Ep 145: Why Men Swallow Their Feelings & Fixing Your Marital Disconnection with Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst

In Episode 144 of the Married and Connected podcast, host Kameran Alareqi sits down with clinical psychologist and author Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst to unpack the startling truth about men, boys, and emotional suppression.

With nearly 50 years of experience, Dr. Vanderhorst explains how boys are socialized from infancy to narrow their emotional range and "swallow" their feelings—and how that childhood conditioning directly impacts your marriage today. We cover everything from the preschool phenomenon of emotional boundaries to shedding the "sticky notes" of childhood trauma that don't belong to you. Whether you are 35 or 95, this episode proves it is never too late to grow, expand your emotional vocabulary, and rebuild intimacy in your relationship.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• The Preschool Phenomenon: Why male and female teachers react entirely differently to little boys’ emotional and physical boundaries.
• The Broken Collarbone Story: A powerful example of how society teaches young boys to suppress pain and swallow their feelings.
• The Marital Disconnect: Why men excel at complex workplace problem-solving but shut down when faced with emotional problem-solving at home.
• Curiosity vs. Judgment: Why asking "Why do you do it that way?" is actually threatening to your partner, and how to use statements like "Tell me more" to foster real connection.
• The "Feeling Sheet" Strategy: How placing a simple vocabulary list on your kitchen table can help toddlers, dismissive teenagers, and grown adults identify complex emotions.
• Shedding Your Sticky Notes: How to use Dr. Vanderhorst's interactive journals to peel off the burdens and childhood injuries that aren't yours to carry.

Key Takeaways & Quotes:

• "One cannot lead down a path that they have never been allowed to walk."
• "Men swallow feelings... If you express them, you've released it. If you don't express it, you're holding it someplace."
• "We have all these sticky notes on us and they don't belong to us. We need to start taking them off and letting them drop."

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Website: Visit www.drvanderhorst.com for resources, therapy videos, and to download the free "List of Feelings" sheet.
• Books: Read, Reflect, Respond and her newest interactive journal, Return, Revisit, Renew (Available on Amazon and local bookstores).
• Upcoming Book: How to Not F Up Being a Father
• Social Media: Follow Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst on Facebook- gloria.vanderhorst.7, LinkedIn-  gloria-vanderhorst ph-d-730826b/ , and TikTok!
  
  

Work with Kameran: Ready to bridge the emotional gap in your marriage? Kameran is currently accepting new couples! If you want to learn how to communicate effectively, build vulnerability, and shed the childhood baggage holding your relationship back, book your coaching spot today. (Note: There are currently only 3 spots available!)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What are you feeding your mind right now? If it's social media, are you tired of doom scrolling through the angry comment sections and political rants yet? What if you use that time to actually fix your marriage? Welcome to the free married and connected school community. It's like social media, but without the ads, without the judgment, and without the noise. Just real self-paced tools that get you out of that roommate phase starting today. Inside, you get an exact blueprint for a weekly State of the Union meeting with your spouse. We're cutting mental load, we're stopping miscommunications, and we're breaking that exhausting loop of doom argument once and for all. Plus, you get instant access to workshops on overcoming resentment and bringing the actual fun back into your marriage. We have a dedicated space just for guys jumping into forging fortitude. It's a 10-week intensive to help you step into your masculine leadership and become the husband and man that God called you to be. And for ladies joining Edifying Eden, we're stepping out of that controlling, nagging era into our soft, nurturing feminine era. Even if your husband hasn't taken the reins yet. Either way, you can take responsibility for your side of the street. Stop scrolling the internet and start investing in your home. The community is 100% free with options to purchase certain courses. Click the link in the show notes and join the Married and Connected school community today. I'll see you inside. Marriage isn't supposed to feel like roommates, but it doesn't have to feel like a war either. Hi, I'm Cameron Alricki, certified marriage coach and a relationship expert. Every week on Married and Connected, I bring you real talk, hard truths, and practical tools you can start using right away. Whether you've been married two years or 42, this is where you'll find hope, encouragement, and steps that actually work. So let's make your marriage feel good again, starting right now. Hey friend, welcome to another episode of the Married and Connected podcast. I'm your host, Cameron Alaricki, and today we have a very special guest as a psychologist, Gloria Vanderhorst career. And throughout almost 50 years of private practice, she has worked with preschoolers, elementary age children, teens, adults, and couples. Her training in emotionally focused therapy and internal family systems has been effective in helping each client heal from childhood injuries and learn to embrace their strengths. For centuries, we have raised boys to suppress access to the more tender range of feelings. And then we expect them to exhibit compassion, form deep commitments, get married, develop intimate and supportive emotional relationships with another, and eventually provide emotional guidance to their sons and daughters. And this is absolute setup for failure. One cannot lead down a path that they have never been allowed to walk. And today we are going to talk all about it. So welcome, Gloria. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Cameron, thank you for this opportunity. I'm excited too. This is gonna be a great conversation.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Absolutely. Now, as a mother of two boys, myself, 16 and five, we have some big emotions in this house.

