Men Don’t Feel Pain (But Maybe Let’s Acknowledge that it Exists)
Men don’t feel pain. We don’t feel pain because we do not acknowledge pain’s existence. We cannot acknowledge such a thing because we were never taught how.
If you grew up in a time when machismo was a thing, when little boys were told to stop acting like little girls, to man up, to brush it off and get back in the game, you know what I am talking about. If you cried, if your bottom lip quivered, even slightly, your tears were shamed into submission. Acknowledging that you were hurting made you weak, it made you a sissy, it made you a crybaby, it made you a punk, it made you a little bitch.
You were told that you were a girl. You hated being called a girl. You would fight epic battles and hurl your body headlong into a mob of antagonists to prove that you were tough. You weren’t a sissy, a girl, a crybaby, a punk, a little bitch; you were a man (a child really) living up to unrealistic societal expectations of male toughness. A 1970s period of years featuring Clint Eastwood and John Wayne westerns and Charles Bronson vigilante movies reinforced the idea that boys simply don’t feel pain and boys don’t cry.
The world exists through a perfect balance of competing ideas. Good exists only because of evil, according to the philosopher Augustine. There is no love without hate, peace comes opposite war, there is no light without darkness. Pain is the antithesis to pleasure.
Who cares if boys don’t feel pain? Our inability to acknowledge our pain leads to disastrous results, physically and emotionally. CDC statistics tell us that women attempt suicide, caused by emotional pain, more than men. Unfortunately men are more successful in their attempts — 356% more successful at a rate of 20.7 per 100,000 population (men) versus 5.8 per 100,000 population for women. If you are an African-American male, the rate of suicide is 9.7 per 100,000 population. We may not acknowledge pain but we men take an extreme approach to ending our suffering.
Our refusal to acknowledge pain manifests itself into mental and addictive disorders, self-medication through alcohol and other drug/substance abuse, feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, aggressiveness, and engaging in impulsive, sometimes dangerous behaviors that lead to higher incidents of death by or at our own hands.
Maybe a recognition of pain can save our lives. Perhaps the old custom of acting like a man and toughening up isn’t working so well for us men. Maybe, just maybe, we need to come to terms with and deal head on with the pain we have so clumsily repressed deep within the pits of our bowels.
Pain hurts. Its suppose to hurt. Physical pain is a natural part of the healing process as it acts as a trigger or signal that prompts us to seek attention and find the appropriate cure for that pain. Emotional pain is an outward expression of our inward turmoil that not only hurts the same way physical pain does, it forces us to confront our vulnerabilities. How we choose to confront that which causes us pain is the difference between enlightenment and growth and (unfortunately) death.
We must come to terms with the things that hurt us. We as men have to locate the pain and address its root cause. We cannot simply ignore or refuse to acknowledge that we are in pain because even if we carry a poker face, our tell is weak. Our outbursts may be a way to begin the process of recognition but suppression and silence is a dangerous acquiescence to the seductive nature of emotional pain and its downward spiral toward despair and death.
We must stop being what we are not and acknowledge what we are. We all live lives of quiet desperation and despair. We take our best step forward and put on a happy public face but as the Smokey Robinson song goes, we cry the “tears of a clown, when there’s no one around.” Maybe it’s time to have someone around to talk through the pain.
