Will the World Ever Have a Place for Tortured, Haunted Men?

Disclaimer: this piece mentions suicide. If you or anyone you know needs help, please contact 988 or visit the 988 Helpline. This piece also has spoilers for the show “This Is Us.” If you have not watched the show and don’t want it spoiled, do not read any further.

I present as a very nice, chill, and loving person. But I am more tortured and in pain than I would like to admit sometimes. As much as we try to embrace men in the world to be more open about their feelings, I sometimes feel like the world is not quite there yet.

I am in the process of watching This Is Us, and a common elephant in the room is one of the protagonists’ experiences in the Vietnam War. One of the protagonists, Jack Pearson, seems like the prototypical good husband and family man. He makes sacrifices for the family. He does all the maintenance work. He’s extremely involved in the lives of all his kids. For a man in the 1970s and 1980s, he’s remarkably emotionally open.

But there is one thing he does not talk about: his time serving in the Vietnam War. He was a Sergeant who saw many die. He saw his own brother, another soldier inadvertently kill a Vietnamese child, and then he cut off all contact and communication with that brother out of disgust. This brother, similarly, suffers from PTSD-like symptoms, turning into a recluse who lived out of a trailer alone for almost half a century.

He told his wife and parents that his brother died in the war. After he dies, his wife discovers a lot more about him than she ever knew, including that his brother was still alive, because he never talked about it, even to his wife.

This is the part of the story where I’m supposed to compare myself to men like Jack Pearson and determine whether I, too, am a tortured, haunted man with events in the past I would rather forget about than talk openly about.

The answer is yes. These are not things I hide from people I love, including my wife. They are parts of my life that I still talk about in therapy.

But they are parts of my life that would be incredibly damaging to a lot of people if shared openly, that would implicate a lot of different people’s stories and complicate matters far too much. Sharing my deepest story openly would hurt a lot of other people, despite how cathartic and freeing it would be for me. I am a proponent of the vulnerability movement, championed by the great Brene Brown, and it has changed my life for the better in my daily emotional expression rather than suppression.

There is time and space for sharing and processing these past events. But they are in the trusted hands of the few. They are the ghosts of the past, skeletons in the closet that I have to be very, very tactful about who is and is not within the orbit. My wife is one of those people, as are my closest friends, as is my therapist.

There was a time when I thought about these moments, all day every day.

Sometimes I do feel out of place, like I’m not supposed to be where I am. It’s likely how Jack Pearson and many Vietnam War veterans felt upon returning from the war. This sometimes gives me a sense of imposter syndrome — I survived my trauma and got through it. I lucked out in plenty of situations to be the youngest in my family and suffer the least hardship, and not everyone in my family can say that.

To be clear, there are tortured and haunted people who aren’t men in the world, too. This is not to redirect conversation away from anyone else’s pain, including women, which is also valid (and sometimes worse), but can be different.

I think there is an emphasis on men’s PTSD and when men feel haunted and tortured because that pain has, for so long, been suppressed and not talked about. It has traditionally gone against the grain of the whole “men don’t talk about their feelings” sentiment. Of course, the implication there is that women do, but that isn’t always true, either, and it’s essential not to dismiss the pain women so often feel as well.

For men, a lot of the problem is internal. There’s a very common shared experience of having gone through some very difficult and traumatic experiences and actively trying to suppress talking about it. I have had friends with siblings who have passed, parents who have passed, and friends who struggled with drug addiction. At some point, these very close friends and I talk about these experiences, but it takes a very long time, often after more than half a year of knowing each other, and I think there’s a shared sentiment that as men, we’re not supposed to talk about these things.

The irony, most of the time, is the more often I try not to think about the topics that lead me to feel tortured and haunted, I think about them a lot more often than I would like to admit anyway.

It’s not that no one wants to hear about these — it is not the public or my peers’ regard for my trauma I think is the problem. It’s not the comparison between how society regards men’s and women’s trauma and struggles.

Rather, I think it’s how most of us as men were raised and conditioned and how we regard our pain and trauma. It’s how we learn from a very early age to shut it down and suppress, to never allow ourselves to feel, to always keep our heads down and not talk about it.

Any time another male peer or I have opened up about a very difficult time in our lives, about mental health, or something that we have been conditioned not to talk about, the vast majority of the time, the response from other men isn’t one of dismissal.

