How Traditional Masculinity Fucked the World Over, and Why Freud was Right
The Source of Violence
Violence in all forms is a product of negative, low vibration emotions and inner pain. We don’t know if it’s possible for a life to be fully lived without inner pain, and Freud certainly believes that the very process of being removed from the womb at birth traumatizes us, blemishing our purity of spirit right off the very start. Supposedly, and I may be off a little, we live our lives in search for that sense of completion we had in the womb, subconsciously (this can get very interesting to talk about). Over the years, we are traumatized, and without the proper guidance, we see those experiences as horrifying events we do not want to accept and as such they haunt our subconscious, causing us to lash out in what Eckhart Tolle calls pain body attacks, when the emotions associated with the memory is triggered. Practically speaking, healing can only come from acceptance of the experience, the pain and the reality that everyone is in pain, and rather than get angry, realize that the only correct response is love.
Traditional Masculinity
Masculinity can sometimes be characterized by negative attitudes towards women, which come from a place of pain. To recruit young boys into the tradition of Masculinity, they are shamed for doing things that are perceived as feminine, traumatizing them and associating an emotion of shame and guilt with ‘feminine’ practices. As such, and this is my theory, and I recognize that everyone is different, while they seek the feminine energy of women to complete the side of them that they repress, they simultaneously become violent towards women as an expression of how they’ve had to be ‘violent’ to the ‘feminine’ side of themselves, killing that side to be a ‘man’.
The Pain Body
Add that to the numerous traumatizing events a person encounters in their lives and you see how this accumulation of pain and negative emotions can build up over a lifetime. This collection of pain is called the pain body, by Eckhart Tolle, as mentioned earlier. It is the side of a person that acts from a place of pain. While some have innocuous pain bodies that merely make them irritable or anxious and unhappy their whole lives, some pain bodies drive their hosts to commit suicide or cause massive destruction of lives.
In retrospect, the word ‘traumatizing’ isn’t always the right word. Traumatizing events by their definition create strong synaptic pathways in the brain linked to negative emotions, that can be reaccessed easily, but strong synaptic pathways can also be created by practicing an emotion regularly. If someone gets angry easily, it could be due to a shocking incident long ago, but could also be due to the person practicing negativity, strengthening those pathways linked to negativity, only allowing them to see the bad in life, blocking out the good. In one case, the negative pathways are strong due to the traumatic experience, and in the other case they are strengthened by practice.
The reason traumatizing events are so effective at creating long term pain is that they hurt so much in the moment that the brain covers it up making the memory itself hard to access, but the strong pain still exists and is very easily accessible. However, sometimes it is the case of the Princess and the Pea. A small unresolved issue; a case of sacrificed integrity, a life decision made decades ago that you deeply knew was wrong but went along with it due to social conditioning or the ego- these things are small but can make you preoccupied with the past and future without you even knowing why. Like the pea under the numerous mattresses troubling the princess. While traumatizing events are hidden by your brain as a defense mechanism, these smaller events are hard to identify because they were so insignificant at the time, and are just that: small. These small events can lead to a lifetime of inner conflict which can lead to alot of anger, manifesting in physical violence.
Freud and Religion
The more I think about it, I do truly believe that the enforcing of ‘masculine’ qualities on boys is a major source, maybe a cornerstone of pain in this world. Coming back to the womb, I do believe that the desire for completion (associated with being complete in the womb, and this is my interpretation of Freud), is also why so many people have a hard time accepting the pain, the denial of which leads to more pain.
People turn to religion because religion provides for them a brain hack, allowing them to believe in a theory of completion, allowing them to accept their pain, believing that ‘god’ has healed them. Really, they’ve been healed because they’ve accepted the pain, and the associated experience. A higher paradigm, would be to abandon the desire for completion and accept the world for what it is, uncertain, and the pain for what it is, just another experience in the only life you will ever have.
Having said that, if we were all born perfect, we wouldn’t value our perfection. It is only through the journey of life that we appreciate the destination, and realize that the joy lies in the journey itself.