Emotional avoidance: why men do it and what we can do about it

A deep dive into men's most popular coping strategy

Emotional avoidance is a hallmark of many men and an often voiced complaint by their partners. We get it all the time in our practice, from both the person doing the avoiding and the person experiencing it. Both of them have problems with it. Both of them want to fix it, but the problem itself persists. I’m here today to give an in-depth look as to why that is and what we can do about it.

To reiterate for clarity, we’re not talking about avoiding house work or child care, another complaint levied by men’s partners. We’re talking about the psychological resistance to experiencing and expressing our emotions. An avoidance of vulnerability.

If you were to be honest with yourselves right now, to those of you reading this, how many of you avoid negative emotions? Negative emotions being sadness, guilt, anxiety. Are you even aware when you are doing it? What does it look like in real time? And because we are avoiding something, what is it that you go to instead? Video games? Phone?

To be frank, there are many times I’ve had to have it pointed out to me that I was avoiding something. My partner notices it. It will be, to start, a subtle shift in my mood — more irritability — followed by a reduced participation in discussion and connection. Emotional connection is very important to both of us so when one of us notices the other drifting, we will try and bring the other around, but that is more frequently me. I’m more prone to it and after irritability/mood shift, I gravitate toward something distracting.

Anecdotally, men seem to avoid more than women, at least in our practice they do, but since this is supposed to be a deeper dive into the subject, I thought I’d take the time and see what the research says about men and emotional avoidance. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find rates or frequencies of these things. It’s difficult to quantify when and how we avoid and so it usually presents how I’m describing it: either 1) someone’s partner will express it to them and suggest they talk about it in therapy then the clients will bring it up to us or 2) the partners will directly say their husbands avoid emotions in their own sessions and that it has become a fracture in their relationship.

Let’s break down what some data suggests first and then get into why men would continue to do it and what we can do about it.

In 2005, a study demonstrated that men’s fear of emotions led to expressions of anger and hostility, even after accounting for masculinity and shame, two other areas they were studying.

“Men’s fear of emotions emerged as a significant predictor of overt hostility, anger expression, and (diminished) anger control.”

And later…

These results are also supportive of theories suggesting men’s anger and aggression serve an emotional avoidance function and/or function as a strategy to regain control (O’Neil & Har- way, 1997) and are congruent with general models of human aggression in which power- ful, negative emotional responses (not simply anger) increase the potential for aggression (Berkowitz, 1989).”

This effect is exacerbated by a diagnosis of PTSD. Men’s fear of experiencing strong negative emotions such as sadness, guilt, and emotional pain, lead to avoidance of said emotions and to regain control they become aggressive. Interesting. But what about some others?

Bear and colleagues (2014) at Stony Brook demonstrated the following, which is quite peculiar:

“We found that, for men, the extent to which they used avoidant conflict management mitigated the association between negative emotions due to relationship conflict and emotional exhaustion. In contrast, among women, avoidant conflict management did not attenuate the relationship between these negative emotions and emotional exhaustion. Thus, the moderating effects of avoidant conflict management did not accrue for everyone to the same extent.”

In short, men experienced less negative emotions and emotional exhaustion when they practiced avoidant conflict management but this was not seen for women. Does this suggest there is an adaptation ingrained evolutionarily for men to avoid conflict with their partners? If they experience less distress by avoiding as compared to women, then they would learn to avoid more frequently than their partners. But there is a problem with that. This avoidance — experiential avoidance coined in the literature — also mediates the relationship in conflicts between genders and psychological distress. Significantly in fact. This same avoidance is seen correlated highly with problematic pornography use and alcohol and drug use. And it was positively associated with psychological, physical, and sexual aggression in a college student sample. I want to quote them here:

Findings were consistent with our first hypothesis that greater levels of experiential avoidance would be associated with a greater frequency of psychological, physical, and sexual aggression perpetration. Moreover, perpetrators of both psychological and sexual aggression reporter higher levels of experiential avoidance than non-perpetrators of these forms of aggression. These findings are consistent with the scant research literature that has demonstrated a relation between experiential avoidance and physical aggression (e.g., Hayes et al., 2004; Kingston et al., 2010)

So it seems that emotional avoidance is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it can help stave off high conflict intensely distressing emotions either personally or interpersonally (e.g., between partners) and lower distress but that lowered distress, anecdotally and in the literature, seems temporary. As we often say in the field, negative emotions HAVE to go somewhere and so if we avoid talking, expressing, or experiencing those emotions, they have to leak out of us somewhere, somehow. Unfortunately for everyone, when it leaks out, it’s not in good ways.

