Caring about men and boys; In part 2 of Psychotherapy with Male Shame, I continue my discussion about the most common difficulty that my male clients present with which is also very common amongst my female clients, the rage, endorphin release and shame cycle. I offer an empathic understanding, and definitions of, masculinity, rage, shame and trauma. I describe how misandry contributes to male shame and rage issues. And of course, there’s a Good Guy of the Week; Matt Lima, a Massachusetts police officer who deals with Christmas shoplifters in a very unexpected way.
Caring about men and boys; In part 2 of Psychotherapy with Male Shame, I continue my discussion about the most common difficulty that my male clients present with which is also very common amongst my female clients, the rage, endorphin release and shame cycle. I offer an empathic understanding, and definitions of, masculinity, rage, shame and trauma. I describe how misandry contributes to male shame and rage issues. And of course, there’s a Good Guy of the Week; Matt Lima, a Massachusetts police officer who deals with Christmas shoplifters in a very unexpected way.
Psychotherapy with Male Shame: Part 2
I’m just going to recap on a couple of points from my last podcast before I develop them further in this one.
I’m an anger, rage and shame specialist, and as I said last time, the issue most of my male and indeed many female clients present with, is a repeating cycle of rage that leads to endorphins release which temporarily feels good, that then leads to shame which feels bad; the cycle can also happen the other way around so that shame leads to rage leads to the endorphins release. I’m going to ask you again to, in your mind’s eye, imagine please, a circle where rage is placed at 12 o’clock, endorphin release placed at 4 o’clock and where shame is placed at 8 o’clock. I’m also asking you again to imagine, if you will, that the word TRAUMA, written in capital letters, fills the centre of that circle. This is to emphasise that it’s trauma that lies at the heart of this cycle.
I’m reminding you here that rage and shame are trauma responses and that trauma responses are unconscious; in other words, we have absolutely no conscious control over them and it’s abusive to treat someone with these symptoms as if they did have conscious control. Of course, a person is responsible for getting help with their behaviour, but the behaviour has nothing to do with their character or personality, it says nothing about the person, they’re pure and simple trauma behaviours which need help.
By the time clients come to me they have tried every cognitive and behavioural strategy in the book, most of them know many more strategies than I do; any strategy that relies on willpower simply don’t hold up under a stressful situation because, when we white knuckle it, every cell of our body is poised to capitulate, to surrender to the behaviour we sincerely want to avoid.
A much more effective and long-lasting intervention involves not focussing on the trauma behaviour but by focussing on the life events and experiences which have caused the trauma behaviour.
There is a very good reason why this cycle gets repeated over and over again; research has found that endorphins are released when we experience rage. As you probably know already, endorphins make us feel good, they have analgesic or anaesthetic properties, they provide insensitivity to pain, physical and emotional pain. When these endorphins are activated, there is a soothing effect and the distress very temporarily goes away, there is some brief relief; consequently, this cycle can be very addictive.
In my experience, this cycle only happens with people who haven’t learned how to regulate or manage their emotional experience so they can become easily overwhelmed by it.
However dramatic this cycle may appear, it’s actually very passive behaviour in terms of solving problems and difficulties; it consistently retraumatises the individual and those around them; it seriously damages relationships with self and with others, may land you or someone else in hospital with an injury or with a heart attack, or in a court or a prison.
So now let’s look at some definitions of the terms I’ll be talking about. The first definition is of ‘masculinity’ which I define as,
‘a set of attributes, behaviours, and roles associated with boys and men….including traits of stoicness, strength, honour, courage, independence, leadership, and assertiveness’.
I am very unhappy, as you know if you’re a regular listener, about the way that traditional masculinity traits have been made bad, called ‘toxic’ or harmful. It’s been especially sad and angering to me that the American Psychological Association and many of my colleagues have been seduced into believing that traditional masculinity needs to be ‘addressed’, ‘mitigated’, ‘reconstituted’ or ‘deconstructed ‘. I would like ‘traditional masculinity’ to be more widely accepted, encouraged even, as one possible OK masculine identity amongst other OK masculine identities. I think it can be really helpful for men to have a balance of Alpha and Beta traits which equip them to engage in the variety of roles that society expects from them, he roles Martin Seager, psychologist has identified as,
· a fighter and a winner
· a provider and a protector (of women, children and others), which I believe includes nurturing
· and to exercise mastery and control
Seager tells us that men can experience a good deal of shame if they fail to live up to these roles.
And now let’s define trauma.
Trauma by its nature cannot be anticipated; we are unselfconsciously going about our business and then ‘bam’ it strikes. It’s unexpected so we have no defence against it, it shocks our body and our mind, and its impact can lodge in our body and our mind for many years. I define trauma as,
‘an untold story; an emotional and physiological response to life experience, whether of epic or apparently trivial proportions, which has not yet been acknowledged, processed or integrated’
In other words, a life event or life events which we have not yet come to terms with.
Trauma can be caused in two distinct ways; one is that as a child, important needs were not met which affects a person’s security and stability in the world; the other cause of trauma is experiencing adverse life events; my clients typically present with both.
Pierre Janet, as long ago as 1907, partly defines trauma as ‘there was nobody there’. I have qualified that by saying there was literally nobody there, there was nobody there who wasn’t traumatised themselves or there was nobody there who wasn’t being abusive or neglectful.
So, let’s define shame now.
