Men dealing with fear is one issue that is so common among guys, yet hardly talked about.

Questions to consider:

• How much of a man’s defensive posturing covers up his feelings of fear?
• Are we really that far removed from that scared little 5 or 6 year old boy inside of us?
• How does running from the fear hurt us and our loved ones?

The culture of men has no room for fear in our culture. American culture encourages guys to stuff it, annihilate it, drink it away, or obscure it with enough anger or rage. Men and fear don’t mix: they never have.

From ancient icons of warrior-kings to modern movie archetypes, men have historically been engaged in a war on fear, which has had negative effects on the planet and the environment, as well as in our families and relationships with ourselves.

Instead of staying with the emotional (and often physiological) experience of fear, men run from it. They hide, and, over time, construct fantasies and illusions that feed the fear and make it exponentially larger than it really is. We suppress and avoid the construct of fear, not really the fear itself. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” proclaimed Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address in 1932. The walls we construct around our fear makes us avoid it more.

We create imaginary sand castle fortresses, when the reality is that when we can truly experience our fear – in a lived, experiential way, and not just thinking about – then it reduces and goes away. Fear, like any emotion, is a natural emotion that needs to be processed. Think bodily functions, or how the body maintains itself in homeostasis.

Dealing with fear is critical to improving our relationships with others, be they business partners, wives and girlfriends, our children or, most importantly, with ourselves. Fear can be dealt with, but it needs acknowledgement. What it doesn’t need is to be swept under the rug anymore, because that just doesn’t work.

It’s wedding season, and a lot of guys are getting ready to move down the aisle. They’ll either walk, or they’ll slink, or, quite possibly, they may kick and scream and need to be pulled down it. Does one of these styles describe you? Or, a better question might be, would your better-half-to-be describe you in one of these ways?

Wedding jitters are quite normal. They reflect a certain anxiety on a number of different levels. First, we come to the acceptance that this is the woman that we will spend our lives with: living with, having sex with, sharing the rest of the moments of our human existence with. Wow. It’s a powerful experience either way. It’s totally normal to feel scared, and worry that you’ll replicate your parents’ marriage, for better or for worse.

Wedding terror is a whole other thing. It’s different from normal jitters. Wedding terror is paralyzing in a way that prevents forward growth toward getting married. Wedding terror is when men shrink behind fear and freeze. Forward momentum slows down to a standstill. The bride-to-be is often confused, angry and lashes out over and over again at her guy, who continues to backtrack and avoid the conflict.

Some couples I know operate under this m.o. One partner is hell bent on marrying, and the other (many times the guy, but not always) shrinks behind the fear. Their whole relationship survives on the “I Do” proposition, and lives in the future more than it does in the present.

There are real fears associated with wedding terror – fear that the marriage will be as distasterous as his parents’ was, fear that he’ll make a poor partner and that he’ll let her down, fear of growing bored in 20 years, fear that, and this is a big one, he’ll lose his independence and his bachelorness.

It’s hard to stay in the “fear place” and communicate what is hard to communicate. For guys, it’s not easy to speak from their fear, and thus we end up shrinking behind all of the above examples. Sometimes, the work is deeper, and requires counseling to identify and gain awareness about old tapes, messages and faulty beliefs we have about marriage and our role in it. Sometimes, we are programmed with these messages, and they run us so unconsciously that’s it’s really hard even knowing that they’re there.

Fear of anger is just as preventative for growth as is anger itself. For men, a lot of times being afraid of their anger and the effects of playing out their anger makes their mental health worse off. 

Many men I speak to are afraid of the damaging effects of their anger on other people. They are simply afraid of unleashing what they think will be destructive anger onto their mates, partners, co-workers or family, so they muzzle it. Men are known to stuff their anger, suppress it, mute it or fail to communicate it. This creates a host of problems. The anger is in their, building up over time like a pressure cooker, and needs a release valve to depressurize it.

So, without a good valve, the anger gets mutated. It comes out as sideswipes, quips, sarcasm or criticism. It is worn on the sleeve and becomes part of one’s personality structure. It becomes “who we are,” and we forget or simply don’t have a clue about how to deal with it effectively, for fear that we’ll do it ineffectively and be rejected by others for our rageful behavior.

We get afraid of our own anger, but the reality is that anger is a normal and natural force that needs expression just like the other feelings that we experience, such as sadness, pain, happiness, etc. But, somehow along the way, either by cultural forces or gender expectations or both, we as men learned to stuff that natural force that is anger. We hid it, and stopped its organic and expressive flow. 

So, learning to express our anger in a healthy way is a must, to find better mental health and more open and happier relationships. Learning to simply say “I’m angry about this,” or “I’m angry at you” are acceptable and non-violent ways to express yourself. It’s difficult to do, because we’re usually fixated on the person that caused us to be angry, and subsequently spend all of our time and psychic energy damning them and their actions that caused us to be angry. Taking responsibility for our own anger is a must, and we must learn to get better in touch with our own anger, so that it does not drive us into the ground and run our lives.

