Why Today's Young Men Seem Trapped |
Readers receive a clear distinction about two forms of power and how each was ascribed to a particular gender.
Information was gathered in clinical work with hundreds of clients.
Readers receive a clear description of Personal Power and its immediate application.
Readers can gain an understanding why young me struggle to find themselves.
Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man and Dr. Niobe Way’s Rebels with a Cause sound the alarm about the crisis facing young men. They are experiencing more anxiety and depression due to financial challenges. They are more socially isolated, underachieving academically, and very confused about the nature of manhood.
With a measure of psychopathology, males can easily compensate for the loss of personal power by unleashing a ruthless bravado in the external world. We can account for the predicament young men find themselves in by clarifying the different worlds of power attributed to females and males.
We are all acquainted with the first world of power, socio-economic and political power, which mostly manifests in the external world, and is often glorified.
The second is personal power, which gets very little attention in our culture and happens in the interior world. With little or no attention, women were relegated to the power of the interior world, where they experienced the compost of emotional maturation, instinct, emotion, intuition, and imagination. Men have access to the favored power in socioeconomics and politics, where there is little support for maturing. Human potential relies upon both sources of power, and without both, there is naturally arrested development.
Personal power is the result of stewarding our emotional lives, intuition, and imagination.
Socio-economic power provides us with opportunities in the external world to discover and refine our feelings, beliefs, and choices.
There are endless chances to respond to people, places, and events, shaping who we are through our responses. As John Steinbeck pointed out, our characters are forged as we learn to triumph equally over defeat and victory.
Luckily, leading feminists knew that and championed women's acquisition of socio-economic power. However, I’m not sure that even these leaders of the movement noticed how much females were benefiting from a kinship with their interior worlds. It should not be so puzzling why girls mature faster than boys.
Males Condemned to One Power
For the most part, males of all ages do not realize they are condemned to a single power. I mean, if you’ve got financial and political power, what’s the problem? The problem is that you won’t have a mature clue about what to do with your power. We may have enough examples of men holding power in politics, business, and industry to see what happens when personal power is lost. Greed, duplicity, arrogance, and ignorance are the mainstays of immature males, regardless of how much financial success they have.
I was being mentored by a bright and insightful man when I was 29 and completely ignorant of the challenge of putting a life together with one form of power.
One day, he said to me, “I want to acknowledge how intuitive you are.” I responded, “I want you to know how insulted I feel.” I continued by explaining that intuition is something that old women do. Luckily, he could see how the culture’s mandate was wrapped around my neck, driving me away from the potential power sitting in my interior world.
We spent the next six years together, with this older man inviting me back to my emotions, intuition, desire, and imagination. He placed me on the path to wholeness, where my intuition guided a fifty-year career as a psychotherapist.
The Personal Power of the Interior World
Let’s look more closely at the compost of the interior world and how it contributes to the maturation.
Committed to a life of self-examination. Socrates claimed it was the highest of virtues. Without such a commitment, we risk becoming a caricature of our surroundings.
Able to create a viable support system. This empowers our understanding of giving, receiving, love, inter-dependency, gratitude, and generosity.
Honoring personal limitations and asking for help when needed. This kind of honesty empowers us when we feel most helpless or lost.
Allowing ourselves to be guided by our heart’s desire and our personal values. These touchstones allow us to live in our own story, rather than in the stories of others.
The creation of a humble path. With humility, our path is less dramatic, with fewer attempts to conquer life or to feel like a victim.
A greater understanding of what emotionally intimate relationships are asking for. By having greater resonance with our emotions and needs and a willingness to make requests to meet those needs, we can create relationships with depth and longevity.
We can create a life with minimal drama. As we honor our boundaries and those of others, be accountable for our mistakes, and keep our agreements, we live with less drama. This allows us to lead more creative and productive lives.
Grief. We learn to grieve in the interior world, generating the power to address our losses and move on.
Young men and teenage boys need to be in the presence of men who live with the power of both worlds. This can be done with our sons, leadership offered at work, and the teams we coach, and by stepping into mentoring. It’s time we helped young men move into genuine empowerment, freeing them from the chore of pretending to be men. They need to be reminded that being a whole person doesn’t make them girls.
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