Читать книгу A Man's Way through Relationships - Dan Griffin - Страница 11
Оглавление“Recovery has allowed me to question the measures of manhood I had set for myself.” —Jim
Has it ever felt to you like you were following some set of unwritten rules on how to be a man? Men can do this but can’t do that. These are the Man Rules I referred to in the Introduction. They are unwritten yet very real, and they guide our lives from an early age, telling us how to be boys and men. We follow these Rules to let the world know that we are real boys and real men. When we don’t follow them we run the risk of being viewed by others and viewing ourselves as being less than real boys or men. Where did the Rules come from? The answer is that they come from many different sources, some personal and some societal. The Rules come from both of our parents and other caregivers, from other family members, from coaches and teachers, from the kids on the playground, and from the media based on the images of “real” men presented on television, in movies, and in print and broadcast advertising. Adolescence can be a particularly brutal period of indoctrination to the Man Rules.
Think about your day-to-day experiences and look at how many Man Rules you follow. Think about how you may judge yourself as less than manly if you don’t follow them. There is the Rule that real men do not ask for help. This rule contributes to many men remaining lost for much longer than necessary, among other problems. You may be pretty good at asking for help, but how do you feel when you do it? It’s still hard for me to ask for help, and when I do it is frequently accompanied by some sort of self-criticism. If you are anything like me, every time you ask for help it is a struggle just to get to that point, and once there you probably have at least a twinge of shame around feeling or appearing weak or incompetent or stupid. But with time and practice, it gets better. Luke spoke for a lot of the men in recovery whom I know: “I had a huge amount of self-hatred before recovery, due to the nature of my acting out and hiding my true self from others. I had issues and doubts of myself about even being a man. Since recovery, the self-hatred has been greatly reduced, and I’m more confident in my masculinity and how I express it out in the world.”
Some of the most common Man Rules I hear about from men and women are:
• Don’t be weak.
• Don’t show emotion.
• Don’t ask for help.
• Don’t cry.
• Don’t care about relationships.
Do these sound familiar?
Into Action
Take some time right now to write down as many Rules about being a man as you can think of. Think about the Rules you learned from your parents/caregivers, school, neighborhood/community, the media, and workplace. If you are having trouble, think of them in the following areas: Self, Relationships, Activities, Power, Sexuality, and Spirituality.
Think of Rules that reinforce a healthier idea of masculinity. While the majority of the Rules are neither inherently bad nor good, how they tend to be enforced can be rigid and restricting. However, there are Man Rules like integrity and self-discipline that seem to be inherently healthy traits.
What does your list of Man Rules look like? My guess, if your experience is anything like the majority of the men and women I work with, is that you have not previously spent a lot of time consciously thinking about and attempting to identify these Rules.
Think about what you learned in elementary school of how Europeans imagined the New World (the Americas) looked before they actually had traversed the territory and were able to map it out. In some ways, those are just like the maps men have been using to navigate their way in relationships—out-of-date and inaccurate. The available maps for men are guided by the Man Rules. Like those who sought to explore the New World in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, we may imagine monsters lurking in the oceans and dangerous creatures dominating the land, along with the possibility of falling off the edge of the Earth. We have no real idea of what the landscape actually looks like. And, as the first explorers discovered in traveling previously uncharted territory, the risks were great, but so were the rewards. Yet the only way to learn this was to take the journey and face the many challenges and struggles along the way. Welcome to the new world of healthy relationships.
There is a story of two fish swimming in the ocean when a third fish swims up to them and says, “Hello, gents. How’s the water?” and he swims away. The two fish look at each other and say, “What the hell is water?” In this way, the Water becomes a metaphor for those built-in aspects of our experience we take for granted to such an extent that we don’t even notice them. That is how the Rules show up in so many of our lives. We have no awareness of them; we do not see them because we are so used to them being there as a natural part of our experience. We react to them as if they are the only version of reality—the one truth. However, they are social constructions that have been created by other men (and women) and passed on. Most of us were never given a choice. Nobody sat us down, reviewed the Rules with us, and asked us which ones we wanted to follow and which ones didn’t fit for us. In all likelihood we became immersed in them early in our lives when we were incapable of thinking about them critically. We never had the opportunity to consider whether the Rules made sense for who we were and who we wanted to become.
When I walked into my first recovery meeting a man tried to hug me as a welcoming gesture. Another man, named Bud, wearing a sweat-covered T-shirt and a “Honk if you Love Tits” baseball cap, was one of the first men I noticed standing around. Twenty minutes later this same man—one I arrogantly thought embodied so much of what I detested about traditional masculinity—was crying as he talked about his marriage falling apart at seven years of recovery and how he had been kicked out of the house again.
