Ken Porter is a frequent guest on the Revealing Men podcast, hosted by Randy Flood, psychotherapist and director of the Men’s Resource Center. He often helps clients navigate traumatic experiences, past and present, through his work as a somatic therapist and Hakomi-trained clinician. In this conversation, he and Flood focus on the interface between mind, body, and emotion. They discuss what Flood calls armoring or blocking access to feeling. And, through their own experience and that of clients, they examine how stress and emotional tension exist in the body and, when we lose awareness of what’s happening, the impact they can have on our long-term physical, emotional, and relational health.
You can listen to the Revealing Men podcast and the full conversation using the link on this site or on your favorite platform. Portions of the conversation appear below, edited for length and clarity.
“A lot of things happen in our body that we’re just too busy or just too distracted to notice.” – Ken Porter
Mind and Body Interact
“I’ve been thinking a lot about how many men live in a state of what I’d call this kind of chronic armoring,” Flood says. “And the thing is, they don’t experience it hardly as even tension anymore. They experience it as just normal. What starts as protection, perhaps, holding it together, staying in control, over time becomes the way the body lives.” He asks Porter how that works. How does the body take something adaptive and turn it into a chronic pattern.
“The body will only respond to whatever data it’s presented with,” Porter responds, “but the mind can make up whatever kinds of data it feels like. … it can make up the craziest shit and the body will respond to that as if it were the actual reality.” To illustrate this, he uses a cat chasing a mouse versus a cat chasing a laser light. “The cat chasing the mouse is just what our body does. It’s like it’s an instinct. Like ‘I’m hungry. There’s something moving.’ My body tells me to chase it so that I can get my needs met. And the laser light is like the mind making up something totally disconnected from reality, causing our body to react as if it were actually chasing food, but it’s not.”
How an Experience Develops Inside Our Body
Porter moves a bit past the abstract and explains the four laddered steps involved for an experience to be processed in the body. “The first one, neuroception, is our nervous system, our autonomic nervous system, having a reaction to something. So, the cat sees the mouse move, and it has a neuroception of like, ‘whoop,’ jumping into high alert, getting ready to pounce.” “An instinctive response,” Flood interjects. “Right,” Porter says. “Neuroception is completely unconscious. It’s the first thing that happens, and it happens in a split second.”
He continues, “Then the next thing that happens, is called interoception, and that’s when you feel the neuroception. It becomes palpable. You feel the adrenaline rush. You feel the excitement in your body. You feel your heart pounding, your muscles tensing up. You observe, ‘Oh. My body’s running.’ That’s all interoception. And that interoception ideally is conscious, but it’s often unconscious, too.
“The next thing that shows up is emotion … fear, anger, sadness, whatever it is. Joy, desire. Like, ‘We’re going to go after the mouse.’ There’s an emotion involved in that. And then the next thing that comes up the ladder is our cognition. …. We’re going to take that emotion, and our mind is going to come up with something in an attempt to respond to the emotion. To go all the way back down the ladder and meet the original need that the neuroception was responding to.”
Following the Script
Both Flood and Porter are, as Flood notes, “students of male psychology and male socialization.” He asks, “How would traditional ideas about masculinity create complications with those four levels? Like what types of problems or issues might get created because of the way in which we walk the earth as men?”
“A lot of what we have been socialized to think and the ways we’ve been socialized to behave as men is like the laser light with the cat. You know, it’s disconnected from actual reality,” replies Porter. “We’ve been given these messages like we always have to be in charge, or we always have to be right. When the mind has this script that it’s following, this man code script [saying] ‘I can’t be vulnerable. I can’t be weak. I have to be in charge,’ and then we’re presented with a situation when actually being vulnerable would really be adaptive, would really be in our best interest — ‘Hey, ask for help. Hey, I could use some help here,’— but the script won’t let us; the script then becomes the laser light that creates the new neuroception.
“The brain is giving the body misinformation. Instead of ‘asking for help would really help me meet this need’, the brain is telling the body, ‘No, it’s dangerous to ask for help.’ And so now the neuroception is responding to danger. The danger is not actually there. It’s just manufactured. But the body doesn’t know the difference. It’s just responding to the data that it got. Then the whole cascade of hormones, the whole unfolding of events, from neuroception up to cognition, happens based on this misinformation that it’s dangerous to ask for help. So then we’ll have an emotional response of fear, and we’ll get tense, and then there’s a whole cycle that happens and gets established.”
