On this episode, 2 of the biggest emotional mistakes that
guys make in relationships and one path to avoid them both.
This is the Holistic Alpha Male Optimization podcast where we
help you unleash your true power as a man.
Hey, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Steven Mathis. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for checking it out for the first time.
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Appreciate you taking a few minutes to share with me.
Let's talk about two of the biggest emotional mistakes that
guys make in dating and in relationships.
I've made these guilty as charged and one path that we can
focus on that will help us avoid them both.
Emotions are at the root of basically everything that we do
as humans. Things that even we don't think
are emotional decisions, they really are at the root of it.
You know, you buy a car, it's an emotional decision.
Buy business, it's an emotional decision.
You sell a business, it's an emotional decision.
Things that you would think are not, they are.
They are now, yes, there's some logic involved in more so in
some situations than others, but we are emotional creatures and
thus that's where we have some of our biggest challenges.
And when it comes to dating in relationships, that's where,
especially as guys, we tend to have a lot of challenges in
relationships. I certainly have had my share
much more. So in my early years, the early
years of my marriage, my 20s, I had no idea of even a fraction
of the things that I understand and that I've developed and
practiced and healed. Now I'm in completely different
human being in a lot of ways. So there's two big mistakes that
I have made that I hear from coaching clients, that I hear
from guys, from you guys over and over again in conversations,
from my friends, from family members.
One is being emotionally closed off.
Lot of guys, especially the older generation, but really in
the deepest way, a lot of guys from today's generation as well
are emotionally closed off. So this means we're not able to
actually get in and work with our emotions.
We're we're not able or willing to go into our emotional world
if we're emotionally closed off. We can't communicate effectively
in the language of emotions with other people, with our partners,
with our girlfriends, with our wives.
If we are emotionally closed off.
It blocks the deepest, most powerful communication and bond
building and it isolates us. It isolates us from the world,
from our partner. So that's kind of one end of the
spectrum and then the other end, and often these are kind of
blended at the same time, which is kind of the the double whammy
worst of both worlds. But the other end of the
spectrum is being too emotional, too ready to just dump
everything emotionally on our partner.
It's a big, big issue. I've heard from so many women
that they have felt like an emotional dumping ground with
guys that they have been with friends that you know, women who
are friends, just meeting people in everyday life, all kinds of
conversations, partners, people that I have been with, I've
heard from so many women, they have felt this.
They have felt like an emotional dumping ground.
They have felt like their, their boyfriend, their husband is
basically looking for them to mother him emotionally, right?
Like, oh, I'm having these hard emotions.
I need you to help me with them. And that's a big problem.
It's a big problem if we go too much that direction.
Now, sometimes this can kind of be blended, and that was part of
my experience as well. And it kind of would shift at
times depending on where I was and whether I was sort of closed
down or in this extra open emotional state.
But I would at times overshare. I would at times look for her to
process my emotions for me or to help me process them.
I would put some of that ownership on her and then I
would also get closed down at times.
Both of those not good. Here's the path.
Here's the path that will help us deal with our emotions as an
individual, independent of any relationship.
So you might be single and you're just much more focused on
how do I work with my own emotions.
The path really is largely the same because this is not
specific to romantic relationships.
It's big in that when you're dating, when you're in some kind
of committed relationship, it's definitely a big factor in that,
but it also impacts how we relate to family members, to
friends, how we relate to our own emotions.
Here's what I think the path is based on my experience and based
on working with lots and lots of guys in conversations around
this stuff. The first thing is building our
own inner emotional foundation. It's doing your own inner work,
right? You might hear or see the phrase
online, doing the inner work. Have you done your work?
Are you to me? What that really means is are we
willing and able to go into our inner world to see what's in
there, to accept it, to work with it, to understand it, to
heal it, where it needs to be healed, to transform it, where
we desire to transform it? It's being willing and able to
speak the language of emotions within ourselves.
And that is a skill. It's a practice.
We are not most people, the vast, vast majority people, both
men and women, but more so men, are not born with any sort of
inherent ability or skill in this area.
We have to develop it or we don't, and a lot of guys don't,
but we do need to develop it if we want to relate to our
emotions effectively and especially if we want to avoid
these mistakes in the context of dating and relationships.
And so many guys, I guarantee that you, if you're in the
dating realm, if you're in a dating sort of part of your
journey, you have likely experienced having a connection
kind of go awry because of one of these two emotional mistakes,
right? And by the way, mistakes are not
bad. Mistakes are great.
Recognizing a mistake, hey, this is actually not ideal.
I would like to transform this. That's a beautiful thing because
that's how we grow, right? So you've likely made one of
these mistakes or both. I have.
Here's the path. The path is the foundation,
meaning you meditate, you look at your own emotions, you're
willing to actually sit with them, you're willing to feel
them, you're maybe even willing to cry in the right time and
place, which we're going to talk more about that in just a second
in terms of sharing our emotions, the right time and
place. You might be willing to dive in
to the degree that you cry. You might just be willing to
actually pay attention day-to-day to your emotions as
opposed to pushing them away and avoiding them and resisting
them. That's really building that
inner emotional foundation. There's different kind of
tactics, whether it's meditation, it's therapy, it's,
you know, a coaching session with me, it's whatever.
Any tactic that helps you get in there, it's not really about the
tactic. What it's really about is
getting in there and understanding and healing and
figuring out where you need to heal and how you need to heal
and working through that and letting go of what you need to
let go of and all these things. So that's the first part.