In my experience, it’s usually one of respect. It’s one with the implication that “I wish I could be brave enough to talk about my issues too.” It’s one that realizes we’re all stuck in the mud and quicksand of how we were raised and conditioned, but also that realizes how much suffering that conditioning has caused us. Maybe when we were 13 we would have seen such vulnerability as weak, but after young adulthood, men have been through enough and suffered in silence long enough to want any other choice.

The tortured, haunted man is in a cage that they, so often, may never break out of. Those of us who can break free and tackle that pain are the regarded as the brave ones.

2024 is a time when men receive a lot of conflicting messages.

The data in the disparity or suicide rates shows why the problem of haunted, tortured men is a big problem for society. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, in 2022, men were 3.85 times more likely to die from suicide than women. However, three times as many women than men reported a history of attempted suicide. Across all racial groups, elderly men had higher suicide rates than younger ones. White males accounted for 68.46% of suicide deaths in the United States, despite being just 30% of the population as of 2020. Elderly White men have the highest suicide rate of any group, with 51.4 deaths per 100,000 for White men aged 85 or older.

This isn’t a piece that tackles the unique problems White guys deal with or how they are also suffering, despite the disproportionate suicide rates compared to the rest of the population. It might go against the grain to say this, but I can see how it can seem invalidating and lonely to constantly be told you have nothing to complain about because you’re privileged and other people have it a lot worse.

There could be plenty of reasons why elderly men are more prone to dying by suicide. One common explanation is that men have weaker resilience and coping mechanisms than women. Men might like to feel in control, and have a lot less control as they get older. Another might be that older men are more likely to be veterans, and another sociological factor could be a declining social safety net.

But that there is a mental health crisis among men in general is undeniable, and something we need to tackle.

For me, I chase achievements and success these days. I chase them almost to a fault, but I do not cast aside my knack for service and morality, and doing the right thing according to my faith. This past two years, I have gone to incredible lengths for my students. But sometimes I wonder if these lengths I go to are a direct result of my feeling like I owe the world something.

Let me explain that feeling a bit more. These traumatic experiences from my past make me feel lucky and indebted. They make me feel lucky I survived and made it to where I am now. I am well aware that others who suffered from trauma don’t cope in the same ways I do. Some self-destruct and drink too much. I like to channel my pain outward so I don’t have to spend a lot of time looking inward.

I mention this tendency of mine because it is a part of who I am, but also the messaging I received that that was the most important thing, as an Asian man. This may be a byproduct of the traditional sexism of my Asian culture, but I distinctly recall our parents being completely fine with one of their daughter becoming a journalist because she was a woman. If I became a journalist, my parents would have completely yelled at me and berated me for hours because I didn’t want to become a doctor. In these traditional, patriarchal cultures, there is a much bigger expectation for girls to help with housework, which is unfair. But what is often not talked about is also the pressure for boys to carry on the family name and have heightened career expectations.

We have all heard for a very long time that success and achievement are all that matters. It’s not a message exclusive to men, but I think it is unique because there is a lot more of the messaging that you are worthless if you are not successful and don’t achieve anything. There are more limited alternative avenues for men if they don’t find success — and society certainly messages this for men more, particularly in traditional circles. There is, unfortunately, a lot less acceptance for stay-at-home dads than there should be.

There is also simultaneous messaging that it’s okay to be vulnerable and talk about your feelings. Although people don’t say this super openly, there is also an undercurrent of older-fashioned people who believe in the strong, silent type who doesn’t talk about their feelings, and scoff at men who do. I have heard both throughout my life and although I lean now a lot more toward the former than the latter, but I have certainly had my critics for being vulnerable, too.

Either way, society’s expectations for men and their feelings are at a turning point. And it’s incredibly confusing.

Sometimes, though, I do hope a younger generation of men has it better than I did. For the record, I was a very lucky person to have avoided a lot of the mental health struggles of my brother or struggles of addiction among my friends. And many of my friends have undergone similar periodic challenges with depression, anxiety, and this suffocating emotional suppression.

I know the world changes slower than we would like, but I do wish, sometimes, that the messaging to a younger generation of men could be one where it’s not so taboo to talk about your mental health and feelings, where your career and accomplishments don’t define all of your worth.

I don’t think the problems of men are worse than those of women in society. I do think they are different.

Until we all normalize men talking about their struggles, pain, and trauma, too many of us will continue to suffer in silence.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:

White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism

Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box

The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer

What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

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