Philippe Jacquet has worked with men with eating disorders across private practice, hospital settings, and residential rehabilitation. One observation comes back, again and again, with a consistency that makes it impossible to ignore.
A man returns from a period in treatment. He describes the group sessions — the conversations about feelings, the invitations to share. He says: they kept asking me how I felt. And I didn’t know what to say.
Some of these men describe a more specific experience: they said something. They named an emotion — scared, angry, sad — because they understood that was what the situation called for. But they were not connected to it. They were performing emotional literacy rather than experiencing it.
This is not dishonesty. It is the result of never having learned the language.
Emotion as a foreign language
For many men — and this is particularly true of men who develop eating disorders — the language of emotion is genuinely unfamiliar. It was not spoken in the family they grew up in. It was not modelled, not encouraged, not practised.
The capacity to identify what one is feeling, name it, and communicate it is a skill. It has to be learned. And for men who have spent decades not learning it, being placed in a therapeutic environment that assumes its fluency is like being asked to participate in a conversation conducted in a language they have never studied.
Learning to identify emotion — starting with the body
The first step is not to speak about emotions. It is to notice them.
The body is always ahead of language. Before a person can name what they feel, the body is already registering it — in the chest, in the hands, in the stomach, in the legs.
A body scan is a simple but precise tool. You slow down and take inventory. The heart is beating faster than usual. The hands are slightly damp. The legs feel less steady.
Now connect those sensations to the situation. You were crossing the road. A car came closer than expected and sounded its horn. Your body responded before you had time to think.
You were scared.
This is the process: physical sensation → gather what the body is reporting → connect it to the context → put a word to it. Naming it makes it available — to consciousness, to communication, to the therapeutic work.
Why this matters particularly for men with eating disorders
Philippe’s doctoral research examined the relationship between father-son dynamics and the development of eating disorders in men. One of the consistent themes is the role of emotional disconnection. The eating disorder, in many of these cases, is doing the work that emotional language never could: managing states that were never given words.
Teaching a man with an eating disorder to identify his emotions is not a therapeutic exercise on the way to the real work. It is the real work.
The man who can feel scared — and know that he is scared, and say that he is scared, and stay with it rather than immediately managing it through restriction or compulsive exercise — is a man who is beginning to have access to himself.
“Men come back from rehab and tell me they didn’t know what to say when someone asked how they felt. Some of them said the right word anyway — scared, angry — but they weren’t connected to it. That is not dishonesty. That is never having been taught the language. The first step is not to speak about the emotion. It is to find it in the body first.” — Philippe Jacquet
Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet — psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, London.