I’m obviously not the first man in history that has taken my emotional life as a man seriously. For example the writer Robert Bly has written about it. Professor, writer and psychologist Jordan Peterson certainly takes emotions seriously. And probably every male artist that has ever produced something of value, must have been at least somewhat in touch with his emotional life, even if it often has been in a chaotic, neurotic way, such as the emotional lives of men like August Strindberg, Vincent van Gogh or why not any of the beatnicks.
Think for a second how crippling it is for a man to live with this emotional deficiency that our culture has instilled in us from generation to generation. To be, to different degrees, depending on the individual, cut off from such a vital part of what it means to be human. Another reason among many to be skeptical about culture, huh? We grow up taking so many things for granted. And when these things are questioned, the proposed solutions are often even worse than that which has been put into question. To put it bluntly, I don’t like the feminist, politically correct approach to the problem of male emotional deficiency one bit. I don’t want to become more like a woman in order to get more in touch with my emotions. I want to be a man that fully feels. Just like I believe that women need to become more empowered while embracing their femininity and not by becoming more like men.
Things are not always as they seem on the surface. There is a divine order to things. Whether we recognize it or not. And if we mess with this order we suffer for it. I will go more into detail about this in the next post. But for now I will just say that human beings cannot be treated as blank slate which we can imprint whatever we want on, in order to reach a desired goal. Not without creating emotional dysfunctions, that are at their core spiritual. Dysfunctions that will most definitely lead to dysfunctions on a social level, both in the interactions between individuals and in the collective.
I’m hardly the only one that is tired of how ideas of how we are supposed to be, seem to always be pushed upon us from above through some sort of ideology. How it sneaks up on us through the mass-media and the movies and music that we consume. I want to be fully human on my own terms and not be brainwashed into some image of what a contemporary man or woman should be like. I want to embrace the nature that God put into me, and not the twisted ways of the world. What we had a hundred years ago was definitely not healthy. But can you really say that what we have today is an improvement of that?
In many ways, I think that healthy emotional expression has to do with appropriateness. This is because another answer that cannot be it, is to just let the emotions go and allow them to be expressed in any way they want, whenever they come up. We don’t become emotionally mature by just letting our emotions run rampant. What is the alternative? Well, here are some ideas that I’ve come across so far. As in many cases we come back to mindfulness and to train ourselves into a non-reactive mindset. To push down our emotions and not express them at all is a bad idea. But we can train ourselves to not express them in a reactive manner. In other words to not express them in the first way that comes up. Instead we can take a step back and first try to understand what it is that we are actually feeling. Which is not always self-evident. And then we can consciously think of a way of expressing the emotion.
And now it’s time to share something that I felt very reluctant about. But I don’t want to go around pretending that I’m perfect, even though my ego would love for me to do so. But the real me wants to look at all aspects of my life and see what can be learned from them. The real me doesn’t care about perfection. Only about truth, knowledge and understanding.
So here we go: As I said in the beginning, I’ve never been a violent person. But I do have some minor anger issues, that have made me shout and punch walls in the past. I have become better with this lately though and it was quite a while since I did this. But I still have to be vigilant with myself when something happens that knocks me off balance.
These types of reactions have always been followed by feelings of shame and hopelessness because I hate the feeling of not being in control of myself. And I especially hate the feeling of losing control when someone else sees it. I’m trying to look at it as just a pattern that I’ve unconsciously practiced since I was a child, but which can be unlearned with the right tools.
Then, in my youth, I often learned to suppress my anger. So I never learned to deal with anger in a healthy way. And on top of that, I’ve learned that other negative emotions can be transformed into anger as well, when they are suppressed. I’ve found mainly grief and fear hiding behind my anger. It is also often tied to a sense of lack of control, which in turn is linked to really low emotions, such as helplessness, regret, shame and hopelessness.
This is not what my soul is like. It is how my soul’s vehicle functions because I’ve never learned how to operate it properly. It’s not as if our bodies and brains come with an instruction manual and our education system is next to useless when it comes to such crucial learning. But I’ve learned tons of stuff that I will never have any use for instead…
Something that I came to think of with regards to this, is that when I took a couple of courses in psychology at the university, we learned that domestic abusers were motivated by a drive to dominate. This was framed as men’s will to dominate women. But what if this is incorrect. What if at least many of these men feel helpless in most areas of life, but try to dominate the few areas where they can feel powerful? It doesn’t make it any more okay, but it sheds a totally different light on the problem. The problem is no longer dominant men that use force to subjugate women. It instead becomes broken, disempowered men that try to grab on to what little power they can in their lives, in the most dysfunctional, destructive way possible. I would never say that this is always the case. There are of course throughly cruel people, that use violence in a cold, calculated way. But what if these are the minority cases?
I think that there is a case to be made for changing gender norms for both men and women. Just not in the way that is taught by political correctness. But in this case, the focus might need to shift from what is wrong with men, to what is wrong with a society that creates these specific men. And when I think about it, aren’t the cold calculating men, at least to a certain degree, also created by societal norms? Norms that, while having to do with gender, also have to do with the value we ascribe to power in general. Maybe our relation to power has a lot to do with dysfunctional emotions? This is something that I need to think more about. And by extension, what role power plays in my and other people’s lives in general.
Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash
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