Men Suffer from Emotional Abuse Too

October 3, 2010

Men Suffer from Emotional Abuse Too

In the Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education and Development, Vol. 43 (Fall 2004), Joshua M. Gold and Gabriela V. Pitariu wrote an article on counselors’ lack of awareness of men’s emotional abuse experiences in domestic relationships. They mention several reasons for not treating this effectively, but of greatest interest to me was the assumption that many counselors have that certain emotional experiences (such as fear, dependency, and vulnerability) aren’t suitable for men to express. Therefore, they’re not comfortable dealing with male clients who express these emotions.

I’ve chosen not to blog about domestic abuse, but I think it’s important to discuss how assumptions about “acceptable” and “unacceptable” emotions may influence how a guy views his own suffering. Despite (slowly!) growing awareness that emotions have nothing to do with gender, our society strongly supports certain emotional behaviors based on gender. This can make it difficult for a man to admit to common emotionally abusive experiences like oppression, helplessness, and despair.

"Emotions of Hell" Photo by AlicePopkorn (http://www.alicepopkorn.de/Alicepopkorn/start.html), courtesy of Flickr's Creative Commons

A son is just as vulnerable to the authority of an emotionally abusive parent as a daughter. If a boy is constantly ridiculed by his mother and father, his self-esteem and self-trust will suffer. If he has a controlling mother and/or father then his sense of identity will be scarred. If he’s deprived of unconditional love, acceptance, and respect then he’ll struggle to develop these things within himself.

My parents had a patriarchal worldview, and ironically, my father was slightly more open-minded than my mother when it came to a woman building a career for herself (as long, of course, as it didn’t interfere with her more important duties of being a good wife and mother). My brother was given more respect, more room to develop his identity, and more independence than my sister and me, and he was well aware of that himself.

However, he wasn’t immune to the emotionally abusive tactics that my parents used. When he started college, he studied biology because my father believed that this was a field that would develop in the future. It took him two years to realize that this really wasn’t what he wanted, and he switched to business, a much more suitable field for him. My brother’s friends and girlfriends were also open game for my parents’ criticisms and nasty jokes. I can remember them putting down many of his American friends in high school, just as they put down mine. They didn’t like one of his girlfriends because she was Catholic (we’re Jewish), despite the fact that my parents were never religious. My mother was constantly bitching that his current girlfriend isn’t interested in getting married or having children.

In the late 1990s, my brother decided to build a business around his passion for multicultural art. He set himself up as a consultant for technology companies wanting to demonstrate their commitment to diversity by displaying art from emerging minority artists. He just started to get the company off the ground when the dot-com bubble burst. My father was sure that these art consulting services (which he never really took seriously in the first place) would be slashed from the budget and my brother’s business would fail. We were all skeptical that he could make it work. He had some tough times, but he persevered and his business has managed to stay afloat until this day. In spite of being surrounded by a family who didn’t believe in him or support him (including, I’m ashamed to say, me), he made it work. He’s an emotional abuse survivor.

Reading the experiences of other men may help. In the blog Suburban Black Sheep, Shaun writes about how he deals with his emotionally abusive mother, starting with The Backstory. Mike McBride blogs about his experiences at Child Abuse Survivor. Another useful resource is the forum for Male Survivors of Incest/Sexual/Child Abuse at isurvive.org, a community for abuse survivors. Here’s a discussion on recommended books, some specifically about sexual abuse and some not. I’d personally like to see more blogs and forum posts from men who’ve survived emotional abuse because this whole concept of gender-based emotions is just plain dumb.

Update 3/9/11

I ran across two other blogs by male abuse survivors. Don Shetterly is a massage therapist and musician who talks about healing from abuse and other topics at Mind-Body Thoughts. He also wrote a book called Hope and Possibility Through Trauma where he reflects on his healing journey.

Rick Belden is a poet who shares his poetry on his blog. He’s written a book that addresses many of his abuse experiences called Iron Man Family Outing: Poems About Transition into a More Conscious Manhood, and he’s working on a new book called Scapegoat’s Cross: Poems about Finding and Reclaiming the Lost Man Within.

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