MENS-WELLBEING.COM

The Straw Man 0f Masculinity.

2013-05-02T19:03:20+01:00

Men, in short, reflect the full range of human potential. They are fully human in their vices, and in their virtues.

As men, we all face one thing in common. Maintaining our dignity, as men, in the face of the straw man of masculinity. Let me explain.

Men, we are told, are cruel, warmongering, insensitive, disrespectful towards women and children. Men cannot be trusted, are sex man, and finally, all men are rapists.

This version of masculinity, of course, is a straw man. Yes some men, some of the time, can be like this. The assumption though, is that all men are like this, all of the time.

From a psychological point of view, what is going on here is a core belief. A core belief about men. It is a view of the world, which may or may not touch base with reality.

We all have core beliefs. Some of us feel we are ugly, or that we are bad in social situations, or that life is a struggle. They shape the flavor of the world we experience through are senses.

Indeed, a core belief acts as a signpost for sense perception. If we expect people to treat us as ugly, we look for their revulsion. If we believe we are bad in social situations, we look for evidence of our ineptness. If we believe life is a struggle, we disproportionately pay attention to the times when things are hard.

By directing our enquiry of the world, core beliefs work to reinforce themselves as ongoing fact.

In the case of the straw man of masculinity, we are caught in something more profound than an idiosyncratic unhelpful core belief. We are faced with a society wide held belief. A social delusion. An institutionalized misperception and misunderstanding of reality.

This view is particularly unhelpful for men in caring roles. Men as nurses, child care providers, social workers and therapists often rub up against the straw man most acutely.

In the face of our caring, our trustworthiness and our kindness we are treated as if we are uncaring, untrustworthy and unkind. It is as if we are invisible. And in a sense we are. The other person’s attention bias means our good qualities are simply unseen.

I sometimes see this in my ongoing training in my therapeutic work. Often I am the only man in the group, and I am subtly, left holding the straw man of masculinity. Whatever I do to demonstrate my own qualities and failings, I am treated as if I were the straw man. Hopelessly entangled in other peoples projections.

What choices do I have in this situation? One solution is to become a male apologist to feminism. Go native, and be even more feminist than the feminists. The other is to be myself, especially when I look “straw man-ish”.

The former trades authenticity for approval, the latter courts rejection for authenticity.

What we cannot do, at least on our own, is take on the straw man. In life, the only thing we can effectively change is ourselves. Other people’s delusions are for them to sort out. But we should not fail to recognize them for what they are, delusions, and we need not get too entangled within them.

Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK. He offers:

Dead Men Don’t Count in War.

2013-01-07T17:58:05+00:00

We live in troubled times. The US is fighting an asymmetric war against the world to maintain its perceived right of exploitation and enrichment in the face of its inevitable decline. With the Patriot Act and the infiltration by the FBI of the ‘terrorists’ of the Occupy movement, it has even taken the war to its own people.

Wars of course, are messy, not least because ‘innocent’ women and children get caught up in them. Men, on mass, are guilty, so their deaths don’t count. This, at any rate, is the relentless narrative of the mainstream media.

“The bomb killed thirty people, some of them women and children”.

How many times have we heard this on our television screens? It’s as if we expect men to die in war zones, but it is unreasonable to expect women and children to die also.

War is undeniably deeply gendered. Generally societies expect men to do the fighting, and they are expected to do it away from women and children. If women and children die, men are not only culpable for being the aggressors, but also culpable of letting down the women and children. As men are doubly culpable, why should we care how many get killed?

Well I care about everybody who gets killed in war zones. Yes I care about the needless death of women and children. But I also care about the needless death of the men who fight them.

I care about the young recruit from the US Deep South who sees a military life as the only economic option, and is put on the front line to face dangers the generals and their political masters observe from the comfort of being out of range.

I care about the millions of indigenous men who are forced into defending themselves and their families as the largest war machine ever assembled rolls into town to occupy their country, exploit their natural resources, dismantle their society, and torture their fellow citizens.

I care about the men whose economic circumstances mean they cannot provide for their family and see the people they love, their women and children, die through lack of food, shelter and medicine, and see armed resistance as the only way to gain a better life for them and their families.

I care about the men who are shamed, through intense social pressure of other men, and yes, women, to fight a war they don’t understand or believe in.

I care about the men who are brutalised by initiation and training regimens which aim to divorce them from their humanity and innate compassion for others.

I care about the men I have worked with who have to make sense of the horrific images they saw in battle, and the guilt they feel at pulling the trigger, and being responsible for the death of other human beings.

