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In the process of holding and sitting with many men, as with my own life, I’ve noticed different approaches for managing emotional pain. Most of us use all of these strategies at one time or another. Each strategy can be effective, or ineffective, depending on the circumstance. Each strategy has an upside and a downside.

Today, I want to explore four strategies in particular. These probably have many names by which they might be called, but I’m going to call them them ventilation, identification, suppression and containment.  And I’m going to group these into pairs: the first two, “outside the container” strategies, and the last two, “inside the container” approaches. Outside-the-container strategies are those where the emotions are clearly visible or obvious to an outside observer. With inside-the-container approaches, the emotions might not be so visible.

Outside the Container: VENTILATION

The strategy we’re born with is ventilation. Babies learn to scream and do so about every four hours. It’s a remarkably effective way of managing emotional discomfort. When babies want to be held, they scream until the world changes in a way that makes them happy. Ventilation means “let it all hang out. Show it, express it, get it out there.” Screaming is an effective and adaptive behavior for babies.

If you’re 35 and still using this strategy, you may find that it has become maladaptive; it’s not going to be as effective with your boss as it was with your mother. Each of these methods for dealing with emotional needs is very effective in some situations and not so effective in others.

If you’ve just broken up with your girlfriend, going out with a friend and telling him how hurt and sad and lonely you feel is probably a very good thing to do for yourself. Writing in a journal, listening to songs the two of you shared, and crying are all very good things. Those strategies tend to move people forward and help them process that kind of experience. The experience of having and losing that relationship needs to be ventilated.

However, watch what happens if, four years later, that same guy is still going out to dinner once a week and the entire topic of dinner is how sad and hurt and lonely he is and how devastated he was by his ex-girlfriend. You’ll notice a shift in the friends’ response; it can look like avoidance. There’s a sense of fatigue and concern; when his friends speak with each other, they say things like “wow, Mick is really STUCK. What are we going to do?” The friends are able to perceive that, while Mick’s feelings are what they are, his strategy is losing effectiveness, and has become maladaptive. What happened?

Mick is no longer ventilating; he’s moved to another strategy.

Outside the Container: IDENTIFICATION

Mick’s approach to the loss of his relationship has shifted from “something that happened to me” to “something I have become.” He has identified with the feelings, substituted “I am” for “I feel.”

Mick has taken on the event, in his character, in such a way that it becomes his new identity. It obscures other aspects of his personality. Not only is it something that he IS, rather than something he feels; increasingly, it is ALL he is. Like a weed that takes over the garden, Mick is “all grief, all the time.”

Is identification useful? Heck yeah. Identification can be a very important and adaptive strategy, and I have experienced this twice in my life, but my own experience suggests that identification is only useful for limited periods of time.

The first was during my recovery from cancer, when I heard myself say, in a support group, “I am a cancer survivor.” Having cancer was an experience where I had to manage a lot of emotional pain, primarily fear, and identifying with my experience was powerful, because I was joined by others who also identified themselves in that way. They became powerful allies and offered me a way of moving forward with my experience. When someone stands up in a twelve-step meeting and says, “I’m John, and I’m an alcoholic,” the “I am” statement is powerful; it is identification. This is a different phase of recovery than “I’m John and sometimes I feel concern about my drinking.”

With identification, the experience becomes the container for the person, rather than the other way around. If you look at Mick, he shifts in week one from “this is an experience I had that was so painful” to “this is who I have become.” The experience of losing his relationship becomes the container inside which all of the rest of his life is lived.

So the downside of identification is that it can be extremely limiting, because the shape and size of our entire life is limited by this one experience or emotion. Used unskillfully, identification cuts us off from assets we need to recover; it points us away from useful practices like gratitude and service, and it slowly consumes a person until little is left of the personality; the event becomes the new personality. When we are with people who are using identification in a maladaptive way, we sometimes have a sense that they are “wallowing in” or “stuck in” something they have experienced.

Inside the Container: SUPPRESSION

This one’s easy; it’s the preferred strategy for many American men. We stuff it down inside; we make an effort not to feel the feelings. A great strategy for suppression is to get busy, really busy. We fill our lives up with stuff to do, and we have devices, not one, but several, a laptop, an i-phone, the TV screen at the sports bar and the person we’re having conversation with, all running at once. It’s virtually impossible to feel anything at all if you run all those things at the same time (go try it.) Another strategy is to use our intellect and reasoning skills in an attempt to think our way around our feelings.

Is suppression ever a successful strategy? You bet it is!  If I’m flying on a plane and an engine blows out and catches fire, I am betting my ass that the pilot is going to go for suppression. Stuff it down, don’t pay any attention to what you’re going through emotionally, and get busy. Get REALLY busy. Focus, run your checklists, and get that fucker down on the ground. I really don’t care how you’re feeling; we’ll talk about it later.

People in crisis situations, people in combat, firefighters running into burning buildings, for all of these situations suppression is a terrific strategy. It also explains why, often, people in these situations will need emotional and psychological care after the fact. People who come back from combat situations or terrible disasters often need help later on to process what they’ve experienced, because they’re not able to process things as they are happening.

