Authenticity and the Pressure to Conform
How do we stay true to ourselves - and still fully belong?
When I was 45 I joined a group - in my case a men’s group - where I had a sense of belonging and being listened to, being important and being valuable. That was big for me. In all the time before I’d hardly ever spoken honestly about my life. I’d been thoroughly lost in complex trauma so being heard wasn’t just big, it was huge.
I spent some 18 years in that group meeting bi-weekly. It was wonderful and I made good friends and learned a lot. However in all that time, I never worked on my deeper issue of not belonging, the complex trauma that I entered into it with. I continued to feel a sense of unworthiness, invisibility and pain inside myself. During that time I had a great deal of experience in other men’s groups and forums. I was prime mover in initiating Everyman Men’s Journal, described by Warren Farrell as the best of it’s kind - admittedly a small pool. I helped co-host nine nationalish Canadian gatherings of men and women focused on men. I became a coach based on masculine archetypes (though I practiced little). I knew major players in the men’s movement.
But for all this, the inside of my personal issues remained largely invisible and unaddressed. I suspect a similar experience is true for many men and women in a large range of groups. To stay focused, I’ll speak here of men’s groups and organizations, the place where the largest part of my group experience has been. The men do receive a benefit but, as was the case for me, it can be a mere token of what’s available and may distract us and lead us away from what’s most important and needed.
I’ll describe what I think the problem is, putting it before you for reflection and appraisal.
The Problem and the Solution Hiding in the Problem
There be dragons here . . . Most readers will want to go back to the comfort of dry land rather than reading on. I completely understand. I think it’s about five minutes more.
Men’s issues are typically not addressed in a men's group. The men who enter are carrying a strong sense of personal wound, as are many or most of us in the wider society. The group forms to address this need and from this perspective, healing the private wounding becomes the group task even though it may never be said.
The difficulty is that the problem men face doesn’t stem from men’s their personal wounding. It’s not actually in the individual psyche of the men. A crucial part of men’s difficulty is that it’s a response to society’s view of men. Personal wounds and the pain of them are in great part the effect.
For heterosexual men especially, it’s our response to society’s view of men being oppressive to women, of being morally suspect and second-class with no possibility of change.
That’s hard enough to swallow but the next part is harder: Most men vehemently reject any part of the view that the source of their problem may be in the relational or social field. They defend their right to their wounds and to be working on them forever.
As said, men typically come into personal work with a deep sense of unworthiness, unworthy of strong and happy pride in their natures. They take low aspirations and “I’m working on myself” as the highest we can attain to.
They often seem to take the motto of Possum Lodge from the Red-Green show, “I’m a man but I can change. If I have to. I guess.”
Or as Garrisson Keilor put it, “Men, once one of the world’s great sexes . . .” People laugh because they recognize the truth in it. That truth serves no one.
Women have an equally-charged and equally incorrect version of this difficulty; like men they’re also subject to a largely invisible social expectation that derails them. I’m pleased to be in conversation about this with some conscious women. For right here, now, I’m confining myself to my understanding of men’s experience. But it’s common to all of us.
Men feel a strong pressure to identify with the role of men as held in the wider society in order to maintain their good standing in the wider society. In order to belong. If they (we/I) imagine ourselves straying from that, questioning it, we feel an automatic sense of shame and recoil - like drifting over the yellow line to the wrong side of the road.
Here’s a ray of hope: When two or more men see this at the same time and can honestly in their hearts see that the social conditioning is bullsh*t, the power of the spell is over and a new light shines. It’s an astounding recognition. Most of men’s difficulty drops off them in a heartbeat.
The reality is that men are healthy, happy and good already, just as we are. We’re not the walking wounded. We’re not broken and we don’t need fixing. The road is open for us. We’re blessed with a beautiful and absolutely essential role in the human family. A 21st century version of our traditional strength as fighters - warriors for the common good in service to the King - is crucially needed in this time of crisis. A lot happens very quickly from there.
Similarly when a man and a women in deep relationship see the constraints that social pressure has placed on them, their relationship and the road ahead become clearer.
We’ve been suffering under false assumptions about the sexes for some three generations and men and women today have grown up with it as normal. Nonetheless, it’s similar in shape and a part of the weakening of culture and society around us.
End of Part 1. There’s much more to say about how we fall into and escape the conditioning and I’ll pick it up again in a few days.
Dear reader,
These ideas developed over years and I was able to articulate it in my book, Evolutionary YOU: Discovering the depths of radical change. (The book fills out the inner process of how we unconsciously conform in order to belong, for those who are are interested in this dynamic.) But there too it was hard to say as evidenced by fact that the book wasn’t marketed. Partly that was lack of marketing know-how – or even the smarts to do marketing – but a larger part was a lack of courage on my part. I used my poor track record with worldly success and successful relationships as an excuse to not step fully into owning what I knew and felt; I was an example of the difficulty that I spoke to in the book. But I was also inspired by what I was learning and it was part of finding a measure of trust and security in my inner being, when I was, without fully knowing it, looking for external validation.
As well I’ll be offering Substack patrons opportunities to explore their relationship with social control in live zoom groups and in person where possible. No one will be turned away but becoming a patron helps me immeasureably. (You can write and request a subsidy if you want one and are unable to afford it.) Today groups are only available to men but I’m hoping to be part of extending that, in collaboration with women friends, to men and women in the near future. Both sexes have the same issue from different ends and are in this together.
Hi, Andrew! Thank you for sharing your wisdom with the world. I share a concern for what's going on with men, and women today. I briefly mentioned something in one artlcle of mine... I see masculinity in men being under attack, and masculinity in women celebrated. I also see femininity in men being celebrated (but that without the focus on masculinity does not work). And femininity in women is talked about, but it's not encouraged as much as it is in men. It's a mess leaving us confused and the result is a society that is very concerning. I used to think that to heal and move on healthily, we need women-only and men-only communities. That might be a good start. However, looking at where we are today, I believe we need communities of people who have chosen to be whole human beings no matter their gender, or what I call like-hearted people. We need to be surrounded by both women and men who support us and challenge us, an environment where we can embrace our unique differences and find our commonalities, all at the same time.
Thanks Andrew, much for me to consider here. How is this true for me? I think it is. I appreciate you for bringing this to light for me to consider. Also, a few years ago I moved to a conservative area of California (yes, they exist) and it seems to me that men here are more actively resisting the cultural condemnation. Also something for me to observe and think about. Thank you!