3 (Useless) Questions Men Ask Themselves When Their Women Is Upset

“Hearing a woman’s pain and carrying it are two different things.” ~ Robert Bly

We men tend to ask ourselves 3 (useless) questions when faced with a woman’s upset (frustration, anger, sadness, etc):

1. What does her upset say about me?
2. How can I fix her upset?
3. What does me being unable to fix her upset say about me?

Dead-end questions. For they lead a man nowhere, except down into the darkness of his own shame (“it means I’m an idiot”) or upwards into the untouchable airs of grandiosity (“ain’t my fault; I’m too good to make her feel that way”).

Most of the men I work with tend to spiral into shame – after all, grandiosity doesn’t “need” coaching. Some have lived for years feeling trapped in a suffocating “damned if I do something, damned if I do nothing” reality of relating.

“If she’s in pain and I try to fix it, she feels worse. If I don’t try, she also feels worse.”

Thus, he’s paralyzed; stuck between incompetence and a persisting soul-desire to stay related.

What’s a man to do?

Learn how to hear a woman’s pain without carrying it.

What I’ve described so far is carrying her pain: making it about me, whether I can fix or make it better, and what it means about my character when I can’t.

Hearing her pain is about being with it, sitting in it with her, comforting her, reassuring her, without needing to make it go away.

Look, I know many men experience – as I have – a woman expecting her man to indeed carry her pain, to make it his own, and do something decisive to fix it, even if it requires he sacrifice himself at the altar of her contentment.

Which never serves.

When a man sells himself out to satisfy his woman (and vice versa), no one ends up satisfied.

We men can also learn how to help her express her upset in ways that set the relationship up for success. That’s vital, too.

We can learn to create a safe space for her – which means honoring not just her experience, but honoring our own boundaries, too – so she can speak vulnerably about what’s actually happening for her. We can help her get “beneath the level of the complaint” to the real source of her pain.

Sure, sometimes there’s an action necessary to clean up some unconscious or unskillful behavior that caused her to feel pain. Being a loving stand for boundaried communication can help reveal that.

More often than not, she just needs to know he can just be with her pain. The world has long dismissed her experience as invalid. She’s long felt abandoned in her need to feel safe.

She doesn’t need a man to carry her pain, anyway. She’s an adult.

What she does need is for her man to simply listen, and be able to say, “I hear you. I trust your experience. I’m with you in it. We’ll find our way together.”

That’d be a good start.