Men and Women – Healing the Hurt

For many months we have had separate groups for the men and the women within our community and this week we decided to bring them together and see what it would be like to hear from each other.

Twenty six of us came together, evenly split between men and women. So how was it? Difficult. So much needed to be said, to be expressed, probably a lifetime, if not generations, of confusion, hurt and anger and we had just over an hour. So yes it was unrealistic to expect us to be able to come to any neat conclusion and yet hopefully we were able to leave with an enlarged perspective.

One of the issues raised by one of the women was the question of why men “trash talk” women? She cited the example of male friends of hers who she attested to be warm, kind and generous men however when they were together would talk about the sexual merit of the women that they knew; reducing women to sexual objects and their F***ability value. She asked the men present why this happened. A few men were brave enough to answer. One responded by saying yes he did do this as it gave him a sense of “power” another said he would never engage in this kind of behaviour.

However the reason I’m writing this blog post is to reveal what happened the following day. A man whom I’ll call Mark, approached me and told me he wanted to let me know his own personal response to the question as to why men trash talk women. He told me that he had tried to respond within the group but for various reasons it hadn’t happened. He told me that he had been burning up with a response within him and that was why he needed to talk to me.

This is what Mark told me. (I’ve asked his permission to be able to share this) He was brought up in a very male dominated world. His Father never showed any emotion other than anger and he was often beaten both physically and psychologically. His temperament is much more in tune with listening to classical music, exploring literature than with sports but he was made to conform for fear of being called “a sissy”. So conform he did. He stuffed his true nature down and picked up the armour that his peers and his culture demanded of him. He trash-talked women, he beat men up sending one to hospital. He did what he did because he was terrified of being turned on himself. Of being beaten senseless. He had no other male role model showing him a different way. And he hated himself. He hated what he had become and the only way he was able to make it through his day was to drown himself in drugs and drink. He needed to numb out his deep sense of disconnection, of feeling completely adrift from his true nature, of having adopted values and behaviours that made no sense to him and so he lived his life for many years. Gradually the toll became worse and worse, his drug habit turned into a heroin habit that was demanding more every month; he witnessed the casualties amongst his friends- four suicides and he felt the lure of suicide himself “It was the only way to stop the madness I was living in”. He did find another way out- to simply walk away from everything he knew and travel across the world, finding our community along the way.

Listening to Mark had a profound effect on me. It opened up my perspective and my compassion. Yes Mark had been one of the men that I’ve both judged and feared- an angry man, a violent man and yet listening to his story was heart-breaking. To hear him speak of his sense of utter desolation, desperation and hopelessness was to make me see the incredible burden that so many men carry within our fractured world; a world where men are not shown and not allowed to display their sensitivity, their vulnerability; a world where women are encouraged –and rightly so- to speak up about the generations of male oppression and yet men have also suffered under this oppressive patriarchy and where is the place for them to share their stories too?

It seems to me that we have all, men and women alike, suffered under the distorted patriarchal story that our western culture has been enslaved by for the last few hundred years. A story that values dominance over co-operation, that sings the song of separation over connection, that believes reason is superior to emotions, that tells us that the purpose of life is to be more, better, greater than those around you. A story that is starting to crumble around us as we peer behind the facade of the dominant male and find him trembling with fear, with PTSD, with depression and addiction and begging us all to show him another way out.

The following is a poem that arose from these thoughts.

How do we speak of our pain, of our hurt, without blaming and shaming the other?
How can we lay down our arms? Extinguish the flames of angry words, whilst honouring the ravages of our past experiences?
How can we finally come together and see beyond the armour of protection, of caustic words and gross generalisations?
To see beyond and through our current projections?
I don’t have the answers. But maybe asking the questions is enough.
It’s a start.
It’s a start to acknowledge all our confusion, despair anger and hurt.
Can we turn to meet these places inside of us? Allow them entry into our own hearts?
And not hurl them at another in blame and shame?
Maybe the most courageous act we could take would be for just a moment to turn our focus away from ourselves and truly look each other in the eye and in that looking maybe we might glimpse
Our own hurt, our own longing to be seen, to be loved reflected back at us.
What then would we do?