Ease Your Mind and Heal Your Body
“One of the things I’ve seen and experienced personally is that the body eventually pushes back,” says Flood. “These patterns we talked about that are adaptive over time to carry tension and armor up become a chronic pattern. …And you might be able to get away with it perhaps when you’re a younger person, but then over time carrying a tension a certain way, then you begin to start experiencing the body kind of speaking back. And if you’re not listening to the subtle signals, the body might get louder.”
He and Porter trade stories of back and nerve pain that subsided once they actively listened to what their bodies were telling them. “I thought it was because I bike all the time,” Flood says, referring to his back pain, “and I thought maybe hanging onto the handlebars and biking all these crazy miles was causing it. When I went to the doc, I said, ‘I got this problem in my back because of biking.’ And he was wise enough to say, ‘I think it’s probably more going on.’ The doctor recommended dry needling. “Long story short, the dry needling, you can say maybe it actually changed the neurochemistry …. It kind of makes the circuitry fire differently and get out of patterns. But what it did for me consciously was to make me more aware of that part of my body.
“And then I became more aware that when I experienced stress or tension, I was hunching my shoulders up. Very subtly, not a lot. And then I would sit a certain way. I would kind of lean back and kind of brace. And those subtle bracings over time were what was causing the pain. And that didn’t manifest until later in my life.” It was, he notes, “an old pattern that didn’t catch up with my current level of competence and confidence. It was just like, ‘you got to be super afraid here.’ ‘No, you don’t. Just relax.’ But I had to have a relationship with that, and the awareness is what helped.”
“I’ll just throw in an anecdote of my own,” Porter begins. “I had huge issues with sciatica earlier in my life for years. One of the main things involved in sciatic pain is the psoas muscle, which is a large trunk flexor muscle. It’s really the primary fight or flight muscle. …. And I was socialized to really repress my emotions and my responses. So, if I had fear, and if I had anger, … I learned that I had to inhibit it. “So,” he continues, “it made all kinds of sense to me when I had to do all kinds of physical therapy and chiropractic. But when I started understanding on a more emotional level how when my body was telling me to react to something and something else was inhibiting that response, of course things get jammed up in my psoas, and I feel it in my sciatic nerve.”
“This is where it gets really fascinating,” says Flood, “because we’re talking about the body holding emotional tension or experience, outside of conscious awareness, right? And you see it in trauma, … the pelvic pain, gut issues, chronic tension patterns. I think even Freud talked about that with conversion symptoms. …It’s like, even though you might not remember the trauma or might not remember the details of it, the body stores it, right?”
It’s all Connected
“Right,” agrees Porter, who then references Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist and primatologist at Stanford University. “He’s got a book called “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.” “Why don’t zebras get ulcers?” asks Flood. “Because they run?” “Yeah, because they don’t have the laser light feeding them misinformation,” Porter replies. “They run if they’re scared. If they’re hungry, they eat. If they’re tired, they sleep.” On the other hand, he says, “We have this constant way that our brain overrides all of these instinctual responses. And we can be under the illusion that that’s actually working.”
“You know,” he continues, “we can do that. We can inhibit those responses. But the way that the body keeps the score is, if you feel anger, and you’ve got that neuroception, that initial response, that anger is like ‘I am in danger, and I have to mobilize my body to fight.’ That’s going to increase your heart rate. You’re going to release adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine, and the blood is going to go to your major muscle groups. It’s going to go to your psoas. It’s going to go to your shoulder muscles. You’re going to go into this mobilization response.”
That biological response happens, Porter says, even if the emotional response is repressed. “If you’re angry about something and your mental script is telling you, ‘Whatever you do, don’t say it.’ And you don’t say it. You don’t act. That doesn’t affect any of these stress hormones. Your heart rate still increases. The blood still rushes to your major muscle groups. Your blood pressure still goes up.”
“We have to at times, right?” queries Flood. “Yeah, absolutely,” replies Porter, “but if we’re chronically doing that, because we have this overarching script that says never be angry or never be sad or never be vulnerable, it’s like the body doesn’t care. It’s going to keep being sad, and it’s going to keep being angry, but it’s not ever going to manifest outwardly until enough time has gone on. … After doing that day after day for years and years, you’re going to have physical problems. You’re going to have musculoskeletal problems. You’re going to have cardiac issues. You’re going to have endocrine issues, hormone issues.”
The Immune System
“When our body goes into the fight or flight response,” says Porter, “it basically shuts down anything extraneous that’s not connected to getting out of the immediate danger. That includes some pretty important things like our immune system. Our immune system gets shut down because if we need to run away from the tiger, it’s like we can delay fighting off this bacterial infection; that’s not going to matter in the five seconds we need to get to safety. We can turn our immune system back on after we get to safety. But in those immediate few seconds, it doesn’t matter.”
