What’s “Wrong” With Men?

“It’s like you start overthinking every thing and you start overreacting, finding unnecessary things to do, when people tell you it’s alright” my therapist said, effectively halting a panicking dialogue that, until then, had only lived underneath my skin and in the recesses of my mind.

I had done nothing that hurt me, my loved ones, or anyone else — and yet, I had saddled myself with guilt. It wasn’t the first time. I had felt bad about myself as long as I could remember. Back when I was in college for my bachelor’s, one of the professors asked for something innocuous, to share our journey to faith, I was a ministry major at the time. Being a few years older than my classmates fresh out of high school, I did not wish to condescend to the gushy and rousing stories some had shared, often appearing to hold back tears. So when it was my turn, I spoke matter of factly and logically then sat down.

Days later though, I somehow became convinced in my mind I had done a supreme wrong to all and found myself exasperated, breathlessly explaining to the professor, in his office, how convicted I felt and that I would like to, no, I must give my story anew. This freaked out ol’ white dude who was like, “uh OK…sure” and I walked away pleased. But 30 minutes later, I got my first bit of clarity, remembering a similar past situation.

“So when I feel really bad and excited for a reason I can’t fully explain, it’s not real,” I began to reason. Thankfully, several years later, that is not the way I live or operate — but the seeds remain, the general feeling that I am wrong and everything around me is somehow unacceptable.“It’s like you start overthinking every thing and you start overreacting, finding unnecessary things to do, when people tell you it’s alright” my therapist said, effectively halting a panicking dialogue that, until then, had only lived underneath my skin and in the recesses of my mind.

I had done nothing that hurt me, my loved ones, or anyone else — and yet, I had saddled myself with guilt. It wasn’t the first time. I had felt bad about myself as long as I could remember. Back when I was in college for my bachelor’s, one of the professors asked for something innocuous, to share our journey to faith, I was a ministry major at the time. Being a few years older than my classmates fresh out of high school, I did not wish to condescend to the gushy and rousing stories some had shared, often appearing to hold back tears. So when it was my turn, I spoke matter of factly and logically then sat down.

Days later though, I somehow became convinced in my mind I had done a supreme wrong to all and found myself exasperated, breathlessly explaining to the professor, in his office, how convicted I felt and that I would like to, no, I must give my story anew. This freaked out ol’ white dude who was like, “uh OK…sure” and I walked away pleased. But 30 minutes later, I got my first bit of clarity, remembering a similar past situation.

“So when I feel really bad and excited for a reason I can’t fully explain, it’s not real,” I began to reason. Thankfully, several years later, that is not the way I live or operate — but the seeds remain, the general feeling that I am wrong and everything around me is somehow unacceptable.

Why We Believe We Are Wrong

As humans, we basically believe there is something wrong with us. That is the eternal mosquito that buzzes around the ears, itches our skin, and pierces the flesh of our humanity over and over and over and over. I figure sometime around when religious folks call the “Age of Understanding,” think 2nd or 3rd grade age, we acquiesce. And it drives our never-ending self improvement projects from then on. Buddhist teachers call this desire to improve for happiness’ sake, the “If-Only” mind. The trance, for me, goes like this,

If only I made a lot more money then the people in my life would be happier

If only I could get a bit more ripped than I would feel better about myself

You get the drift. This idea is somewhat tied to the idea of the hedonistic treadmill, as in, when I buy this suit I’ll be happy — but now that I have the suit, what’ll really make me happy is that new car — etcetera. We all live it each day, much of the time, unconsciously, but it helps to place it before us, like that little paper parking card we dread not finding when it’s time to leave that parking garage downtown. While 100% mindfulness sounds like a dubious goal, we can mentally mark certain feelings and situations as reminders to bring us back to what’s real.As humans, we basically believe there is something wrong with us. That is the eternal mosquito that buzzes around the ears, itches our skin, and pierces the flesh of our humanity over and over and over and over. I figure sometime around when religious folks call the “Age of Understanding,” think 2nd or 3rd grade age, we acquiesce. And it drives our never-ending self improvement projects from then on. Buddhist teachers call this desire to improve for happiness’ sake, the “If-Only” mind. The trance, for me, goes like this,

If only I made a lot more money then the people in my life would be happier

If only I could get a bit more ripped than I would feel better about myself

You get the drift. This idea is somewhat tied to the idea of the hedonistic treadmill, as in, when I buy this suit I’ll be happy — but now that I have the suit, what’ll really make me happy is that new car — etcetera. We all live it each day, much of the time, unconsciously, but it helps to place it before us, like that little paper parking card we dread not finding when it’s time to leave that parking garage downtown. While 100% mindfulness sounds like a dubious goal, we can mentally mark certain feelings and situations as reminders to bring us back to what’s real.

