How to Process Your Emotions: A New Model for Men
Emotional processing can seem like an elusive art to many men. This happens for a variety of reasons. First, there’s the myth that men aren’t very emotional. Men are also often taught to ignore or control their emotions, which are neither helpful nor realistic.
The truth is that men do, in fact, experience the full spectrum of emotions just like women do. The problem is that we’ve been taught to disregard or disconnect from them. After a lifetime of practice at that, it becomes second nature.
Learning to process and respond to emotion is a valuable skill to gain, because emotions have a purpose. And, contrary to what you may have seen online coming from the modern stoicism movement and various influencers, emotions cannot be controlled or mastered.
But how you recognize, relate, and respond to them can.
That’s where the PIVOT Protocol enters as a tool for helping you walk yourself through the process of recognizing, understanding, and responding to your emotions rather than ignoring, suppressing, or thoughtlessly reacting to them.
What is Emotional Processing, Anyway?
When people talk about emotional processing, they’re basically talking about the ability to be aware of what you’re feeling, accept and validate those feelings, and express them appropriately. But appropriate expression of emotion can be difficult if, like many men, you grew up learning emotional repression instead of expression.
There isn’t one single way to process emotions. There are a few models out there with different steps, but I’ve found in my work with men that breaking something down in a process that’s easy to remember – often with a handy acronym – helps them in the moment when they’re about to do or say something they’ll later regret.
Men Really Do Experience Emotions
One reason boys and men aren’t taught how to process emotions is the myth that men don’t experience the wide range of emotions as deeply or fully as women do. While it may be true many men don’t recognize or express emotions in the same way, they do, in fact, experience them.
Have you ever had moments like these?
That flash of panic when someone cuts you off in traffic, forcing you to stomp on the breaks.
A sense of dread when your boss calls you in for an unknown reason.
The edge-of-your-seat excitement in the last few seconds of a tied basketball game or soccer match and the thrill of victory when your team scores the winning point.
That flutter in your chest and stomach when you’re about to ask someone out or text them back to ask for a second date.
Those are emotions at play. Getting cut off in traffic may cause you to feel fear – which is often quickly followed by anger in men. Wondering what your boss wants to talk about can cause you to worry, which is just a different form of anxiety or fear.
The excitement you feel in the last few seconds of a game can be a mix of emotions. The nervous tension might be fear that your team will lose. That thrill of victory might be described as joy or elation, which are different kinds of happiness.
How Do You Control Your Emotions?
A lot of men and influencers who discuss things like masculinity and willpower look the work of Epictetus and classical stoicism for inspiration. They talk about “mastering your emotions” but mistake emotional repression for self-regulation.
Before I get a semantic debate erupting in the comments, let me be clear that I’m talking about the average layperson’s interpretation of “stoic” as not feeling emotion rather than applying reason to your emotional experience.
So, the fundamental problem controlling emotions is — you can’t.
Stick with me here, because I might be going against the grain of everything you’ve been taught to believe about men and emotions. But it’s true, you can’t control your emotions any more than you can control sweating in hot weather or shivering in the cold.
That’s because emotions are part our evolutionary survival responses.
Fear triggers our fight-or-flight response in relation to a threat. Disgust tells us something should be avoided because it may be spoiled, poisonous, or toxic. Anger generates energy in body systems in response to fear to defend ourselves or someone or something that is important to us.
Feelings like happiness or love tell us that something is good for our mood or social connection, which are important for rest, health, and survival in a community. Conversely a feeling of sadness may tell us that we need to conserve energy or that we have lost someone or something important to us – which could affect our wellbeing and survival.
So, emotions serve a survival purpose the same way sweating and shivering serve a purpose. But, in our modern age, the survival part of your brain doesn’t know the difference between the threat of hearing a lion nearby and the perceived threat of a conversation with your boss.
Another problem with the idea of trying to apply thought or reason before you experience emotion is you simply can’t. The survival center of your brain, the amygdala, is responsible for your fight-flight response and the associated primary emotions like fear, disgust, and anger. It also reacts to situations faster than the thinking portion of your brain, the prefrontal cortex.
That means you experience emotions in response to a situation before your thinking brain has time to fully process those emotions. It happens in a span of milliseconds, but the lag between a situation, an emotional response, and a thinking response is there all the same.
So, what can you do if you can’t actually control your emotions?
Master Your Response to Your Emotions
Think about a time you got angry because you thought someone was snapping at you then later found out they were just tired, hungry, or distracted. The truth of the situation didn’t matter in that moment — you still had the emotional response you had.
