MALES FEELING SUPPRESSED, CONFUSION BECOMES VIOLENCE
Being alive, aware, responding, beings all combine sensory input with our personal histories and decide our best course of action. Our life is daily choosing what to do. What shall we do about male emotional violence?
All of us experienced and will experience feelings ranging from anger to compassion. Each emotions is valuable to our ability to adapt, change, grow, heal, help.
Feelings are part of our wisdom. There are no good emotions nor bad. Anger and fear are just as natural as benevolence and confidence. No right without left, no up without down, no birth without death. Each of us maintains a full palette of feelings so that we may choose our own authentic, accurate way. This unlimited array of feeling is life’s wisdom, and teaches us in ongoing experiences how to adjust to life’s universe of unforseeable experiences.
When I was about twenty, my father told me that the strongest emotion he experienced was loneliness, and well, I remember being silent outwardly, and inwardly scrambling to fix him, fix his pain. But I didn’t. Turns out I couldn’t, but at that time his pain felt like my obligation.
I never did talk to him about that part of his life. My feelings of fear were too strong to trust pushing the conversation into the dark. I didn’t believe his loneliness was enough to help me with mine. Today I know differently.
The management of my lonely feelings has led me to accept highs and lows which I am still negotiating on a daily basis. Whether it’s family, world news, friends, the waves keep coming. Committed to live feelings of connection and sufficiency helped me help others.
I am here today in part because my father Clem Rannigan shared that emotional loneliness truth with me. From the time he told me his secret I continued to use life in the form of extreme experiences to keep a feeling of worth.
You might say my father’s loneliness became my spiritual umbilical cord. Being aware of “lonelies” (thoughts, feelings, habits) emerged in my identity far too often. I nearly killed my best friend driving drunk, took care of relationships with friends male and female, held my awareness to remaining kind even when suffering loneliness.
I hurt many people while helping many, learning the value and power of our emotional feelings. If my father’s loneliness was his strongest feeling (which I now see was a passing truth), there must have been other feelings which ruled loneliness enough to keep him in his role of father, husband, friend.
So what about guns and emotional weapons?
SO WHAT ABOUT GUNS AS EMOTIONAL WEAPONS?
The weapons which males have so often turned on others are outpicturings of their feelings about themselves and their safety in the world. Healthy males do not kill indiscriminately. Emotionally unhealthy males do. The question I am asking you to answer is “Who teaches males to be so emotionally isolated?” Do you?
If you’re a female, then I know you are using life to share emotional connection towards mutual growth and caring. Even if you are a teenage girl who has felt the sting of others’ words, you are learning to use emotions as connectors, not separators. Feelings are links not bullets. Generally females are way ahead of males in emotional understanding and honesty. This doesn’t mean females don’t get hurt, confused, afraid. They do. They also participate in waves of emotional honesty capable of leading males into self-compassion, if we are humble enough to trust.
My father’s naked honesty serves me thru this day. I shared the loneliness card with you because he was honest with me. His shared vulnerabilty is part of my question to you: are you encouraging loving connection?
Men with guns are not trusting. They have been threatened, punished, isolated, rebuked to the point of outrage. Their rage comes out as bullets intending to end their pain. They don’t know yet that words are the equalizers. Words of humble honesty and love carry the truth of our connection. Bullets are the pain of emotions unexpressed, suppressed and exploding.
Shooters of people are expressing isolation, fear, helplessness they experienced in relationships, often in their families. These isolations, which we humans are capable of communicating with words are commonly shut down in family structures where men are living without expressing their sense of loneliness. Females are generally raised to share vulnerability. This is in a context of social skill useful towards problem solving. We are capable of helping others by asking for help.
How do we help those so lost they feel violent? How do you manage your relations with men who are isolated, dominant, committed to being superior? You may be one of these guys.
Do you speak kindly as a disicpline? Do you embrace the loneliness you and others feel? Do you trust your feelings to guide your through this miracle life as wise, helpful, loving?
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This post was previously published on The Father Connection.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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