MENTAL HEALTH

Do Black Men Need to Expand Their Emotional Vocabulary?

There's no downside to learning how to express yourself better

Photo by Bansah Photography on Unsplash

A Black woman therapist set the internet ablaze when she suggested that Black men would benefit from expanding their emotional vocabulary on TikTok. The backlash was swift, as some users doxxed Shabree Rawls and cheered as she lost her job. While many Black men took offense to her advice, their critiques helped to prove her point. If someone recommending that you should expand your emotional vocabulary feels triggering to you, maybe it's time to ask why that discomfort exists. Some Black men were so angry at Rawls that you would think she told them to jump off the nearest cliff rather than attend therapy sessions.

"When you expand your emotional vocabulary, you expand your awareness of yourself," Rawls said in a fiery TikTok where she also used profanity. In an article entitled "Black Men's Mental Health Matters," the American Psychological Association indicated that "Black men are not receiving the help they need," and "only 26.4% of Black and Hispanic men ages 18–44 who experience daily feelings of anxiety or depression were likely to have used mental health services compared with 45.4% of White men with those same feelings." While many people took issue with Rawls' use of…