Pliable Saplings

“The greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent”.
Carl Jung

Grounded in Fear
You know how last post we went into how fear kind of runs things for a lot of guys and we don’t even know it?  We act one way without realizing we might have scared ourselves into it, by being afraid of not doing it. A person’s personality is often in defense of a person’s pain.  This pain becomes a constant buffer between themselves and everyone else.

This pain leaves a wound that must be realized to heal.  This usually leaves a guy to cling to someone to solve all their problems (which cannot be done), or carry macho pride about the enforced loneliness they have. Can you imagine being a guy whose entire mythos is secretly grounded in fear?  Think of a lone hero, a romanticized drifter, like the Marlboro Man or Clint Eastwood. Wouldn’t these guys be the biggest assholes if you were around them? Always pushing away anyone close to them (or shooting them), unable to admit their need for nurturance and support from anyone. I tried to act like and embody this idea, a teenage John Wayne, for much of my life after puberty.  This man, just like the person who wants a mother figure to save him, is ambushed by his inner feminine (as everybody has feminine and masculine qualities) and in denial of it. He is trying so hard to act like he does not need nurturing or support like he isn’t a human. This cuts him off from himself, which cuts him off from others and denies him the right to solve his problem. This slow rot is responsible for so much hate, hate of things he is afraid of in himself, and we so often oppress in others what one fears of in him or herself. It doesn’t matter who it is but a man, even those drifters, must eventually open up to someone in a way that can admit the things they’re shameful of. Acknowledging a need doesn’t mean caving to its every whim, but seeing something in your way is the only way fo confidently avoid it. It also is the only way to not pick up and throw those needs at the people around us. All men feel a wound in this way, a lot of people have had to deal with a man projecting his need for mothering onto them or fear that need and recoil and defend against them. These men can hardly see who is actually in front of them, as they can only see the outline of the parent the other person reminds them of.

James Hollis says, “The child is born whole, but then is wounded by life events, each wound splitting off some natural truth and producing a concomitant strategy for survival”.  The first, and because of that, normally most grievous wounds we will experience are from our parents or those that raised us. Just as we start with our mother in real life, we should start with her here.  Men (and like, everyone) are literally united with their mother before they are even born. She sets the cadence for their life’s rhythm. We are dependent on her for our beginning life, and all relationships and interactions if taken back far enough, go back to the mother.  In general, mothers either give too much or too little to us, and this has men normally pull towards one or defend against it. This and all the other interactions with her create a big ball of emotional string in our heads called a complex, and when one individual string gets pulled the whole ball is charged. These complexes are universal, everyone has a mother and father complex (even those who weren’t raised by one) and they are the biggest ones as they are the first on the scene. The mother is the bridge to the outside world, to relationships, that twists how we see the dynamic and nature of life.  Because of this, she supplies the colored glasses that we wear to view our life.

Father’s Laws

I know the immensity of a mother complex because I had two moms, as my father passed away when I was young so my mom and her best friend raised me.  Precisely because of his absence I know the power of the father complex (and that I have pretty huge ones of both). The mother complex is so powerful, and because of this our brain tries to balance it with its other.  So many of the students I work with and the patients I see have so much rage and shame from too much mother and not enough father. Rage also powered me until I was mature enough to see what was beyond it. I can see the pain and questioning in them that I carried for so long, and know intimately the powerlessness they feel.    

Acknowledging and working with the idea of the father is vital to the psychological health of anyone, especially men who use it as a model. My father was a depressed man who did not believe he was “good enough”, and I took that to mean that I also was not good enough. I followed his lead, and if I have a son, he will follow mine.  We all give a person that looks to us for understanding a law to follow.  It is overarching and defines us even though we are often unconscious of it.  It could be “to work hard is what it is to be a man” and if you believe that, you also believe it’s inverse: “I am not a man if I don’t work hard”.   These laws are the legacy we imprint on ourselves as well as those we raise or influence. Our ripple goes far deeper and wider than we realize. So we must face these looming figures inside not only for us, but for the ones we love.  

Wounded Saplings
So much of what I do as a psychotherapist is trying to correct and mend an individual’s wounds from their parents, and virtually no parent realizes the damage they are doing.  It is impossible to not wound a child emotionally, and mild wounds help foster growth, just like pruning a sapling does. Severe emotional wounds will fester out of sight, exerting control over us without us even knowing. Not realizing the wounds we carry allows us to wound others in a compensatory way, and then blame them like they caused us to act like an ass.  

Men (and again, everyone) must stop deceiving ourselves. No one has power over you if you do not let them.  We must see if we still are projecting our parent’s needs into our lives. This requires us to examine our values to just make sure we are not, even if we don’t think we are.  Once we have done this, our perspective changes. Our fear of and need for others gets properly sorted out. Jung says that we cannot solve our problems, “only outgrow them”. This outgrowing means that we realize the questions that our parents could not or failed to answer we must courageously answer for ourselves. What was not fully activated by our parent’s falls on us to activate. This job can go to no one else as no one else can, as you must find the courage to heroically jump into yourself and discover the answers waiting to be picked up.  

Our Hands
All this starts, Hollis says, by realizing that “we all would still like mother to take us in her arms and nurture us, and we long to stand behind father as he leads the way.  But that is not going to happen. Each man must shed the directives of his parent complexes and make his own decisions, feed his own hungers”. We must realize the trials we have been through and the  complexes we face. It is not our fault for having them as a child, we were then unable to differentiate what we needed from what we got. We deserve and need to forgive ourselves for our response to our childhood. We also deserve to not continue anxiously defending against or regressing into the bad habits we lived as children. We are children no longer, and the responsibility of improving our life lies in only our hands.

This is an almost inexhaustible topic, as long as men act out of their own hurt and oppress themselves, women, and children, more should be written. I want to go into what we can do to outgrow these problems and live to spite them. I also think it’s very believable that the patriarchy with its rigid rules and hierarchy, and so much hate and fear in general, was established as a man’s defense against the mother complex.  Since we also just had mother’s day, I would like to hammer in a few more points with her being the focus this time and then talk about how we can overcome all this heavy stuff.

Photos from our Gentleman