Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst transforms lives through psychology. She leads a thriving practice in Bethesda, Maryland. With 50 years of experience, she specializes in trauma healing. Additionally, she supports high performers and couples. Consequently, her compassionate approach drives change. In this feature, we explore her vision. Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst is a renowned psychologist with 50 years of wisdom in trauma healing. Her book Read, Reflect, Respond empowers emotional recovery and supports high performers, couples and youth development for males and females. So get ready for her compassionate insights on personal growth and development.
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Beverly Hills Magazine: Hello everyone and welcome to the world’s most famous podcast. I’m your hostess Jacqueline Madison. Today we have a returning very special guest. Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst is a renowned psychologist with 50 years of wisdom in trauma healing. Her book Read, Reflect, Respond empowers emotional recovery and supports high performers, couples and youth development for males and females. So get ready for her compassionate insights on personal growth and development. I’m so excited to have her back. She is a wealth of wisdom. Let’s welcome Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst to the show. And remember if you enjoy these interviews, please like and share. We really appreciate the support. Thanks so much and enjoy the show. Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst, how are you?
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: I am excellent. How are you?
Beverly Hills Magazine: Doing very well today. Thank you so much. It’s such an honor to have you back. I’m so glad you’re going to be sharing more of your wisdom with everybody. Let’s dive right in. Give us a short backstory first on sort of what sparked your initial passion for psychology and what shaped your personal practice.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: The passion for psychology is a wonderful story. I was a math major. I loved math from very young childhood and I wanted to be a math teacher and I challenged myself to finish college in three years with a straight A. I was on track to do that my junior year in college. Calculus two came into my life as a math major. The teacher faced the blackboard, never turned around to the class. Talked to the blackboard, wrote with her right hand, erased with her left. Everyone was lost and I was thrilled to get a D out of that class so I would never have to take it again. And I immediately switched my major and my minor and my minor was psychology. I was taking psychology because I just liked it. It was fun. It was challenging. It was very interesting. So it is just one of those times in life when the world tells you change directions.
Beverly Hills Magazine: I love that. I’ve always been fascinated by psychology and I think it’s wonderful you’ve had so much experience with it and today we’re going to delve deeper into the development of young boys to men, which I think is such an important topic in today’s generation, especially when there’s a lot of confusion in terms of our identities. So we’re really going to get into it and I’m excited. What sort of mental health practices help strengthen identity development in boys?
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: In order to facilitate healthy emotional development in boys, we have to start at the preschool level. Preschools typically are run by women. They’re staffed by women. The owners of preschools are women and they don’t understand how different boys are and how important it is to give them agency with their bodies. They don’t want to sit in a circle. They want to move or they want to climb a tree while you’re reading the book. There are preschools now that have actually put trees into the room so boys can climb trees and listen to the story that you’re reading. But we need to start at that level to really appreciate and understand that how different boys are from girls and they lag behind girls in development by about three years. If you think about the difference, you definitely want to continue interaction with boys and girls, but you don’t want to put boys in a situation where they’re required to perform in exactly the same way that girls are performing. These are different sexes. They develop in different ways with a completely different process. We have to recognize that and change the structure of our preschools.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Absolutely. It’s a silly example, but I just have a female and a male dogs and I noticed that the boy is so much more active and he wants to play and he wants to be aggressive and she just wants to sit and be calm. I was totally thinking, wow, that is so indicative of the differences between masculine boys and girls.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: You’ve got a great example.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Infant boys or young boys in preschool age, these are young children and they have a broader emotional range than girls. Is that correct? Which is so interesting because a lot of times and a lot of these female teachers think, oh, boys can’t be emotional. And I think a lot of boys kind of have to suppress their emotional side. But tell us more about the importance of the emotional range of young boys.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: We actually teach them to do that. But boys come into the world with a broader range of emotional expression than girls. They can go higher on the positive and they can go lower on the negative. And by and large, they are raised by women. Either a nanny, a mother, the infant interaction typically is with a female. There is change happening. There’s a significant increase in the number of husbands who are staying home to raise children while mother goes to work. But that’s still a smaller percentage. And the truth is that men will accept that broader range. Women don’t know that they’re rejecting it. Women only experience a range that’s this big. Boys are this big. And so without knowing it, when your infant boy goes to an extreme, either on the positive end or the negative end, the female has a reaction that trains the boy not to do that. Maybe she’ll just move back a little bit. Maybe she’ll get a scrunchy look on her face. Maybe she will just go, uh-oh. Do something more dramatic to communicate. I’m not comfortable with that of emotion. So she’s not doing it intentionally, but infants are brilliant. Their survival mechanism is understanding the emotional attachment with the person that’s taking care of them. So if mother gives any kind of a negative signal, you better believe it. That boy is going to narrow the range of emotional expression for survival.
