Naming, Not Shaming.

Naming what we’re carrying — and the welcome, unexpected relief that follows.

A man I interviewed recently was talking about the pressure of trying to make everything perfect — the stable career, the right kind of father, the present husband, all of it moving forward at once — when he stopped mid-sentence and said something he hadn’t planned to say.

“The freedom comes from not trapping myself in this racetrack of trying to make everything perfect and stable all the time.”

The racetrack. He hadn’t used that word before. It arrived in the conversation, in the stopping, in the act of being asked who he was and how he’d gotten here. He wasn’t looking for the word. The word found him.

And once he said it, something shifted. He could see the racetrack from the outside for the first time. And once he could see it, he could imagine stepping off.

That’s what naming does.

In my last post I wrote about finding a safe place to stop — about how most men are climbing a mountain without telling anyone which mountain we’re on, and how the smartest climbers don’t climb alone. A ledge is where we stop. But stopping is only the first move.

The second move is harder. And for most men, it’s the one nobody taught them.

Naming what we’re carrying. The problem is, we don’t always have the words — because we’ve spent so long keeping the feelings hidden that the language never developed.

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Early in my research career, I tried getting men to describe their emotional response to an idea or a message. I kept hitting the same wall. They couldn’t tell me what they felt. Some of my female clients would get frustrated that men couldn’t express emotion. I knew the feelings were there. I realized we just didn’t have the words to express them.

So, I started handing men a sheet of emotions and asking them to choose.

Something opened immediately. The moment a man could point at a word and say ‘that one, that’s it’ — he could suddenly talk about what he’d been carrying. Not because the sheet told him something new. Because it gave him language for something he already knew. As it turns out:

Men aren’t short on feelings. We’re long on shame and short on vocabulary.

A man can spend years organizing his life around something he’s never named. Moving faster to stay ahead of it. Providing more to justify it. Going quiet in the moments it gets closest to the surface. Just ignoring it in the hopes it fades away on its own.

I’ve spent time with a number of men’s coaches and therapists who use naming deliberately — as a method, not just a metaphor. One approach, drawn from a therapeutic model called Internal Family Systems, guides a man through a series of questions about where he feels something in his body. Not what he thinks about it. Where he feels it. And then, eventually, asks him to give it a name. A man who walked in carrying something he couldn’t describe walks out with a word for it. And the word changes something.

Polyvagal theory works similarly — from a different direction. It helps men understand that the fight, flight, or freeze they’re experiencing is a natural stress response from their nervous system. When a man learns that what he experiences as emotional shutdown is actually something his body does automatically under stress — something that happens to every human being — the shame changes shape. He’s not deficient. He’s not weak. He’s having a stress response. That’s not a character verdict. It’s a description. And descriptions, unlike verdicts, can be worked with.

Owen Marcus has helped men name what they’re carrying for forty years. He describes what happens physiologically when men suppress:

“Men lock things down, then use more effort to keep them locked down, and eventually it all becomes stuck. The freeze response isn’t a character flaw — it’s the body doing exactly what it was designed to do under threat. And once a man has a name for what his nervous system is doing, something begins to shift.”

Most men aren’t waiting for someone to tell them what to feel. Without really being aware of it, we’re waiting for someone to give us the words for what we’re already feeling. The words that take away the shame and the pain that goes with it.

That’s what the racetrack did for the man I was interviewing. He wasn’t carrying something new. It was something he’d been carrying for years — the relentless pressure to make everything perfect, to keep the machinery running, to never stop long enough for the inadequacy to catch up with him.

He just finally had a word for it.

And once he had the word, the racetrack lost some of its power over him. Not all of it. But some. Enough to see it. Enough to imagine, for the first time, what it might feel like to step off.

I know something about this from my own life.

I grew up with a mother whose mental illness shaped the atmosphere of our home in ways I couldn’t understand as a child. I didn’t have a word for it. I just knew something was wrong — in the house, in her, and somehow, in a way I couldn’t articulate, in me. I carried it the way children can carry things they don’t have language for: as shame. As a private weight. As something I instinctively knew not to name out loud.

It took years before I had the word. Schizophrenia. A disease. Something with a clinical reality entirely separate from anything I had done or failed to do or been. The word didn’t fix anything. My mother’s suffering was real regardless of what I called it. But the naming changed what I had been carrying. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my secret. It wasn’t proof of something wrong with me or my family. It was a disease. And diseases have names.

I didn’t have the concept of naming in my vocabulary back then, but I experienced the benefit of it.

It didn’t remove the weight. It removed the verdict.

In my last post I asked: which mountain are you on right now, and who knows you’re climbing it? This week, one more question — and I mean it as a genuine one, not rhetorical:

What are you carrying right now that you don’t have a word for yet?

You don’t have to answer it out loud. You don’t have to answer it at all. But sitting with it — letting it surface, waiting for the word that fits — is the second move.

You found the ledge. Now name what you brought with you.