The Strength That Costs Men Everything
The Cost of Never Showing Weakness is Paid in Your Relationships, Your Health, and Your Peace
TL;DR: The strength you're proud of is the same thing wrecking your marriage, your health, and your peace of mind. Men were trained to never show weakness, and we built armor to prove it. That armor worked once. Now it's suffocating you.
“Failure is NOT an option.” Fuck that.
That’s what our parents learned from watching John Wayne movies; that’s what another generation learned from Top Gun and other military propaganda that somehow became a “Oorah” for the expectations on all men.
Failure is always an option, at least as a possibility. It’s just not the option we want, because, at least on the surface, failure sucks.
So when shit gets real, men hide our vulnerability; we decide to carry all the weight of what we think everyone else expects of us, and ultimately, that shielding disrupts our most important relationships – you know, family…spouse…partner. All the relationships that are based in our heart.
You can feel it in your chest – something has to change before you lose those you care about; before you lose yourself.
What Counts as Weakness for Men?
Let’s count down the top 3:
3. Physical weakness – unable to do a physical task or protect your loved ones.
2. Mental weakness – “I should have known better…”
What’s the number one weakness for me? Survey says:
1. Emotional weakness – “Real men don’t cry.” “I can’t show emotion. Emotions are for women.”
All falsehoods and lies that you’ve been indoctrinated to believe. Collective hangovers from days of survival long-gone. Your ancestors drank the belief, they were swimming in it trying to stay alive; you’re left with the lingering headache.
Who Taught You That Weakness Was Dangerous?
Typically, we learn these lessons from our parents when we are quite young.
Easy to blame them; harder to accept that they were just doing the best they could and were living from the shame shielding that they had learned. After all, it must have worked – they were alive and created you…now they could teach you the only thing they knew: what kept them alive.
They couldn’t show vulnerability; they had to protect you. They couldn’t tell you, “I have no clue what I am doing and I’m just making it up as I go along.”
You learned by watching and experiencing. Evidently, the shielding has worked, because here you are.
But, since you are here, there’s something else happening; a deeper level of awareness percolating up. You’re recognizing, or a part of you is recognizing, that this way of living ain’t workin’ for you no more.
What Has "Never Showing Weakness" Actually Cost You?
Jobs? Friends? Family? Marriages? Your health? Your peace of mind? Your happiness?
The rigidity that it takes for us to stuff down our emotions and hold them there takes a ton of effort. You’ve been doing the equivalent of holding a plank for years.
When we can’t show weakness, men instead feign strength.
Then we either worry that a distraction will break our concentration, that we snap; effectively the straw that broke your plank, or we’ll beat ourselves up when we finally collapse.
Rather than realizing we’ve been under too much strain, we’ll judge our ability to contain what we’ve created…”I just gotta get better at holding this down.”
No…what you need to learn is how to express emotions appropriately in any situation, so that they flow instead of being dammed and held back.
What Would Strength Look Like If You Defined It?
Who do you imagine yourself to be when you’re not stressed out and armored up? What’s it like to imagine saying what needs to be said, to allow yourself to actually fucking feel something other than ‘like shit’ and express it?
Here’s the million-dollar question: The more you hold back, and hold onto all this stress, how much are you preventing yourself from truly being happy? Where’s the room for happiness if you’re full of emotional crap?
You have a choice here: You can keep doing what you’ve been doing and honestly, nothing is going to change except your stress level and blood pressure. The more you stuff, the higher they go; or you can take a scary step forward, a courageous step to do something differently.
Change is scary. What’s scarier: making new decisions now to change what could be in the future, or not doing anything and thinking about what will be in 2, 3, 5 years with more of the same.
If you don’t change course soon, what’s it going to cost you in your life?
The armor keeps men safe. It also keeps you alone.
You’ve made it this far. That’s to be celebrated.
And you’re beginning to notice the suit of armor that has protected you for years no longer fits. It’s getting snug as you outgrow it. It was built for a much younger version of you, and you’ve grown.
That armor is now suffocating you.
That sensation in your chest is your heart calling for your attention. The Undivided Man shows you what it’s trying to tell you, and what’s possible when you stop holding it all in.
Fourteen questions. Less than five minutes. Uncannily accurate.
Let me know your results. I’m curious how you feel when you see them.
