Angry Men, Passive Men by Marvin Allen
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Angry Men, Passive Men explores the concept of anger in men and how to deal with it through expressing those pent-up feelings of anger, fear and sadness.
Hey guys, I read a lot of books on personal development and as a result of that it’s pretty rare nowadays that I come across a book that contains brand new concepts or ideas that I’ve never heard of before. So what I’m looking for in the books that I read now is more a matter of how they affect me, like how they make me feel.
Because I really believe that if you want to make a lasting change in your life, then you need to deal with emotions and particularly the emotions that we have been avoiding feeling in the past and all that business that’s repressed in our subconscious.
So, yeah, nowadays I look at how books make me feel. Now, with that in mind, one of the emotions that I’ve really struggled with in the past and am still working on is anger. This makes total sense because I grew up in a household where anger wasn’t handled well. The anger around me was expressed in ways that I found traumatic and destructive, and I made a decision at a very early age that anger was just a bad emotion, it was a terrible thing, I wasn’t supposed to feel angry, I wasn’t supposed to let the sun go down on my anger, I wasn’t supposed to be quick to anger, I was meant to be slow to anger.
And as a result of a lot of these messages that I’d heard from outside and also just from my personal experience, I learnt to repress my anger and just push it down so deeply that I most of the time didn’t even feel it any more.
Now, that’s not a good thing because when you repress anger it tends to come out as some other emotion, particularly anxiety, because they’re generated in the same emotional center of the brain, in your amygdala. So as a result, repressing my anger led to a whole bunch of negative consequences for me. For instance, I was bullied a lot because I no longer had my anger to protect me and stand up for myself. I became very afraid of conflict.
So that led to a vicious cycle where I would just repress the anger even further, get bullied more, get hurt more and then end up with a whole bunch of traumatic emotional wounds. So lately I’ve been learning to liberate my anger, and as part of that I went to the library and borrowed a whole bunch of books. And one of the books that resonated most intensely with me is this one; it’s called Angry Men, Passive Men, by Marvin Allen, Understanding the Roots of Men’s Anger and How to Move Beyond It.
And I found when I started reading this book that I was immediately affected by what it had to say. Firstly off, the personal journey of the author really moved me. It resonated a lot. In his case, he had a father who oscillated between passive and violent, and so his father was the dominant force in his life, he writes, and it was quite oppressive, obviously, the experience he had.
I found that reading the personal introduction I found myself crying because I could so resonate with this guy, and he talked a lot about his experience of therapy and why he had so much therapy that just didn’t seem to work. It was like he was talking about what happened but it wasn’t healing him for some reason.
And eventually the reason that he worked out why just talking about what happened wasn’t healing him was that he wasn’t actually experiencing the emotions that he had suppressed as a result of what had happened to him. He was talking about the emotions but he wasn’t actually feeling the emotions, and as a result he wasn’t healing them.
He became a therapist himself and started working with male and female clients. He found that a lot of his male clients he was unable to reach or wasn’t able to help for some reason. He could help the females, but the men, their anger and their rage was so suppressed and repressed that they had trouble getting in touch with it.
Now, this made a whole lot of sense to me because I’ve had a lot of therapy too and a lot of it I was like, “Well, I don’t know if I’m really getting anywhere here.” And it’s only in recent years that I’ve learned how to get in touch with those feelings so that I can really do some serious healing work.
Now, reading section 1, Men and Their Emotions, I was immediately triggered, and by the time I even got to page 3 simply reading the title of the next section, Why Men Can’t Feel and How Boys are Taught to Suppress Their Emotions, when I read that, I felt waves of grief go through me. I started sobbing deeply. My whole body started convulsing. And I just stopped. Like, I took some time to just let that grief out of my system.
Continue reading at https://confidentman.net/emotions/ang...