Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Down and dirty #1: The weakest of men


A little comment (https://nyti.ms/3PWZyRL#permid=122256406) to a recent New York Times article on domestic violence and murder-suicide:

Men are often lonelier and needier than women are. Their plight – their dysfunction – starts in childhood when they are discouraged from expressing – giving to a caring other – their full spectrum of feelings. Because they're supposed to be real men. They become self-enclosed repositories of need for emotional bonds that they are not allowed to have. Men who stalk are desperate children of abandoning parents, but now are big and angry. The same for men who abuse and kill. The irony is that women who are victims are subjugated by the weakest of men: little boys who couldn't grow up.

This is a generalization that you can count on. One, it's hitched to a basic principle of human dysfunction: the ungrown "inner child" which is most of us. Two, boys are still tainted by the culture of macho, the strong, silent type, the less-feeling, the aggressive. This is not to say that girls do not grow up needy for love, and lonely. But there is a difference, the difference between reality- and delusion-based suppression. Girls will be deprived of what their introjected lesson tells them they should have: communion, bond, an emotional life. Their whole is injured, but vital. Boys are deprived of vitality as they are given to assume they should be left out in the cold. The soldierly calm, the soldierly lost. They can't conceive they are merely human.

Men are born, live and die under this delusion. What a fate.

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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.