The Sensitive Son
What Happens When Boys Don’t Learn to Feel
We’re watching an epidemic unfold quietly in front of us: young men drowning in their emotions with no language, no map, and no model for how to feel.
So many of the young men I treat are not “defiant,” “lazy,” “emotionally unavailable,” or “addicted”— they are deeply sensitive beings who never learned the most basic human skill: how to feel what is happening inside their own bodies.
The Household That Shapes Him
Most come from a familiar dynamic:
A father who grew up believing emotions = weakness
A mother who is overwhelmed, unstable, or emotionally flooded
A boy who absorbs both extremes
He looks around his home and learns:
There is no safe place for my feelings.
There is no model for emotional strength.
There is no language for what I’m experiencing.
And so he’s left in the middle, alone with an entire internal landscape he cannot understand.
Interoception: The Missing Sense
At the core of this struggle is something no one teaches boys:
interoception — the ability to sense internal states.
It’s the skill that lets you know:
I’m anxious
My chest is tight
My stomach hurts because I’m scared
I need connection
I need space
I need help
When a child grows up in emotional chaos, interoception becomes scrambled.
He can’t access his internal compass.
So by adolescence, he feels:
flooded but numb
angry but hollow
sad but disconnected
overwhelmed but expressionless
He has no words for his pain, only sensations he can’t decode.
When He Can’t Feel, He Can’t Release
Without interoception, emotions become pressure trapped inside the body —
a buildup with no valve.
He doesn’t talk.
He doesn’t cry.
He doesn’t express.
Instead, he implodes.
This is why so many young men say:
“I don’t know what I’m feeling until I explode.”
“I feel too much, but I don’t feel anything.”
“I can’t calm down unless I use.”
This is not moral failure.
This is nervous system overload.
The Path to Peace Becomes a Path to Pain
When they cannot find peace inside their bodies, they seek it outside:
weed
pills
alcohol
gaming
porn
risk
shutdown
Not because they want to escape life, but because the inside of their body is unbearable.
It becomes an internal war:
A battle between the sensitive self who feels deeply
and the survival self who must shut it all down.
This is how self-destruction begins.
Not from rebellion.
Not from defiance.
But from a body that never learned how to hold the truth of what it feels.
How We Bring Them Back to Themselves
Healing begins the moment a young man learns:
There is nothing wrong with you.
You were born sensitive.
No one taught you how to feel.
But you can learn and your body wants to come home.
The work is physioenergetic:
reconnecting to the gut
grounding through the core
creating safety in the chest
naming sensations
learning how to move feelings instead of swallow them
When a boy learns to feel again, he learns to live again.
He stops running.
He stops numbing.
He comes back into his body — the home he left long ago.
Young men are not broken.
They are overwhelmed, under-supported, and emotionally unparented.
And we can rewrite that story.
With heart,
Dr. G
I think this can be part of a feedback loop. The sensitive boy grows up in the house you described, learns to shutdown his emotions, believing they are weak or don’t exist. He raises a boy in this same environment. His partner is also sensitive but overwhelmed with the emotional load of the house. The cycle continues until someone breaks the cycle. I am the sensitive, overwhelmed mother. I’m teaching my children emotional intelligence the best I can and showing them emotionally intelligent men do exist, because I didn’t even believe it myself.
Beautiful read 🙏