SPEAKER_03 3:00

I'll beg you do.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Basically the same emotions, just on a deeper scale. So I really found interesting in the email that you sent me about working with boys at the school age because female teachers are more distressed both by boys than girls. And teaching, I was a before I became an a certified marriage coach, I actually was in the kindergarten classroom between kindergarten and second grade for over a decade. And that is like as I was reading that, I was like, holy cow, that is so true. It is true. And I would see, I always got like the problem children because I had good classroom management. But I also like I gravitated towards those kids because they had a personality. They didn't just sit there and it was yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, you know, thank you, all the things. But I actually I just loved the Arnery ones. And most teachers, though, were not like that. Most teachers were like, I'm not dealing with that kid. And so kind of talk about your findings and how that affects not only their education, but then also as they grow up. Because now I have one of those children. My second boy is absolutely that child. So talk about that.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

That's great. I I'm glad to hear that you have one of these and that you have two boys at different developmental stages, yeah, too. But each one of those stages is really fascinating. These are periods of change, all right? That preschool boy, the teenage boy. These are dramatic periods of change. And it's great that you have had experience in the classroom at that young age as well. I have a classroom story that I want to share with you that really points out the difference between a female teacher and a male teacher in most preschool classrooms. Sure. And it's a personal story. It's a story about my granddaughter.

SPEAKER_03 5:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

She was in a kindergarten class run by a man. Very unusual, but still a great idea for the following reason. One day they were doing finger painting, right? Large pieces of white paper on the table, six kids around the table, and the finger paints lined up down the middle. And so she's painting on the paper and enjoying herself, and then she decides to go off the paper onto the table. And so she's painting the table, and then she decides to go down the leg of the table. Okay. Right? And you can feel your heartbeat, right? It's just increasing, right? The male teacher took out his phone and videotaped her doing this. He never stopped her. Not one IOT. He let her experiment as far as she wanted to go. And the female teacher, I swear, if she had had a female teacher, she would have been stopped immediately. Immediately. Keep the paint on the paper. Keep the paint on the paper. Right? So the big difference is this broader range of acceptance that you'll find in the male. They will let kids experiment. They'll just see where is this going to go? What's going to happen next? Yeah, once in a while a kid will get hurt because of that experimentation, but you're not going to get hurt finger painting. Right. So the the huge difference between male and female is this ability to accept a broader range of emotions. This guy did not get anxious about her going onto the table and down the table leg. He got curious. And a female would have been very anxious and not at all curious about where this was going to go. So this pages back to the truth that men, boys, come into this world with a broader range of emotional expression than girls do. Now that's a shocker. And it's it's not commonly discussed either.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

It's not.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

And I will say that's changing in this environment. All right. There's an increase in the number of dads who are staying home to raise their children while mom goes off to work. But by and large, women have and continue to take care of infants. And women don't have this broader range. So when the baby boy kind of gets more excited, more exuberant, mother does this, right? She backs up a little bit or she turns away or she scrunches up her face. Same thing is true if the boy is more agitated, goes kind of deeper into irritation, mother is gonna withdraw. Mother's gonna make a facial expression that says, uh-uh, I'm not comfortable with that. Well, infants are brilliant. Their only survival mechanism is reading the room around them. And so when mother does that, this brilliant infant who wants to survive immediately goes, oops, I'm gonna narrow my range of expression. So right there in infancy, the male is taught to narrow the range of feeling expression. Now it doesn't disappear, and that's the good news.