A lot of the time, we lose valuable experiences that take place in the present moment because we are busy “living” our lives in our heads, either lost in the memories of the past, or fantasizing about the future, where life will be better. It’s difficult to stay planted in the present moment, because that is where our minds don’t want to stay.

Men tend to avoid the experience of their emotions and feelings by living in the past or the future, and have a difficult time dealing with the present moment. Some men avoid their present moment experience by staying in their heads all of the time, and “thinking too much.” Some just avoid the present moment by not having their experience of anger, of pain, of sadness, or of grief. The failure to attend to these crucial experiences means that we have to find surrogate places to be. 

Growing up, many of us learned to stuff our emotions or feelings, and started creating a life that avoided the pain of the present moment. It was too hard then, and it’s too hard now. We build lives on top of these individual experiences of pain, fear and sadness, and then lament when our problems are getting the best of us. We forget that we are the ones that created a lot of the problems that we experience, because it’s been too long and our problems have been embedded in our lives for as long as we can remember.

Learning to be in the present moment is truly living our lives, and not living in the false realities of the past and future. It is difficult for people to do this type of living, especially when there are many places inside of us that are too scary to revisit.

Meditation, yoga, therapy, and other vehicles of mindfulness are all ways to get back into the beauty of the present moment. Deep breathing is also a practice into accessing the present moment. 

Learning to have our feelings and experiences, and then communicating them to the ones we love is a form of acceptance of the present moment. We are truly living our lives when we do this.

The work that I do with men is very much grounded in the present moment. Most of the problems that we experience are byproducts of living in the past, in memories about how things used to be (for better or for worse) or in the future, where things look better than they do now. Happiness, change and personal and relationship success all lie in living in the present moment, and developing present-moment awareness about how to access the feelings and emotions that come up in that moment.

In working with men, the present moment is often difficult to experience. Men tend to hide their feelings, or not be in touch with them at all. Men I work with tend to have found residence in their heads, which makes their problems worse. There is an unconscious tendency to try to figure out or fix problems from the head, which doesn’t always seem to work. If it did work, we wouldn’t need therapy.

To experience the present moment, feelings can slowly surface and find the light they need to burn away. Fear, pain, anger, sadness – all want to run their natural courses, which in an organic sense is to process and to leave. But, because we learned poor coping skills (defense mechanisms) to deal with those very painful experiences, we do not have the experience of the present moment and keep those feelings frozen and stored away, where they don’t reach the light of day and melt away. 

Counseling with me is an experiential process, because I work from a framework called Gestalt Therapy. IT’s a little different than just talk therapy, because it is learning from experience in the present moment. Gestalt Therapy works with the present moment as it unfolds in the therapy transaction, often through experiments in the session. It is effective at helping clients “get out of their heads” and into their experience of living, where the pain resides and true transformation can be had.

So you aren’t sure if you want this relationship. OK. Maybe it’s been really great for a while, and now you’re just not sure. You know you’re confused, that’s for sure. And you think you want to stay with this girl, but, damn, there comes the confusion again. OK. You’re sure that that you want it now – the times got good again! Oh, wait, uhh, maybe it’s going bad again…. you just have no idea, and you are driving both of you crazy.

Here’s what I think: something else is going on (you’re thinking, yes, Jason, of course it is). Here’s some (oversimplified) explanations that might point you in the right direction and help lower your immediate confusion. These tips/ideas are by no means a quick fix, and understanding where you are stuck will take some time and work to unravel (preferably in men’s counseling). But, it’s a beginning to bring your sanity back.

One: maybe you’re afraid to commit to her. The stereotype that men are afraid to commit in an intimate relationship has some truth, and, although I shy away from stereotypes (especially about me), this one may have some truth to it. Is this you? You may not know the answer to this, except to know that when you get closer in your relationships, you freak out and either directly (or more likely, indirectly) “plug out” or “check out” of your relationship.

Two: you do really know what you want, and it’s not with her. Except you’re too afraid to be alone, and the mere idea of being with the loneliness could keep you in your relationship, even though you don’t want to be in it at all. It’s “sustained comfort,” and you can have this is you want. But it’s fear that is motivating you, and you’re not taking responsibility for your own happiness, and not allowing your beloved the chance to get on with her life and meet someone else.

Three: You’re scared of not meeting someone again (or someone like her). It took you this long to meet her, and the idea that it will take you all that time again is really overwhelming to you.

Four: You have messages from the past about saving your relationship, or not being a kind of person that ends a relationship. The thought of it is incompatible with your idealized image of yourself. You don’t see yourself as someone to end this relationship, help it, or make it grow. You stay trapped in the relationship, and in indecision.

Taken further, some guys then stay stuck in the relationship, and then do stupid stuff and push their girl away, so that she is forced into ending it. And then you don’t look like the bad guy, because she ended it. If you’re doing this, get in here right now and see me. That’s just passive-aggressive behavior, and you need some help communicating yourself clearly and directly.

So, these are some ways that guys stay in relationships, and really don’t want to be there. Let’s talk if one of these things defines the way you do relationships.

- Jason