Tim Walker - On Men's Pain and Transformation

Over at Beams and Struts, Tim Walker has written an outstanding post - On Men's Pain and Transformation.

This is a crucial conversation for men to be having. For the most part, we are never taught how to hold pain, or how to transform pain, fear, and anxiety into personal growth simply by witnessing them in our bodies and NOT stuffing them down in the unconscious (the body) or in the shadow.

Here is the beginning of the article - I highly recommend you go read the whole thing if this makes any connection with you.

On Men's Pain and Transformation

Written by Tim Walker
"There is no coming to consciousness without pain" – Carl Jung

This article is about pain, its healing, and its transformative importance for men, particularly men in Western, secular culture. It's not to say that this topic isn't important for woman or that the challenges I outline don't translate to woman, but I'm exploring this from a male perspective to attempt to isolate some key hindrances to - and opportunities for - men's transformation. Specifically I'm speaking here of the deep psychosomatic and at times existential pain that comes in moments of personal crisis, loss, identity dismantling, and emotional breakdown – the pain experience that can open us to profound new ways of seeing and being in the world as men.

Since my earliest memories as a child, I remember stuffing emotional pain and hurt out of my awareness – either simply unconsciously as a pattern already set in my individual psyche and the male condition or by external influence from parents, family, father figures, and the pain avoidant Western culture at large. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I vividly remember the all to common lines, "suck it up!" and "don't be a cry baby!", "boys don't cry", among many others. As a child I swallowed up and began to emulate many of the masculine personifications in television, movies, and play. You know them: Rocky Balboa, The Terminator, Hee Man, Gi Joe, and all other things masculine. At a very young age I learned how (or at least tried my darned best) to be strong, tough, and stoic. I don't mean to say there's anything wrong with these qualities, it's just that my environment and the culture around me provided very little encouragement to experience other essential qualities to healthy development such as vulnerability, openness, and emotional awareness. I know I'm not the only one here. After recently going through a life crisis with probably the most significant emotional pain of my own life I realized that I was very unfamiliar with pain, what do with it, and how to process it in general. After talking with other men during this experience I began to realize that this is a general immaturity among us. Several men I talked to in fact advised me to "just keep busy and keep your mind off it". I began to realize that in our secular, pain-avoidant culture men simply don't have an understanding of the importance of pain nor wisdom or contexts for making meaning out of pain and using it as a catalyst for their emotional and spiritual development.

Go read the rest of the article.