Let me cut right to the chase. If you have untreated emotional wounds, your life will be dramatically impacted. To put it simply, you will survive, when instead, you could thrive.
What emotional wounds do you have that have gone untreated? I can’t impress upon you enough how important it is to look at and heal emotional wounds, as a component of having the life you want. Please see the index for examples of some common emotional wounds.
If underlying emotional wounds are not healed and or not coped with effectively they can become traumatic and the mind may repeat negative thoughts and feelings from the past that are stored in an individual’s subconscious and accessed when a person is facing certain triggers.
These thoughts and feelings can make up a person’s worldview (how they see the world). Is it safe, or unsafe, is it full of opportunity or minefields? Do they fundamentally believe they are flawed and have lowered self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-worth because of this, or are they ok?
You see, I know that if a person believes the world is unsafe and full of minefields and or has lowered self-esteem, self-worth, and self-confidence, then they will generally just survive, not thrive, and may generally be reactive to the world around them instead of being proactive and forging ahead with the life they want and envision.
Part of a person’s ability to heal and cope with emotional wounds lies in being able to express these emotions as they are experienced. Emotion equals energy, it needs to be expressed or released. If the emotion is not expressed or released in the moment, the mind will determine a more negative pathway for release. This new pathway generally has that person acting out and or acting in. Examples of acting out include anger and rage. Examples of acting in include depression, anxiety and or isolation.
Toxic Masculinity
1Unfortunately, in men, toxic masculinity says men should not feel or display or express their emotions, except anger. Imagine being a young boy and crying over a painful injury or emotional heartbreak that feels like the end of the world and then being told to man up, instead of being gently asked what’s making you cry, how do you feel about it and what things can you do to feel better or just letting the boy know having these emotions are ok and just.
When feelings are dismissed and gender-defining thinking is heard repeatedly, a young person learns to avoid expressing their feelings and begins to bottle up the sadness, which can lead to dysfunctional emotional expression and acting out or acting in, as defined above.
What if the person who perpetuated these wounds was a primary caregiver whose job was to protect you, but instead abused you, and there was nothing you could do about this because the caretaker had all the power? This results in the deadening of a child’s trust and openness. If the child can no longer rely on the safety of his caretaker, he becomes more vigilant and anxious. If the rupture is chronically repeated, he becomes pessimistic and loses his sense of hope, and can lose his sense of self. These types of wounds and all types of emotional wounds if not coped with or expressed to a caring and compassionate human being can lead to trauma.
Attachment Theory
A primer on attachment theory, and how this could affect the life you want to live. Attachment theory(which is the basis for Attachment-Based Family Therapy), states that people can generally fall into 4 categories of attachment style. If when you cried, your caregivers responded to this crying with love, tenderness, and support. When you were sad, they comforted you and held you, when you needed food, they fed you. They were generally really happy you were born and showed this to you with smiles, laughter, ease, love, holding you and above all else let you know there was nothing more important in their lives beyond you, then a child will be securely attached, generally not fearing abandonment or intimacy.
There are three types of insecure attachment styles, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment. Anxious or ambivalent attached people will go to great lengths to secure love from others, which can be manipulative and self-serving. Unless they make a spectacle of themselves they will not get the attention they need. They can never seem to get enough love. Individuals that were anxious as a child tend to carry these traits into adulthood.
Avoidant attached people, take an almost opposite approach, because they could not rely on their parents or caregivers for support, they have learned to become very highly independent to get their needs met, at a certain expense of intimacy and collaboration with others. Because of their abandonment as a child, their underlying fear of abandonment works to insulate them from this pain again, through pushing people away.
Disorganized attached people seem to be, one sec they are with you and the next second they are dismissive and then they are repulsed by you. Very chaotic. During their childhood, their caretakers were both monsters and abusive and nice and supportive.
Imagine all the time, energy, and emotion that goes into maintaining one of these insecure attachment styles which could easily have been used to help you live the life you want and envision.
