Lessons From Fathers: Detoxing Masculinity p. I

My dad and I didn’t always get each other. I took a path in psychology very different from his career as a bricklayer. What I know about the human nervous system he knows about cars. At times we’ve hung out, surrounded by his automotive tools while I thought damn, he named me car-son and yet his son doesn’t know cars.

We’ve always had a bit of this going on:

He’s been pretty clear though that he wanted a different life for me than that of a bricklayer. In this way, he made a sacrifice: He could have brought me into his world as an apprentice, fitting more naturally into my role of Carson the Second (always sounded better than ‘junior’). We’d have worked with our hands together and maybe have stayed more connected during life’s chaotic transitions.

But instead he protected me from a field that isn’t kind on the body. Perhaps like he’d hoped, I learned to work from my mind. Creative and intellectual fascinations guided me. As a result, him and I ended up with completely opposite skillsets and knowledge in different parts of the world.

While our differences (and frankly too many years of distance) definitely created some awkwardness, the last several years saw us push through surface level phone calls and figure our shit out. As time went on, curiosity and mutual respect won out. We started chatting long into the nights and discovered something interesting:

It doesn’t matter how different our lives were. We’re cut from the same cloth and our similarities outweigh the differences. Every time I hang out with my dad I’m like, “My God, there’s another one of me. Maybe I’m not so weird after all” (I definitely am though).

This is not just an article series where I tell you that I get along with my dad. I reflect on our evolving relationship simply because a lot of his qualities that intimidated me as a child are those I’ve now come to not only respect but see in myself.

With poorly defined terms like toxic masculinity floating around I see the same process of fear and misunderstanding that him and I went through happening on a society-wide scale. Qualities of classical maleness are at times vilified—perceived as dangerous because they remind us of men who scared us.

This doesn’t happen out loud in discussion where someone says, “Sooo, I’m thinking of adopting prejudice towards men who remind us of my abusive uncle.” It happens automatically and unconsciously while our system attempts to protect us from repeating trauma. Our brains paint in broad brushstrokes. While indeed sometimes these signals are helpful warnings, very often they are false alarms in the form of fear and anger—a primary basis of sexism, racism and all the -isms really.

There isn’t an article or YouTube series that will rid us of these autopilot reactions. Our neural architecture loves to make snap judgments, categorizing things to make quick calls. The category of ‘male’ is just one of many boxes our brains put humans into, scanning with cautious scrutiny. Just like the ignorance of blanketing trans-folks, conservatives, academics, Mexicans or any of those people as if they are all the same and share one cloned identity. The beautiful and messy nuance is lost, often with destructive overtones.

In the case of male identities, any man who feels guilty walking by a playground knows what I’m talking about. This is just one more identity group that has inherited the unconscious baggage of generations past. Nobody wants to be painted into a corner before they’ve ever said a word.

This article is not to compare the suffering of social categories. Illustrating unfair ignorance towards men is to say nothing of the experiences of marginalized populations. Raising consciousness is not a competition, but an invite to compassionate collaboration. I strongly believe that when we do inner work the entire spectrum of unconscious wounding heals. We all benefit.

On the topic of fathers, this series dusts off some of the virtues of how men of the previous generation were socialized. I argue that not only are we unwisely cutting our succeeding generations off from the benefits of some classically masculine qualities, but that too extreme a swing away from them is setting society up for even more future over-corrections and vengeful cultural warfare.

These articles were inspired by a recent visit to my dad’s place in the rural Shuswap of British Columbia. He thought we were just hanging out, but the whole time I just kept thinking this guy has so many positive qualities society is sleeping on and even shaming. It felt full circle in my own healing to see my dad as a teacher again, even if he had no idea this was happening on the down low.

But as is tradition in my Substack, let’s back up into historical context first:

It’s Been Manly Out There

This era of examined gender roles has taught us that corporations like Gillette are full of kind people who care about society’s wellbeing humanity swings between extremes. To expand on that, let me first pose that the culture of western society has long been masculine dominant.

I’m avoiding the loaded term patriarchy because it conjures an image of men meeting very intentionally like Pinky and the Brain to discuss tonight’s plan to take over the world. That word has more emotional force than it has value at describing a tangible social process we can agree on. What is more helpful is to share something we can define and understand across cultural reference points.

