How Do You Break Social Conditioning?

8 comments

1. I was raised – not by my parents, but by my surroundings – in the believe that men shouldn’t feel anything. Except for maybe anger. Men should be “strong” and “hard”. Emotions are “weak”. As a rather emotional man, that wasn’t pleasant.

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   In the end, it took the right friends to break out of this. Friends that took me as I truly am. This way I learned: To surpress emotions is easy. To show emotions and empathy, to admit that we too cry sometimes, that we get sad, that we love, whatever… that’s what is hard, due to the conditioning you mentioned.

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   So I turned it around, with the help of my friends. At least in my mind, to show emotions that are seen as weak by society is real strength. Yes, I have emotions. Yes, I show them. So what? I don’t fear being “weak” anymore.

   It hasn’t been easy, but that’s how I broke out. And I feel more like myself and stronger than ever before.

2. >I think it’s pretty obvious to say that men are stereotyped and conditioned to not really care about things.

   Not really. Our range of acceptable emotional expression is somewhat more limited I suppose.

   It makes me think that when things do cause us emotional pain, it affects us harder because of that conditioning.

   No. All emotional pain for anyone eventually involves sucking it up and getting over it. It doesn’t matter how long or how hard you cry, or how publicly, eventually you have to go do other things, that’s life. Learning that makes us better at dealing with emotional pain, not worse.

   >Has anyone got the same kind of suspicion or experience? Am I overthinking things?

   I think your error is you think feeling and struggling with pain and suffering is a problem. Or that the rest of the world is processing their trauma in healthy supportive groups who make space for their expressions of pain in whatever way seems most appropriate, or whatever other pseudo-clinical language is in vogue.

   The human condition is painful. It will continue to be painful. You will continue to lose things. You will continue to struggle.

   I have not found that the twice a week therapy and emotionally available people are radically more capable, or well adjusted, or whatever, than I am. They do not process their fathers death in half the time, they do not react better in emergencies. Their marriages aren’t better, kids aren’t healthier, divorce rate isn’t lower….

   So what are they doing all this for?

3. I have never got the impression that men are conditioned not to care about things. We just don’t care about things *that don’t matter*. It’s perfectly normal to have things you care about.

   Maybe it’s cultural. Maybe it’s a class thing.

   If you want to break conditioning it just takes strength of will.

4. The older the generation, the truer this becomes. “Boys don’t cry” is ingrained in many of us, and sometimes it’s hard to express anything but the “acceptable” emotions like happiness and anger. Sadness isn’t tolerated, you’re being a “bitch”, “little girl”, “pussy” a “f**” or whatever the time appropriate slur was for your generation.

   I was physically unable to cry for nearly a decade. I was only able to start crying again once I went through serious trauma. And even now, with PTSD, therapy, and a better understanding of myself and my emotions I still use a playlist of sad songs or songs that remind me of traumatic things that happened to push me over the edge into tears.

   It was the case for many years that “it is the duty of all men to suffer in silence” and that’s why older generations had chemical assistance in the form of hardcore prescriptions like amphetamines (dexadrine), opiates (morphine), and benzos (valium), often followed with alcohol and smoking 2 packs a day. The health ramifications were heart attacks, strokes, organ failure, ulcers, cancer etc. The stress of being a “man” killed so many men early it’s unreal.

   Now the health consequences are known, and many old school chemical crutches are seen as un manly, or at least socially unacceptable, so more and more young men are fighting for the right to have feelings, which I support whole heartedly. It can be taken too far in the other direction as well, so I caution young men to keep an eye out for being ruled by their emotions, it’s ok to feel, it’s ok to express your feelings, but if you can’t control them to an extent you’ll be made more unhappy.

5. >I think it’s pretty obvious to say that men are stereotyped and conditioned to not really care about things.

   I don’t know if that’s true.

   In general though, you break social conditioning by choosing to learn how to reason or think, choosing to challenge your beliefs, choosing to use reason to learn what’s true and choosing to act accordingly.

6. who told you this shit?

7. You are overthinking things. You are the way you are because that is what you decided to be, whether by looking up to specific role models or whatever but at the end of the day it’s your choice. If you feel like you don’t care about things and you want to be different, then find new role models and grow from there.

   Choose to be who you want to be!

8. stop watching tv and stop listening to radio. dont go on social media. go outside and go running and workout.