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Skill development requires experience. We didn’t learn to walk, read, play football, or drive a car without lots of practice.
Emotional skill is also based on experience. It’s generally understood that women are far more emotionally skilled than men. This is because women have had and continue to have more emotional experience than men. It’s not that men can’t learn emotional skills. We have. Most men are good-hearted. What has limited our development is cultural pressures teaching us not to have certain emotional experiences.
What we haven’t developed as well as our sisters, wives, mothers, is an ease with vulnerable feelings. Women talk about their feelings of fear, difficulty, inadequacy, whereas men don’t. So women have a broader skill set, a skill set which is necessary in raising children and maintaining all relationships.
Without this experience, without this skill of emotional vulnerability, relationships become conflicts.
Here is where we men have had the emotional upper hand, because in conflict the male TRUMP card has been anger and dominance or shut down, rather than open-hearted conversation.
Innocent boys become fearful men.
At the age of twelve, I was first knocked senseless during football tackling practice….indescribable sudden pain, bright lights, a feeling of being far away and watching a movie.
During the next ten years, that experience was repeated more times than I can remember. It was part of the expectation I had for myself that I would weather these hits, because that was what football required, and football was the measuring stick of becoming a man.
By the age of 20, I had “advanced” to tackling so viciously that in my facemask broke off my helmet while I head tackled a ball carrier outweighing me by forty pounds. He fumbled the ball, I had held my ground my task was accomplished.
From this moment, this morning decades later, I look out at a world where the mandate for boys to suppress their fears and participate in health and life-threatening activities remains as a test of masculinity.
The residue of this type of thinking has remained part of my life. Believing I must be dominant has been the fearful thinking which led to every angry thought and word moving through me.
How did this happen? How many tackles? How many instances of swallowing my fear and exploding with a growl into another boy doing the same thing, trying to dominate, trying to be something of worth?
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When I was 23, my father died suddenly. The man from whom I sought acceptance and approval for my life and football performance disappeared. A trap door had dropped out from under me. As I fell with no handholds, I continued to lash out and shut down, the emotional skills that had led me for most of my life in challenging situations.
Five years after dad’s death my ‘man’ training was alive and visible in my relationship with my fiancé. Punching an oak desk and breaking my hand, for example, or angrily kicking a door off its hinges while chasing my fiancé during an argument.
Seven or eight years later, with children ages three and five, the power of using anger and shut-down in response to feeling vulnerable was still damaging me and those around me. I remember vividly punching holes in the wall to teach them to stop fighting. Fifteen years later, one of our sons punched a hole in the wall in front of me. Glaring he said, “I remember seeing you doing this when I was three.”
How many tackles? How many temper tantrums? How many times feeling unjustly bullied and hurt? How many instances of adults demanding “stop whining”? Well-intended parents teaching that boys are not afraid?
Of course, I have the ability to fear, rage and flee as every animal does, to protect its life. As I consider the countless experiences of being goaded into rage by men and women, nuns and priests, who were touting ‘manly’ behavior, it’s very clear that at the age of seventy, I am still recovering and learning. But what is the lesson?
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The Lesson
Fortunately, several women who understood that I had been a wounded animal at times, found their way into my life. They taught the courage of self-love. One who stayed through my instant insanity taught me to use the powerful emotional connection we are made from, to forgive and grow. From within that relationship, raising three wonderful children with her, I have learned many lessons.
Along with the results of listening to relationships stories as a therapist, this is a lesson I can share.
The way boys become men is multifaceted and complicated. In that development, many values and experiences grow into place. The flip side of manly, fearless dominance is acceptance and understanding.
Women with the courage, self-love, and skill to manage their own vulnerability are all around us. As the women in your life touch your sore spots, your fears of inadequacy, know that they are loving you, showing you where your growth is ready to take place, if you will simply speak your true feelings
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