When I was growing up I never really had a steady male influence in my life until my mother met and married my step-father. The man I soon came to call Dad was everything the men in my life prior to that were not. The men in my life up until that point were a bingo card of good, bad, and occasionally ugly. Alcoholics with anger issues, chronic jailbirds, and unstable relationships were the norm for them. Half of them had children being raised by other members of the family and the other half couldn’t maintain a healthy relationship with their kids even while living under the same roof. My own biological father left my mother when I was less than a year old.
Growing up I wish I could say I learned a lot from my stepdad about what it means to be a man but unfortunately that was not the case. As I got older I began retreating into myself, overwhelmed by what would later be diagnosed as a sever anxiety disorder in adulthood. I struggled with my emotions and would frequently become overwhelmed when things were not as I thought they should be.
Since I could not cope with my emotions I turned to what I thought would be the easier option: Suppressing them. I didn’t see the use for things like sadness, worry, etc so I decided it would be easier to just rid myself of them. If I didn’t feel them I couldn’t waste time on them. I took solace in logic because that is something I could understand. Logic made sense. Everything had a place. It made it easier for me because emotions are NOT logical. I could tell myself it was a waste of time to be sad about something because it didn’t change the fact that it happened, nor did it help me with whatever my current situation was.
In short, I became what was considered a “man”. I was cold, logical, and completely ignorant. I didn’t understand my own feelings and so I was unable to help anyone else with theirs. I felt in extremes, not knowing how to temper my own emotional responses to the level necessitated by the event in question. Losing a treasured possession would cause the same level of emotional response as losing a loved one, albeit with different emotions involved. Something not going the way that I envisioned it prior to starting out would completely derail my mind, not for hours but DAYS. Unable to process the wide array of emotions I dealt with on a daily basis I stuffed them all away which lead them to all look like anger.
I realized what was happening when I saw my own sons starting to emulate my behavior. My oldest son gets bent out of shape if things aren’t exactly right. My middle son started lashing out in anger at his brothers. My youngest son would scream in anger at his mother and I over little things when they didn’t go his way. I knew that if I didn’t change that they would go down the same path that I did and that was something I did not want for them.
I started to see a therapist to work out my own issues where I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, severe Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and borderline Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I finally had a name for the things I had been suffering from most of my life which, while scary, was also very liberating. I was no longer at the mercy of nameless, shapeless fears. There wasn’t some boogeyman hiding in the dark waiting to take me. Instead I had something tangible and real to work with. Naming your fear is the first step towards conquering it and I had now done that.
Once that was done we started work on strategies and coping mechanisms in addition to medication to help me with my struggles. As I started going through therapy I began to realize that so many of the things I had grown up accepting as the truth were, at best, gross misrepresentations of the truth and, at worst, outright toxic to by myself and my relationships. I grew up believing emotions made you weak and pathetic. I viewed them as a distraction, something that served no logical purpose. I was unable to maintain close friendships with others because I couldn’t understand them. I was an outsider in my own life, doomed to a lonely existence because I pushed away everything I didn’t understand.
I know now that that is the furthest it is possible to be from the truth. Emotions are amazing things, not something to be feared. True strength lies not in hiding your emotions but really feeling them and letting others see. Real men are compassionate, not stoic. They are tough but vulnerable. They care for others as much, if not more, than they care for themselves. They are protective without being hard. They listen to others as well as to themselves. They own up to their mistakes and learn from them.
These are the lessons I want my sons to learn. These are the things I will spend the rest of my life showing them. I only hope I continue to be a man they can look up to.
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This is a great article. On a macro level how much have we all lost because we did not see ourselves the way you have have. Thanks