The Three Emotions That Sink Good Men

Quick test: how do you deal with your neediness? If you just cringed, you found your enemy emotion. Psychiatrist Dr. Laura Dabney has spent her career working with successful men who buried three feelings so deep they stopped recognizing them: neediness, anger, and sadness. In this Deep Cut from the vault, recorded in 2019, she maps what each one turns into when it goes underground: neediness becomes compulsive giving, sadness becomes relentless positivity and joking, and anger becomes the blowup you swore you’d never have. Jon goes first, naming his own version of all three, before Dabney lays out the way back.

The Cringe Test

Dabney’s diagnostic is simple. Say the word tied to the feeling you’ve declared an enemy, whether that’s neediness, anger, or sadness, and notice if you flinch. That flinch is the tell. Jon admits he sees all three in himself, but anger and sadness run deepest.

“In fact, right now I have a swollen knuckle from punching something. And it’s like, I don’t see myself as a violent person in any way or shape or form. It just honestly, when I wasn’t dealing with something, I didn’t know what to do with all that.”

What Buried Emotions Turn Into

None of the three enemy emotions disappear when they’re pushed down. They change shape. Buried neediness can turn into what Dabney calls pathological altruism, giving to feel important rather than giving to give. Buried sadness turns into relentless positivity, becoming, as Jon put it, the most positive person on the planet because sadness feels too heavy to show. Buried anger waits, then blows up.

“You’ve also been winning, but you don’t realize the price you’re paying on the flip side.”

The Way Back Starts With Not Invalidating the Feeling

Dabney’s method isn’t complicated, but it runs against instinct. Accept the feeling instead of arguing yourself out of it, and catch the moment you start to invalidate it, telling yourself you shouldn’t need validation, or that being sad is selfish. Journaling helps, she says, but only journaling with a purpose: catching the phrases where you turn on yourself, not just narrating the day.

“Why isn’t it self-love? Why isn’t it self-aware?… You have to start with you. And then if somebody says to you, hey, your sadness is kind of going on a long time and it’s kind of bothering me, that’s when you use your empathy.”

The Turnaround Story

Dabney closes with a composite of patients she’s worked with: a successful professional man in his thirties who had buried his anger so completely, taught from childhood that separation from family required an aggression he wasn’t allowed to feel, that he was still living at home, isolated, and could not bring himself to ask a woman on a date. He had reached a point of being suicidal alongside everything else. Slowly, in therapy, he got comfortable with the idea that some aggression, some separation, is healthy rather than dangerous. He moved out, started dating, and eventually married. Dabney still gets postcards from him of his four kids.

Listen to the full conversation, “How Men Deal With Neediness, Anger and Sadness with Dr. Laura Dabney,” here. For the full list of books this community keeps recommending, click here. Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Join a free 60-minute Brotherhood Experience on Zoom here.