Here's the second part, sharing. When and how do we share,
whether it's a friendship, it's in a relationship, a romantic
relationship, especially in a romantic relationship, it is
absolutely important that we're not completely closed down, that
we do share in the right time and way.
And here's how to go about that. First, we need to evaluate, is
this something that I should share or not?
Because not everything is appropriate to share.
The reality of being human is that some things are ours to
process. You will not have someone to
help you carry every single little emotion.
You know who that person is that will help you carry that It's
you, right? So the first evaluation is, is
this something that is worth sharing, that I should share
that there's some benefit or some value in sharing with my
partner, my friend, whoever it is?
Or is this something that is on me to to process and some of it
is that so if you determine OK in some way, shape or form,
yeah, this is something that would be beneficial to talk
about. And make no mistake, you are not
an island. I'm not an island.
It is important that we talk with our partner, with our
friends about emotional stuff, but it's important that we do it
with a mindfulness and an intention and an awareness
instead of just a Willy nilly whatever happens.
And that's kind of the way we start out until we actually
develop these skills. So once we determine, yes, this
is something that would be beneficial to share.
Here's the the other part of that we consider what state is
the other person in? So if it's your wife, for
example, you consider what state is she in right now?
What kind of day has she had? What moment is she in right now?
Is she busy with the kids? And her mind's in a million
different places. And this would be maybe the
worst time for you to dump some emotional thing on her.
Like you come home from work and you've had a stressful,
stressful day and you have some kind of emotional stuff happen
at work and you come home and she's in the midst of her day
and you just dump your emotional stuff from the day on her.
That is not the way to go about it.
It's not the way to go about it. We consider, well, where is the
other person? Are they willing and able to
accept this stuff in the moment? Do they have a desire?
Have they communicated a willingness to communicate with
me about these kinds of things? We might even ask, are you in a
space where I can share something with you in general,
that's kind of hard for me. Maybe something just super broad
like that. Or maybe you say, oh, I kind of
am having this thing in this area.
Are you in a space where are you OK to talk with me about it?
Ask the question, ask if they're OK Give them the opportunity to
say, yeah, it's a great time, share with me or no, let's talk
about it later, honey. You know, And then beyond just
asking, use your own, use your own power of discernment to
recognize that there are times and things that are very good to
share with your partner that create some, some trust that
help build the bond that help her understand you.
And then there are times when you need to take care of your
own emotional shit, to put it bluntly, right?
For example, the vast majority of your work life, whatever
emotions you experience in work, the majority of that is on you.
Don't come home to your partner and dump all that on them.
Now, does it mean you don't tell them anything about it?
You don't tell her anything about it?
You don't share anything? No, it doesn't mean that.
But what it does mean is day-to-day, you have your own
processes. You have your own practices
within yourself to handle those things.
And then you share them in a mindful way at the right times,
in a way that helps you build trust because it helps your
partner understand you and you share it with her in a time when
she's interested, when she's ready to hear that.
And very importantly, this is the last really important thing
is that anytime, if we're going to share emotional stuff with
other people, whether it's our partner, it's a friend, it's
whoever, our first go to reaction to emotions should not
be to share it with someone else.
That is called emotional dumping.
It's a dumping it on someone else.
Our first process should be work with it, understand it, have
existing practices in place, and then in the in the moment, in
the exact circumstance, sit with it, work with it, understand it
before you go and just blurt out and explode to someone about it,
whether it's the person who's involved in that particular
emotion, right? Like you're upset at your wife
and you just dump everything on her or it's something that's
sort of unrelated to her. It doesn't really matter.
Don't let the first go to response be to dump it on
another person. Work with it, understand it, and
then you can use discernment and you can really think about how
can I share this in a way that's beneficial for me, That's
beneficial for the other person actually, because it does build
trust. This is a huge part of humanity
is sharing these kinds of things with people.
How can I share it and what should I be sharing to
facilitate that kind of positive thing that actually lifts us
both up as opposed to. And here's what can really
happen in both of these scenarios is it builds
resentment. And when I say both of these
scenarios, I mean the two ways that we can really go wrong,
being extremely emotionally closed off or just dumping.
And in both cases, it builds resentment.
That's really what happens. You know, and I've kind of felt
this, my own sort of part of this in years past, meaning kind
of resentment from having been dumped on or having that closed
off feeling. And then I've certainly been on
on my side of it in terms of being closed off and dumping as
well. So I've experienced the both
sides of it for sure. And one thing that I have seen
is undoubtedly it builds resentment and it builds these
little kind of cracks, right? It's like I talk about building
the castle of our life, 1 little brick at a time.
Well, when we have something where we, for example, we just
emotionally dump on our partner, what we're actually doing is
we're sticking a brick in the castle, but it's a faulty brick.
It's a brick that's weak, that'll crumble.
And so if you stack enough of those, the structure becomes
unstable. It's as simple as that.
Emotions are never simple, really.
I, for my own personal life, try to sort of simplify some of
these really complex things to help me work through them and
figure them out and figure out how I can be better, how I can
experience more peace, how I could show up for other people
more effectively. And I think a huge part of that
is trying to sort of simplify some of these things.
I hope that maybe this has landed with you in some kind of
positive way. If it hasn't, that's fine too.
Either way, thanks for taking a few minutes to be here with me
and and Jackie the dog. You haven't seen her or heard
from her? Because I don't really hear from
her. She's quiet, quiet, beautiful,
sweet dog. But we're exploring the
mountains together. Thanks for sharing a few minutes
of your day with me. Go stack some positive bricks in
your life. Go stack some intention Nuggets.
Build that castle 1 little brick at a time.
Talk to you soon.