It’s not unlike flinching when a car backfires because your brain immediately took that as a danger signal.
For some men, they may stuff that feeling of anger down and never communicate how they felt. This might then turn into resentment toward the other person, further fueling the anger. This continues until it boils over in an angry response later that leads to more miscommunication.
For others, they may create a story in their heads justifying their feelings. Instead of acknowledging that the emotion may have not been based on the actual situation, they may think, “I don’t deserve to be disrespected like that!”
So, what can you do in a situation like this if you can’t simply shut out or control your emotions?
You can choose your responses.
Many men think in terms of actions rather than insight, but learning to process your emotions provides the insight that can help you consciously act rather than unconsciously react. Learning to process your emotions isn’t a replacement for action. It’s the pathway to choosing actions that are aligned with your ideals and values.
Enter the PIVOT Protocol
Imagine the situation described above in which someone snaps at you. You feel hurt and angry in response. In that moment, you’re at a crossroads — what is often called the Choice Point in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). You can choose to:
React based on that hurt and anger, snapping back at them or retreating to stew in resentment, OR...
Process what shows up in you and respond in a way that is more aligned with your values and the person you want to be.
And this is where the PIVOT Protocol can help. PIVOT stands for:
Pause
Identify
Validate
Orient
Take Action
Going back to the earlier reference to classical Stoicism, the PIVOT Protocol is basically a process of applying reason to an emotionally charged situation to respond with thoughtful choice and action rather than reactivity or emotional repression.
Step 1: Pause
The first step here is to literally take a few seconds before reacting or responding. So many of us — especially men — are used to operating on autopilot and reacting without thinking. By injecting a pause into the process, you’re interrupting those reflexive, habitual patterns of reacting.
Remember what was described above about how your survival brain responds to a situation before your thinking brain does? Taking a moment to intentionally pause helps to stretch out that gap long enough for your thinking brain to catch up with what is going on.
It’s kind of like letting your mental engine warm up before you step on the accelerator.
How you pause can look different depending on what works for you. It might be as simple as a deep, conscious breath or using box breathing.
You might also coach yourself to pause and be aware by saying something like, “Okay, here’s the PIVOT point” or simply, “Pause.”
Step 2: Identify
After you interrupt your normal reaction with the pause, it’s time to identify what exactly is going on. This might be a longer, step-by-step process at first. But the more you practice it, the more you’ll be able to do this intuitively.
The Identify step is time to ask yourself questions like:
What is the situation I’m reacting to?
How is my body reacting?
What thoughts am I having?
What emotion is showing up in response to the situation, my sensations, and my thoughts?
Is my perception of the situation correct, or could it be different than my interpretation?
This is when you use the pause to let your thinking brain come online and assess the situation rather than reacting purely from your reflexive, survival brain.
Step 3: Validate
This one can be difficult for men, because some men confuse validating feelings with making excuses for them or get caught up in feeling guilt or shame for having a particular emotional response. But all you’re doing here is simply acknowledging that the emotion you’re experiencing is there and it somehow made sense to your survival brain. Because survival brains are good at helping us, well… survive. But they don’t know what a car is. All they know is, “Auugh! Loud noise! Danger! Danger! Danger!”
So, validation is just being aware and accepting of what shows up. You’re not labeling it a good emotion or a bad emotion. You’re not deciding if your emotion makes sense or not. You’re not judging yourself for having the emotion.
You’re simply noticing the emotion is there.
And that’s okay.
Step 4: Orient
Here is where you get your bearings and decide what direction you want to go.
In Step 2, you asked yourself if your interpretation of the situation was accurate or not. In Step 3, you validated the emotion without judging it or yourself. In Step 4, you first ask yourself if your emotional response fits the situation or not so you can decide how you want to respond.
Again, you’re not judging the emotion or yourself. You’re just deciding if your thoughts and feelings are giving you helpful information to choose your response.
If your interpretation of the situation is accurate and the emotional response fits, that lets you know that you have information that will help guide your response. On the other hand, if your thoughts and emotions don’t fit the situation, then you know those feelings are probably not trustworthy guides for making a decision in that moment.
Once you decide whether or not your interpretation of the situation and emotions were accurate, you can then choose how you will respond based on your values, the things that are important to you, and the person you are trying to be. Knowing what you want do more of, rather than just knowing what you want to stop doing, and knowing what values guide you will give you a clearer goal to move toward at that moment of choice.
Step 5: Take Action
This is the moment of truth. It’s one thing to feel differently or have better insight into what’s going on in your mind and body — but insight without action is just interesting information.
And what we’re after is change that doesn’t just help you feel better, but live better.
