I have discovered something very important ever since I found the courage to bring my inquiry about masculinity out into the world, and my guess is that this also applies to you: Every man I have spoken with or heard from has some kind of conversation happening inside him, questioning how much of a man he is. Very few men feel completely secure and grounded in their masculinity. When they are being truly honest, very few can say they feel deeply confident in their masculinity and their sense of being a real man. Of course, that is the problem with so much of this: What is a real man? Is being a real man solely defined by society? Of course not. Ultimately, it is different for each of us, but it is essential that we reflect on our ideas about what it means to be a man, and the degree to which we have blindly followed the Rules.
Today, as I stated above, I have been happily married for ten years, with a beautiful four-year-old daughter. I am fairly confident in who I am and basically comfortable in my skin. You would never look at me and have any idea about what I have been through or the road I have traveled to become the man I am today. What is most important about that statement is that you can say the exact same thing about every man—you have no idea what his journey has been to become the man you now see. That is why our stories are so important and why I have shared mine. It is in telling our stories that we get to reinforce who we are and create the man we want to be. As sharing our stories transforms us, our map and everything charted upon it is also transformed. We have the opportunity to own our stories—or they will continue to own us.
Into Action
In your notebook, set aside about ten blank pages. Begin to write your story. Focus on specific intervals of your life based on age (0–5, 6–10, 11–15, 16–20, 21–25, etc.) or specific milestones (childhood, grade school, middle school, high school, etc.) until you get to your present age. Allow each interval to have at least its own page, front and back. For each interval, write your story of becoming a boy or a man during that time, as applicable. Answer the following questions for each interval:
Share some or all of your story with your partner, sponsor, and/or a trusted friend.
Men, Relationships, and Trauma
“Through recovery I reshaped my beliefs of what being a man really is. Subsequently, I look at trauma as something that I don’t have to duck and hide from, and with the help of others, I move through it in an authentic manner.” —Mike
“My first sexual experience was with my adopted sister. She was sixteen, I was seven.” —Roland
“Forty-eight years of emotional abuse by a society that doesn’t accept men who have sex with men. Forty-eight years as an African-American walking on eggshells at times.” —David
“The shame of severe poverty, being referred to as a half-breed in a full-blood world, and the boarding school drove me to alcohol and other drugs and nearly destroyed me.” —Rod
The concept of trauma is absolutely essential to understanding the terrain over which we are traveling. Have you ever found yourself on a road trip or going for a walk and you encounter various obstacles that were not on the map you were using to guide you? You may not even be sure what the obstacles are or how to overcome them. You just know you are stuck.
Most of the men I’ve talked to over the years who are on the journey of recovery can identify some point in their lives when they realized it was not okay to express certain feelings and discuss particular behaviors or recount certain experiences, especially if these showed weakness, vulnerability, or sensitivity. Crying, above all, was strictly discouraged. These restrictions were not made up in our heads. They came from the Man Rules and what these Rules tell us.
We learned, sometimes through everyday interactions with other men but frequently because of abuse or other traumatic experiences, that the only appropriate way to express feelings like fear, hurt, rejection, or sadness was through the conduit of anger and violence. For the longest time I thought that meant that all men were like me, full of rage and bad tempered; but that is not the case at all. Anger happens along a continuum. Some men stuff their anger and it comes out through isolation and cold silence, and can lead to severe depression. In fact, I wasn’t always full of rage or temperamental; far from it. The point is that we have all of these emotions, and for many of us they get “stuffed” and held inside us and come out as some form of anger.
One of the most powerful breakthroughs in addiction recovery is our growing understanding of trauma. My friend, Jamie Marich, PhD, has a wonderful analogy she uses in her work to make trauma easier to understand. She reminds us that the word trauma is Greek for “wound.” She talks about all of the different kinds of wounds that exist—open wounds (lacerations, abrasions, punctures) vs. closed wounds (contusions, hematomas, crush injuries, or slowly developing chronic wounds)—and the different ways those wounds heal. As she describes, “For some people, simple traumas (wounds) can clear up on their own, but for others with more complicating emotional variables (many of which can be biologically based), the healing process may take longer. If an individual who has experienced a major emotional trauma doesn’t obtain the proper conditions to heal (which can include formal mental health treatment), it will likely take longer for the trauma to clear up, and it could end up causing other symptoms. Of course, the wound is never going to get better; in all likelihood, it will worsen.” And just like a physical wound, when someone experiences a traumatic event, he or she becomes susceptible to “rewounding” or being retraumatized. When other people in his or her life (sometimes including helping professionals) keep unintentionally disturbing the wound through words or actions that tap into the trauma, healing never takes place.
Mental health practitioners now understand that one of