Why We Men Believe We Are Wrong

To tack onto this unhelpful mental program, what psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach in her book “Radical Acceptance” calls the “Trance of Unworthiness,” men face unique pressures leading to us feeling all kinds of wrong.To tack onto this unhelpful mental program, what psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach in her book “Radical Acceptance” calls the “Trance of Unworthiness,” men face unique pressures leading to us feeling all kinds of wrong.

We are told we are threats

As a man of color, this is the big rock I needed to maneuver the minute I started therapy, for it challenged my basic place in the world. In fact, while it wasn’t the only thing at play, this idea plagued me to the point of majorly contributing to my mental breakdown years ago. But brother, “threat” is not your identity.

This idea of who you are being antagonistic towards the world takes a toll because community is one of our basic human needs. To be honest, sometimes I wish it weren’t; but whenever I’ve ignored this fact I’ve only been left hurt and writhing in the proverbial fetal position. Mother Teresa once said,As a man of color, this is the big rock I needed to maneuver the minute I started therapy, for it challenged my basic place in the world. In fact, while it wasn’t the only thing at play, this idea plagued me to the point of majorly contributing to my mental breakdown years ago. But brother, “threat” is not your identity.

This idea of who you are being antagonistic towards the world takes a toll because community is one of our basic human needs. To be honest, sometimes I wish it weren’t; but whenever I’ve ignored this fact I’ve only been left hurt and writhing in the proverbial fetal position. Mother Teresa once said,

And the first step in creating friendliness outside of yourself is learning to cultivate friendliness within. As Thomas Merton once noted,

We believe we must earn our manhood

“What kind of guy are you?!”

Whispers of post-conditioning sweat found their way into my eye corners as the Florida sun stung. Standing upon the sunbaked grass that collected us teenagers waiting for a relative’s ride home or simply the next thing to do, a few of my football teammates had encircled for the teenage male’s traditional spitting contest.I did not take part — then a pissing contest ensued.

“Yo, who wants to wrestle me?” asked a dual-sports junior on the wrestling team. He extended his arms outward, accepting all incomers. Looking around for his next victory, he quizzed some, gave the proven a pass, then he laid eyes on me.

“Jean…Marc? You ready?”

“Uh…nah man”

“C’mon! I’ll even let you get a better position. I’ll start on my knees”

“No thanks man”

“What, you wanna box? Let’s box!” he baited.

“No thanks man”

“Yo!” Now he was universally offended. “You don’t spit. You don’t box. You don’t wrestle?!” he interrogated.

“What kind of guy are you?!”

He was not off the mark from what I’d been raised to believe. Men were the Balboas in Rocky 4, the Bash Brothers in Mighty Ducks 2, and the Vics in Fast and the Furious. You were either a man, a little girl, a punk, or worse a.k.a what they called me at home. One of the disappointments of masculinity and manhood up until our current moment was that it felt revokable. “Be a man” was akin to “get right” or leave the world of men and have no place.

Mental health professionals specializing in narcissistic abuse tell us this is the specific sticky spur of emotional and mental abuse when it comes to developing minds. We, as children, are pure love for our parents and families and we act out of this love. Love is the foundation of life. We begin with our babbling until we find our way to the words that would better connect us to this love; it is foundational. Therefore, the greatest fear a developing mind can have is that it might have to forfeit that love. That mind fears being nothing to no one. And we must belong to someone, to survive mentally, emotionally, and physically.

For this mind, our betters can do wrong. We change the meaning of right and wrong, up and down to suit our caregivers first and the world second. For when the love line is lacking in the home, we seek it anywhere that pulse might potentially be caught. Bodybuilding magazines, fashion ads, television commercials, and internet personalities become our betters and happily show us the way. Anyone or anything with a stronger or more clear idea, in our traumatized mind, deserves our deep respect somehow. That is why we learned to defend our manhood with everything we had. Growing up, the saying, “let’s test your manhood” was often a call to a fist fight. Because the idea of manhood was worth defending and bleeding for.

