My eyelids start to twitch a little bit, and I realize that something weird is going on inside me as I lay on the ground during an exercise. Consciously, I am aware of everything and everyone around me, yet I do not feel in control of myself. I surrender to it, telling myself to see what happens with curiosity. Now my left arm starts shaking a little bit. Before I know it, people are around me and telling me to wake up. I start deepening my breath and regain a sense of inhabitancy of my body. I think to myself, I haven’t suffered any traumatic incident in my life per say, so how did that happen?!
Let us dive into this by talking about the various ways in which traumatic symptoms can present themselves in us, with a focus on men. Gender is a socially constructed phenomenon. As females have pressures and expectations placed on them by society and culture, so do men. When thinking about what it means to be a man, or how a man is expected to behave, one may say that they are supposed to be tough, fixers, providers, ‘rocks’ of the family, and only communicating certain emotions such as anger. These are expectations and qualities that can define masculinity. What happens, then, when one is not able to align with these expectations? This can lead to shame. It can lead to not thinking of yourself as “man enough”, as someone who is weak or has failed in some way. When these messages are internalized severely, it can lead to the notion of toxic masculinity.
Think about this scenario. A man under these ideals of their society spends a long and tiring day at work. They feel they need to be the provider for their family, so whether or not they are passionate about their job may be irrelevant. They come home tired and drained, emotionally and physically. Their child comes to them explaining that they failed a test in school and need help, and then their partner comes to them to talk about their own struggles with work or needing things fixed or done around the house. The man is stressed, but he cannot say so, or refuse to help, for that would convey weakness. It would mean he is not strong, that he does not have all the solutions, that he cannot be the backbone of the family. This is unacceptable for him, so he compromises himself in that moment and takes on more than he can handle. He suppressed his negative emotions inside and forces himself to carry on.
This kind of situation may seem common and normal, but think for a second about the long term effects of this lifestyle. Your stress, pain, and emotions have nowhere to release, so they are stored inside you, compounding with each day. This suppression builds up, it’s like a volcano waiting to explode. Over the years, this emotion and energy is so built up that it is desperately looking to be released somehow. Our bodies try to get our attention through physical pain, migraines, health problems, etc. No matter the consequence, suppression and distraction from uncomfortable emotions persists.
This is where therapy can really be fruitful and effective. Modalities such as MBST work with these effects of suppressing emotion at the most root level, our body. It offers a way of releasing this stuck energy within you that has been piling up over so many years. For myself, I found this energy releasing all at once and had no idea it would be so powerful to the point that it almost overwhelmed my system. I did not have a specific horrible event occur to me per say, but what I realized was that I was suffering from a byproduct of internalizing societal messages around how a man should not communicate emotions openly.