
Well, that doesn't apply to this adult party situation.
I'm no longer three, right? I have other options.
I can engage people. I can learn about the other person. I can share pieces of meat. It isn't dangerous.
But we all get influenced by early history that shapes our emotional reactions. And we. We don't even ask, all right? We don't ask ourselves, well, why does this feeling come over me?
But we need to start asking ourselves, why does this feeling come over me in this particular situation? It has a history to it, all right? Take that deeper dive. Go find the history so that you have choice.
[00:56:51] Speaker B: How do you feel about trauma workshops where. Experiential workshops, where one goes back into childhood and gets to the root of when that shaming happened?
And with the help of a very trained clinical therapist.
[00:57:06] Speaker A: That's a very positive experience. All right. And that's what happens in individual therapy. All right? You get facilitated to go back and find the root of this so that you have choice.
And maybe sometimes there might be pieces of that that you do want to honor and hold on to, but not the whole thing.
Right. I no longer want to experience myself as this wallflower every time I walk into a party.
That just doesn't make sense.
[00:57:43] Speaker B: Well, back in the day, I used to feel very uncomfortable about walking into a party.
And then I used to help. What helped was heading straight to the bar and getting a glass in my hand.
And then, then I had my armor on and my mask on and I was fine. But it was. It was about a two, you know, one minute, two minute discomfort where I just needed to get to that bar.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: Yep. And you're. You're not alone. Right. There are thousands of people out there who have that same history. And something happened early on that created a sense of shame or embarrassment or fear that blocks that person from actually being willing to engage and take the risk of meeting somebody that you didn't know before.
[00:58:35] Speaker B: There's so much work to be done. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Van der Horst, for being here. When is your book coming out?
[00:58:42] Speaker A: So I'm hoping that it will be out by the first of the year. I'm working on finishing it at this point. Then it needs to go to the editor, then to the publisher. It should be available the first of the year.
[00:58:57] Speaker B: And what's the name?
[00:58:58] Speaker A: How not to blank up raising your boy. Ooh, wow.
[00:59:04] Speaker B: Edgy.
[00:59:06] Speaker A: Yes, it's edgy.
[00:59:07] Speaker B: Very edgy. And people can find you on.
[00:59:09] Speaker A: They can find me at my website, which is www.dashr v a N-E-R h o r s t dot com. So it's www.drvanderhorst.com. and you can find my current journal books on another website called GloriasBooks. All lowercase G L O R I A S B o o k s dot com. So it's gloriasbooks.com all smashed together.
And my website also has some free downloads. It also has some videos of different approaches to therapy, and it has all of my blogs and essays.
So you can go to my website. You can contact me through that website and set up time or use any of the free resources. It's a valuable website.
[01:00:06] Speaker B: That's wonderful. So they can get the resources before the book even comes out.
[01:00:09] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[01:00:11] Speaker B: And in terms of working privately with you, people would have to live in Maryland or DC.
[01:00:17] Speaker A: Maryland or DC? I'm licensed in Maryland or D.C. so
[01:00:21] Speaker B: lucky people who live in Maryland and D.C. they get to access you only. Right? Well, thank you so much, Dr. Fedora.
[01:00:28] Speaker A: Well, thank you. I've enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for the opportunity.
[01:00:36] Speaker B: If this episode landed for you, share it with someone who might need to hear it.
[01:00:41] Speaker A: And if you haven't already, subscribe so
[01:00:43] Speaker B: you don't miss what's coming. But here's the real thing. I want you to know if you're carrying something you can't talk about, if you have every resource except someone who actually understands what wealth costs. I work one on one with people like you navigating exactly that. You can reach me@diana oehrli.com thanks for listening.
