Women Speak, Men Feel

(It’s not research I’m sharing here — the number of “test subjects” isn’t large enough for that — but simply my personal experiences as a therapist.)
I often hear women say about men that they’re not in touch with their emotions, that it’s hard to talk to men about feelings because they’re not as verbal as we women are. And maybe it’s true that men don’t talk as much about emotions — but is that the same as not feeling their emotions? I’m not so sure about that...

Last year, I worked full-time as an EQ therapist and had both women and men in therapy — and I made some surprising discoveries. The percentage of women versus men who came to me was about 90/10, which perhaps wasn’t all that unexpected, since women generally aren’t just good at talking but also comfortably share big and small things with friends and people in their network. Many, therefore, conclude that women are better and more used to talking about feelings. And maybe that explains why the ratio of women to men in therapy is so unbalanced…
But does that necessarily mean that women are more in touch with their emotions than men?
And could it be that the gender imbalance in therapy is affected by the fact that men keep hearing they’re bad at talking about feelings — and therefore shy away from therapy?
Could this, in the worst case, be a self-fulfilling prophecy that society itself reinforces?

I made a somewhat unexpected and surprising observation during my first year as a therapist, and it makes me suspect that things might actually be the opposite of what we’ve always been told and believed. I can only speak from my own experience, but I’d like to share it with you:

Yes, women are generally very verbal about their emotions — they can talk about them for hours and have theories, explanations, and opinions about why they feel the way they do. But when we talk about our feelings, we’re in our heads — where our thoughts live. So what we’re really talking about are our thoughts about our feelings.
The feelings themselves, on the other hand, live in the body. That’s why, in EQ therapy, we can recover bodily memories that our brains may have repressed or forgotten — because the body remembers what it has experienced. When we’ve talked extensively about our emotions (or thoughts about our emotions), it’s easy to think we’ve processed them. But we haven’t.
Feelings can only be processed by being felt.
The rest is just “mapping.” And that mapping can make it feel like we’ve relieved some pressure — at least temporarily — but for lasting change, something more is needed: to feel the unfelt feelings. That’s how they’re truly processed.

What I experienced looked something like this:
When I asked women “how do you feel right now?”, they would talk for a long time about their emotions, the details, and the people involved in various situations that made them feel the way they did, and why they thought it was wrong, unfair, or difficult.
The average time it took to reach the core of the issue — the actual feeling to be processed — was about three times longer than what it took for the men.
The men weren’t just quick to describe what they truly felt — they often did so precisely, using short, concrete words like “angry,” “afraid,” “alone,” or “excluded,” and they would often describe, unprompted, where in the body they felt it.

Once I began noticing this difference, I made a point of asking both genders the same questions so that my approach would be as similar as possible — and the results remained consistent. When I worked with men, the treatment time was shorter.
Could it be that we’ve been wrong about men all along?
What I take away from this past year is this: yes, women talk more about feelings, but men are more in their feelings.
I found that the path from thoughts in the head to feelings in the body was shorter for men.
And that might mean they actually respond better to EQ therapy than we’ve assumed — and that’s a really good thing!

So I want to warmly welcome even more men to therapy. Don’t be put off by women who complain that you’re bad at talking about feelings — what matters most is that you feel your feelings, that you’re in them, that you’re connected to your body — without all the overthinking or endless explanations.
Just be the man you are. The rest is the therapist’s job :-)

Even though I’ve just generalized quite a bit, I don’t see men as a uniform group. There are just as big individual differences among men as there are between (for instance) women and men. My goal is for everyone to feel well cared for and safe when they come to therapy. So just be the person you are. A warm welcome!