The Patriarchy hurts women in obvious and well-chronicled ways. But how it hurts men is a more covert affair, and is responsible for the uptick in male suicides, particularly in middle-aged males.
There is a myth that runs through our culture, one that says a man can shut off his emotions and be an island of self-sufficiency. While it sounds like a great idea to liberate oneself from the messy parts of being human, it also disconnects us from the most fundamental part of who we are. Because our feelings tell us what we want and need in our lives, to cut these off is to stop the very flow of the life force within.
In my twenties I dated a man who, like me, had come from a background of childhood trauma. Neither of us had any inkling of why we were so full of rage and pain, and we hurled this onto each other at every opportunity. Needless to say, the relationship eventually came to its logical and dysfunctional end.
Although it would have been easy to blame this man for the obvious ways in which he participated in the dysfunction, I chose instead to look at why I might have attracted such a dark, rageful man. What ensued was a journey into the depths of my own darkness that to this day remains the most harrowing adventure I have ever been on.
Not so for my ex, who decided that heading into that darkness was infinitely messier than simply blaming me for what had happened in our relationship. Walling himself off from his own darkness, he unknowingly set in motion the conditions that would guarantee it would boomerang back at him until he dealt with it.
Our society prefers the calm cool logic of the mind over the marauding mess of the emotions. But this chaos is where true life resides, where we encounter our soul’s deepest longings, and grapple with such mysteries as birth and death, and everything in between. Denying our feelings leaves us disconnected from ourselves, from others, and ultimately from life itself. Feelings of meaningless and hopelessness ensue. I see it all the time in my clients who are depressed, and the older they get, the more pronounced it becomes.
In December 2019, as the light waned in the lead-up to solstice, so too did my ex lose his battle with the darkness within. Ken and I spent our lifetimes seeking freedom from our burden of pain; we simply accomplished it in different ways.
