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A composite again: details changed, a few men folded into one.
He was a few weeks into a men’s circle. Mid-forties, a teacher, the sort of man who turns up early and helps put the chairs out. That night he was talking about his daughter going off to university. He’d been fine about it, he said. Proud. Then he got halfway through a sentence about packing her things into the car, and stopped.
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Said “sorry, sorry.” Laughed. Said “I don’t know where that came from.” He tried to carry on, lost it again, and said sorry twice more. The man next to him picked up the box of tissues and held it out. Two others looked at the floor.
What I did
Not much, to begin with. I said “take your time,” and then I left a gap. Silence in a circle can feel very long when you’re the one in it, and that’s partly why it matters. If I fill it, I’m saying the same thing his sorry was saying to everyone else. Let’s move on.
I asked the man with the tissues to put the box down on the floor, where he could reach it if he wanted it. Handing someone a tissue is kind. It can also say “tidy yourself up.” He put it down, and nobody said anything for a while.
When he’d finished, I asked him who he’d been saying sorry to. He thought about it and said he didn’t know. Then he said he didn’t want to make it awkward for everyone. A bit later he said the last time he’d cried in front of anyone, he was about nine, and he’d been told to pack it in.
Why men apologise for this
I hear it a lot. A man’s voice goes, and before anything else he apologises. Sometimes he makes a joke. Sometimes he says he’s tired, or it’s been a long week.
It isn’t weakness. Most of us learned early that tears were something you did in private, if at all, and that they made other people uncomfortable. So the apology comes out before the feeling has finished. It’s good manners, pointed at the wrong thing.
It’s the same pattern I wrote about in anger with nowhere to go. Anger gets swallowed. Tears get apologised for. Either way the feeling gets cut short.
What usually shifts it isn’t me telling a man he doesn’t need to say sorry. It’s watching another man cry, not apologise, and seeing that nobody in the room flinches. A few weeks on, the man in this story still had his voice go sometimes. He just kept talking.
Give me a second
Next time you catch yourself saying sorry for a feeling, whether it’s tears, a shaky voice or getting worked up, try swapping it for “give me a second.” It asks for the same thing, a bit of space, without apologising for needing it.
And if you want a question to sit with: who taught you that crying needed an apology?
If you’d like somewhere to practise that with other men, I run online men’s groups you can join from anywhere, and men’s retreats for when you want more time.
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