Building Emotional Intelligence in Boys and Men

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One of the hallmarks of a great leader is the ability to revisit a foundational truth when the stakes get higher.

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Last year in episode 73, Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst introduced us to a framework that changed the way many of you look at growth. The three Rs read, reflect and respond. Since that conversation, I've received so many emails, especially asking about the boys in our career, the grandsons who are clenching their fists, going silent, or struggling to name the secondary grief they are carrying. Today, Gloria is back in the boardroom to help us take her 50 years of wisdom and apply it to one of the most critical missions we face, protecting the emotional future of our men and boys.

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Welcome to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Nurturing through Adversity. In this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of Grandparents Raising Grandchildren as we navigate the complexities of legal, financial and emotional support. I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society. Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of child rearing for children who have experienced trauma and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of kinship care.

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We'll discuss how we can change the course of history by rewriting our grandchildren's future, all within a supportive community that understands the unique joys and struggles. This podcast was made especially for you.

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Welcome to a community where your voice is heard, your experiences are valued and your journey is honored.

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When he first arrived, it felt like a never ending cycle of hurting my grandson's stomach, his head, his knees hurting. It was constant. I'll admit there were days my journal was less than patient.

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I wrote, I feel like I'm raising a seven year old hypochondriac. Is he truly in pain or is this just a plea for more of me? But then I sat down with Dr. Gloria Van Der Horst in episode 73 and she gave me the three R's. I stopped trying to fix the stomach ache and started to read the room. I realized his body was simply speaking the language he didn't have words for yet. His grief didn't have a voice, so it had a headache. His fear didn't have a name, so it had a stomachache. I'm bringing Gloria back today because her techniques didn't just help me get in touch with his feelings, they helped me get in touch with my grandson. Today he's happier, more grounded, self secure and confident. Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst is a New York Times best selling author with 50 years of wisdom. We are moving beyond the basics today to look at how we can stop the emotional robbery of our boys and give them a vocabulary that reaches deeper than their physical pain. Welcome back, Gloria. It's so nice to see you again. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here and looking forward to this conversation. Gloria, it's said that boys often somaticize their trauma because they've been culturally conditioned to believe that feeling is a weakness but hurting is acceptable. Can you tell us how that culturally handicaps our boys and limits their access to a full emotional range and why our positions as kinship caregivers gives us a unique opportunity to break that cycle. You do have a unique opportunity, right? Educating yourself and actually understanding why we have such an impact on boys in particular. We limit the range of feelings that they can express. We do it first, I think, unintentionally, don't kind of set out with a program to do it. It happens over the course of just the natural cultural experience of raising boys. And we do have a very, very strict, specific culture for raising boys. We completely shut them down in terms of the softer emotions, right? We don't want them playing with dolls unless they're soldiers.

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We don't want them in the dress up corner in kindergarten unless they're putting on uniforms. We don't want them in the kitchen part of the preschool.

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Right? They grow up to be chefs, but still, when they're in preschool and kindergarten, we don't want them playing as though they enjoy cooking or cleaning.

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We just completely eliminate kind of half of the range of just the natural curiosity and interest and capability that children have.

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And we've done it forever. So the entire population is. I'm going to call it pickled. Right? My mother used to make pickles. She had these huge ceramic jars in the basement and she filled that with vinegar and spices and then put these cucumbers in there. And over time, they would change into something completely different. We do the same thing with boys, right? We pickle them and turn them into something completely different than the way they were designed.

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The only time that you're allowed to shed tears is actually in jubilation, when you have won, right? When you've been the victor, your team has come in first or beat the other team, right? You can shed tears of joy, but if you've made a mistake that has caused your team to lose the game, you're not supposed to cry, you're supposed to stifle that. When in fact, that's tragic. That's truly a sad experience. If I Dropped a ball or missed a shot, and it caused my team to lose this very important game. I should be crying and somebody should be comforting me, but boys are not allowed to do that. So let's talk about the new framework that you've developed, the three Rs of growth, which stand for read, observing the behavior, reflect, looking beneath the surface, and respond, leading with empathy rather than discipline. Absolutely.

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Absolutely. It's designed for adults to be able to expand their own understanding of themselves, because we have to understand ourselves before we can reach to our children and grandchildren and for them to understand themselves. So the deeper dive that you take into your own brain and your own history, the easier it will be to help your grandchildren.

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The truth is, our brains hold on to everything. Right. They have memories, even from the last trimester in utero.

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Wow. It's fascinating, isn't it? All right, it is.

