Am I a Robot?

My wife would often say to me “you’re not here, you don’t have any emotions.” Her statement completely baffled me. I would scoff and think to myself “I am here and I have emotions! I feel happy sometimes, I feel mad sometimes, and I feel sad sometimes. I even feel depressed sometimes!” Back then, I was still struggling with my addiction to pornography and even in the early days of recovery she was saying it. While I did feel those things, what I now realize is that those feelings were just the surface-level result of much deeper emotions underneath.

In one of my very first sessions with my recovery counselor, he gave me a list of feelings to use as a tool to learn how to communicate my emotions to my wife. The list was broken down into 6 categories with a further 10-15 feelings listed underneath each one. I had no idea there were so many different ways to feel! Admittedly, I did not know what many of the words actually meant. Sure, I knew the academic definition of the words, I had read them in books or learned them in school, but I had no idea what it meant to feel that way.

Learning to connect with my feelings to be able to communicate my emotions was really difficult for me at first. I remember calling my sponsor and telling him, “I don’t feel like a human, I feel like a robot.” He explained to me I had been using my addiction, since childhood, to cope with, push down, ignore, and hide away anything I was feeling. As a result, I had conditioned myself to automatically run from and avoid my emotions. Worse yet, since I had been doing that since I was 11 or 12 years old, I never actually learned how to cope with anything in a healthy way and I was stuck using the tools of a boy in the world I was now experiencing as a man.

It stung to hear that from my sponsor, but I knew it was true. What I was lacking was maturity. I was an angry little boy inside the body of a man. My counselor challenged me further. He helped me understand that my go-to emotion, anger, was actually just a mask I presented to people because I was not able to connect with what I was actually feeling. His words, “anger is a secondary emotion” have stuck with me ever since. He challenged me to treat my anger just like my addiction and commit to not acting out in it. When I felt it well up, I should reach out with a call to my sponsor or a guy in my group and unpack what I was actually feeling underneath the anger, using the list of feelings he provided as my guide.

In the days, weeks, months, and now years that followed, I have made a lot of calls to “dig” into what I am feeling so I can connect with it, sit with it, and cope with it in a healthy way. Doing this has helped me grow to understand myself and how I feel, and since the words from the feeling list now have meaning to me, it has helped me become more empathetic with others as well. Overall, I matured from a stoic robot who was actually just an angry little boy, to a man who has complex emotions who is able to feel them, embrace them, communicate them in a healthier way and not just run and hide from them. I am by no means perfect at it; however, I now have the emotional muscle memory to turn to the healthy way instead of the unhealthy way of my past addiction.

I know I am not alone; feelings and emotions are a really difficult topic for most men, myself included. As a kid, I was taught by TV, movies, and music, that it is not “manly” to have feelings and talking about them means I am “weak” or “soft.” I was often told growing up something along the lines of “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and “be tough.” My pornography addiction was a way to cope with the emotions I believed I had to conceal. My counselor said, “one of the most manly things you can do is tell the truth” and that includes telling the truth about your feelings and emotions. It was a really hard thing to do, but I learned a healthier way and it has changed my life for the better.

I could not do it on my own though. Talking with my counselor, my sponsor, and the men in my recovery group, I practiced, daily, being honest about my emotions until it became a new habit. I had to unlearn the old behavior and learn a new one with their help and support. I would never have grown and matured in isolation. If you are reading this and what I have described sounds familiar to you, I would love to connect with you and hear more about your story. I know from my own recovery journey how scary it is to bring your struggle to other people, but you do not have to go it alone. Reach out, there is help!