Porter continues to say that this response is fine in the short term. But, “if we’re chronically inhibiting our nervous system because we’re chronically in stress, because we’re chronically getting misinformation from our brain …we’re constantly feeling this fear about the prospect of being vulnerable …That means our immune system is going to get compromised over time.”
Strategies for Releasing Tension
“The body does speak to us,” says Flood. “If we listen, it tells us a story about our lives.” He then describes how clients will talk about not feeling much at all, disconnecting from what their body is telling them. “What I see is not necessarily a lack of feeling, but a pattern of blocking the access to the feeling. Armoring doesn’t just protect you from pain, but it protects you from everything. So I’m just wondering, when you sit with men who say they don’t feel anything, what do you actually notice happening in their body? How do you hear that when someone says, ‘Well, I don’t feel a thing?’”
“The first thing I think is ‘bullshit,’ says Porter. “Clearly, you feel something, or you wouldn’t be sitting here, because we are emotional creatures. It’s just part of our wiring. But yeah, if I’m sitting with somebody saying that, if I’m sitting with a man who’s been socialized to not recognize that he’s feeling his emotions, I’ll usually notice his armoring. I’ll notice a general kind of a stiffness or just a hardness, a rigidity. …a hardness in the eyes. Holding the breath like when you see a little kid who’s trying not to cry or is being told not to cry. … It’s like, you hold your breath, and you tense up your body. That’s the only way to stop this strong emotion from coming out is stop breathing and just tighten everything down.”
“It’s unconscious,” adds Flood. “You see it in our offices. … you can see the emotion bubbling up inside them, and then you see them hold their breath. Just getting them to breathe, breathe, and keep the breath open, keep the connection to the trunk of your body, your heart, your diaphragm. Sometimes the emotion can then be free to flow and expressed.”
“Yeah,” Porter concurs, “that happens often. I like to have people and men especially, where there’s that armoring, and that kind of rigidity, and that hardness in the eyes, to just have them turn their head, turn their neck, and their shoulders, and their whole torso, look around the room, let their eyes engage, with the world … a more like loosened up way. Generally, men will start to feel something when they do that.”
How Emotional Disconnect Affects Relationships
Flood brings up how unprocessed tension and emotions can impact relationships. “It may show up as irritability, reactivity, or just a basic disconnection,” he says. “And if you’re in a relationship with someone who’s doing that, you might say, ‘He feels shut down, distant. He only shows anger.’ So, what isn’t felt gets expressed. Sometimes we say that it ‘comes out sideways.’ How do you see that connection between body tension and how people show up relationally?”
“People in relationship of any kind end up doing various dances when things aren’t fully conscious,” says Porter. He explains that a classic dynamic is the pursuer/distancer. When one person feels as if the other isn’t present, isn’t showing up, and they start asking for more connection. This, in turn, terrifies the other person. Because, he says, you have someone who’s pursuing someone who believes it’s dangerous to be vulnerable. That creates a response of fight or flight, Porter says. “That creates more distance, more disconnection. And then, the other person wants to pursue harder because, well, you just move further away—now I’m coming after you even harder—and then that creates more fear in the distancer, and they’ll pull away even further.”
Understanding Relational Consequences
“Intimate relationships are unique,” Flood says, “in that they are highly designed for emotional awareness and connection … if you’re not a student of your emotions and you don’t know what’s going on inside of you, that relationship process touches that. And if you don’t know what to do with what gets stimulated and triggered inside of you, you can want to just throw it out, get it out, and pass it back to them. …. That’s the relational consequence of being armored up and not being able to know how to process things in your own life and in your own individual work.”
Add to that the idea that our autonomic nervous systems are tuned in to the autonomic nervous systems around us. “Somebody who’s walking around with a lot of armor is going to have a dysregulated nervous system much of the time,” says Porter. “So anytime their partner walks into the room, or they walk into the room, their partner’s nervous system is going to pick up on that dysregulation and quite possibly get dysregulated itself.” On the other hand, he continues, “If I have a regulated nervous system and I walk into the room and my partner is dysregulated, and if I can maintain that regulation in my system, their nervous system will ideally start to co-regulate to mine, and then we’ll both be regulated. … It’s a beautiful thing.”