In my own life, my primary emotional wound centered around having an emotionally unavailable father, except for his anger and rage. This anger and rage and emotional neglect traumatized me, and significantly impacted me in having the life I wanted. Many years later and after having done much work on healing, I am truly doing the type of work that I love and I am living the life I want. I do however continue to work on healing my inner child wounds from long ago.
The metaphor I like to use is that healing from emotional wounds is the foundation on which one builds a house. If the foundation is weak or vulnerable (untreated wounds) then the overall house could dramatically suffer and be very vulnerable.
Summary
In summary, if you’re dealing with unhealed emotional wounds, find a therapist or an experienced coach, with a therapeutic background, who can help you heal from these wounds and move forward with your life. You can find my guide to choosing a good therapist here: Choosing A Therapist, what to look for and what are the various major types of psychotherapy options. You can also do several things on your own in addition to seeking professional help, to heal from these wounds. I’ve listed below several suggestions.
2Things you can do on your own to overcome emotional wounds:
- Honor your pain. To heal you must pass through the doorway of grief. Emotional wounds are beyond sadness; they’re felt in the depths of your being. Honor your pain; don’t run from it. Put time aside to grieve. If part of your emotional wound is healing your inner child and thus your adult child, then I highly recommend the book, “Home Coming” by John Bradshaw.
- Reach out. Deep pain can bring out personal demons, such as blaming yourself, embracing victimhood or bitterness. Such choices breed entrapment and depression not freedom. Find a trusted therapist or coach, reach out to friends, find support groups, seek comfort in prayer, meditation. Do whatever brings you peace of mind.
- Take a break. It’s important to take a break from your pain and engage in healthy compartmentalization. Experiment with things that could provide relief. For some a creative outlet helps, like writing, reading, music, art of movies. For others movement, such as dance, hiking, long walks or working out. Choose a task that allows you to escape into another reality.
- Learn from it. I’ve heard that wisdom is paved with suffering. Reflecting, exploring, and pondering without self-attack or blame, opens you up to a greater understanding and compassion for yourself and others.
- Move on after you’ve healed. Some people allow suffering to define them, shape them, and ultimately rob them of living. After you give yourself time to grieve and mourn, after you’ve reached out for professional help or others for support and make space for your recovery, you have to make a decision. Will this emotional pain hold you back or will you decide to use it to propel you forward in a new direction.
Index
A partial list of some of the more common emotional wounds that affect men.
- Being raised by neglectful parents
- Being raised by overprotective parents or caregivers.
- Being raised by controlling or overly restrictive parents or caregivers.
- Being raised in an emotionally repressed household
- Being raised by parents or caregivers that favored one child over another
- Being raised by a parent or caregiver that was an addict
- Being raised by a parent or caregiver that was a narcissist
- Being abandoned or rejected by a parent or caregiver.
- Being abused, sexually, emotionally, or physically by your parents or caregivers
- A parents divorce
- A nomadic childhood
- Being sent away as a child
- Being sexually violated
- Being a caregiver at a young age
- Domestic abuse
- Battling a mental disorder
- Living in chronic pain or illness
- A learning disability
- A life threatening accident
- A toxic relationship
- Unrequited love
- A suicide of a loved one.
- A miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion
- A natural or manmade disaster
- A physical disfigurement
- Infidelity
- Experiencing poverty
- Living in a dangerous neighborhood
- Being homeless for reasons out of one’s control
- Declaring bankruptcy
- Losing one of your five senses
- Prejudice or discrimination
- Social difficulties
- Sexual dysfunction
- Experiencing war, its violence, its death, and or killing someone as a result of experiencing war
1Many concepts taken from Henry A. Montero, MS, LMHC, in his Psycom.net article, “
What is Toxic Masculinity and How Does it Contribute to Depression in Men”
2Sean Grover, L.C.S.W, in his Psychology Today article, “ How to Recover When Life
Crushes You”