Thank you so much for this explanation. Men and women have a hard time understanding each other so your attempt to bridge the divide is good.
Got thinking about you and hope you are doing well during the holiday season. I’m going to open up a lot here - I hope it helps you and others. The reason why is interspersed throughout but is clarified at the bottom. (See part 2).
This post is long hence the two parts.
I’ve spent quite some time in therapy in the past few years. This is my second time, and it is helping me to get to the real root of some issues. Often it is the interplay of several childhood issues that as an adult we are trying to resolve that cause us to act in ways that we really don’t understand or fully choose. My wife accompanied me for some time, but was never comfortable in therapy. While this helped our joint issues, I was able to accomplish more for myself once she stopped coming, and the therapist agreed this was good for me. An issue for the marriage is that she also has childhood issues but is less willing to define them as an issue that impacts our marriage and so she doesn’t see them as something to be worked on. It would help us if we were both working on our individual issues.
As I noted, I believe (and certainly many counselors/therapists, etc. indicate) that acceptance is very important to men. Perhaps this is in part because their stronger urges are less accepted, perhaps it is other childhood issues, or some combination thereof. I don’t know, for me personally it doesn’t matter why, it just IS.
In addition, I was a bright child in a bright family raised in a rural area with few friends nearby. I grew up alone much of the time or with adults or much older siblings (and later - much younger siblings) so I had few connections.
My family was lower middle class. My parents worked hard and did what they could. My mom had some issues with self esteem, weight, she never learned to drive, etc. My older brothers would tease me as older brothers will. But the response I got in my interactions when this would anger or upset me was “You shouldn’t feel that way” “They’re just playing” etc. The way I was corrected and raised was largely via being made to feel shame or to disavow the validity of my feelings. I can see today that this led to a disconnect between how I think and how I feel, and I still work to integrate this better.
This was all exacerbated by some terrible events when I was in 6th grade in 1968/89. I had my first male teacher who was a year or two older than my oldest brother. We were in a small town, he knew my family, my uncle the high school football coach, etc. etc. He stayed after school with me and we read books together, he taught me algebra etc. I met his fiancée and was invited to his wedding over Christmas break. He seemed to take a real interest in me and helped me to advance myself in ways other teachers did not.
A week before his wedding, he brutally and violently murdered his fiancée. (He beat her and asphyxiated her - I won’t go into more graphic detail here.) The way my mother told me about this (in a room decorated for Christmas - it was just a few days away, just a few days before Apollo 8 would circle the moon) was to come and tell me during Saturday morning cartoons. She told me his fiancée had been killed and when I said that he must feel terrible she said “They think he did it.” She then asked me if I was alright, and left - it wasn’t spoken of again.
I cried. I prayed that he hadn’t done it and if he had that he would turn himself in. In hindsight, my parents didn’t know how to talk to me about this. I was too young to know I needed help in dealing with it, but clearly I did need help.
It wasn’t until 20+ years later that I woke up one day and realized - I had likely been in danger.
It wasn’t until 45 years later that my therapist said to me “It wasn’t your fault” and it had an amazingly powerful emotional impact. You see - my teacher and I had read and talked about many things. And when we read Frankenstein and he talked about the scene where the monster strangles Victor Frankenstein’s just married wife, he said to me “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to let out all your anger, all your frustration, in one violent act.” In hindsight part of me realized that I was the only person in the world that had a clue that he was a monster - and I had done nothing to stop this. I was 11. I couldn’t have known. But I have carried that feeling for 45 years, and am still working through it now that I realize I have it.
