In my experience as a man, most of the men I’ve had around me tend to avoid talking about what is going on inside of them, not sharing and describing what they feel and how this relates to their unmet human needs.

"The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, 'Please do not tell us what you feel.' ... If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed."

— bell hooks

This quote resonates with me. I want to share a few more gifts and ideas that have come my way in the past few years.

Last year I learned about the work of Pia Mellody, who believes that that there is not just one type of abuse, ‘disempowering abuse’ - shaming someone and making that person see themselves as ‘less than’ others, but two types of abuse. The second type of abuse, which I think American culture suffers, is what Pia calls: ‘false empowerment’, making a person feel like they are somehow 'better than' others. This leads to people having what she calls other-esteem, in contrast to reality-based self-esteem - which someone on the internet described as: "other-esteem happens when we base our self-worth on external things".

Psychologist Terrence Real has a great summary which I copied from his book ‘How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men and Women’:

“What Pia has called “disempowering abuse” is the one we can all readily identify. It is made up of transactions that shame a child, hurt him, physically or psychologically, make him feel unwanted, helpless, unworthy. What Pia has called “false empowerment,” by contrast, is comprised of transactions that pump up a child’s grandiosity, or at the least, that do not actively hold it in check. Pia’s genius was in understanding that falsely empowering a child is also a form of abuse.”

At the same time, I also believe our modern culture has a massive fear of grief and sadness.

“In this culture we display a compulsive avoidance of difficult matters and an obsession with distraction. Because we cannot acknowledge our grief, we’re forced to stay on the surface of life. Poet Kahlil Gibran said, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” We experience little genuine joy in part because we avoid the depths. We are an ascension culture. We love rising, and we fear going down. Consequently we find ways to deny the reality of this rich but difficult territory, and we are thinned psychically. We live in what I call a “flat-line culture,” where the band is narrow in terms of what we let ourselves fully feel. We may cry at a wedding or when we watch a movie, but the full-throated expression of emotion is off-limits.”

— Francis Weller

I personally experienced a welcoming introduction to Weller's work in this podcast: https://charleseisenstein.org/podcasts/new-and-ancient-story...

It goes well with this video, inspired by him: https://www.youtube.com/embed/HSqLr8dA3wo

I'm curious if anyone here has heard about Nonviolent Communication (NVC)? Marshall Rosenberg's voice is often a light in the dark for me, helping me become aware of what's going on inside me. He has 2 or 3 great audiobooks that he recorded himself. There are also some great facebook groups where people practise together. Here's a short intro video with Rosenberg where he presents some of his theories: https://www.youtube.com/embed/DgaeHeIL39Y

I also admire very much Dr. Gabor Maté's work, and have found much relief in his work and his words (many of his talks are free on YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/embed/TIjvXtZRerY and https://www.youtube.com/embed/adYJm_A2CSM

Lastly, reading socialist authors like Mark Fisher, Wendy Liu, Jakob Rigi, Vijay Prashad, and of course Marx and Engels, has helped me to see why bourgeois Global North culture (heavily influenced specifically by American cinema/Hollywood) has evolved into a culture that glorifies violence, turns young girls into sex objects, sends young working class men to their deaths to ‘defend' their country, and indoctrinates it's citizens with bizarre nationalistic views and a sense of cultural superiority.

This video illustrate my last point (trigger warning: it's dark): https://www.youtube.com/embed/j800SVeiS5I