We had an uncle who threatened us with violence if we ever came back from school beat up. He would beat us up, the thinking went, to teach us to be tough. The men I was taught to emulate were the college running backs who took beltings to teach their body toughness. Savagery was justified if it protected this manhood. I was expected to be the human equivalent of an attack dog, publicly threatening violence to protect those I was told were incapable of defending themselves, when ordered. There are too many stories like this to recount.

But, ultimately, masculinity, when done in this way, has no winners. There can be no first prize for a behavioral take that, author and masculinity revisionist Cooper Thompson found, relied upon systematizing homophobia and misogyny. What these men who praised toughness actually accomplished was kicking up their stress responses to unhealthy levels that increased chances of physical injury, illness, and an early death. These men who perpetuated this masculinity and sought to defeat any signal to the contrary were themselves defeated to various degrees: stroke, decaying dental health, suicidal behavior , excessive drug use, mental health challenges, and trouble with law enforcement.

In truth, our masculinity is not a thing to grab and fight for but something inherent to encourage. Author Keith Thompson, who complied the anthology “To Be A Man: In Search of The Deep Masculine” with some of the world’s top minds on the subject, summarized it well…

“Masculinity, taken literally as a singular anything, invariably obscures the richness, complexity, and multiplicity of the male experience, fostering the supposition that one or another model of male ways is ‘correct’ in some absolute sense, as if masculinity could not be big enough to include Sly Stallone and David Bowie, James Earl Jones and Peewee Herman, George Patton and Mohandas Gandhi…all at once.”

The Truth: Things Are Complicated

The cult, as we think of it, has not existed in the United States for decades. While every once in a while we might encounter another manipulative and egomaniacal celebrity chaser in our news feeds, we, thankfully, haven’t seen anything close to the magnitude of the Peoples’ Temple tragedy in half a century. And the main reason for that is our fear of charlatans that extends to the level of federal law enforcement.

What makes charlatans and the worst politicians most despicable is their ability to invert perception through an oversimplification of reality. A politician telling you jobs are being taken from your country and your economy weakened by thirsty migrants is not too far from the cult figure who preaches civil leaders and certain people groups are actively birthing hell.

Our world is complex — that is the truth. Just watch the history of the Federal Reserve raising or lowering interest rates to inconsistent effects. Sometimes things don’t work as they should and even really smart people can’t explain why. Even people like me, who work with technology all day, know the dirty truth: that sometimes tech doesn’t work and we don’t always know why. Our world, like us, is not a pinball machine simply in want of a quarter. Linear, life is not. The issue with falling into this mental trap is that we find ourselves tortured inside of it — when the truth is, things are complicated in a myriad of ways.

We don’t recognize this world nor ourselves

Our brains were trained for a time of greater violence and exclusion, whether we’re talking the long arc of evolution or just earlier experiences in our lifetimes. Before I got into the car to go to elementary school, my parents’ news would play me clips of Rodney King being beaten by a mob of police, OJ Simpson on trial for murder, or the bombing at the Olympics, basically the horrors of the time. We learn to change our agreements and expectations with the world, based upon what we encounter; perhaps, the thinking goes, safety is too much to expect.

Sometimes I feel like a roughed-up relic of a bygone age. I hear my friends’ children scream over food preferences and I wait for the angry parent monster to come out and shame them for not “being grateful” when there are so many hungry children in the world. But they, like many others now, believe in working on themselves and not through fracking the fragile psyche of little growing humans.

I notice a female colleague wearing some really cute stone decorated sandals and think something that violates the previously sacrosanct, that I might acquire the same pair for myself. One of my work dudes gives me the thumbs up, encouraging my fashion forwardness, while his pearls swing from his neck. In my household, one could have received a bottle to the head for playing at anything less than a blue-is-for-boys mentality. Post-high school, my own mother once warned I was asking to attract the “wrong sort” of attention when I purchased myself a decidedly pink shirt. She wanted me back in-line.

We lack rituals and rights

When did you become a man? It feels like none of us knows. Unfortunate. Where previous cultures our historians labeled primitive would torture would-be men with rituals involving naked humiliation, surviving in extreme hot and cold, or enduring potentially fatal hunts of carnivorous beasts, ours often does not bother noting the change has taken place at all. It’s as though we have collectively decided entering adulthood was no longer something worthy of celebration. The lack of a clear line between adulthood and teenage life can contribute to a sense that perhaps we were not ready to be full grownups. As a result, we feel like pretenders explaining away our badness.