“Whoa. What is going on here?” I asked myself. And that was the first time I began to see the Water. I realized right away that in the rooms of the twelve-step community men expressed themselves differently than they did virtually everywhere else in our society (though that has changed somewhat during the past two decades).
Of course, that was one of many examples from my first year of recovery that I could point to demonstrating how men in twelve-step recovery tend to express masculinity differently than in American society at-large. The more I travel the country talking about these issues, the clearer it is that the biggest problem with the Man Rules is how oblivious to them so many of us are.
This is what Jim is talking about in the quote that heads this chapter; he has a choice now in how he gets to be a man and what that means to him. He is becoming aware of the Water. The freedom inherent in this idea is immeasurable, yet so many men have no idea of the opportunities and choices that are available to them. A lot of men have not thought about their ideas of being a man. If you do not consciously reflect on this, you can’t see or feel the Water in which you are swimming. When asked about the process of how his ideas of being a man have evolved, Jose said it this way: “I’ve let go of old ideas that I thought served me well but were actually based on false information or poor perspective on my part.”
How aware of your own internal conversations are you? What do the voices from your past tell you about being a man? I encourage you to listen closely without preconceptions. Only in this way can you come to truly see the Water in which you swim every day.
My guess is that a lot of the Rules have been invisible to you. If we do not consciously call them out, they tend to operate in the shadows, driving a lot of our behavior, with little awareness on our part. We treat them as reality, and as inevitable. How often have you heard the dismissive phrase, “Well, that’s just how men are”? I have heard it all of my life, and a lot of the time it did not apply to me. So I thought the only thing that made sense to me at the time was, I must not be much of a man. That sentiment haunted me for a long time, and I didn’t think I could tell anyone about it. Once I had the courage to begin talking about the insecurity of feeling like I wasn’t a real man and share about the negative judgments I hurled at myself, I heard from man after man that I was not alone; many men have these feelings in common.
Let me be very clear that the Rules are not necessarily bad. How the Rules are taught to us (sometimes literally beaten into us) and how we respond to them can be problematic. Rigidly following the Rules is unhealthy because there is no freedom; there is no choice. The Rules at their extremes are toxic. They lead to disconnection, violence, homophobia, objectification of women, and extreme competition, as well as isolation, loneliness, self-hatred, and misery. Discover who you are despite the Rules, and you cannot help but become the man you were meant to be. With self-aware practice, the Rules become more relaxed and flexible. They feel less like tight, constricting clothes and more like loose-fitting, comfortable garments. Mike said this about how recovery and the Twelve Steps had changed his ideas of who he was as a man: “I like what I see when I look in the mirror. I have come to a level of self-acceptance I’m comfortable with.”
Many of the men (and women) I know who defend their behavior by saying, “It’s just who I am,” are often lost in the Rules because they are not aware of the Water. These are the people who keep using old, out-of-date maps. It is easier to simply say men don’t know how to communicate feelings and continue to be disconnected in their relationships than to take the risk of communicating feelings. That involves immense vulnerability for those of us who have been told all of our lives that sharing feelings, outside of anger, is not manly. As Mike says, “When I share my feelings, honest connection is possible.” The converse also seems to be true: When we do not share our feelings or our inner lives, it is hard to truly connect with others. This is just one of the many “ways that men are” that I still hear all the time, even in the rooms of recovery.
Of course, the Rules are not always specific and concrete; they can be a set of ideas that we react to or resist. For instance, all of my life I have felt more emotional and sensitive than most men (and women). I have found this to be a common trait I share with a lot of men in recovery. The Rules, however, dictate that men are not to show emotions other than anger, and that certain emotions, such as fear, sadness, and hurt, are signs of weakness. These emotions are associated with being feminine, which in the context of the Man Rules has negative connotations. Maybe we feel “less than.” We may even spend a fair amount of time trying not to engage in certain Rules that we consider unhealthy and even destructive, but doing so may affect how we feel about ourselves as men. However, if we’re self-aware and allow ourselves to experience how becoming emotionally vulnerable can enhance the quality of our connections with others, through practice we begin to have a better understanding of the man we want to be rather than one whose relationships are being suffocated by the Rules.
Implicit in many of the Rules are a lot of “don’ts.” For example, if the Rule is “Men have to be strong,” an underlying message is “Don’t be weak.” Which is the greater Rule—that men have to be strong or that men cannot be weak or show weakness of any kind? In other words, the negatives associated with many of the Rules tend to be the stronger part of the message. These “don’ts” are important because, at the heart of it, they are telling us as men what and who not to be. How much of your identity is built around what and who you are not? How much time do you spend not being somebody as opposed to being someone, or more importantly, being who you are and who you want to become?
Interestingly, if you look at the “don’ts” and get rid of the word “don’t,” you get a list of Rules that tend to be associated with a particular group of people. Let’s look at some of them.
• Don’t be weak.
• Don’t show emotion.