SPEAKER_03 9:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

It's still up there, all right? He still has access to it, but the society has told him, don't go there. Don't even pretend that you have access to that. All right. Cut those ends off of your emotional capability. Now we do know that men under stressful circumstances will tap back into that range. That's why more men get into physical fights and do physical harm to other people because they've tapped into that extreme range of emotional reaction. But by and large, we can find them to stay in this range that the female is familiar with. So that's step one, right? We limit them right at uh infancy. And then when your boy starts to walk around, we tend to tell boys that they shouldn't cry. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You know, hey, stop crying, nothing wrong with you. I have this great story from a friend of mine who was a military wife, right? She had three boys, right? One of the boys broke his collarbone, took him to the hospital, obviously. The guy is not crying. He has a broken collarbone, which hurts like hell if you've ever had the experience. It just hurts like hell. And it every time you move, it's poking you, right? Yeah. So it's it's continuing to hurt. And the doctor says to this little guy, you know, you have a broken collarbone, but you're not crying. Why aren't you crying? And he says, Mama told me it didn't hurt. Oh.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Right?

SPEAKER_01 12:03

And there's that.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

And there it is. So I will not let it hurt. I will swallow that.

SPEAKER_03 12:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

And that's what men do. Men swallow feelings. So you wonder why do men die earlier than women? There it is. They swallow feelings.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

The disease is caused by repressed emotion.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

By repressed emotion. Heart attacks, stomach problems, all kinds of difficulties in your body because feelings don't just melt away. If you express them, you've released it. If you don't express it, you're holding it someplace. Right? Maybe you get headaches, maybe you get stomach aches, maybe you get heart palpitations, but trust me, you're dying younger if you don't express your feeling states. And so that's what we've done to the male population, is that we've restricted and then told them face to face, don't cry, don't be emotional. And then, you know, boys make fun of their peers. If there's any kind of sadness or anxiety, you get really ragged on, right? You really get reamed out. If boys are not allowed to have tender, softer emotions.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

One of the things that you just said was that men will typically, when they are stressed, they will release some of those emotions or they will show a little bit more emotion. Is this why it takes someone being mad at them for them to finally engage?

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Right. Absolutely. Right. Because they have been trained to confine and not to express. So they could have a traumatic experience. Let's say that, you know, you your guy, you're driving to work, and you know, some other car just comes out of the blue, they just barely miss you.

unknown 14:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Right? You're terrified. Right? Sure. That's that's scary. But will you find the guy talking about that once he gets to work? You'll find him complaining about the traffic, right? And being really pissed that someone cut him off on the highway, but you will not find him talking about, you know, being scared.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

How scared he was.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

Right? That's just not allowed.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Do you think fear is one of the primary emotions that men often feel more so than others?

SPEAKER_00 15:03

I don't know that they feel it more. I think boys in particular invade each other more than girls do. And so any invasion, pushing, shoving, hitting, right? And then they invade each other emotionally as well. Boys do much more to shame and irritate and make fun of. They're assaulting their friends on a regular basis emotionally, right? That's part of the way that they play is to assault each other emotionally. And so the the entire culture for boys and men is really aimed at keeping their emotional expression really, really tight, really narrow. And so, you know, then think about it. You fall in love, you find a woman that you want to spend the rest of your life with. Um, and love is a is a magical feeling, right? We're programmed to feel this in order to survive, in order to reproduce. Right. Right. And so it's programmed in your head that you're gonna fall in love with somebody, and it has a a life to it, all right? You're gonna have that intense emotional feeling for a period of time. It's fairly short-lived, right? Maybe weeks, months if you're lucky, but it's gonna dissipate, all right, because it's there really only for survival. We want the species to keep producing. And so this magical thing happens to you, you fall in love and you're crazy about that other person. You don't see any of their flaws, all right. You don't see any difficulties between spending the rest of your life with this person, even though it's gonna be very complicated. Chemistry wins out. Yeah. But but then the chemistry calms down, it completely flushes out of your body, and you're face to face with this person who has all these characteristics and all of these weird things you didn't notice before, you didn't see them, you didn't hear them, they just weren't a part of the dynamic between the two of you. So now you have to problem solve. But we've trained you as a male not to problem solve intimately. I could put you on any project in the world that requires difficult problem solving, and as a guy, you'll dive into it and you'll find the solution.

