Want to share with others some of your own experiences with men's Emotional Absence? (Men as well as women are encouraged to respond) Click here to email your experience and how you dealt with it, or write to me at 77 Park Avenue, Suite 1F, New York, NY. 10016. Your story may be included in a collection of readers' reactions to If Men Could Talk to be published at a future date. Note: in such a publication your name and all other names you may refer to will be changed to protect your privacy. Also, what you wrote will be edited for style and/or content.
	What is Emotional Absence ? While breaking down the shame barrier helps all men to open up, most men have yet a deeper, even more troubling resistance to the language of feelings. This is the second male attribute, Emotional Absence (I don't know what I feel). Here, we are on a more complicated terrain where the usual psychological tools don't necessarily work. For example, the rather uninspiring question "How does that make you feel?" which many therapists (and I hate to admit, myself included) resort to in desperation or for lack of imagination, is particularly useless here. The typical male response to such a question is, "I think," to which the therapist might say, "That's not a feeling." Men's proclivity to live in their heads and to distance themselves from their feelings is an obvious liability in intimate relationships. But it can also be a subtle yet devastating problem in business situations. For example, one young investment banker was "sent" to therapy by his fiancée, who was concerned about his workaholic tendencies. When he came to see me he had already amassed eight million dollars. But within two years, he gambled it all away in risky investments. Because he was incapable of feeling any fear or anxiety when making business decisions, he couldn't calibrate the degree of risk involved. How can I learn more about Emotional Absence? Get the book! Some of the techniques to cope with this truly difficult issue which I discuss in the book are "Winning with Logic," "Winning with Action," "Detective in the Dark," and "Forfeit the Home Field Advantage."