Growing up, your man may have never witnessed an adult who could regulate their emotions. I hear this more often than not from the men I’ve coached. Maybe they saw yelling, maybe the silent treatment, and maybe even complete avoidance.

What happens is we learn the way to deal with uncomfortable emotions is to well, not deal with them. 

Often, if this is the childhood experience the man in your life has had, he will view small situations as a crisis and complete chaos. He may have saw shame stop him from speaking up about the realities going on around him, and never feeling like he could trust that his emotions were safe.

He might have learned that what people thought and that the intellect was more important than how he felt.

If so, then He learned codependency, enabling, and overachieving, and overprotecting was love. 

There comes a time when he will want to try a different way of living for himself and the family he’s creating. But he won’t know...

Have you ever wondered, when you see another person upset, “what the heck do I say right now?” or “this is so awkward!” Do you wonder how to draw a quiet, withdrawn teenager out of their shell and get them to talk to you more, to open up to you if there’s distance in the relationship? Do you wonder “why doesn't my child listen to me?”

When your partner is upset or hurting - and you want to help but you’re so worried about the problem you don’t even know what to say and everything you DO say seems to be the wrong thing? 

Or what about when your spouse is having a hard time, say it’s a problem at work, and you know the solution, but the more you offer suggestions, the more frustrating the conversation becomes? 

The #1 reason even the most “well-intended” conversations can fall flat - and it has to do with the role we are taking on in the moment we are witnessing a loved one having a hard time.

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Have you seen the Cruella Deville movie yet? So good. I’m always fascinated with a good origin story. I have some metrics I use when watching movies, a few rules I apply on whether the story is categorized as good or not. And this is part of how I raised my children to critically think about the media – the books and movies and entertainment they take in – I wanted my children to be able to discern between heroes and heroines to look up to, or whether to dismiss them even though the story might be entertaining.

And so with that set up, let’s first talk about the metrics I use. And this comes from a philosophy I used when homeschooling my children for seven years – we applied the style of literary analysis promoted by Daniel Taylor in his book, The Healing Power of Stories, we applied his framework to how we would discuss literature.

The art of telling a good story is powerful. Stories and characters add meaning to our lives and can remind...