SPEAKER_03 18:16

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Bring you home and put you in front of your wife, there's no problem solving that's going on. You you might risk complaining and repeating that complaint, but there'll be no problem solving, there'll be no deeper dive into why does this bother you? You know, I talk with my hands, right? So there'll be no deeper dive into, well, if it bothers you that I talk with my hands, we should discuss that. Right. But that that won't happen. Yeah. They've been trained together.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

So in your books, you talk about you have the first two, and then you have this one that's coming up. That's in progress, how to not f up being a father. Now, let me ask you this. I'm assuming, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that a lot of the ways you don't F up being a father are the same ways you don't F up being a husband. Is that true?

SPEAKER_00 19:24

That's absolutely right.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

So Okay, so let's dive into some of those.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Yep. You have to take the risk. Uh but I before we take that dive, all right, I do want to be clear that women have been socialized, that men shouldn't go into deeper, more tender emotions. All right, we're victims of that socialization as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

So Do you think that's changing though?

SPEAKER_00 19:56

It's changing a little bit because I see it in teenagers that boys uh talking with a girl are more willing as current teenagers to go into softer territory to disclose a bit more about being injured or being nervous, being worried. And girls are open to receiving that. But historically, both male and female have been taught that boys should not be tender, they should not be soft, they should not be needy. Well, you know, if I'm having a guy that having a struggle at work, and I think I'm being, you know, shunted aside, picked on in some way, blocked from progress, you better believe I'm gonna have a ton of negative feelings and fearful feelings about that. So I it's gonna show on my face and my body. So I come home, my wife is obviously gonna know I had a bad day, and she's gonna comment on it, you know. Yeah, look, looks like you had a really rough day today. Yeah, right? And he's gonna give a headline. Yeah, Joe Schmoe did this to me, and you know, I think I'm just out of the running for that promotion. That's his headline. And she's gonna say, I'm so sorry, or that's awful, you know, you do really deserve a promotion. She's gonna give one or two sentences as her response, and then she is not going to pursue a deeper conversation. Right? She's got something on the stove that needs attention. She's got to get back to this email that she was doing on her computer. Or, you know, the baby is crying and needs attention. She's gonna leave him in that space because she's also been socialized, not to expect a deeper dive from a male. And so there he is, all right. He might have been ready to take a deeper dive, but she's also been trained. Don't go there, that's dangerous, and you know, you don't want to emasculate your husband, right, by thinking that he has feelings at a deeper level that he would like to share. And therein lies the reason that many marriages dissolve because they distance emotion.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

There's no emotional connection for sure. We talk a lot about that here on the podcast. So for that, how do we, I mean, obviously getting help, learning something different, all of that. Let's let's dive into how do we be better, better husbands as well as better fathers. But then I want to come back and I want to talk about what we can do not only not only as spouses, but as parents to do something different. Because we are the first generation that is actively parenting our children while also reparenting ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

So, in doing that, how does all that work? So let's dive into um what what does it mean to not f up being a parent or a or a spouse here?

SPEAKER_00 23:54

Right. So reparenting yourself is really critical. You have to take yourself seriously, all right? You have to be able to face this reality that I'm a guy. I was never trained to go into emotions, so I do hold on to them, I don't talk about them, I feel them and I swallow them, right? They take up residence in my body. So the journal books that I published are for this guy.