I say masculine dominant because it describes observable psychobehavioural patterns that both perennial philosophy and gender-role research find common ground on. Ancient existential roadmaps like Taoism, the positivist research of scholars like Joseph Pleck and gender performance focused social constructionists like Judith Butler share a conceptualization that masculinity as a construct (or as an enduring archetype in a more spiritual or Jungian lens) has qualities of logic, agency, directness, self-sufficiency, action-orientation and accomplishment through pain. It is very much in the realm of ‘doing’ and ‘stuff.’

While I could write a whole paper on the likely reasons western society is masculine dominant, that’s not what this article is about. My point for now is just that for a long time, the dominant North American way of being has been less receptive, intuitive and nurturing Earth Mother and more logical, penetrative and conquering Sky Father. Even female politicians portray masculinity in their detached and persuasive, often very action-focused rhetoric.

…And so as #metoo occurred—a milestone event across a century of women getting their voices—is it any wonder that rebalancing how to share space as gendered beings would have its complications? Everything pendulates back and forth. A masculine dominant society would eventually shift its momentum the other way.

The issue is, there are some very hurt outstanding feelings. It seems like every story I hear about folks’ great grandparents (and even grandparents) involved a time when heavy drinking and wife beating was taken for granted. Let us understand that with normative levels of traumatic abuse towards women (and to say nothing about societal unconscious bias) it isn’t hard to see why there would be plaintive and even vengeful tones as the pendulum swings the other way.

Men Are A Problem

The pendulum did a lot of swinging around the new millennium. As is often the case, culture follows the academic world. Again, given masculine dominance and normative male-biased sexism, it isn’t hard to grasp why university research would start to problematize male personality.

The issue is, pointing the finger at masculinity as if we discovered it was Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the pipe wrench is just too basic of an explanation and far too simplistic of a ‘solution.’ Does toxic masculinity affect everyone? Is male gender role itself a problem, or are there cases that it contributes gainfully to society? What about when it is positive and generative? Is aggressiveness always just bad or is it not useful in some cases, such as standing up to bullies?

Remember, these qualities were the ‘cool kid move’ for a long time and so to just say we lived in millennia of complete delusion seems pretty unrealistic. Somewhere there is a baby in some bathwater saying, “WTF guys.”

An example of curiosity instead of condemnation comes from research of trauma and the nervous system. Consider exploring and solving why men would act violently, destructively and with cold numbness. Modern trauma-theory has helped us to understand that overwhelmingly stressful periods activate desperate pathways within our survival circuitry. Have you seen what past generations and previous centuries were like? A calculated and caring approach to healing trauma means looking into the past with empathy and care.

Unfortunately, 90s academic research took a simpler lens, in many cases preferring to problematize masculinity itself. We didn’t consider what upstream factors lead to agentic and task oriented men who are traumatized entering an icy hell of isolation from which their relationships crumble. It was more popular to propose that the very personality structure of men itself is toxic and problematic. This is akin to saying that the problem for someone with cancer is that they have a body instead of focusing on treating the cancer.

Look how Dr. Ronald Levant of Harvard Medical School characterizes male socialization:

What do you think happens when we come to view “masculinity not as a formative referent, but rather as a problematic construct.”

Maleness as a problematic construct.

I actually used Levant’s Male Roles Norms Inventory—Revised as one of the assessment tools in my unreadably long undergraduate honour’s thesis which looked at how gender roles influence our willingness to access help. I was just a kid though and at the time I didn’t realize the implications of citing Levant’s work.

What is very obvious now is that characterizing the entire historical male social process—forged over hundreds of thousands of years of human development—simply as a problematic construct is shortsighted and lacks understanding of how we as people work.

If gendered-personality is the horse we rode in on, what happens when we decide our horse is shitty? Do we treat it very well? Do we care for it compassionately? Probably not. We likely resent it. Withhold affection from it. Kick it too often and feed it tumbleweeds (the metaphor lost steam, but you get my point).

From the perspective of a therapist, labeling one’s personality structure as inherently problematic is a fast road to shameful inner conflict. At best the head and the heart start to fight as individuals struggle under depressive emptiness. At worst, states of ego fracture into dissociative identities (formerly multiple personalities) in an attempt to exist successfully while being unwanted. The call to ‘recover from maleness’ as a pathology sends a message to men (and worse, boys) that masculinity is a sin.

This is a dead end road, as never once have I seen a client cured by shame, let alone by fearful self-consciousness towards a major aspect of their very being.

Are Men Worth Caring For?

