I've coached a lot of men over the years, and a good handful of them have been first responders, firefighters, paramedics, police officers. One thing keeps repeating across almost every one of them: a deep, practiced ability to compartmentalize, paired with almost no practice at all in letting anything back out.

It makes sense. Their job depends on staying steady while everyone around them is falling apart. But that steadiness comes at a cost, and I've watched more than one of these men want something different for the people they love, a father wanting to actually cry in front of his kids instead of just managing everyone else's emergencies while quietly carrying his own. Wanting to model something better for the next generation than stoic and unreachable.

It's rarely easy for them. Which makes total sense, given a job that requires compartmentalizing nearly everything they see and experience, shift after shift. When you spend your whole day trying to feel in control, the idea of letting an emotion actually run its course, of crying and not knowing exactly when it'll stop, can feel like losing your grip entirely. Scary. Vulnerable. What if I start and can't stop?

I know this pattern personally too, not just professionally. My dad was a police officer, and let's just say I know the emotional-robot-with-a-badge type intimately.

Here's the thing though, and it's a little counterintuitive: the more we lean into an emotion instead of bracing against it, the faster it actually moves through us.

Society has strong opinions about how men are allowed to show emotion, and the opinion is usually: don't. Strong. Silent. Stoic. Show no fear, take no prisoners, never appear weak.

Crying isn't a required part of grieving. But I wonder how many men genuinely don't feel the urge to cry, versus how many have simply been trained, for decades, to override it before it ever surfaces. For men especially, there's an extra layer of judgement sitting on top of an already hard moment.

When we narrow the emotional range boys and men are allowed, we don't just make things harder on them personally. We set them up for problems in every relationship that follows, and we quietly deny them their full humanity. Boys who grow up believing men don't cry tend to grow into men who rage instead. Boys who learn that pain equals weakness often die before they'll ever ask for help. That's not an exaggeration. Researchers have documented this pattern for decades: rigid adherence to traditional masculine norms, stoicism, self-reliance, emotional suppression, is consistently linked to higher aggression, lower help-seeking, and a suicide rate for men that runs three to four times higher than women's across Western countries.

Crying itself is just the nervous system's way of releasing intense emotion and completing something called the stress response cycle, the same mechanism behind why we cry when we're moved, afraid, sad, joyful, or simply relieved. There's a useful distinction here between the stress itself and whatever caused it. A good, full cry doesn't solve the problem that triggered it. But it does clear the physical charge enough that you can actually start dealing with what caused it in the first place. The same is true for grief. Crying doesn't finish your grief. It just relieves enough pressure that you can begin working with it.

These men aren't outliers. First responders witness some of the hardest moments a person can witness, and they do it wearing a professional calm that reassures the rest of us in exactly the moment our own world feels like it's caving in. (Endless respect for that.) But that calm has a cost, and it needs somewhere safe to go afterward.

I'd been telling my dad about the benefits of meditation for years, research consistently links it to lower PTSD symptoms, among other things. But he wasn't convinced until he saw a news story about meditation being introduced into police forces. Sometimes we genuinely need to see someone who looks like us go first before we'll give ourselves permission to try something new, ask for help, or actually express what we're feeling. 

And the models are showing up in places you wouldn't have expected a decade ago. When the Toronto Blue Jays made their 2025 World Series run, the images that stuck weren't just about the wins. It was Ernie Clement in tears talking about his love for his teammates, pitcher Chris Bassitt calling the team bond "true love," grown men hugging each other on a field without a hint of self-consciousness. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, two of the most competitive athletes on the planet, once sat crying side by side after a match, an image that's become genuinely iconic. 

Even fiction is catching up. Ted Lasso built an entire show around a man (and the players) going to therapy, crying in front of his team, and treating emotional honesty as a form of strength rather than a liability. Friday Night Lights did something similar years earlier, Coach Taylor (swoon) was tough as nails and also consistently made room for his players to actually feel something. (No wonder both of those shows hit so hard.)

Women absorb the "stay strong" messaging too. Suck it up, buttercup. Put your big girl panties on. Black women in particular are often handed the label "strong," which makes it disturbingly easy for people around them to assume they don't need help or softness, when nothing could be further from the truth. Just like men, women get asked to suppress emotion, suffer quietly, and hide any sign of vulnerability. Anywhere we flatten a whole person down into a one-dimensional trope, we lose the chance to actually see them.

Every one of us, regardless of gender or race, was born with the full range of human emotion available to us. When we narrow that range down to only the "acceptable" feelings, we cut ourselves off from whatever that emotion was actually trying to tell us. And our emotions are always trying to tell us something.

It can genuinely unsettle us to watch a man, or anyone, fall apart. Our discomfort, even completely unintentional, can send the same old signal right back at them: not here, not now.

Boys deserve permission, real opportunities, and safe spaces to share their full humanity, the same as girls do. Ask about their feelings, their relationships, their hopes, their dreams, so they don't grow into men who only feel permitted to talk about sports, sex, the news, and the weather. Help the boys in your life grow into adults who don't have to carry life entirely alone.

Holding space for the men around us means offering a judgement-free place to feel whatever actually comes up. One of the most useful things any of us can do is learn to regulate our own emotions and heal our own wounds first, so we can actually hold steady for someone else instead of getting triggered by their pain and unintentionally shutting them back down.

Are the men in your life comfortable expressing something like grief?

How does it land in your own body when you watch a man cry?

How can we help the boys around us build their own definition of masculinity, one spacious enough to hold the whole of who they actually are?

None of us are asking anyone to fall apart on command. Just to know that if the tears come, they've got permission to stay.