The Lie: Things Are So Simple

With the proliferation of tech-powered communicative channels, there is a glut of individuals seeking substantial attention and validation through the dispatch of effective marketing. However, as some countries banning mass marketing tactics can attest, marketing generally works through highlighting lack. A completely content person in need of nothing would not purchase. Therefore, where marketing dominates, self-fulfillment typically sputters. The list is incredibly long in our culture and minds concerning what we neither have nor have achieved. This environment preps us to swallow the lie our essence is as at the heart of our discontent.

“If only I were stronger, I wouldn’t need help”

My dear friend, who’s a therapist confided in me a realization she had in therapy. Lamenting her recent emotional condition, she sought to completely “get past” some deep wounds and trauma. She wanted to be further along. Truth is, she wanted “it” to be over for once and for all. Her therapist illuminated her to a different idea,

“Maybe, you can release the pressure of being cured and you can start to acknowledge, this is something you might have to work on healing throughout your life”

Doesn’t everything in you want to resist that? No, we say, I work on myself, I get better, then I stop needing help. We have this simple program in our head that says:

for (let i = 1; 
i <= 10; i++) {
    console.log(i);
}

So if “i” is me, I’m willing to acknowledge that I am only at 1 now.

But I “know” that life will be perfect at level 10. So, I’ll implement self-improvements strategies that say,

As long as “i” am not a 10, we’ll keep up the “i++” strategy until “i” get there.

At 10, we tell ourselves, everything will be good and the program can end.

But, in our personal lives, 10 is an amorphous concept that keeps shifting. For example, I was raised by my family to hate my body. From the age of 8, I began working out, bench pressing a watermelon I found in the garage while watching ridiculous miracle weight loss product infomercials. The story still makes me cringe and required me to take a break before continuing to write.

The mental story I was taught to develop said, if only I could have a flawless body, like the ones in the underwear ads, people would love me and I would be happy. So I worked at it for decades, made 30 plus changes to diet and exercise regimens over the years — until I achieved it. I could have been an underwear model. I looked around and wondered why all the women weren’t flocking to me. Yeah, I got some scorchin’ hotties to like me on the apps, but they would each ghost and ditch for their own reason. I would get dissed in-person too.

I once met this woman at the store where I was working, and who I gave loads of discounts to; “I would ABSOLUTELY love to get a coffee with you!” she exclaimed. Ghosted. I once dated this woman who lived up in the mountains in Evergreen and I would drive an hour and a half, and navigate those stress-inducing winding roads to go see her. I did that for a month of increasing emotional and physical intensity. Then one Monday she stopped responding to texts. I had been ghosted. The underwear model body had not fulfilled its expectations. So, in typical fashion I looked around for something else to improve, I decided I needed more money. And on and on it went.

In our minds, we think we’re fixing a leaky roof then the pipes burst; we think we need to replace the spark plugs but the engine konks out; we believe our computer just needs a software update then the battery dies. This is not to say to not get after it.

When I take strengths finder tests, my top traits are competition and achievement. I love rooting for my championship basketball team. I think much of the time folks need to stop whining and exert their will to get where they want to go professionally. I don’t tend to have a ton of patience for excuses. But life is not some linear program that only requires 10X the input to be executed successfully.

While striving for improvement and success is commendable, it's crucial to understand that self-acceptance and contentment often lie in embracing the unfolding of ourselves, with all its ups and downs. As we unfold, we loose the things that were never truly us and once again grasp the untold we’ve known to be true about ourselves. When we aren’t wrapped up in obsession, sadness, and fear, we are good. As our highest selves, we can accept our goodness.

Conclusion

As we navigate the labyrinth of self-discovery and societal expectations, it becomes increasingly apparent that life defies our attempts to simplify it into neat, linear narratives. The journey towards self-improvement is not a straightforward climb towards an elusive pinnacle of perfection. Rather, it's a continuous evolution, marked by setbacks, detours, and moments of profound clarity. We must confront the fallacy of believing that reaching a predefined level in any aspect of our lives will bring lasting fulfillment. True growth lies in embracing the complexity of our existence, not only as men, but people on this planet, acknowledging our imperfections, and finding solace in the journey itself. It's not about reaching some distant destination but about embracing the beauty of our own humanity and genuine masculinity within it. We are not wrong, we are unfolding.