You’ve been filled with and consumed by feelings of separation and angry thoughts since you were little. Your father and likely, at times, your mother didn’t know how to understand you in the world. Your father was angry and explosive as well as withdrawn and unapproachable.
You have felt that the beautiful love which makes life was stolen from you, though you still desperately feel the longing for that connection. BUT you don’t dare reach for love anymore. Expecting to receive love became a lesson in predictable pain. You have not been seen, touched, included, or heard. Now you are considering communicating by imposing pain on others so they can understand what you’ve been feeling.
You desire attention. Now the attention others have gotten for killing seems like a way to share your voice of pain. That seems like a way to at least be seen and heard. By plunging into the life around you with anger and destruction you can at least get attention for your pain, and the distance of your father and mother because emotional pain has been the most powerful lesson in your life.
The pain caused by your father’s physical and emotional distance has you so focused on itself that you have almost lost your way. Your place in life has been steadily and painfully deepened as it has become how it has felt to be increasingly helpless. The more you have kept the pain to yourself, the deeper you pushed it, the more it has pushed back for release into the world, like a beach ball held underwater. You’re tired of trying, hopeless, defeated, ready to destroy some of yourself to at least feel the pain connection which all humans experience.
I know you because I have felt and experienced what you are. Our story is awful and confusing and feels way too complicated for anyone else to get it. You are sure no one else can understand unless you become violent. But if that’s true, if you are without connection, completely hopeless and misunderstood, without alternatives to becoming physically violent, why are you reading this? I know you because I know me, I know us, all of us from a similar position.
Within us is a power much wiser and more powerful than the emotional pain and distance we have experienced. This wisdom is looking for ways to live and grow, and so are you, or you wouldn’t still be reading. The challenge is to release the beach ball of pain from under the water and let it out into the world. Nature, your nature, our nature includes healing from emotional damage.
There has been someone in your life who has been kind to you, who lives in your heart’s memory as a reminder that you are not lost, unloved, or unworthy. Within you is some memory of kindness which may be hidden, but it’s there. Touching it with awareness has felt dangerous as well as inviting. This is the truth of you whereas the emotional isolation, separation, and punishment are the result of lies.
There’s nothing wrong with you. I know you. You feel pain and don’t know yet how to share it with other men. But you’re still trying or, more accurately, Life is working through you to help you feel that love is both pain and peace, and the pain of the past is a choice that won’t continue to take form through you without your permission.
Peace is your nature, our nature. Peace is also the source of both life and death, I know your beauty and so do you. It’s time to use it as the courage to reach out in love surpassing what your father taught. Your rightful place is understandable and able to understand others. I know who you are. You are love taking form.
—
A version of this post was previously published on The FatherConnection.wordpress.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
—
◊♦◊
Have you read the original anthology that was the catalyst for The Good Men Project? Buy here: The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood
◊♦◊
Talk to you soon.
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here
—
Photo credit: Shutterstock
Bob, Thanks for sharing this. We need more compassion and understanding of men who have been severely wounded enough the be thinking of killing and wanting to die. I just listened to an insightful podcast by poet, storyteller, and counselor, Michael Meade. It’s 25 minutes and worth every minute to listen. https://www.mosaicvoices.org/episode-135-the-march-of-violence