SPEAKER_03 24:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

They're for girls too, because we also need to maintain access to deeper feelings. But the journal book lets you get access to feelings before you could talk and before you could walk. And right there at the beginning, when you started walking, and everybody told you not to cry, because the journal book is very different from other journals. It has an essay on one page, and the facing page is blank with a couple of questions on it, but the facing page is blank so that you can bypass language. We store information in terms of language, in terms of actions, and in terms of feeling states. So you can express something without using words. All right. You can draw, you can scribble. I tell people you could, you know, tear the page if you want. You have to tape it back together to read the essay on the other side. But yeah, but you know, if if that's what comes out, whatever comes out is legitimate. It's giving you clearer information about pieces of history that you've packed away. Everything's there. We don't lose anything, right? So if you're an infant and your parents are fighting with each other with great frequency, that memory is still up there and you can find it. And once you find it, then kind of your sense of, you know, I keep distant from other people, I'm afraid they're going to explode or do something that will hurt me. Well, that's your infant part experiencing that. And once you know that's your infant part, you have a choice. You can go, okay, I could still stay distant from other people if I wanted, but now that I know it's about mom and dad fighting with each other, uh, and it's not really about me, then I can take some risks. All right. I'll I'll walk up to this person at the next party that we go to. I'll initiate a conversation instead of waiting for everybody to come to me. So understanding that all your history is there, you can tap into it, and using tools to get yourself to tap into it is the ideal process for answering your question of, you know, how do we start this journey of understanding ourselves, opening ourselves up, and being able to see that we have choices, we have a broader range of choices than we've given ourselves permission to do. So that's key for a couple to take a deeper dive into their own histories and release some of the rules and some of the thoughts, some of the feeling states that you've held on to that are not really about you, right? Those were about mom and dad yelling at each other. You're just kind of the innocent bystander that got victimized. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Yeah. So then as a as a couple, obviously working with yourself or me or or whomever to do that inner work from your childhood, because childhood it really does just affect everything. It does. It does. Okay. So what happens when you are that father that is now needing to do the deeper dive, but also trying to parent? How do we show up as a parent? How do we do better? How do, you know, how do how do these men do better than their fathers did?

SPEAKER_00 28:34

I I think most men really want to do better. All the work that I've done with men, that would be a common theme, right? I definitely don't want to turn into my father.

SPEAKER_03 28:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

Great. All right. That's a great starting point. That's a great launching pad. But you have to think of it as being on the high dive. I have the memory, I don't know if you have the memory, of being an elementary school kid climbing to the high dive, right? And then being terrified to jump.

SPEAKER_01 29:08

Oh, yeah, I just wouldn't do it. I just, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Well, that was well. I think that's the experience of a man in the face of this newborn infant, particularly when it's a boy, right? Men tend to get very excited about having boys passing on that legacy. Right. Sure. Right. And so, but now you have to find some tender parts of yourself that you've denied. The good news is that they do exist. So you have to go on a hunt. I tell I tell fathers, let's go hunting, right? Let's find these softer parts of you that you can be safe to experience with your infant and with your toddler. All right. Because they're not going to judge you, they're not going to reject you. You've got a great place to do some experiments because they're going to welcome all of those parts.

SPEAKER_03 30:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

So it's safe to cry with your infant. If you're putting your infant to bed one night and it just kind of overwhelms you that this is a piece of you, this is your baby, this is your son, and it brings up tears. Let yourself cry. Give it permission because the baby's not going to judge you for crying. The baby is going to respond in a positive way because that crying brings the baby closer to you. So allow yourself not just to think, oh, this is tender, this is really sensitive for me, but allow it to go into your body so that your body can respond to this, both with touch and with tears. And that's how you begin the journey to open up your own feeling states. And it has to be based in curiosity. You just have to be super curious about this thing in your arms. Sure. And when when your son or daughter start to move and walk around, there's such excitement for parents. Maybe tomorrow he's gonna walk. He's almost there, he's ready to walk, right? Yeah. All of that excitement is positive emotion. Right? And I have seen men actually cry at that first step from a child because it is so moving, so powerful, it's so important. It's the start of a whole new life for that person to be able to walk around on their own two feet. And so having safety in your own home is really critical. Sure. So your wife should not make fun of you for crying when your son or daughter starts to walk. There should be an enjoyment of that, a validation of those feelings. So it takes more than just you. You need to have a relationship where you will be supported and where kind of these melting into the moment will be valued by your spouse. And you won't be teased or made fun of, but you'll be enjoyed, you'll be embraced, you'll be validated, that it makes perfect sense that you know, seeing your boy walk for the first time is definitely a very moving experience. And then it's funny when he lands on his butt.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