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They have sound memories, for sure, from the last trimester, and motion memories as well. And from the moment you're born, your brain just records everything. It all gets packed up there. None of it gets lost. But it's difficult to access unless you're doing that intentionally. And that's why the book Reflect Respond is really powerful, because it helps you to intentionally access your pieces of history. And when you can understand your pieces of history, you can facilitate your grandchildren accessing their pieces.

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Right. And the reason that you're raising your grandchildren is that something traumatic happens, has happened to them. Right. Their lives have been turned upside down in some way. So you really want to help them find those pieces of trauma that are impacting them. And what's amazing to me is that as I help them with their trauma, the layers of trauma that I've experienced, and I care very much about the legacy that I'm leaving them emotionally so that they are not raising children that are repeating the same patterns that we have, or they are, that it peels away another layer within me. Good, good. So I think we're doing it together, which is a beautiful thing. And there's no shame in that. Not at all. In fact, there's joy in that. And just the development of each person is powerful. So the more. It's like energy, right? More energy that you can uncover and release from your own history, the more energy you have available to interact with your grandson or your granddaughter. So we want energy. We need energy. And this is hard work, right? This is not what you're supposed to be doing. No. But I'm so thankful that I'm having the opportunity to make these breakthroughs at this Late age in my life.

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And yes, it is difficult, but I think we teach more through example than we do in any other way. It's the greatest gift that we can give our grandchildren.

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Absolutely. So you've been at this for 50 years? That's right. That's a long time. What's your wisdom on the long game of development, moving from the preschool years to adulthood? How are we raising a more mature generation by doing this? It's critical, all right, that we legitimize the power of emotion for all human beings. We've given permission to women to be emotional and to hold on to their emotional states. We've historically limited, restricted and shamed males for holding on to feeling states. That's changing, and I'm delighted to see that that's changing. And as that changes, there's going to be kind of an improvement in the way that the entire culture can function, Right.

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We will function better as a society when the, the men in our culture can have access to the full range of emotions. You can do a better job of problem solving. You could do a better job of creating and designing if you have access to the full range of your feeling states. So this is definite progress for the culture as a whole that it's inclusive, incredibly powerful on the individual level. So as you as a grandparent are interacting with your grandson and your granddaughter, and you're giving them space to be emotional, to really explore their feeling states and see how are those represented, right? Sometimes I can't put it into words. Sometimes I can find it in my body, right? I got an ache someplace, right? We talk about my heart aching, right? And often we have aches in other parts of our bodies that are actually emotional expressions. And if I can open myself up and open you and your listeners and watchers up to really understanding that your body really holds emotional information. So, you know, if you've got a tense part of your body, have an interaction with that part, talk to that part, right? Figure out what that part is really trying to do to educate you about your own emotional state. Because it's doing that. That's part of its job.

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Could this not be the source of a lot of illness, long term illness? It definitely is, right?

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We hold tension in our bodies.

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We hold information in our bodies. And men in particular have been educated not to verbalize feeling states, not to recognize feeling states, not to name feeling states. And so it shows up in their body instead, right? It shows up with heart problems, right? It shows up with gastrointestinal problems. It shows up with just Physical strength problems, headaches.

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Your body is trying to help you. You mentioned a book, the Body Keeps the Score. Absolutely. Bessel van der Kolk's book, the Body Keeps the Score, is an excellent book, and it's an excellent way to think about developing your own relationship with your body. Well, speaking of physical ailments, so many of us as grandparents are getting older. We're more tired than we were when we were younger.

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How can you help us when we have caregiver fatigue? We're getting complaints from these children, and we're just too exhausted to address them at the moment. What is a healthier way that we can deal with them rather than just shoving it aside and saying, oh, you're being a baby. Being a grandparent. You're supposed to visit your grandchildren periodically, have fun with them, right? And then go home and live your life. Right.

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You're not supposed to be 24 7, available to them. So naturally you're going to get tired, you're going to get exhausted. Parents get tired and exhausted, but somehow. We bounce back a little more easily. Of course, that might get stored in our bodies and be the reason that we age a little more quickly. I know parenting has aged me. I'm sure. I'm sure it has. And that's why it is so important that. That you increase your awareness of what is changing in your body and that you do some of the emotional work necessary to release that tension. We all carry tension. It's normal, it's natural. That's just part of being a human being.

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But I don't have to say, solidify that tension, right? It doesn't have to turn into a repeat headache. It doesn't have to turn into a muscle strain that just keeps coming back over and over and over. So we have to pay attention to our bodies. And I would love for people to do a better job of actually communicating with that part of your body that is telling you, I'm holding something that's valuable and it's hurtful. So don't just rub it and ignore it.

