Pesky Emotions - who needs them!

Fathers manage their own Emotions

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Did I mention that by eight years old, I believed myself to operate as a fully functioning therapist? I wanted to weather all the emotions at home and thought I could do this if I just listened better.

Nowadays we believe therapy to be “I listen while you talk and if you don’t talk, I’ll ask questions to prompt you to start talking; bonus points if you cry.”

A long as talking is what you need, maybe not what you wanted, then yes, that therapy will cure “what ails you.”

Now that I think about it, I was not a therapist by 8 years, but maybe I was more of a priest in a confessional booth where people wou

ld share with me there painful emotions, shameful experiences, and secret hopes that could never survive the daylight.

By 9 years old, I simply prayed, “God, make me a wizard.” We all have wild beliefs on how to survive this world. And as a boy, I believed that if I just knew magic - well, then, I could really do some good in this world, especially in the turbulent realm of emotions.

Emotions are shifty, pesky, ugly little things that become more familiar to you the more the wreak havoc in your life - like the Gremlins carousing during Christmas in 1984.

In the book by Douglas Gillette and Robert L. Moore King Warrior Magician Lover, I read to my surprise that my “feminine” self was actually my boyhood halting progress on the road to manhood. I learned that indulging in my emotions was immature, and instead I learned to make them work for me.

Not unlike Gremlins.

Left to their own devices, emotions cause havoc, destruction, all the while guised in the “fun” of boyhood. But if assembled under a leader, namely my higher self, they can then be put to a more divine use.

Shame - fuels contribution

Fear - fuels thoughtfulness

Anger - fuels right action

And many more can be harnessed as tools to wield in the quest of manhood as a King Warrior Magician or Lover. Ideally, the great man ascends from boyhood where the emotions dominate his life, dictating his day, overriding his decisions.

Most of my life, I have heard that men need to express their emotions more. I never really heard where that need came from. Also, I learned that when people say that, what they really mean is that “I want to see a man cry in public.” Because, when a man expresses anger in public, people do not tend to enjoy that as much.

So, then, does a man need to express himself emotionally? Terrible question, because it implies that there is a need and before anyone can ask that, they must first tell me what is the need? And what will happen if that need goes unmet?

Urination is a need. While on a road trip, one should plan for stops based on how often you need to relieve yourself. We have a need to express. But creating an urgency for everyone else by demanding to pull over by way of interruption doesn’t tell me that you have a need, it just tells me that you already failed to care for that need and now it has become an emergency - namely ours.

Caution! When a man does not manage his emotions, someone else, usually a woman, manages it for him. In the least, she must clean up after his mess. In this way, he never graduates boyhood, even into his 20s and 30s and 40s…a man baby.

So, here is what I am proposing. A man does not need to cry in public, but he does need to process his own emotions with great intention.

There are so many ways to process an emotion, two of them being “talk it out” and “cry”. Take responsibility and catch your little gremlins because they work for you.

May your Story Continue

You have 2 ears and 1 tongue, so listen before and after you speak, for listening is also therapy.