Yes it is men who fight wars. Or more accurately, men fight other people’s wars; and in so doing are just as much victims as anyone else. But the narrative doesn’t allow for that. So, as men, we are forced to hold our pain in silence, accept the blame, and bear the collective guilt, so our women and children don’t have to.

Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK. He offers:

Make Awareness Your New Year’s Resolution.

2013-01-01T00:01:00+00:00

My father trained as a psychiatric nurse after the Second World War. During his career he witnessed firsthand many of the systemic changes (and fads) within mental health care. He trained in the remnants of the soon to be disbanded Victorian asylum system. He saw the ascendancy and decline of Freud’s theories of mental health, as well as the rise and ultimate hegemony of biological psychiatry. He was a pioneer in the fields of community care for serious mental health problems, and even worked in secure mental hospitals.

We didn’t spend much time talking about our work and careers, so when he was dying from the cancer that was to take his life, I was curious as to what he thought was the single most important factor in promoting mental health. His response was instant, clear and shockingly precise “insight”. He didn’t need to explain, I knew exactly what he meant.

Most of us, most of the time, are reactive. Life carries us forward as a series of responses to stimuli. We get angry about the same things … over and over again. We get demoralised about the same things … over and over again. We choose the same kinds of relationships with the same kinds of people … over and over again.

If we are lucky, our swing through the reactive jungle of life is rather pleasant. We may not be aware of anything, or even ever make a truly ‘free’ choice … but we are happy.

For most of us at some point in our lives, the reactive somnolence no longer works. We are in psychic pain and we need to stop, reflect, and become aware of the way we are living our lives. It is in these moments of awareness, what my father called ‘insight’, that we are truly free to choose a different, perhaps more rewarding way of life.

The tragedy is that we can all benefit from waking up. We shouldn’t need to wait until we are so unhappy we need professional help. Developing insight and awareness into one’s life, also sometimes called mindfulness, doesn’t even need a therapist. All you need to do is start to meditate every day. The best thing is to join a class, or if you can’t manage this, try an app or an mp3 download.

Whatever you do this year … learn to do it with awareness.

Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK. He offers:

Why Looking After Your Feelings is Looking After Your Health.

2012-12-30T16:03:16+00:00

A character in a Woody Allan movie once said that he doesn’t get angry, he just grows tumours! Instinctively we all know that there is an intimate link between our emotional wellbeing and our physical health … but is there any evidence to link the two realms?

In fact the evidence that connects the health of the mind with the health of the body is overwhelming. If you have a bought of stress, for example, you are more likely to experience a cough or a cold. If you suffer from chronic (long term) stress, you are more likely to develop cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, motor neurone disease … and in fact a whole range of other diseases. In other words, if you don’t find a way of dealing with your emotional problems, your body will find a way of expressing them for you.

The science that explores the mind body link is called psychoneuroimmunology. I know it’s a mouthful. It basically looks at how the emotional system, immunune system, nervous system and endocrine system work as a unified whole. The basic finding is that psychological stress suppresses the immune system. If the immune system is suppressed, disease cannot be controlled by the body, and is therefore expressed as symptoms.

The implications of this research is that if you want to live a healthy life, or you want to have the best chance of curing a physical illness, you need to consider ways of processing your emotional pain. Denial and suppression, quite simply, is lethal.

In one study, a cohort of cancer patients was randomly divided into two groups. One received treatment as usual; the other was given six sessions of group support and psychotherapy. The death rate of the group offered a chance to emotionally heal was one third of the death rate of those who received treatment as usual.

If such a simple intervention can save lives, why is emotional healing given such a low priority in conventional medicine?

Well one reason is the very idea of the mind body split itself. It is a peculiarly western phenomenon, which other systems of healing, such as Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, refuse to follow. Yet it is anti-scientific. You cannot, from a scientific point of view, hold that the mind and the body are separate entities. The physician Dr Gabor Mate, in his book “When the Body says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection” suggested that mind-body research in medicine disappears into a ‘Bermuda Triangle’. That is to say, it is consistently produced, but rarely taken up by the medical profession itself.

This, of course, is unsurprising. The myth of medicine is that there are discreet disease entities with physical causes that can be reliably diagnosed and treated with discreet surgical or pharmacological interventions. The model makes available a vast medical industrial complex for financial exploitation by business. The subtle, time consuming and messy business of emotional processing of childhood trauma and working through the implications for acceptance and autonomy in adult life is less easily commercially standardised and exploitable.

Yet it’s what we need to do if we don’t want our emotions to kill us.

Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK. He offers: