Strangers to Themselves: Shame, Anger, and the Dissociation of Men

There is a particular kind of silence that lives in men. Not the comfortable silence of contentment, but the silence of things swallowed, pushed down, held in the chest until they calcify into something unrecognizable. From a psychoanalytic lens, we call this repression when done unconsciously or suppression when intentional. Unfortunately, men in our society are encouraged to do both.

I see it often in my practice. A man sits across from me, articulate and competent, able to talk about his work, his relationships, even his childhood, with a kind of detached clarity. But when I ask what he feels, something shifts. The pause stretches. He looks away. "I don't know" comes out like an apology or even a defense as in “How dare you even ask me that?”

He is not lying. He genuinely does not know and this feels vulnerable to admit. Somewhere along the way, he learned not to know.

What Boys Learn

The research on this is consistent and painful. Boys, by the time they reach adolescence, have received thousands of messages about what they are allowed to feel and express. Sadness is weakness. Fear is cowardice. Vulnerability is exposure. The only acceptable negative emotion is anger, because anger at least looks like strength.

So boys learn to convert. Grief becomes irritation. Hurt becomes rage. Loneliness becomes withdrawal or numbness or the pursuit of something, anything, that offers relief. By the time they are men, many have lost access to their own emotional interiors. They are not always suppressing their feelings. Often, they are strangers to them.

We talk often about the ways society is unfair to women, and it is. I am an enraged feminist and think about how to move the needle toward equity in various ways all the time. Yet, there is a parallel unfairness we discuss less: the way men are required to perform invulnerability at all costs. Women are punished for being too much. Men are punished for being anything at all.

The Costs

The costs are not abstract. Men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. This is not because men suffer more than women. It is because men are more likely to use lethal means and less likely to reach out before they reach that point. The silence has consequences.

Substance use follows a similar pattern. Many men I work with describe their drinking or drug use as the only time they felt permission to feel. Alcohol softened the edges. It allows them to access tears, to laugh, or say the thing they have been holding. The substance became a bridge to their own humanity because no one had taught them another way across. Then if it comes across as “too much”, they can blame the bottle.

Why Men Choose Female Therapists

I have heard this from many male clients: they sought out a female therapist on purpose. When I ask why, the answers are variations of the same thing. They worry that they cannot be themselves in front of a male therapist. They expect competition, or stoicism, or a subtle message that they should toughen up. That they will not be held and nurtured. They assume another man will not be able to hold their softness because they have rarely experienced a man holding it before.

This makes sense given their histories. If every man in your life modeled emotional suppression, why would you trust a man with your vulnerability now? The projection is not irrational. It is learned.

However, something important can happen when men do find safety with other men. When a male therapist, or a male friend, or a men's group offers genuine acceptance of the full range of human emotion, it can be profoundly healing. It rewrites the template. It says: you can be a man and also be soft. You can be strong and also be afraid. These are not contradictions. (Side note, many of my most cherished colleagues are male therapists. They are doing incredible work by modeling vulnerability and emotional attunement from a male body).

Finding the Feelings Again

The men I work with are not broken. They are adapted. They did what they needed to do to survive the environments they grew up in, and those adaptations made sense at the time. The work now is not to become a different person. It is to expand, to recover the parts that were put away, to learn that feelings are not threats to be managed but information to be understood.

This is slow work. It requires patience and safety and a relationship where nothing has to be performed. It often begins with the body, because the body holds what the mind has learned to dismiss. A tightness in the chest. A clenching in the jaw. A heaviness that appears without explanation. We start there. We get curious. We let the feeling exist without immediately converting it into something more acceptable.

Over time, many things shift. The man who could not name what he felt begins to notice it. The man who only knew anger begins to find the sadness underneath. The man who believed he had to carry everything alone begins to let someone else sit with him in it. The automatic reaching for something to soothe that is outside of the self begins to soften.

That is not weakness. That is the bravest thing I see in my office.