• Don’t ask for help.
• Don’t cry.
• Don’t care about relationships.
What group do we tend to identify these statements with? Women. Practically from the moment we are born, men are raised with messages that conflict with those given to girls and women. We receive messages—explicitly and implicitly—that not only are certain behaviors against the Rules, they are to be avoided because they are associated with the “weaker” sex. Now, consider that some of the same behaviors are exactly what we are expected to practice in our most intimate relationships. This is one of the phenomena that creates serious internal tension for men and conflict between men and women in relationships.
You may be saying, “But, Dan, I don’t live by a lot of these Rules.” Fair enough. But as a man you are still frequently judged consistent with them. Chances are there is still a voice inside you, a model of a “manly” man that you have internalized, with a tendency to judge you more harshly than you realize when you don’t follow the Rules. I know that is the case for me, and I have been living an examined life with respect to my masculinity for a very long time.
The Man Rules have also changed a lot in the past two decades. They have loosened up, allowing for what I referred to in my master’s research as a “relaxed masculinity.” The armor I talked about earlier is less rigid. We have more flexibility and more room in which to move. I am convinced we are on the right path as we evolve as individual human beings and as a society. Unfortunately, I have also found that this relaxed masculinity can cause a great deal of confusion. In the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s the Rules were pretty clear. Men and women knew exactly how to act and how to be in relationship with each other. Half a century later there is much less clarity and certainty. Under what circumstances is it okay to show weakness? When is it acceptable and preferable to be vulnerable with our authentic emotions? Some men have learned the hard way that when they do not follow the Rules they are made fun of or rejected for not being manly enough, not only by men in their lives, but by women as well. Understandably, women can buy into the Man Rules as much as men do. They don’t see the Water either.
The Rules provide one very important experience for all men: safety. When I ask audiences what following the Man Rules offers men, they often say “acceptance” or “sense of belonging.” I will push them to look further underneath that. What does acceptance, a sense of belonging, or being liked give us? Safety. At the heart of the Rules is an attempt to be safe in the world, to not only be validated as men but to truly feel safe and fit in. Every young boy learns that when he follows the Man Rules he is safer in that he is less likely to be made fun of, criticized, beaten up, and so on. The majority of us did not learn the Rules in peaceful conditions. Maybe your home had a more enlightened approach to gender, but no boy escapes the brutality of the schoolyard. In fact, I would say that given how much the process of socialization cuts us off from core parts of our humanity, there is a degree of trauma experienced by every man. For some of us the trauma is severe. To make matters worse, at the heart of any attempts we make to be intimate and truly known to others is a level of vulnerability that we may not be prepared for or have the ability to navigate. This experience can touch our trauma, triggering it constantly in our most intimate relationships, and when it happens we have no idea what to do and end up sabotaging our relationships as a result.
Finally, there is another nuance of the Rules that affects some men differently than others that must not be ignored. The people I have had the honor to train and share this conversation with have helped me to see more of the Water. When we think of criminals or drug dealers, whose face do we tend to see? When we think of illegal immigrants or people doing menial work, if they are even men, whose faces do we see? The point is that the Man Rules are not color-blind or classless. I will never know what it is like to walk down the street and have people fearing me simply because of the color of my skin. Or make judgments about me and my intelligence, moral character, or basic humanity simply because of the color of my skin or who I am drawn to love. The intensity and expression of the Man Rules also seem to be different in the suburbs where I grew up than they are in the inner city, the child protection system, or the juvenile and criminal justice systems. All men are not socialized equally.
Through the process of recovery, something happens to us that changes how we express ourselves at the foundation of our identity: our gender. Many people can get confused about the difference between sex and gender, not to mention sexuality (covered later in this book). Our sex is a biological and physiological attribute based upon having specific genitalia and other key distinguishing factors (breasts, etc.), even though there is much variation among human beings, even physiologically. Gender, however, is a social construct. It varies according to so many things and is a fluid concept. What masculinity means in one country versus another can be very different. How we express our gender is malleable and often changes over time and even through the course of relationships.
Many of us are unaware of what happens to our gender in recovery and personal growth because it occurs in the context of our recovery, as part of a bigger process of learning and growth. That was certainly what I found when I interviewed men over fifteen years ago for my master’s research, as well as among the men I interviewed for A Man’s Way through the Twelve Steps. When I asked, “How have your ideas of being a man changed since getting into recovery?” the number-one answer was “They haven’t.” I followed up with “You mean before recovery you walked around hugging other men? Asking for help? Talking about your feelings?” It was only when these changes were pointed out and they began to reflect on the question that they saw they were very different from the men they were before recovery. The same thing happened with a number of the men I interviewed for this book.
