“Why should I be like my wife? This whole thing of appreciating is just not my thing. When do I talk like that to anyone? Not even my wife…and why should I talk to my teen like this? I just want results. I just want a good outcome. I cannot pretend to be who I’m not. I’m not a softy, like my wife or my daughter. I’m just myself, and this is just how I talk and how I’m in the world.” Some of the fathers or male caregivers of the teens I work with have made comments like these. Their mind is simply doing its job, like a popcorn machine, coming up with all the different thoughts they have been exposed to growing up as males.
If you’re the father or male caregiver of a boy (and we’re making a generalization), then you probably relate to one of the biggest goals: preparing your teen to become a man. Traditionally, this preparation involves messages like “stop acting like a girl” if he sheds tears, expresses joy, or shows fear. As long as your son isn’t behaving in ways that mirror traditional feminine behavior, then he’s earning his man cards. However, if you have a daughter, it’s likely she doesn’t shoulder the same yoke; no one demands of her “to woman up” or “be a real woman.” But if she shows emotionality, your mind may come up with categorizing thoughts like This is what girls do and even judgment thoughts: Girls are weak; they’re emotional. Showing emotional vulnerability and asking for help are behaviors perceived as signs of weakness for both men and women but particularly for men; men are taught to mask, hide, and bottle up their feelings as much as possible unless it’s anger, even if angry behaviors destroy their relationships and alienate the people they love. Your mind has also been trained to come up with reasons about the benefits of teaching boys and girls to be emotionally strong; after all, you don’t want them to be bullied or taken for a wimp or a pushover as they get older. Yet, placing these rigid expectations on your teen is actually backfiring.
Research has consistently indicated that suppressing, masking, or avoiding uncomfortable emotions can, in fact, further entrench them and make them stronger and more powerful; the more you avoid and push down these unwanted emotions, the more they fester (Hayes et al. 2004). For instance, if you were feeling sad because someone you cared about passed away and you wanted to avoid feeling down, you might drink a beer or distract yourself with TV, pretending as if nothing had happened, as parents do when using the pusher emotion management strategy, if you recall from chapter 7. However, you still feel down, and as soon as the alcohol tapers off from your body or you’re not keeping yourself busy with TV, it will simply emerge again. The more you try to avoid sadness, the worse you feel in the long term. Similarly, getting fused and acting on the thought of asking teens to “man up” is like asking them to deny, suppress, and dismiss their emotions.
Let’s take a look at this problem with ACT lenses on.
As you may recall, ACT is based on the relational frame theory (RFT) of language; this theory about language, at its core, suggests that our mind carries on all the derived relations among symbols, such as words, images, memories, and feelings, that are established throughout our life because of our learning history. There are two processes that RFT refers to quite often: tracking and pliance. These two processes are very handy for understanding how some beliefs are stronger than others regardless of how much we try to be independent thinkers.
Pliance occurs when we behave based on a derived relation of symbols without even noticing them; for example, if you grew up in a household in which the roles of man and woman were rigidly defined, you have been naturally exposed to what is “proper” social behavior for a man and a woman, such as the man is a provider, is stronger, is a protector, never cries, doesn’t show emotions in general, and the woman is a caregiver—nurturing, soft, and emotional. Because of pliance, every time you see a woman, you quickly associate her with high emotionality without even knowing her.
Tracking, on the contrary, is about noticing those derived relations among words, images, memories, feelings, and so on, established throughout our learning history, and distinguishing them from our direct experience. For instance, following with the previous example, when looking at a woman expressing emotion, your mind may come up with thoughts such as It’s natural, all women are emotional, but because of tracking, you notice that thought, have it as a hypothesis, and do your best to learn how this woman is when showing emotion, distinguishing whatever association you have about women from the person in front of you.
Now let’s zoom in on all those messages you have received, either explicitly or not, when growing up and how they may or may not be showing up when parenting your teen.
We all have been socialized within different contexts, starting in our household, school, group of friends, and later on with coworkers. Within each social context, we have learned—through being explicitly told, by observation, or by direct experience—certain ways to behave associated with the constructs of being a man or a woman. Let’s do a brief exercise to notice or track these associations your mind holds.
Exercise: Tracking Your Associations About Men and Women
Grab your parenting journal, go back in time to your childhood and adolescence, and complete these statements as they apply to you, filling in with as many associations as you can recall for each one:
Now complete the next statements about how your parents handled different situations like conflict, sadness, and so on:
Take a couple of minutes to read your responses. There is no right or wrong response; you’re simply noticing how your mind is coming up with all those derived associations about the words “men,” “women,” “dad,” and “mom,” and behaviors that come associated with them because of your upbringing. Let’s take this a step further and see how other experiences you have had, in addition to the ones learned within your family, may have contributed to associations about your role as a man and a father. Grab your parenting journal and complete these statements:
Now, let’s pay attention to what your mind comes up with when thinking about how your highly sensitive teen is misbehaving. Complete these statements:
After completing your responses, see if there are any similarities or differences between how you were raised and how you are raising your teen and teaching your teen to handle emotions. Have you been fused with beliefs about masculinity when raising your teen? The response is yours.
Your mind will naturally come up with all types of thoughts, anytime, anywhere. It’s possible that while reading a particular section in this book your mind came up with thoughts along the lines of This is too feminine or I’m being asked to show a weak response. I invite you to notice those thoughts, write them down, and write down the parenting behaviors associated with them. For instance, Ramsy came up with this: “When thinking about appreciation skills, my mind said, This is just showing weakness to my teen, and no one talks like this in real life. Then I usually don’t compliment my teen and don’t even notice what he may be doing right at home or school. When reading the assertiveness chapter, I noticed the thought, This a bunch of soft talk to say ‘no’ to my teen, and in general, I respond to his request by saying no in a very firm tone of voice, so he doesn’t come back to me with more questions.”
Noticing when you’re getting fused with any of these historical thoughts about masculinity is the first step to answering a very important question in ACT: How is it working? When you get fused with those beliefs about being a man and act on them, what happens to the relationship with your teen? What are you really teaching your teen about emotionality?
At the end of the day, these are the questions you are invited to ask yourself: is this really the legacy you want to pass on? Do you really want your teen to become yet another faceless statistic in the spiking numbers of teens struggling with emotional dysregulation?
Here is an alternative response for all those moments in which past or future thoughts, rules, or judgment thoughts along the lines of Man up, Be strong, Stop acting like a girl, or Don’t show your emotions show up in your mind when dealing with your teen: defusion. Here is how to get unhooked from those thoughts:
This defusion exercise will help you have those thoughts and choose your parenting response instead of quickly getting trapped by them.
Sometimes, without even realizing it, you may get caught by these stories. No problem. The moment you realize that has happened, just name it: Oh boy, I just got hooked by “the feminine crap story.” It’s natural. Learning to be flexible with your thoughts is a process, and throughout this book, you have been invited to commit to the process of parenting the best you can, and not to perfect parenting. Over time, defusing from these stories, letting them go, and behaving as the parent you want to be when dealing with your emotionally sensitive teen will get easier. The more you choose your parenting response, the better it gets.
1(Chapter written in collaboration with Andrew Reiner, MFA, Lecturer, Towson University Honors College)