So all things are true.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

It's interesting that what you're talking about having that vulnerability in front of your children, because that's exactly what I teach as well is that vulnerability and humility are the keys to building a better marriage. That when you are truly vulnerable and curiosity as well. You know, instead of judging your partner for what they're feeling or thinking or saying or that they're not doing things exactly the way that you would do them, it's also coming at that with curiosity and saying, why do you do this? Why do you, why do you think this way, or who taught you that, or who showed you that this is the way that it's supposed to be? The vulnerability and humility in both pieces is really, really important. And I think that's what men and women alike are both taught, don't do that, don't be vulnerable. And humility, the ego just kind of takes that away on their own.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

So well, you can tap into curiosity.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

It's so powerful if you can give yourself permission to be curious, not judgmental, right? Yeah. So your husband does it in a way that's very different from the way that you do it or that you were taught to do it by your parents. Be curious, not judgmental, right? You don't start with, no, no, no, you don't fold things that way. Right? You start with you fold different than I do. Where does that come from?

SPEAKER_01 34:51

Yeah. Right kind of talk about that though, because I think I think that's that's kind of one of the automated responses that we have is that even though we come at it with curiosity of, well, why do you do it the way that you do it? Or oh, look, you do it differently than me, and now I'm going to judge you for doing it differently than me.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

That's right. So actually, even asking the question, why do you do it that way? And even if you ask it nicely, I don't understand why you do it that way. Right? Asking a question is threatening. I try to educate couples to eliminate the question from their curiosity and from many of their interactions because a question is threatening.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

How do you tell them to communicate that then?

SPEAKER_00 35:45

Uh I I make I statements instead of asking. Okay, yep, yep, yep. Right? So I see how you're folding that. Sometimes that's all you have to do, right? Is just to make the announcement. Uh and if making the announcement doesn't get, yeah, I do it this way because my mother showed me how to do it that way. If the announcement doesn't get, then you can add to that curiosity. I want to know how you learn to do it that way. I want to know why you do it that way rather than the other way. Right? So the statement is just, you know, I see you do it different than the way I do. And the curiosity is I want to know how you learn to do it that way. Where's that come from? Yeah. Tell me more.

SPEAKER_01 36:43

That makes sense. Tell me more. I love that. Tell me more. Tell me more. Help me understand. Yes, those are such good, such good resources.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Yeah, they're great cues.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

For sure. Talk a little bit more about how we help children, like especially for when we've got teenagers and we've got toddlers and they're just starting out on their on their emotional scale here. How do we not screw them up?

SPEAKER_00 37:10

Time. Believe it or not, teenagers still want time with you. They will not ask for it, right? A toddler, a preschooler, an elementary schooler, they'll ask for it. A teenager will not ask, but they still want time. So I say ritualize time with your teenager. And that and try to do chunks of time where you're not facing each other. Teenagers are brilliant at reading your body.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

Yes. This is why my 16-year-old always starts talking when we're in the car.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

Yes. Take, go for a drive. Yes. Right? Come with me while I run errands. Right? Spend time in the car with your teenager, or spend time walking the dog with your teenager, or just walking through the neighborhood, or find a trail to walk on because you're both facing forward, and the teenager is going to talk more. They want to express themselves, but they are hypersensitive to being judged. And when they can see you full on, they can see when you lose interest. They can see when you don't like something.

SPEAKER_03 38:44

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:46

They can see when you know you'd rather be on your phone than listening to them. They're hypersensitive to those nonverbal cues and they will shut down immediately.

SPEAKER_01 38:59

For sure.

SPEAKER_00 38:59

So find ways to be with your teenager where both of you are facing the same direction.

SPEAKER_01 39:05

Love that. And then with little kids, so going back to that vulnerability, how do we flip the script? How do we teach these boys to open up and to be emotionally healthy and to not swallow all of those feelings like their fathers do?

SPEAKER_00 39:26

Yeah. One easy way to do this is to have a list of feelings. On my website, I have a free download. Everybody can go there and download this list of feelings. I think it's four pages long. There are three or four columns of words on each page. I mean, you'd be surprised at how many feeling words it's in the human language. There's a ton of them. And the truth is that your brain can recognize what you're feeling, even if you're not that familiar with the word. And that's fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 40:05

Yeah, it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

Even if that's not a word that's in your vocabulary, you read through these feeling words and you know, discombobulated will jump off the page. Well, that's a word I never use, and I hardly ever heard of it. But, you know, it struck me that's exactly what I'm experiencing today. So I tell families, put a list of feeling words on the kitchen table, put one in the area where you're going to watch television or play games with your kids, and put one in the bedroom so that you have easy access when a kid starts to talk about something they experienced. Give them the feeling sheet. Well, what did it feel like when that happened? They scan through it, they'll identify two or three genuine, real feeling experiences, then you can have a conversation. And it works. I've seen it work in families, and it expands your vocabulary for sure, but it deepens the conversation and deepens the connections that you can have with your children.

SPEAKER_01 41:17

Love that. That's really important. We've we're pretty big here on naming feelings and on, you know, like if if my five-year-old's upset right now, what do you need? Do you need a hug? Do you need time? Do you need, you know, what do we what do we need to do here? So I love that. I didn't always do that with the 16-year-old as when he was little. And now I do notice that he's a little bit more dismissive avoidant than what than what I would like for him to be. Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 41:49

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

He can he can educate himself. Pop a feeling sheet onto the kitchen table and he will educate himself.

SPEAKER_01 41:59

It's interesting. He can, he doesn't want to at this point. So I think when he starts to become interested, it it will be a thing. But yeah, it's a little bit more difficult to get him interested in that that point. So going with the judgment, you know, he just thinks that all of this is malarkey. Like I'm I'm not gimbaling, you know, like he's like, whatever, this is stupid. I'm not doing this. So yeah, it's interesting. Um, teenagers, man, they're there.

SPEAKER_00 42:30

Yeah, that's that's that's pretty common for a teenager. But you'll find that they'll be doing it when you're not watching too.

SPEAKER_01 42:39

Uh yeah, that makes sense too. Yeah. Yeah. Or his little brother will point out and he's like, Why are you so mad? He's like, I'm not mad. And he's like, Yeah, you are. Your face.

SPEAKER_02 42:49

Your face is mad.

SPEAKER_01 42:50

Like, he will point it out for him. So I'm like, eh. So yeah, it's interesting. Okay, so as we wrap up, is there anything that you would like listeners to know that we haven't covered?

SPEAKER_00 43:01

Well, I would like them to know that they can grow at any age. It doesn't make any difference whether you know you're five or sixteen or ninety-five. Yeah. You can you can grow at any age, and it is so valuable both personally and interpersonally to take the risk of letting yourself grow. Be intentional about it.

SPEAKER_01 43:30

For those of like uh my dad's age that are like 67-ish, like how where do you start? You know, if you're not a a child in a home, if you're an adult, where do where do we start? And this might even be for like a 35 year old man.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

Right. I would start with the journal books that I've published because they tap into some early childhood stories, some adult stories, and and you can't help but find Many things in there that you can easily identify with. And then that gets you telling stories that taps into pieces of your history. And the more you can share and tap into about your own history, the easier it will be to identify stressors, identify personal injury places that you can then do some work to release those because they don't belong to you. We carry a lot of burdens that don't belong to us. There's this ad on television of some kind of big monster with all the yellow sticky notes on it. And I sometimes see that and I think, well, that just represents every person in the world, right? We have all these sticky notes on it, and they don't belong to us. We need to start taking them off and letting them drop. For sure.

SPEAKER_01 45:02

These journals, the downloadable feeling sheets.

SPEAKER_00 45:05

Yeah, the feeling sheet can be down to my website. My website is www.drzn d-er h s t.com. So it's www.drvanderhorse.com. And across the top you can find uh freebies and download the feelings sheet. You can also find my book resources there. The books are available on Amazon, they'll ship anywhere in the world. Also, any bookstore in the world will order one for you if you have a favorite bookstore that you'd like to go to. Um, and there are videos on my website that educate you about different approaches to therapy. And I would encourage people to take a look at those so that you can also take yourself seriously and take a deeper dive into what are the emotional injuries that you carry, what are your sticky notes? Um, and take the risk of removing them.

SPEAKER_01 46:16

Awesome. Are you on social media for people to follow you?

SPEAKER_00 46:19

Everywhere. Everywhere LinkedIn, Facebook, all of them. All the places TikTok, TikTok, anyplace.

SPEAKER_01 46:28

Thank you so much for being on today. Thank you so much for for helping us better ourselves as well as our children.

SPEAKER_00 46:34

I've loved it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

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