Men and women are essentially raised to be half human beings: Women are given one part and men the other. The breakdown could look like this:
We hear from an early age that “boys don’t do that” and “girls don’t do that.” Case in point: I was visiting my sister a few years ago. I was wearing a necklace made of different-colored, small, rounded stones. When my two-year-old nephew saw it he said, as intelligibly as he could, “Why are you wearing that?” “What?” I said. “That necklace. Boys don’t wear necklaces,” he said with great seriousness. I laughed, and yet I thought to myself, holy sh%$! Seriously? That young? My daughter also does this all the time. She doesn’t hear it from me, but she still “knows” that boys don’t paint their fingernails or wear long hair. It is not at all uncommon for her to make comments like “Boys don’t do . . .” and “Girls don’t do . . . .” These are observations she is making about the world in which she lives, and if I do not challenge those comments they become fact for her, stored in the processor of her brain. It becomes part of her Water, with no awareness on her part that it is happening. It happened to me, and it happened to you.
There Is No Gender Neutral
Without breaking into a treatise on oppression and marginalization, we cannot ignore the reality that some people receive benefits and advantages in this society simply because they belong to a certain category. And others get just the opposite—deficits and disadvantages—because they belong to another category or, said another way, do not belong to the dominant group. In terms of gender, men are the dominant group in our society (as in many others). Our society is patriarchal and “maleness” is the norm, the expectation, and even the subconscious default for many men and women. Unless both men and women are aware of this, it infiltrates all of our relationships in insidious ways. Once we are aware of it, we can choose to transcend it.
The issue of gender becomes even more complicated when you consider gay men or men of color who are part of a dominant group (men) and also members of a minority or marginalized group. As Gary put it in A Man’s Way through the Twelve Steps, “Even though I am a man, I am a gay man, and being a gay man is the worst of both worlds. I am seen as a predator, weak, dangerous, sick, and as the ‘other’ all at once by the same people.” Psychologically, this can have seriously damaging effects on how these men express their masculinity and how they are able to engage in their relationships.
As we adhere to the old adage “To thine own self be true,” we begin to move toward wholeness as individuals. We round out the rough edges of our character and discover our true selves. The more we engage in our recovery and the process of personal growth, the more likely we are to move toward authentically expressing who we are. One aspect of this process is learning to love parts of ourselves that we were taught or told were not okay. Another aspect is coming to embrace parts of ourselves that we rejected. A third aspect is expanding what we see as possible, including ways of being that we never considered or had rejected without ever exploring, often because “boys (or girls) don’t act that way.” As I stated earlier, as a young boy I was always sensitive. I learned very early growing up in a violent alcoholic home that being sensitive was not okay (or emotionally safe). I learned to fear and hate that part of myself because I thought it was not manly. I have come to realize that it is a central part of who I am and I do not care if others think it is manly or not. In fact, it is a wonderful quality when I choose to express it in a healthy way.
Chances are you have your own examples of similar experiences. What is important is to be able to verbalize those experiences in a safe environment. This requires doing the work of self-examination and self-discovery. Equally important, however, is that you look at your experiences through the lens of gender to help the unseen become seen.
On a spiritual and moral plane, we don’t ever prosper by treating others as inferior or second class, or by engaging in any of the other ways human beings disparage one another. Nor do we ever prosper by accepting such statements. Such actions affect our spirit deeply. This is particularly true for those of us in recovery, because we are not dulling our consciousness or conscience. We are aware, are living an examined life, and are challenged to see that other people are not responsible for our behavior. And we become aware that the differences between individuals do not confer a status of one person as “better than” another. In fact, the differences enrich our lives. Ultimately, the two primary questions for men that I pose are: How are your behaviors consistent with the man the people in your life truly want you to be? More importantly, how are your behaviors and the beliefs you maintain reflective of the man you want to be?
If you want to have loving and fulfilling relationships, I cannot stress this enough: Screw the Rules! Be who you are, and you cannot help but show up, authentically and as the best man you could ever be. As Jim said in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, recovery gives you the opportunity to redefine what a man is and what that looks like for you. Bob said it this way: “My history of male models has lots of bravado, independence, and low emotional expressiveness. Since recovery I have been more willing to allow interdependence and emotional expressivity as essential aspects of me. As a result, I am more comfortable in my own skin.”
Into Action
Take your own list of Rules and share them with your spouse, partner, and/or sponsor. Have a conversation with them about your Rules.
Consciously look at the Rules you have listed. Which ones do you want to keep? Which ones would you like to get rid of? Which ones would you like to change?
Choose three Rules you want to keep and write about how they have helped you and your relationships. Share what you have written with your partner or a trusted friend.
Choose three Rules that you want to let go of or change and write about how they have hurt you and your relationships. Share what you have written with your partner or a trusted friend.
What are five behaviors or interests you have that would be considered less masculine? What is it like for you to admit that? How long have you had those behaviors or interests? How were you treated when you exhibited them?