And, as you know, suppression is generally not an effective technique if, for example, you’re unhappy in a relationship, or a co-worker is consistently doing something that annoys you, or any other situation involving the deepening of relationships or other aspects of personal growth. Stuffing it down inside has usefulness, but like all strategies, there are limits on when and where it is useful. American men often overuse suppression; it’s almost a bad habit.

(Suppression, by the way, is the exact opposite of ventilation. Instead of letting everything out, we hold everything in and stuff it down inside.) If ventilation works like a volcano, suppression works like a trash compactor.

Inside the Container: CONTAINMENT

And now, my personal favorite strategy, at least right now, because it’s the most recently discovered for me, and partly an outgrowth of my Zen practice: containment. Containment is the exact opposite of identification.

Identification says, “this experience has me in its grip; I am surrounded and consumed by it.” Containment, on the other hand, says, “I have this experience inside of me; I am surrounding it, and I am consuming it. I am curious about it; I’m investigating it, looking at it from all angles, both feeling it AND observing it. There is enough space around it for me to see it clearly, and I’m interested in it.”

People sometimes confuse suppression and containment when I teach about them because, from the outside, they look the same; they’re both inside-the-container strategies, so outside observers may not be seeing a lot of our emotional lives “hanging out.” With suppression, however, the intention is to avoid feeling the emotion. With containment, there’s conscious engagement with the emotion; not just to feel it, but to explore it, exhaustively, with curiosity and also with perspective. The strategy with containment is to build a tiny bit of space around the emotional pain so that we can get our arms around it and really get a good look at it. We’re going to feel it and examine it, but without being overcome or overwhelmed by it.

A great exercise for building space is the Zen practice, “what else is happening?’ It looks like this:

My cat was hit by a car yesterday and I’m devastated. I loved her. I feel so sad. I feel like I don’t even want to get out of bed.

“What else is happening?’

God I feel so sad.

“What else is happening?”

My partner is sleeping next to me.

“What else is happening?”

I bet he feels sad, too.

“What else is happening?”

It’s a beautiful sunrise outside.

“What else is happening?”

The sound of his snoring is like purring; it’s strangely comforting.

“What else is happening?”

You get the idea, but in short, we are always more than our experiences; we are the container for our experiences. So while identification says, “you’re a dumped boyfriend, and ONLY that,” or “a victim of xyz, and ONLY that,” or “angry about your neighbor, and ONLY that” containment says, “I am infinite, and I have all these experiences within me. However many experiences I have in this lifetime, I’m slightly bigger than my experiences. I contain my experiences; they don’t contain me.” I am the sky, not the weather. I am the sky, not the bird.

Meditation is another great way to make space around our experience. What we are doing here is trying to cultivate what some describe as the “witness” or “observer.” Again, to outside observers, containment can look like stoicism, avoidance or repression, because these can look the same from the outside, but the difference is in the heart, the intention. With containment, we’re not trying to avoid what we feel; on the contrary, we’re trying to engage what we feel in a large enough field of awareness so that we can really grasp it, in context.

The last word

There are many different strategies, and each has advantages and disadvantages. Don’t get stuck! If what you’re using isn’t working, try something new. There are LOTS of ways of managing emotional pain; don’t get in a rut or a habit of using only one approach. Especially if it isn’t working, try another.

Lots of men get stuck in suppressing feelings; that one probably doesn’t surprise you. But do you know people can get stuck in ventilation? They do. People get stuck in identification. Any method we choose can be useful at times, and at others, can be unproductive or even become a bad habit, a way we’re used to doing things that no longer serves us, a screaming infant in the body of a 32 year old man.

In Touch Practice, sometimes partners will get overly attached to one management style. For men who rely on suppression, they’ll start talking in the middle of a session and keep talking; it’s a great way to avoid feeling. For others who rely on identification, they’ll go straight to their identity as “a broken person” as a way to connect; I can feel them “become their experience.” Sometimes men who prefer ventilation as a strategy will get stuck in crying; they cry from habit, because they’re used to doing it that way.

The work in Touch Practice is to keep making the container bigger, so that we are able to sit with experience in such a way that we have our arms around it. The question “what else is happening” is useful. So sometimes during practice, if it seems appropriate, I’ll suggest, “try something else.” For example, “try not crying; what else is happening?” or “Try not talking; what else is happening?” “Try not engaging erotic energy; what else happens then?” These are not suggestions intended to suppress, but rather, to expand the field, the infinite field, the sky, in which we live and have our experience. The goal is for us to digest our experience, rather than for our experience to have us!

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

Touch Practice is a sacred practice for me, and part of that is keeping confidences sacred. While a name and e-mail address are required to post a comment, feel free to use just your first name, or a pseudonym if you wish. Your e-mail address will never be seen by or shared with anyone. It is used to prevent spam and inappropriate comments from appearing in the blog. I’d really like to hear from you!