Caring about men and boys. In this episode I’m going to tell you about the kind of issues that my male psychotherapy clients present with; then I’ll share one of my models with you that describes the most common issue that my clients with anger, rage and shame issues present with, the rage, shame and endorphin release cycle.
This episode particularly emphasises how rage and shame issues are trauma related; they are not personality flaws.
And of course there’s a good guy of the week, a Penzance in Cornwall recycling man who was a big help to a young family.
Caring about men and boys. In this episode I’m going to tell you about the kind of issues that my male psychotherapy clients present with; then I’ll share one of my models with you that describes the most common issue that my clients with anger, rage and shame issues present with, the rage, shame and endorphin release cycle.
This episode particularly emphasises how rage and shame issues are trauma related; they are not personality flaws.
And of course there’s a good guy of the week, a Penzance in Cornwall recycling man who was a big help to a young family.
Psychotherapy with Male Shame: Part 1
I’m going to repeat the first couple of paragraphs of episode 7, Male Shame: Misandry is to Blame, in order to remind you of my definitions of shame and its sources. The rest of this episode is based on a presentation that I was delighted to deliver for the ‘International Conference for Men’s Issues’, in November 2020. I’ll leave a link to that in the notes below.
OK, so my understanding of shame is that it occurs as a direct result of being exposed to trauma; because trauma is so unexpected, we are not poised to defend ourselves, we are unprotected when it strikes; it’s as if we are porous, like a sponge, and we absorb the entire impact of the trauma into our bodies.
As the traumatic event happens, there is no separation between us, and the traumatic event, what I call, the bad environment. It’s as if I become merged with the bad environment, then a confusion occurs followed by a mistake in perception; the bad feeling about what has happened to me gets mistaken for a feeling that I am bad. A bad event becomes ‘bad me’ and this sense of badness can go on for decades unless someone can help me extricate myself from the bad event, unless someone can help me see that ‘something bad happened to me, that doesn’t mean that I’m bad’. Such adverse events can feel punishing and it’s quite common for the first response to a trauma to be ‘what did I do wrong?’, ‘I must have done something wrong?’
I just want to add here that there are small ‘t’ traumas and big ‘T’ traumas; either of these can have a seriously negative impact, not just the easily recognisable big ‘T’ traumas…so, for example, a careless word, or an unkind expression can result in a person experiencing shame, especially if they already have a poor opinion of themselves.
So, my definition of shame is that it originates in experiencing a trauma which has not yet been resolved; it ruptures our relationship with our self, with others and the wider world. It stops us appreciating ourselves, others and the goodness in the world.
There are many possible sources of shame, all of them trauma related. When I am working with people generally, I need to be trauma aware, alert to any early life difficulties that would have interfered with a person’s emotional and psychological development and also to any other adverse life events that may have occurred; when I am working with men in particular, I need to be aware of a very particular bad environment that they experience on a daily basis, one that hardly anyone notices because, I would argue, of the influence of radical feminism which has blinded us to it; that particular bad environment is ‘misandry’. Defined as the dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against, men. What I describe as a shadowy cloud of negative regard for men that hangs there, operating as invisibly as the air that we breathe or the water that we drink.
In this episode I’m going to tell you about the kind of issues that my male clients present with; then I’ll share one of my models with you that describes the most common issue that clients with anger, rage and shame issues present with, the rage, shame and endorphin release cycle.
These are the issues that the men I am honoured to work with present
• rage behaviours
• the experience of false allegations; these could be false allegations of intimate partner violence, sexual violence or child sexual abuse
• they may present with feeling suicidal, and possibly having made an attempt at suicide; the latter is rare however because men are more often successful in completing their suicides.
• they may be having fathering issues, with their blood children but more often with step-children; they may be experiencing a distressing lack of contact with their children, significantly reduced contact, or no contact at all
• they come with relationship difficulties & relationship breakdown
• they are often not looking after themselves in their relationships, not attending to their own needs and allowing themselves to be poorly treated
• particular individual feelings can bring men into therapy such as experiencing a lack of control, anger, anxieties, fears or depression
• sometimes they may be unsure of their sexuality
• they may have issues in their sexual relationship
• they may feel overwhelmed, powerless or
• be experiencing grief and loss
Finally, in this episode, I just want to share with you the issue that most men regularly present with; although, I have to say, I work with many women who present with this same issue.
The issue is a cycle of rage leading to endorphins release leading to shame. In your mind’s eye, imagine please, a circle where rage is placed at midday, endorphin release placed at 4.00 p.m., and shame is placed at 8.00 p.m. Imagine too, if you will, that the word TRAUMA, written in capital letters, fills the centre of the circle.
Brene Brown, a psychologist who has done a lot of wonderful work on the impact and healing of shame says, when perfectionism is driving, shame is always riding shotgun; I would say,
· when shame is driving, rage is always riding shotgun
· but also, when rage is driving, shame is always riding shotgun
To my mind, rage and shame are inseparable, like a horse and carriage, you can’t have one without the other.
As I said earlier, trauma lies at the heart of this cycle; rage and shame are trauma responses and, trauma responses, are unconscious; in other words, we have absolutely NO conscious control over them and, in my opinion, it is an abuse of a person who suffers with these issues if we treat them as if they did have conscious control. I am not saying that a person doesn’t have to take responsibility for their behaviour, of course they do! All I’m saying is, I have worked with hundreds of people for thousands of hours, who present with these issues and, in my experience, any improvement can’t be sustained, through using cognitive symptom management or control-type strategies; willpower alone simply doesn’t hold up under stressful situations; when we white knuckle it, every cell of our body is poised to capitulate, to surrender to the behaviour we sincerely want to avoid. I’m going to close this part 1 episode now by saying that, as we will see in future episodes, there is a more helpful and long-lasting intervention that emerges, not by focussing on the trauma behaviour but by focussing on the life events and experiences which have caused the trauma behaviour in the first place.