Why Men Abandon Their Women’s Emotional Needs (And How They Can Stop)

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Uh oh, here it comes again.

She’s bringing one of her emotional shit storms, and it’s going to mess up my order, rhythm, and flow so much so, that it’s probably going to cost me my day.

I’m ready to bail before she even opens her mouth. Full on defense mode activated, looking for whatever way is convenient to remove myself from the situation.

This isn’t even something I’m consciously in control of, everything about me just recoils and wants to run away as fast as possible when I sense a shit storm incoming.

THE BASELINE

Men, can you relate? Do you love your woman, but want absolutely nothing to do with her when she brings her emotional intensity?

It’s normal to feel this way, and I’m saying that because I want to establish a baseline of acceptance before we really get into this.

We’re not wrong for wanting to escape when we feel a storm coming, but there IS a better way of dealing with this. A way that allows for real healing within us, our partners, and our relationships. A way that can lead to a level of intimacy we’ve perhaps never dreamed possible.

All of us men carry wounding around this dynamic with women, and when our women approach us with complaint, anger, or neediness, we feel like we’re under attack. Like our space is being invaded, and that we need to secure it as fast as possible.

The thing is, this way of relating to our women makes our relationships feel like ticking time bombs waiting to go off, and forces us to allocate our energy either toward preventing our women’s upset, or recovering from their emotional barrages.

And almost always, pushing them away or bailing on them makes things even worse by triggering them into closing their hearts, suffocating us even more, or leaving us altogether.

Let’s take a moment to share a collective head nod. I’m pretty sure all men have experienced versions of these responses, and are probably wondering how to get to a place where it no longer happens.

FULL RESPONSIBILITY

We can shift this dynamic by taking full responsibility for the quality of the relationship between our own masculine and feminine energies. Until we do, we will always point the finger at the women in our lives, blaming them for wreaking havoc on our clarity, order, and precision.

Each of us carries both of these energies, though we as men most often carry a greater quantity of masculine energy. And, because of the not-so-good relationship between these two opposite energies that is the result of much pain and violence over the years, we are all starting with a stacked deck.

We, as men, immediately upon entering this world, are conditioned into antagonizing our inner feminines, and we go right along with that because that’s where our energy wants to move due to the wounding in the collective energy fields. The issue is, if we don’t shift this movement toward harmonization, we will never have a healthy relationship with the women in our lives. To some extent, we’ll reduce women to objects for our pleasure or entertainment, and nothing more, abandoning them or cutting them out whenever they become too much of a burden to our ordered lives.

So, the healing of our relationships with our women starts and ends with what’s going on within us. When we commit to understanding and harmonizing with our inner feminines, we less and less feel that antagonism that’s been conditioned so deeply into us from a young age.

Don’t get me wrong, this is the hardest thing there is to do, and it takes a ton of conscious commitment to make progress with it. But, it’s also the most worthwhile thing we can commit to. Not just because it allows us to enjoy better relationships with our women, but because we get to be so much more at peace and at ease with ourselves.

We start to have a better relationship with our feelings, and when intense feelings arise within us, we don’t abandon ourselves. Instead, we stay present with ourselves, and we discover portals into deeper layers of our own hearts. This is such a relieving thing.

Now, back to the abandonment dynamic.

HOW TO STOP ABANDONING HER

If we take full responsibility for the relationship between these two energies within ourselves, we will understand that when our women start bringing emotional storms, it’s because they’ve already felt us moving away from them (or we’ve felt them moving toward us). It’s one motion, and as soon as we start to back away, they start to move toward us to fill that empty space.

Why?

Because the wounded feminine punishes, clings to, or harasses the wounded masculine into giving her the love that fulfills her. This is because of deep pain, and really, all she wants is to be close to her beloved counterpart.

When we stop relating to her storms as anything other than cries for love, and as indicators of how we’re still emotionally unavailable or antagonistic, we can start to heal this dynamic. We can start to make real progress in meeting our women in spaces of understanding, so that we can resolve the deep collective hurt we all carry, and enjoy more intimacy. With ourselves, and with our women.

The next time our women bring a shit storm to our nice and tidy doorsteps, we can notice our tendency to want to escape, keep them out, or blame them for messing up our sacred space. We can instead choose to be present with the intense feelings our women awaken in our hearts, and be present for our relationships.

It’s hard, I know. So hard. But, the less I abandon myself and my beloved, the more we move into a zone where shit storms don’t even need to arise. The less averse I am to my inner feminine, being present with my own feelings, the more my woman feels loved, seen, and appreciated by me. She stops feeling the need to bring a storm into my space to get my attention. She feels my love for who and what she is, and knows I’m not going to abandon her, so she’s safe.

It’s always a work in progress, and each and every one of us men is capable of doing the inner work necessary to enjoy better relationships with ourselves, our women, and our world.

All it takes is a little bit of willingness on our parts to be responsible for what’s going on within ourselves, a little bit of presence in intense moments to stop pointing our fingers at our women, and we can finally start our journeys toward harmonizing with the delicious feminine aspects of ourselves and our lives that, underneath our own turmoil, we’ve always longed for and loved so, so deeply.