So now we can ask the question: why do us men do this? Why do we avoid so much?

The first study I referenced, the one about men increasing their aggression due to their fear and ultimate avoidance of emotions, I think is onto something. Men are built biologically and psychologically different than women. Not only are we doers who find solutions and as I’ve said in a previous article seek to solve emotional problems through action and shared emotional experience, but we also are not given the same instructions for confronting intensely negative emotions. Think back: when your grandparent died or a pet or you had some significant emotionally distressing event occur in your life, how did you handle it?

When my grandfather died, which at the time was the saddest thing that could have happened in my life at 18, I remember not being able to cry or talk about it. I did exactly what he did with every emotion he had — I stayed silent and unable to really even feel it. When I was told a friend of mine had overdosed, I continued playing music and video games without awareness that I had continued to do so. You get this in trauma responses a lot — a dissociative experience so natural that you’re not even aware it’s happening. And that’s what I also think happens to my male clients. Most of the time they’re not even aware they are avoiding. It HAS to be pointed out to them. Avoidance in many ways is advantageous to us: we can continue providing, functioning, and playing the roles we need to play. If we address those emotions instead we may have to stop everything we are doing and that works against us evolutionarily. We’re doers. Emotions can hinder our performance and ability to keep the family going.

Obviously times have changed and OBVIOUSLY there are major drawbacks like you know suicide completion rates, our heroin/fentanyl epidemic, alcohol and marijuana use, etc, things I’ve reviewed before, but it’s almost as if we operate on autopilot with our avoidance issues and that autopilot suggests a deeper problem: our innate inability to tap into our emotional well. Anger, we’re fine with. But how many of us know how to tap into feelings of joy, sadness, guilt, irritation, disgust, or more complex feelings such as shame, despair, hopelessness? Instead, we say we shouldn’t go there, we CANNOT go there. And there it is, the fear again. The real question shouldn’t be why do we avoid, it should be why do we fear these emotions? How have we become conditioned to be terrified of what is natural and human experiences?

Another question for another time. What needs to be answered now is what can men do about their avoidance?

First and foremost, acknowledge that it’s happening and realize that while it’s nice in the moment, it will ultimately end up doing more harm than good in the long run. At some point, your spouse is going to come into the room and say you haven’t bothered to connect in weeks and that might mean less sex. No really. Make these connections. Women in long term relationships do not want to be intimate with their partners if they are not bothering to emotionally connect. Never mind all the other shit that it might come with like increased pornography use, substance use, anger and irritability.

Which brings us to point number two: take a look back at times you were avoiding and what behaviors were you engaging in? Mine is video games. I’ll notice instead of playing one hour a night, it goes from one hour to three very quickly. I notice I’m more distractible and irritable. I notice I feel I don’t WANT to connect with my partner. All these are signs we should be paying attention to. And of course there is usually an identifiable stressor that started it.

Finally, start getting in the habit of experiencing emotions. This means practice — a daily meditation exercise, ten minutes in length, where you sit with emotions and ponder on events that have happened to you. Or you try and test yourself in the moment to see if you can catch when you are avoiding and begin jotting down the time, place, and circumstance, and when you’re ready and you catch yourself, to challenge yourself to pause, hold that moment, and formulate one sentence about your emotion and then verbalize it to your spouse, friend, or close relative. It’s hard for all of us guys but we have to start somewhere. The alternative is, ironically, too frightening to think about.

-Dr. Moffitt