Shame is a direct result of exposure to trauma. Because trauma is so unexpected, we are porous, we are unprotected when it strikes, we can’t defend ourselves; when it happens, there is no separation between me and the traumatic event, or what I call the hostile environment. We can feel punished by the adverse incident, 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?’
It is as if I become imprinted with the bad environment, a confusion occurs, I mistake my feeling bad because of what has happened with ME being bad; a bad event becomes ‘I am bad’, and this sense of ME being bad can go on for decades unless someone helps me extricate myself from the bad event, unless someone can help me see that it’s not that I’m bad, it’s that something bad happened to me.
And here is my definition of shame,
‘an involuntary, unconscious phenomenon; an emotionally and sometimes physically painful affective state caused by the initial impact of any kind of pre-conception, pre-natal or postnatal experience of an environment that is hostile or failing and which has not been repaired; it is experienced personally as a ‘fall from grace’ and it ruptures the relationship with self, others and the wider environment’
There are many possible sources of shame, as my definition implies but within a therapy context, so when I am working with people generally, I need to be trauma aware, alert to the developmental trauma that may have occurred and to the adverse life events that may have occurred.
When I am working with men, I need to acknowledge 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; the bad environment I’m talking about 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 unnoticeable as the air that we breathe or the water that we drink.
There is a good deal of dislike of, contempt for or ingrained prejudice against men in our society. Remember the Gillette advert in 2019, that negatively stereotyped men, respectable men at that, men who were cooking for their family and friends; the advert depicted a series of very ugly and negative behaviours, including bullying, sexual harassment, and the interruption of a woman speaking in the workplace. It also framed healthy boy behaviours such as roughhousing and running about as toxic.
Rather, like the frog who is placed in cold water and then heated up, men I have worked with often don’t realise that they are miserable, don’t realise that they’re suffering. In my experience, many of the men whom I have been honoured to work with have normalised their pain, they would say something like ‘well that’s just what being a man is like!’ or ‘you have to expect that it you’re a man’.
This is the shadow side of men’s stoicness, a tendency and willingness to suffer too much, for too long; in many cases, I see no expectation of happiness, no sense of entitlement to happiness, and this normalising of pain continues as it started, one drip at a time, one degree Fahrenheit at a time, until it’s too late; a boiling point is reached, the man reaches and exceeds the limit of pain he can tolerate, and rage and or shame, or worse, suicide are the result.
There are way too many men who are suiciding; the death of one man or one woman by suicide is a tragedy, but many more men are quite simply living miserably, a hair’s breadth inside their limit of pain tolerance, normalising it and stoically living with it, often only seeking help if a partner, other family member or friend suggest it.
Finally, in this episode I’m going to define rage and offer you an empathic understanding of it.
‘rage is a primitive, unconsciously controlled defence mechanism that is employed when an organism is psychologically overwhelmed; it is an experience processing difficulty’
There are two types, hot and cold rage.
‘hot rage, which is the focus of these few episodes’ is the eruption of raw undifferentiated feeling responses to unprocessed life events’
‘cold rage, just for your information here is ‘numbing of the raw undifferentiated feeling responses to the unprocessed life events’
My empathic understanding of rage is that it is a trauma related problem. Rage and shame issues originate in early life where there is either neglect or abuse.
Hot rage, which is more easily identifiable than cold rage, is an attempt to manage an environment that feels terrifyingly unsafe for several reasons.
Because of early life difficulties, there is a deep lack of trust that important needs can be met in a straightforward way; there is a disconnection from emotional and intuitive intelligence, the frontal cortex goes offline. This makes it difficult to reality check in situations or to assess risk accurately, risk is either exaggerated or minimised, and it’s impossible to decide on the best action to take.
Lastly, there is a chronic inability to be with life experiences and to process them. As a consequence of all this, personal relationships are difficult to manage, to say the least, can feel threatening and are often in crisis.
Some good news at the end of this episode is that a therapeutic relationship that is characterised by attunement, tenderness, responsiveness and validation can lead to emotional regulation, enhanced social skills and empathy for others.
That’s the end of this episode, next time I’ll be discussing Allan Schore’s work about how boys are particularly vulnerable to early life trauma and consequently to experiencing rage and shame, then I’ll talk about how to address these difficult issues.
Good Guy of the Week
A US police officer, Matt Lima, was called to a food store in Somerset, Massachusetts, last month. The police statement said, ‘two women had been reported for not scanning all of their groceries’.
Matt questioned the family and they told him that they had fallen upon hard times and could not afford to pay for all the food.
They told Matt that in spite of not having enough money, they’d still wanted to give the children a Christmas dinner.
Matt Lima didn’t press charges because all the items on the shopping receipt were for food.
He decided to buy them gift cards worth $250 with his own money so that the women and their two children would be able to buy food for their Christmas dinner.
It was reported by BBC news that Matt told them he immediately thought about his own children and because of this he felt he had to help them out.
He commented, ‘obviously, this family was in need and I can't imagine going to the Stop and Shop food store and only being able to pay for a part of the things needed for the kids Christmas dinner"
As you can imagine, the family said they were kind of shocked; they were expecting a very different outcome, that they would be arrested and have to go to court.
Police officer Matt Lima told the BBC that "I bought a gift card close in value to the total cost of their shoplifted goods" and added, "I just did what I felt was right. It's not about me, I put myself in that family's shoes and showed some empathy." What a very kind and generous man.