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Don't just put some aspirin in your body and think that's going to take care of it. Find out what that part of your body is trying to communicate to you. There's a resource that's contained there.

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If you take advantage of it, your grandkids have more energy than you do, right? They're going to be busier than you are. They're going to want more attention than you have the resource to provide. So kind of the interaction here is how do you value the process that they're going through? Because their needs are critical and really important, but you also want them to respect that your energy is limited and that you have to restore yourself. I had a good conversation, actually, two conversations this week, one with the kids therapist and one with a woman who has adopted two children.

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And they are older parents as well.

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She said one of the things they found is that they have younger babysitters that can bring more activity and interaction with the children physically because they're unable to, which I thought was a great solution.

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And the therapist, I explained to her my grief in having to be a disciplinarian when I wish I could be more of the grandmother that just has the kids on the weekends. You know, it's just fun, easy tampering.

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And one of the pains that I found that I was holding within myself was that it grieves me because in particular, my granddaughter has some developmental issues, and she doesn't progress the same way my grandson does. I see. And my experience with my own children was that if I disciplined them several times about something, gave them consequences that they would learn and change their behavior, it doesn't happen the same way with her.

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And the pain I was feeling was that I think she feels so alone. She has so many issues, mental and physical, and I just want to be someone that empathize with her more. So we developed a new way for me to communicate discipline with her differently than I do with my grandson and have with my children, in that I express my feeling, I explain my emotion as to why I'm disappointed. That's excellent. That's excellent. That's it. And it's working. It's working very quickly. And it relieves me of the grief and the feeling I've been holding within. Right. That's hurting me.

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You've changed the palette. You've really changed the palette. Right. So that there are some brighter colors available to both of you. That's a perfect example about a pain that I was feeling within myself and anger that came from previously right in my life that I could dispel from within my body, open up my heart more to her, and solve a problem. Just fascinating. Fascinating to me.

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It's wonderful. And it's. If we all keep in mind that anger 90% of the time is a secondary emotion, not a primary emotion, and we need to be looking for, what did I feel first? Right. That feeling was so uncomfortable that I went to anger in order to get release from the primary feeling. So in this story you're telling about Your granddaughter, that primary feeling might have been sadness, right, that she's struggling more than the average little girl at that age.

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It might have been confusion about why is she struggled, both of those. And it's funny because we do these things over and over and over and get the same results that are not successful. And. And for me, what I've learned is that when I hit a wall in this process, in any process in my life, it's something I've become aware of because of this situation especially.

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I've got to keep going until I found the answer. Well, and you have access to a therapist that you could just describe, here's the experience, here's what's happening, happening. And then that opens up the possibility of looking for a different avenue, a. Different way, which is why we need people like you and experts that we can voice our feelings to that have the knowledge that you all have. So I can't express enough the importance of having a safe person to talk to about these issues. Otherwise they just stay inside and fester and cause us to trip and fall. If they stay inside, trust me, they're going to hurt you.

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I get it. I get it. Okay. Well, Gloria, this has been wonderful. Again, I always enjoy talking with you.

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Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your expertise. You're quite welcome.

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Step into the reflection room with me. Think about the child in your career. When they act out, do you see a behavior problem to be fixed or an emotional handicap needing a bridge?

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Gloria's work reminds us that growth requires the space to reflect before we react. Here's your quick win this week. Try the first R read.

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When a conflict happens, don't say a word for 60 seconds. Just read the room.

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What is the emotion behind the action? Is it fear?

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Is it grief? Simply naming it, even to yourself, changes the chemistry of the conversation you will have with your child. So we've talked about the physical rescue and the warrior heart required to step into the second cradle. But what happens when the greatest hurdle to your family's future is is the emotional weight of your own past? Next week, we're beginning a landmark series with Dr. Anthony Szilard. Anthony isn't just an author.

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He's a professor of leadership in Rome who has coached the CEOs of Disney, GE and IBM, as well as cabinet ministers for the G20. He's joining the project to help us apply high level leadership psychology to to our most intimate struggles.

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We're diving into his award winning book, Love and Suffering to explore the defensive shields we build around our hearts. If you've ever felt that your resentment toward the past is obstructing your ability to love in the present. You just can't miss this episode. We're going to learn how to break the emotional chains and reclaim the present moment with our grandchildren. It's time to move from transactional living to transformational leadership.

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You are the keeper of the future, and your presence is the most sacred thing your family has. We are 2.7 million strong, still nurturing and still here.

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I'm Laura Brazan, and I'll see you in the next boardroom.