As much as I care about mental health, especially when it comes to men, I am not a licensed mental health professional nor will I ever claim to be (unless I become one someday).

But, I do 100% believe in the power of counseling, therapy, coaching or any service that provides you with a knowledgable individual who will be there to listen to you, especially in tough times.

I have become a user of BetterHelp myself and have gotten massive benefit out of it by getting paired with my ideal licensed expert who has immeasurably helped me with my own fears and insecurities that I've struggled with.

If you feel like you can use someone to talk to, BetterHelp is offering you, a Behind The Mask-ulinity Podcast listener, 10% off your first month if you sign up using this link:

BetterHelp.com/BehindTheMaskulinity

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We all know emojis. Those cute (gasp... am I a grown man that just used the word cute to describe something?!) little smiley faces that we use in our text messages, our social media posts, our comments to posts, our emails and in many other forms of our communication.

They are a way of adding a little more expression to a message we want to convey to someone.

We can type a text to our significant other that says "I love and I miss you" and end it with a period. Or, we can type a text to our significant other and instead of ending it with a period, we end it with the emoji with hearts for eyes, or the emoji with the three little hearts circling around its face, or maybe just the big red heart emoji. We can couple that with perhaps the sad face emoji, or the crying emoji, or the slightly angled down lip emoji to let our loved one know that we're really bummed that we're not around them.

Honestly, sometimes my wife and I will communicate with just pure emojis. Sometimes a facial expression (even though it's not technically our faces) can convey more than a thousand words can. She'll send me the dog emoji coupled with the heart emoji that's maybe attached to a picture of our dog, and it instantly brings to mind how much we love our dog Charlie and how happy we are that he's in our lives. It can conjure up all these feelings I have inside without her even having to type out one single word.

Now, are emojis a substitute for deep, honest, vulnerable conversations? No way. But they are a nice addendum to a message that we want to convey or feelings that we want to express.

And guess what?...... Us men have messages to convey and we have feelings and emotions, too!! Just because we're men and we've been taught to suppress them and bury them deep down inside until we lash out abusively at someone else or drown our misery in drugs and alcohol doesn't mean we have to continue to do so.

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