Beverly Hills Magazine: They’re more sensitive to the disciplining or chastening, let’s say, and more adaptive too, in that sense. And maybe that’s why a lot of men have grown up to suppress their emotional self, which I don’t believe is necessarily healthy. I do think it’s important because men have to develop in a certain way to become men. To be the leaders, the hunter-gatherers. Go to work, provide, and take on more pressure, either physically or mentally, and emotionally too. I’m of the mind of the traditional mindset. The man has to take the lead in the family. But now let’s just pivot quickly. How does not having a male father figure in a child’s upbringing or development impact him? Because I believe it’s paramount and so necessary for their healthy development.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: That is truly significant. But male or female, when this boy starts to walk, the culture trains him not to express tender or emotions that are on the sensitive end of the continuum. Not to cry. Not to be needy. I tell parents, tell people, go to a mall. Watch the interaction between a preschool child, male or female, and the adults in the system, father, mother, any adult, nanny, doesn’t make a difference. If the little girl gets hurt on the playground or rejected in some way, she’s distressed. She goes up to the adult. She gets picked up and asked what happened. Little boy, same thing, distressed. He’s either hurt or he’s been rejected on the playground. He goes up to the adult. The adult asks, what happened? If he gives a good enough response, he will get picked up and receive comfort.
Beverly Hills Magazine: In other words, their emotional needs aren’t being met. They’re not validated the same as a young girl’s.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: If they have emotional needs, they are not validated. It’s subtle. Because, hey, I don’t make physical contact with you. I don’t pick you up. I paid attention to you. But I didn’t do what a toddler actually processes with more power, which is, you know, did you touch me? Did you hold me? Did you pick me up? Did you pat me on the head? Did you touch me in some way? Touch is very powerful for children. And if I don’t touch you and I just send you back to go back to the playground and play with everybody else, I have sent you a message that your emotional needs are not that important.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Now, how does this invalidation for young boys manifest into their teenage years and going into early adulthood? Because I would imagine this is why boys become aggressive and don’t really know how to channel their emotions in a healthy way.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: We have robbed them of that opportunity. And so in adolescence, when all these hormones dump into your body, you are very actively in touch with feeling states that you are experiencing. The culture, however, has already trained you as a male, that you are not to acknowledge being needy. Being sad, being worried. Having any feelings on the negative end of the continuum. You’re supposed to take risks. You’re supposed to be brave. You’re supposed to stand up. You’re supposed to be courageous. All of those we will accept from you. But if you doubt yourself, if you’re worried about whether you’re going to be included in the group or make the cut for your particular athletic experience to be accepted in the chess club. None of those things. You cannot be anxious. You cannot be worried. You cannot be sad. You cannot be needy. We have just eliminated that for boys. And so the frustration level increases. That’s why boys kind of tease each other. You notice that they are expressing this through physical aggression. They’re bumping into each other. They’re wrestling with each other. They’re experimenting with, am I okay by doing it physically? Do you accept me as a physical being?
Beverly Hills Magazine: This reminds me for men listening because of King David. He was in the Jewish Torah. He was a king. He was a mighty warrior. And he fought many battles like we’re talking bloody wars. But in the Psalms, he pours out his heart to God. He literally gets so emotional and vulnerable with his emotional expression, which that’s why I want to encourage men that being vulnerable, being in touch with your emotions doesn’t make you not masculine. It enhances your masculinity because it helps you to be more whole as a person.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: It enhances your humanity. The men die younger than women. This very thing that you’ve just described. They are not allowed to express themselves emotionally. So where does all that tension go? It goes into heart disease. It goes into diabetes. It goes into alcoholism. All of that tension goes into physical complaints.
Beverly Hills Magazine: For parents listening or teachers, supervisors of young boys, how can they adjust their behaviors and approach to young boys so that we can allow them the space, the safe space to express their emotions and feel validated in doing so?
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: We started with the preschool level, you could change the physical environment. Accommodating the physical environment and understanding of their needs, physical needs. It doesn’t mean he’s not listening to the story. He can be walking around the room and still processing every piece of the story. He does not have to sit in the circle. And so it is important that we change our approach beginning at the preschool level. It’s also important that we educate both men and women that boys are different. And you have to adjust to that difference and that because women don’t have the same range of emotion, we have to raise our consciousness about accepting more intense feeling states, positive or negative from a boy. Make that a message that you send to them that there’s something wrong with them. There’s nothing wrong with them. This range of feeling states is adaptive. If you’re a caveman, I want you being super brave to go out. I want you to be passionate about killing something and bringing it back to the cave.