It’s not unusual for this to happen with children, notes Flood. “It’s like when they’re upset, they tend to get regulated by being with a parent who’s able to be grounded and not reactive …‘I know you’re upset. Take a breath. Let me give you a hug.’ But if your kid gets upset, and then you react to it, then you’re both upset. The same thing that happens as a couple.”
“That’s the beautiful thing about the way our bodies are engineered. By design, it’s an incredible machine. It’s incredibly complicated.” – Randy Flood
Keeping Your Machine in Top Shape
Flood recently wrote about how men have often valued themselves based on the strength and perceived usefulness of their bodies. “I think sometimes, as men,” he says, “our relationship to our bodies can be very mechanical: ‘This is what my body can do for me. It can help me perform athletically. It can help me work. It can help me fix my plumbing.’ We have a more mechanistic view of our body. The muscular. You know, ‘make my biceps bigger. Make my legs stronger so that I can run faster. I can climb a hill on a bike.’” “It’s a machine,” replies Porter.
“Yeah, a machine,” Flood echoes. “…[but] it’s not just that kind of muscular machine. It’s an electrical machine. It’s neurological from the brain all the way down to your toes. And all of that, it’s all connected, and it speaks to us, and it has wisdom. And just like with engines, if we don’t take care of them, right, they heat up, they blow rings in the pistons, and different things happen to them.” Just by being aware of this interconnectivity, Flood notes, we can begin to make a change.
“Absolutely! responds Porter. “That’s the primary thing in terms of shifting out of all of these patterns of armoring. Self-awareness is absolutely the essential piece.” “The body is honest even when we’re not,” says Flood. “The only organ on the body that lies really is the tongue. All other organs tell the truth.” Porter chimes in, “I would say the tongue and the prefrontal cortex!”
Your Body is Talking; Are You Listening?
“Our body isn’t working against us,” Flood asserts, “it’s working for us. If we let it. The tension, the pain, and the tightness may be part of you that hasn’t had a voice. And so, the question isn’t whether your body is speaking, it’s whether we’re listening.
“I think that’s the work that you do really well with the guys in the group,” he tells Porter. “They often present the narrative, ‘This is what’s going on,’ and then you say, ‘Okay. That’s the story,’ and then, ‘What’s the body telling us about that story,’ right? That’s the work.”
“And I guess what I would say, …in terms of raising self-awareness, I think a real simple practice is to just keep checking in with yourself whenever you can,” says Porter. Ask yourself, ‘What am I feeling? Try to name the emotion: mad, sad, glad, whatever it is. And then, ‘Where is that in my body? How is my body experiencing this? Is there tension? Is there a knot in my stomach? Is there a lightness and an openness? Is there a heaviness and a constriction?
“Just noticing that,” he continues, “and noticing the negative emotions and how they show up, but also noticing the positive emotions, and getting acquainted with how positive emotions feel in your body. Because all the emotions are trying to get us to that positive place. They’re all here to help us get our needs met. They’re all trying to get us to a place of satisfaction, fulfillment, ease, peace, happiness. So, notice both ends of the spectrum.”
Building Connectivity
Flood talks about men who come to seek counseling or therapy at the Men’s Resource Center. “A lot of men don’t come in because they’re presenting problems – ‘I got this tension or pain in my body. Can you help me?’ I mean, … that might happen, but they’re often trained to push through that, or ignore it, or suck it up, and normalize it. But they often come in when the pain can’t stay contained anymore. It starts showing up in their relationships, irritability, disconnection, … the reactivity we talked about earlier. The body can’t carry it alone, so it gets passed on to the people they love.
“What we’re really talking about here,” he says, “isn’t getting rid of the armor. It’s learning when to wear it and when to take it off.” He shares a lesson he learned during meditation. “I think it’s Joan Halifax. She talked about a strong back and a soft front. The ability to stay grounded, have a backbone, hold your values, and at the same time, be open and feel and let people in, stay connected to their inner life. And that’s a very different kind of strength,” he continues, “Not rigid, not shut down, but flexible, nimble, adaptive, alive.”
“If we’re armored up, then a lot of times, we can’t feel the warmth of connection, the warmth of love.” – Flood
Love Your Body; Live a Better Life
The Men’s Resource Center exists to help men navigate the challenges they face in today’s world, gain emotional intelligence, and embrace life to the fullest extent. If you want to become more aware of, and lessen the effects of stress and emotional tension on your body, reach out to the reach out to the Men’s Resource Center online or call us at 616-456-1178. You will find community in our men’s support groups as well as in our range of in-person and online counseling and consultative services. Don’t wait to live your best life.
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