We should cherish our pain, Seth Mullins writes, as it’s a primal expression of our true selves.
Although my real nature runs contrary to such notions, a part of me subscribed, completely, to some of the popular cultural myths about men and their relationship to emotional pain for many years. For example, as a teenager I never doubted that tears were a sign of weakness or that my male peers—those who never shuddered or felt disturbed by any of the many cruelties of the world—were somehow “more masculine” than me because of their numbness. Pain was a sensation to be either ignored or conquered. It never occured to me, throughout my adolescent years, that there could be much to gain by listening to it instead.
My pain had a lot to say. I carried incredible turmoil inside, much of it the product of growing up a confused boy whose natural father never bothered to come around. This circumstance was compounded by a family lie that maintained that my step-father, who scarcely resembled me at all in appearance or temperament, was my “real dad.” But I didn’t have the time (courage) to acknowledge my raw vulnerability. I was pursuing my musical dream, practicing guitar for hours a day and cultivating a new image as a devil-may-care rocker. My entire being was focused upon making something of myself in the world—an ambition that, in a thousand subtle or not-so-subtle ways, our culture insists should be the foremost priority of any man.
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My overarching life strategy—to stuff my pain and conquer the world through force of will—crumbled pretty quickly. The mask that I wore began to chip, fissures marring its immaculately dull demeanor amidst so much internal pressure. At 15, I was still the Good Son. By 19, I was destroying my belongings in fits of rage, taking flight in a long series of dangerous binges, and blaring hostility to such an extent that everyone who came close to me inevitably felt it. Frightened that the path I was on would most likely culminate in jail or suicide, I finally swallowed my pride enough to set up an appointment with a therapist whose number I’d gotten, a couple of years earlier, from my one girlfriend in high school.
The divine joke here was that my therapy involved working extensively with my dreams, and my dreams at the time were constantly playing upon my ideas about what it meant to be an empowered man. I would dream of Jedi knights, Samurai swordsmen, and primitive hunters; then I would bring my journal of these nightly adventures into my sessions. It took me years to fully understand what my inner world was attempting to do. In presenting these archetypes, it was capitalizing on my obsession with male power in order to coax me into facing my inner reality. What I found there was the full force of my long-denied pain.
Many were the sessions when I stormed into my analyst’s office and demanded to know how I was supposed to become empowered by huddling on my bedroom floor and weeping over the long grief of my life, night after night. But I’m grateful that my psyche played me so expertly because I’ve come to see that my pain was the ultimate gift. It awakened me to my tenderness, my compassion, my ability to empathize with my fellow human beings and the natural world. It salvaged so many dear qualities of my soul that had lain blanketed beneath my heavy ambition to be the kind of hard man that I thought my culture wanted.
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Our emotional pain is intimately connected with our hearts and with our potency, passion, and creativity because it is such a primal expression of our true selves. This holds true for both men and women; and it is, therefore, a truth that renders meaningless so many of the distorted concepts concerning men and pain that we grow up with—and become conditioned to—in our society. Denying our pain can lead to neuroses of all kinds, to intimacy and impotency issues, and even to various physical illnesses.
We ignore and repress the feelings that are native to us at our own peril. Real men recognize the gift contained within their pain.
—Photo squeezyboy/Flickr
Thanks for commenting, Justin. In my personal experience, there were times when I could acknowledge and move through my pain on my own and other times when I needed help in order to reap its benefit (and to even bear it, for that matter). What I like to say a lot is that the psyche is its own best physician. Like for instance with dreams; they may unearth powerfully charged emotions, but it’s never more than we can handle. Our inner system knows exactly how much to dole out, and when.
A refreshing approach to personal pain: thank you. So many of the essays on the GMP today about pain neglect to realize that you have to do some kind of therapeutic work to get benefit from the pain in your life. They write about pushing ever harder, finding the maximum amount they can suffer, instead of understanding that a crescendo of pain is an alarm system, not a test of masculinity. Our psyches are sophisticated players, and we’re lucky they are, since we are so apt to want to play the player but may have no idea how to win… Read more »