Beverly Hills Magazine: From babyhood, preschool, what do you call that age? Like there’s a term for it. At that age from like toddlers to the whole phase of development and even into adulthood, even still today, men need emotional validation. I look at married men and I see in their marriages that a lot of times the marital issues is because of emotional invalidation, either from the female or the man. A lot of times a man, he can have the most beautiful wife, the house, the car, the seemingly American dream. And yet he strays. He cheats. Why on earth would he cheat? Because of emotional invalidation.
https://youtu.be/13k7QmVxvfk
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: Absolutely.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Give us more tips for how parents or siblings, what can we do to emotionally validate men in our lives? Let’s start with wives or partners.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: Even though women say that they want a man who can be more emotionally expressive, the truth of the matter is, women have a narrower range of emotional expression. So when the man gets more intense on the positive end, more intense on the negative end, the female is very uncomfortable, doesn’t want to engage, tends to withdraw. Those are extremes. But let’s put you just in the normal range. And your husband comes home from work and he’s disappointed. Something has happened that day that causes distress. So he’s not good at taking a deep dive into the emotional impact of that. He will give you the headline. Headline is, I got screwed today. Joe Schmo got a promotion that I deserve. If you look at what the wife’s response is, it’s empathy. I’m so sorry. But it isn’t curiosity. It isn’t sit down, tell me more. It’s assurance of some kind. That’s awful. They shouldn’t have done that to you. Maybe you should look for a new job or it’ll be your turn next time. They’re prescriptions. It’s not interest in what’s happening emotionally for that guy. It terminates the interaction rather than expanding the interaction.
Beverly Hills Magazine: What is the right questions then to ask him?
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: The right question is let me put aside everything I’m doing. This is really important. Let’s sit down. Tell me more. I just want to encourage the dump because we are stressed male or female. The first thing we want to do is to dump. We don’t want a problem solved. We need to dump. We need to get it off our chest because that’s when it, and I say there’s no healing without tears and sometimes crying it out, but the frustration and this is why men too must not be ashamed to cry because it’s healthy to release those emotions of frustration and disappointment, sadness, whatever it is. If you bottle that it bottles and eventually explodes in rage, violence, or it goes into your body. However, the male is not going to go to tears first. The male is anger. You have to be capable of receiving that and knowing that that’s a healthy thing to do. Anger is a secondary feeling. Always. There is a secondary feeling and that the sadness will come next. So you have to be present with the anger in order to run through that, to get to the disappointment, to get to the sadness, to get to the self-doubt and all the other things that accompany it.
Beverly Hills Magazine: It’s his social training to be aggressive, irritated, angry first, and then be able to get to the disappointment, the frustration, the sadness, the self deprecating experiences that would be normal and natural with that. For all you women out there, wives, even mothers dealing with boys, be patient with them. Don’t welcome their anger because that’s their first response to their hits in life. And we all have them. Women maybe get emotional first, but men get aggressive, angry, frustrated. But know that that’s the doorway to them opening up emotionally, if you can validate it and give them the space to explore it.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: That you said doorway. That’s a great word. Because that opens up possibilities. I can go into this huge ballroom and explore the emotional depth of his feelings.
Beverly Hills Magazine: How can fathers model vulnerability or emotional openness, transparency for their sons?
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: There are numerous organizations across the United States that are developing for men. They have group meetings, they have educational meetings, they have retreats and the focus is really on accepting yourself as a male who has feeling states, finding a group of other men that you can explore and experiment with actually having feelings and disclosing feeling states to other. It’s just a beautiful experience. There are also numerous group books that have been written recently that are aimed at fathers. Read books!
Beverly Hills Magazine: Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst, your insights on raising emotionally healthy boys inspire us all. Thank you for guiding us toward stronger men.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: Thank you, Beverly Hills Magazine, for this platform. I’m honored to share ways to nurture boys’ emotional growth.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst redefines mental health with empathy. Her practice fosters resilience. Moreover, her book inspires transformation. By blending science and compassion, she uplifts clients. Ultimately, Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst’s legacy motivates healing. Her work encourages emotional growth. Connect with her mission for inspiration. Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst transforms lives with empathy. Her guidance strengthens young men. Moreover, her book fuels happiness. By teaching healthy habits, she ensures success. Ultimately, her work inspires joy. Her legacy empowers generations. Connect with her vision today.