A Contrary to Social Conditioning

It's no secret that men can be very bad at showing, understanding, and expressing emotions, and it's a commonly held belief that this stems from a society constantly breathing down emotional men and children, telling them the world has no place for their emotions and that emotion is the antecedent to a lack of masculinity.

But by that logic, you'd expect the people subject to the most intense criticism of emotion to be the most averse to emotion. That narrative quickly falls apart when you look at people with a history of emotional abuse or neglect. In fact, people who go through emotional abuse or neglect are often much more introspective, mindful, and aware of their emotions than the average person — once they've had the chance to heal.

Let's follow the life of Jimmy, a kid with emotionally withdrawn parents who grew up around aggressive chimpanzees masquerading as humans. Jimmy was told to suppress his emotions early on: crying led to harsh criticism, anger led to more aggression, sadness led to taunts and bullying. His friends were better off in the sense that, while they also couldn't show emotion in public, their homes weren't places where emotion was taboo. They developed a somewhat healthy connection to their emotions early, just enough to get by, and so they never really had to introspect or examine the cracks in their own thinking.

Jimmy, far more averse to emotion than his friends, found himself constantly in pain — in futile relationships, often depressed. That endless tirade of feeling helpless eventually pushed him to build a healthy emotional connection to himself. He realized he couldn't do it alone; that was supposed to be a parent's job. So he found a counselor, who slowly and gently helped him learn to deal with his emotions and understand other people's. Because he was working with a trained professional, he was taught healthy coping mechanisms — and because his emotions had been bottled up for so much longer, once he learned to cope, he could handle much stronger emotions with relative ease.

Jimmy's friends, better off to begin with, were never nudged to introspect. They got by fine, never really pushed to work on themselves, and stuck to the same old ideals about emotions being bad — propagating them right along. Because they developed their behavioral patterns on their own, without ever being forced to examine them, they were, if anything, more likely to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms than Jimmy was.

This story is 100% anecdotal, pieced together from multiple anonymous accounts of people with childhood neglect or C-PTSD, but it's an interesting counterpoint to what's usually on offer. This isn't meant to glorify emotional neglect — I want to be clear that many people with that history face real, serious problems before they ever reach a stage of emotional awareness: psychosomatic issues, depression, anxiety disorders, an inability to sustain relationships. It takes a lot of work to get there. But it is a silver lining, all the same.