The psychology behind the stereotype of a strong, emotionless man is disheartening.
The glorification of the manly man remains very alive in some households in America, according to Pew Research Center. The young boys being raised in households where being a man is associated with being tough and emotionless are more prone to mental health problems. The stoic man is a mask for the hurting child underneath, who instead of being comforted when he cried, was scoffed at and told to “man up.”
He was forced to bury his emotions in an abyss that would become a home for anything deemed unmasculine. Even when an urge to violently sob would overtake him, it was never “let it all out” but “keep it all in.” The desire to let his emotions escape from his eyes as drops of cortisol was denied.
A man’s lack of vocabulary to describe his own emotions can be a source of frustration for the woman in his life who wants to be let into his inner world. Their emotional repressiveness may earn these men a label of toxic masculinity — when in actuality, they are suffering from psychological injuries.
Blaming the men who are hesitant to express their emotions would be ignoring the cause of the problem and the reasons underlying their behavior. Instead of giving up on these men, we should try to understand them.
Edward Tronick, a developmental psychologist, conducted research on interactions between infants and their mothers. Tronick concluded that mothers provided more attention and vigilance during interactions with their infant sons than their infant daughters, since the sons needed more help with regard to emotional regulation.
According to quotes from Tronick in an article written by Andrew Reiner for the New York Times, it was discovered that boys’ emotional reactivity was eventually “restricted or perhaps more change-worthy than the reactivity of girls.” Mothers chose to start this process through physical withdrawal. The “manning up” of male babies starts early, according to Tronick.
We should stop blaming men for their inability to express their emotions. In a time when they were upset and needed their mother or father to show them compassion, they were instead shamed for being “soft” or “sensitive.”
“Be a man.” “Crying is for girls.”
Many men are taught to be humiliated by their humanity, embarrassed by emotion.
A boy may be experiencing emotional or physical pain, but the trauma begins when they express their suffering and are dismissed, judged or mocked. Boys do not receive the same compassion and attention that girls receive when they express their emotional needs, they are instead taught to avoid showing emotion.This is a problem because people who suppress emotions have lower resilience and emotional health, according to Harvard psychologist Susan David.
“All of us are born needing, and being able to develop, close personal relationships,” said Judy Chu, who specializes in boys’ psychosocial development at Stanford University. “And those are essential to our health. So what does it mean that we socialize boys away from that inherent need?” Boys may feel compelled to turn unacceptable emotions that they are unable to process and are conditioned to ignore — like rejection, despair and sadness — into anger.
Perhaps this is the reason why girls seem to be more sensitive and empathetic to others’ needs. It may be harder for some boys to feel empathy if it was never demonstrated for them as children, a time when they would have needed the emotional connectedness most
A parent can keep their son in touch with his emotional self by asking questions like, “How are you feeling?”, and asking them to describe their emotions. Most importantly, a parent should be there for their child and treat them with the basic compassion and care that they are entitled to as human beings. It is easier to raise emotionally intuitive boys than to repair emotionally damaged men.
However, there is still hope for those men who can find their way back to their emotional selves and rethink the stigma that has surrounded them.
We should make more of an effort to understand the men who were injured psychologically, rather than judge them.
Woke garbage BS
This is so true. Especially in the African American culture