Hey ya’ll, it’s been a while since I rapped at ya.
I thought I’d get back in lightly with this end of year article from The Onion, “The Most Common Issues Men Bring Up in Therapy.”
The article is (obviously) funny, and really hits on a lot of the urges and motivations we’ve seen here. I’ll paste my table (in progress) of impulses and we can get started.
It opens with
“Though it’s excessively rare, men do actually sometimes recognize that they have emotional issues and then seek to rectify them”
All images from Dall-E Mini, men in therapy
Here’s a sampling of the list, reordered by me.
Can’t Get Comfortable
“Such a weird couch or chair thing, whatever you call it.”
This Nothing Like The Sopranos
“When does therapy start getting juicy like in the show?”
Intrusive Thoughts About Fighting Animals
“Men often find it hard to focus due to obsessive thoughts about their ability to defeat various species of wildlife in hand-to-hand combat.”
Dad Died Or Whatever
“Not a huge deal, but if their dad just died that week they might want to shoot the shit about it for a sec.”
Mistress Is Being Needy
“Therapists often help men implement boundaries with the woman they’ve decided to ruin your marriage with.”
Forming an E7#9 Guitar Chord
“You have to use all your fingers to do the chord, and if you can’t do it, you can’t play ‘Purple Haze’ the right way.”
Frustration Over Mandated Counseling After Vehicular Manslaughter Conviction
“You drunkenly kill one guy with your car and suddenly everyone thinks you’re crazy.”
Constant Sense of Sadness Due to Modern Society’s Contradictory Messaging About Masculinity
“Have they tried booze?”
The Lingering Sense The Knicks Will Never Get Better
“While a rational fear, talking through the ups and downs can help.”
Why The Mets Always Choke In The Playoffs Despite Their Talented Bullpen
“These unanswerable existential questions are especially difficult for men to grapple with.”
Desire To Win Approval Of Bruce Springsteen
“Men often build their whole life around getting just one kind word from the rock icon and are devastated that it never arrives.”
Succeeding In Battle
“Most men are insecure about their lancing prowess, and many of those same men tend towards a corrosive lifestyle of performance-enhancing potions and spells.”
Putting The Handle Of A Gun In Their Mouth
“It can be difficult to talk about suicide, but a therapists can help men figure out which end of the gun to use to blow their brains out.”
Straight-Up Yes Or No On Whether To Commit Suicide
“Skip the psychobabble, and let’s just have a thumbs-up or down.”
I thought about riffing of some of these, and still might, but I think the general topic, “ men do actually sometimes recognize that they have emotional issues” brings up a big question. What are FEELINGS?
Seriously, what ARE feelings?
My first impulse, to get this uncomfortable topic over with, is to say they are “things that help us do things.”
Ha, good, that’s over with. And yes sometimes they get in the way, and those are the “emotional issues” that The Onion bring up.
But really, ok let’s be serious.
I can’t think of a better theory/definition than this:
Feelings are experiences that connect to us being alive.
I think that works. Let’s examine it, and then return to The Onion.
What are some “things” that connect us to being alive? Let’s run down a random sampling you might hear from people, of varying genders.
Feeling the ocean mist in my face
Climbing a mountain
Spending time with my kids
Making a sale
Riding a roller coaster
Solving a theorem
Eating a good meal
Feeling safe
Doing something risky
Now let’s pull a few from The Onion’s therapist:
Reaching a difficult benchmark (an E7#9 chord, for instance.)
Watching the Knicks or Mets win. Or lose.
Winning approval of Bruce Springsteen
Dad dying
Having a mistress
Readers, correct me if I’m wrong, but in every above instance, even “solving a theorem”, the satisfaction (or alert dissatisfaction), there is a connection to being alive, which comes via the channel of feeling.
Feeling is the articulation, through our bodies and back and forth to something larger than us, of being alive.
When we fight an animal, or dream of fighting an animal, we feel alive.
When we take a mistress, we feel alive
When Bruce Springsteen, or any other leader, recognizes us, we feel alive
When our dad dies, we are forced to feel alive, and might possibly notice that we have not been doing so, in our relationships
Solving a strategic problem like The Knicks or The Mets (“How do you solve a problem like The Mets?”), we feel alive.
So why do men in The Onion and elsewhere have a hard time with them?
Another theory:
Men feel more strongly than women.
Think I’m wrong? We built the patriarchy to contain them.
And we’ve forgotten.
Because of the structures we’ve built, men’s “emotional issues” are constant.
We built structures that allowed few men, to feel the grandest of emotions, scroll to the top: Pride, Ecstasy, Camaraderie, Specialness. Only kings and sultans feel the full breadth of those.
And it gets better: Camaraderie, for instance, comes as a result of Domination and Strategy.
Strategy, not on the Periodic Table above but it should be, is an Order created to both Explore and Dominate.
What FEELINGS we have!
Next entry, we’ll look at higher and lower feelings, and the contortions to keep some away (ie Regret, Loneliness and Mortality, the opposites of Pride, Camaraderie and Specialness, respectively) while flooding ourselves with the other (Ecstasy.)
I think men have trouble with feelings because we aren’t connected to each other. We start out life with our emotional world being anchored to our mothers (usually). Well, there is a whole range of feelings men/boys have that viscerally disturb women— often times because the display of them is identified with abuse (anger, aggression etc). I think this revulsion is instinctual, and probably necessary for women to be safe— but this sets us up to feel like certain feelings we have make us unlovable.
In adolescence and young adulthood, If we don’t have any men to guide us and contextualize the feelings that we have to hide from our mothers (and other men who may be overidentified with them), they become totally off limits.
I think this is especially true with aggression, anger, and hatred.
People like to make this about vulnerability a lot— but I feel like even that needs to be put under a microscope a bit. All “vulnerable” means is “ability to be harmed or hurt.” I think we can be emotionally aware, sensitive, and receptive without opening ourselves up to be hurt all the time. I feel like awareness, sensitivity, and receptivity should be virtues, but willingness to get hurt all the time (vulnerability) is just straight up masochism. I think when my wife and I argue wife and she says mean things to me, vulnerability would render me too hurt and scared to function. It’s specifically in having healthy detachment that I don’t get rattled by her cruelty and I can connect with her, meet her where she is at, and come to some sort of understanding or resolution (the same goes in reverse too). As long as we elevate this vulnerability to virtue status, we are creating walls of pain that narrow our vision, and limit our ability to meet aggression and hatred with love.
I will say that vulnerability is a necessarily evil for any healing person. It will come up. And the way we should deal with it is by being aware of what triggers it, advocate for ourselves in those situations, and be air tight with boundaries. If we are talking about a topic that triggers me, I tell the other party to be more delicate with how they talk about it, and if they don’t respect what I said or it gets too painful, I just end the discussion.
At this point— I feel like a lot of what said can be easily misconstrued— but I don’t want this to be too long so I’ll see how it’s received before I say anything further.
(Btw— to those who don’t know me— I speak in a way that sounds authoritative, but this is largely at odds with my actual disposition, so sorry if this reads like it has that horrible combination of narrowness and boldness that people find so off putting)
I’m loving your writing on this topic, Tom! I remember having this conversation with a friend years ago that kind of profoundly shifted how I think about men’s emotions- she said something like, ‘men are so psychic, they can sit together and just watch a game and they’re having this whole mind reading conversation’. Sometimes I really envy that- it can be exhausting to constantly be articulating my feelings. We’re different but the same; right? Like, maybe men don’t feel more than women, but certainly equally -with profound differences in what types of feels the different genders are prone to. maybe men aren’t more intuitive than women or vice versa, but certainly equally intuitive.