Societal Boxes

There are very few men that have been encouraged by their families and societies to be who God made them to be. Real men don't cry, whine, fail, stumble, worry, get sad, get depressed, get weak, or express their feelings. Right? Isn't this what we've been told?

When Jesus cried and expressed his feelings/anguish to his Father, that was just for a Bible story, right? It wouldn't have anything to do with emotions/feelings that God placed in us, right?

Have we gotten strength confused with the complete denial of all God-given abilities to emote? Here's a few messages that were either told to me, or I picked up through observation as a boy, young man, man progressing through life:

• Never cry.
• Be strong.
• Rescue.
• Save.
• Tell everyone that you're okay and have things under "control."
• Don't let anyone know that you're dying inside of the same worries, stress, doubts, etc.., as the women.
• Deny all emotion/tears in times of deep sadness and loss. Someone has to be tough, right?
• Suppress all need for affection, affirmation, and attention. We're an island, right?
• Our boys must play sports, work on cars, hunt, and if he falls out of those categories-- he must be gay, right?
• To be a good husband, a man must bring his wife into submission, right? Same goes for the kids.
• We need to know-it-all and be the almighty conveyors of all information. Death is better than saying, "I don't know."
• We can handle anything and everything that comes our way and never worry.
• Stress is invited, we thrive/perform better under it.
• We're tough and can handle it all-- we don't ever need to talk about it.
• Boys/men don't need to talk about how they feel-- that's for wusses.
• Score more baskets, make more touchdowns, knock their heads off, because performance is how a boy/man is defined/valued.
• You get the picture.....

All that I've listed have played a part in what I now consider a gender prison. We've denied the very ways that God has created us-- to fit into a mold that denies our complete being. I'm not saying that our genders are the same, but I am saying that we've taken it too far. Our children need to know that our love for them is not peformanced-based. Our love is unconditional-- I hope. Let's not be so concerned about genderizing our children and focus more on just loving them. Especially our little boys that may be already squashing their feelings, ideas, and creativity to fall into our boxes.

One of the most tragic results of denying our boys emotional support-- is severe depression. If you're a woman reading this, try to imagine not feeling comfortable enough to share your feelings, cry, or your ideas about anything without the lingering possibility of being made to feel bad about expressing it.

Check this book out. I read it a while back and while it's not "ALL" Christian in approach, it does, more than adequately, touch on male depression. It helped me a ton, to get past all the imposed expectations and start to see how I was really made. Healing came pouring in after I read it. It's worth a try, right?

Jason