Learn How Men and Women React Differently to a Break Up and What You Can Do to Heal.

Men have more difficulty handling their emotions than women.  Simply because men have been trained to be more independent so they have developed fewer skills at handling their emotions.  They become emotionally overwhelmed more easily and demonstrate it by shutting off emotionally and withdrawing, going into denial or becoming workaholics.  All of this is a bid to cut themselves off from those overwhelming feelings of hurt and pain. 

In the process, those feelings lie dormant and are actually never healed.  When we don’t heal those feelings, we don’t allow ourselves to fall in love again and we miss out on one of the most rewarding, healing and satisfying experiences in our lives that of falling in love again.

The secret that women use in handling their feelings is that women are able to think and feel at the same time.  As a result, women will express their emotions more.  They are better able to verbalize what they are feeling.  By verbalizing their feelings, they are able to come to a healing resolution more quickly than men.

Men, on the other hand, are either in thinking mode or feeling mode.  When men are in pain from a break up, they go right into feeling mode and become overwhelmed with those feelings resulting in shut down, paralysis, withdraw or angry bitterness.  Men cannot make good decisions for themselves or anyone else under those conditions.

Whether you are a woman or a man, it’s important to acknowledge that you are going through a crisis and be more compassionate and gentle with yourself.  Remove any blame you may be putting on yourself for anything you may have done to contribute to the break up or for trusting or having been vulnerable to your ex.  It’s important to be able to trust and experience vulnerability.  Its part of being in a relationship and it allows us to experience closeness with another. 

For more information on handling your thoughts and feelings, join Dr. Jim's Facebook Page at DrJamesWalton.com.  Click the link to listen to a free sample of Dr. Jim’s Healing A Broken Heart.

The Importance of Feeling Our Feelings

Half the information we get from the world comes from our thinking, the other half comes from our feelings. When we cut ourselves off from our feelings (narcissism), we are cut off from half the information available to us in our world. By cutting off from our feelings, we cut off from the messages of our internal self.

No one outside of ourselves can control our feelings. Others may influence our thoughts and thinking, but our feelings emanate solely out of the core of our being. They are completely created within us. Our feelings are completely our own. They give us a sense of independence from others and define us as separate individuals. When we cut ourselves off from our feelings, we take away from our sense of independence. ‘

We lose our sense of personal independence when we cut off from our feelings because our only remaining information source, thinking, is vulnerable to the influence of the world around us. Thinking can be influence by others. When we are cut off from our feelings, we can only express our feelings through anger or maudlin sentimentality. Any other expression seems to threaten our sense of security. Those two expressions of feelings are then viewed as the only acceptable expression of feeling.

We can cut off from our feelings because they feel messy or they make us feel vulnerable or, for some reason, we were punished for feeling and expressing them when we were children. As a result, we cut off from our feelings to protect ourselves from feeling bad. Protecting ourselves by restricting feelings that make us feel bad, we become more dependent on our thinking for information about our world. Being more dependent on our thinking, we become more protective of it, which can lead to hostility with others if we feel they are threatening our sense of independence by influencing our thinking.

When thinking becomes the sole way of relating to the world, any feeling other than anger or sentimentality seems to threaten our sense of stability. We then shuttle our messy feelings farther and farther away from our awareness to protect ourselves from the discomfort they carry with them. The vulnerability we feel from our feelings is then seen as a threat to our independence. As we depend on thinking more and more, we grow more and more vulnerable to the influence of others affecting our thinking. This causes us to increasingly withdraw from connection with others. Thus, our efforts to protect ourselves by cutting off from feelings actually causes us to feel increasingly more vulnerable in the world as it causes us to withdraw from connection to others.

This vulnerability and the resulting disconnect from our world can be completely reversed by open up to our feelings. When we open up to our feelings, we are able to experience and express a greater range of emotion. We are then able to process information through our feelings as well as through our thoughts. Our feelings are generated solely within ourselves. No one else is in control of or responsible for our feelings. They are solely our own and allow us to feel a sense of independence over ourselves in our world.

Understanding and experiencing our range of feelings gives us more information about our world and in turn, because they emanate solely from us, we feel a greater sense of independence and differentiation from others. We don’t feel so vulnerable to others when we are able to recognize and value our feelings.

For more information on getting in touch with your feelings, log onto LAtherapist.com or for more information on self-help downloads, and to listen to free samples, log onto The Dr. Walton Series at HypnoCD.com. Check out the Free Affirmations.