Are you trying to be kinder and less sarcastic? You might choose a thoughtful response rather than one that is biting or puts the other person down with a joke.
Is it difficult for you to set boundaries with people? You might decide to practice responding by telling them how their behavior makes you feel and telling them it’s not appropriate rather than keeping silent.
Do you want to learn to respond to a situation assertively rather than aggressively? You may work on standing your ground and stating your position with calm assurance rather than losing your temper and yelling.
Whatever the new responses are, it’s time to put them into practice.
An Example of Emotional Processing With the PIVOT Protocol
Imagine you’re at work on a Friday and get a notification of a message in your inbox. You click to open the app and notice it’s from your supervisor asking for a “quick meeting” at 3:00. You know these meetings are never quick and you’re supposed to pick your kids up from school at 3:30. Typically, you struggle with setting boundaries and immediately reply and agree to the meeting.
You then call your partner up to see if they can pick up the kids even though you know Fridays are one of their busiest days — which is why you are the one that picks the kids up that day. You’re already tense when they remind you that it’s hard for them to get someone to cover for them this late in the day. An argument follows but they eventually agree. You spend the rest of the day resenting your supervisor, your partner, and yourself for the situation.
By the time the meeting rolls around, you’re in a bad mood and get defensive with your supervisor. The meeting doesn’t go well, which then throws a shadow over the whole weekend.
How would emotional processing with the PIVOT Protocol help in this situation?
Pause
Before getting swept up by the emotions, thoughts, and sensations you’re having you pause and take a moment to check in with yourself while taking a few slow, steady breaths.
Identify
You ask yourself what is going on and identify that you’re anxious about the meeting because you worry that it will interfere with your desire to be there for your kids when they get out of school. As you take stock of what’s going on in you, you realize the situation has created tension between your values of being a good parent and a good employee.
You notice that your shoulders and chest feel tight and there is a heavy feeling in your stomach. Your thoughts are images of your kids standing outside the school, wondering where you are while you’re stuck in your supervisor’s office getting yelled at.
Using a skill like Noticing and Naming, you might even voice what you identify out loud like:
“I notice I am experiencing the emotion of worry. I am feeling concern for my kids and irritation at my supervisor. I notice I am imagining a future possibility and feeling torn between my responsibilities to my kids and desire to be a responsible employee.”
Validate
You remind yourself that all of these emotions and experiences make sense because you do want to be a good parent but also a good employee. Rather than judging yourself, your conflicted feelings, or justifying your irritation, you acknowledge and accept those emotions are present.
Orient
Knowing that you are trying to improve your ability to set boundaries at work and guided by the values of being a good parent and supportive partner, you consider what action would be more aligned with these things than simply agreeing to the meeting and spending the rest of the day seething with resentment.
After considering your options, you decide that it would be more aligned with the person you are working to become to reply to your supervisor’s email and suggest meeting earlier.
Take Action
Having given yourself time to pause, check in, and decide what to do you sit down and write your email:
“Hey, I got your message about wanting to talk at 3:00. As you may remember, I usually leave at 3:10 on Fridays to pick up my kids and would probably be more distracted watching the clock than engaged in our conversation. What do you think about talking at 2:30 so I can give you my full attention?”
You send the email off with the understanding that you cannot control your supervisor’s response, but that you’ve taken action to establish a boundary and suggest an alternative rather than automatically agreeing to the meeting as you might have done in the past — hopefully influencing your boss to meet you earlier.
You can find out more about the difference between control, influence, and concern in this article: Dealing With Setbacks: Survival Tips for When Life Doesn’t Go According to Plan.
You Can Do This!
If the above example seems awkward and clunky, that’s okay. Like any new skill, it’s likely to feel odd and unnatural at first.
Whether you use the PIVOT Protocol or another model for emotional processing, it will take practice when you first start pausing to become aware and choose a different response. This is because you’re rewiring how you respond to your emotions rather than getting pushed around by them or caught up in trying to control them.
The more you practice it, the more it will become like second nature to you.
I’ve created a free graphic with a step-by-step guide to the PIVOT Protocol that you can save and download to your phone to refer to any time you need it.
Need Help with Emotional Processing?
I hope what I’ve laid out here gives you some helpful ideas to follow. But if you’re looking for more one-on-one support with emotional processing, I can help. I specialize in providing therapy for men in Arkansas who are exhausted from trying to overthink their way through life and ready to start moving forward.
Click the button below to contact me or access my calendar for a free discovery call.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear how you might use the PIVOT Protocol to help respond to one of your challenges in new ways. Feel free to share your ideas in the comments below!