When Men Shut Down: Understanding Your Emotional Withdrawal

"Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it--what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone. To get rid of the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy. In order to follow the path of knowledge one has to be very imaginative. In the path of knowledge nothing is as clear as we'd like it to be. Warriors fight self-importance as a matter of strategy, not principle.”

Carlos Castaneda - The Fire From Within.

Women often wonder why men don't just "open up" in their hearts when they feel deep love for him. But it is a bigger challenge for him than he himself expects, filled with many layers of inner barriers.

Consciously Choosing to Open Up

We men must himself recognize all his limitations and consciously and gradually choose to open up for each of them, and let the light, higher consciousness or inner wisdom penetrate through. It is only when something conscious presses on that he really feels the pain in himself and he will try to avoid it. Therefore, her love can cause pain in him. It is not her fault or her responsibility, it is merely a result of man's inherent process and his evolutionary journey.

The Fear of the Unknown

In the process, he does not know what will come instead if he opens up - he does not know what he is surrendering to, which can be particularly frightening. What comes up in him surrounds him 100% if he surrenders to it - there is nothing outside the consciousness he is suddenly encapsulated in of pain, depression, anxiety or even momentary psychosis. As illustrated in the picture, he sits in a cave surrounded by all his ideas and limiting thoughts. Closed about himself and in his world.

Guarding Against Vulnerability

He guards himself: For now he thought he had control over the world, life, and his relationships, and no one should come and tell him anything else. It can therefore be terrible to be seen by his woman in his own unrecognized limitations because it hits his deep self-understanding of being good enough and having control of things. But he needs to examine his closedness and find out why he pulls away in order to move on if he wants to approach her. He needs a strategy because his self-importance is in the way.

The Importance of a Strategy and Support

When he finally allows himself to feel his barriers, a deep pain wells up because he recognizes that he has closed himself about himself. If he avoids the pain here, he is not ready to open himself to her. It is his will and capacity to stand in the pain long enough that determines his next move. That he has a strategy and the right support becomes crucial. For it can be experienced as offensive for a man that a woman demands emotional openness of him, in line with when she tries to push sex through. There is a reason why he does not open up, he can simply be roasted in his consciousness if he does it too quickly.

A Choice He Must Make Himself

He must therefore completely choose whether he wants to open up for higher truths, deeper love, and more consciousness - only then can he see her and her beautiful gifts. Only there can he begin to see her more fully. It is not a choice the woman can take for him. Here she can easily become pressing and push him into a corner with threats of leaving him. He may resort to couples therapy, but deep down he has resistance to letting her in. What is found in there is so violent, frightening, aggressive, and violent that she may not be able to handle it.

The Woman's Naive Longing and the Cost of Over-Responsibility

Here the woman can be hopelessly naive and stay on for far too long in deep longing for him to open up. Because she cannot bear that it does not succeed with the man she has chosen, she clings to a slim hope, which over time becomes smaller and smaller, as her body shuts down more and more for him and the desire for sex disappears. If a man does not have the strength to stand in the pain and feel his own barriers, but instead pulls away from feeling the pain and does not dare to go into what is now pressing him, then he is not ready to open up for either her or anything greater. If he does not have a strategy, he is lost and must remain closed to take care of himself.

Her Role: Support, Love, and Bearing Witness

But if he is ready to go into the pain and she can see that he takes responsibility for the journey himself, then she can conversely be supportive and loving. Can she be with him without condemnation, in deep love for him and his process, and witness the darkness that unfolds, because she sees his potential, and because she loves him deeply from the heart. Because she knows that his capacity for loving has not yet been reached. Here she meets the man's darkness, and it can be frightening to witness and can require everything she has for not to run screaming away.

The Risk and Potential of Transformation

It also requires that you both dare to risk the relationship, because you do not know what comes out of his transformation in advance. Who does he turn out to be on the other side, if he is not just swallowed up and disappears down into the darkness with depression, anxiety, and self-pity. Eventually collapses.

Here the woman, out of the desire for security and immutability, may withdraw from being with him, and here a huge potential goes for him to meet love in the middle of the darkness. It can at the same time challenge her trust to see him in pain and weakness, and it can lead to her pulling away because she sees him as weak and cannot bear that he breaks down. But it is not weakness to stand face to face with one's own inner demons, but she must be aware of whether he consistently takes responsibility and has a strategy in place and works mercilessly towards continuing.

It is not her responsibility to be there with him, but it is a beautiful and wonderful opportunity, a gift straight to him, that can help him to find the way towards love when he is enveloped in darkness, because her love for him can become the guiding thread out again that shows him that he is not isolated and alone.