The pendulum swing of humanity meant ‘sharing the mic’ so that women—and many intersections as articulated by evolving feminism—could find their voices in society. Great! Let the silent be heard and let’s welcome a breadth of perspectives, even if we are in a messy period of in-fighting on how to steer the ship.

As those so long overshadowed in masculine culture find their footing, one danger, however, is overcorrecting—simplifying the analysis so that classically socialized men are painted with the same prejudicial assumptiveness that hurt the marginalized in the first place. Men are all entitled and privileged by nature. The very category of maleness implies it. I don’t need curiousity towards men because the label ‘man’ alone explains their inner landscape. I will react to them as if they hold the mantle of every man who ever hurt me.

But let me speak to a massive section of the population who I have always struggled to see as privileged. In my work with older men, I have stared deeply into trauma. The previous male generation—which I have commonly heard counsellors put into unflattering boxes (that’s putting it nicely)—have a story. They are not reducible to inflammatory terms that dehumanize them from their right to the same beautiful complexity all humans share.

These were men who were almost always physically beaten by alcoholic fathers and often sexually assaulted by family members. They launched into the world so laden with shame and traumatic stress that every waking moment was a matter of enduring nearly unending signals of physical pain in nervous systems socialized into numb self-repression. Forget lacking the basic human needs of being touched, interacted with and regulated. These men experienced the most capital T of traumas while being told flinching or reacting to it implied complete failure. By today’s standards, failure is exactly what they were set up for.

These are men who worked thanklessly through lives filled with relational traps of betrayal and abandonment but who weren’t socialized to navigate the subtleties of needs, boundaries and communication. These are men who learned not to complain and that for whom humour is everything. Hardest of all, these men experienced sensitivity as something that could get them killed, and so who with tear filled eyes they packed away their inner children as a matter of survival. Instead of tending their emotions, they caretook their heartbroken mothers.

Tell me again how they ‘lack empathy’ just because it doesn’t fit our 2020s definition.

Against all odds, however, they forced their aching feet into work boots every day. If they couldn’t be sensitive, then they’d learn to be tough. They accepted that hard work without complaint was their path of redemption. They had families and children. Though they grew up in terrifying settings, they found ways to be affectionate to their kids—that is, at least more affectionate than their abusive fathers. They cut the traumatic cycle in half, healing the sins of the father so that there may be a brighter future.

This is progress. This is moving the right direction. It isn’t their fault that our hyper-intellectual society decided that our brand new standards to be picked up even by older generations. By our dictum, the old hands need to update their values right now otherwise they aren’t welcome around these parts.

And so as we we ponder oh, my mood felt a bit off. perhaps I haven’t meditated enough this week they work the body-destroying jobs that no one else will, upholding the infrastructure that we as privileged millennials take for granted. They stand in pouring rain, constructing the buildings in which academics portray them as privilege laden colonialists.

These are men who if told they should be guilty for their entitlement would smirk at our privilege that we can even have these discussions. Perhaps they would be baffled that we have the space to fine-tune emotional wellbeing instead of just pruning off emotion to avoid being beaten.

And that’s not even to talk about their healing. What counselling centres are they going to visit? Therapy spaces are marketed in a way that traditionally socialized men will never enter them. I will tell you after a decade of working with military veterans, men raised into unbearable numbness by unspeakable traumas are not going to go to a place called the Eucalyptus Safety Centre where the entire decor and manner of speaking is a not-so-subtle message that their identity is seen as a disease that must be cured.

They’re going to get drunk and kill themselves.

Reality Is Not A Fight—It’s A Dance

As Gabor Mate’s Compassionate Inquiry and Richard Schwartz’ Internal Family Systems suggest (two of the now most popular approaches for contemporary therapists), we heal through warm curiosity to our parts—not by ideologies guiding us to customize ourselves like a build-your-own pizza into what we are ‘supposed’ to be. This type of effort creates inner warfare and the exhaustion drives us to whatever it is that we do to cope (usually binging on something that numbs us).

And if you’re saying but should someone self accept if they are a racist, sexist or angry and hateful? My clinical work has suggested that intolerance and hatred are never core identity characteristics. I have seen them always as products of trauma. Never once have I witnessed someone healed into wholeness discover wow. I know my heart’s joy and have found my purpose. It is to attack gay people.

Instead, becoming whole is a heart opening process where it is discovered that our unencumbered nature is love towards our self and others. A healed heart and soul don’t require outer guidance of how to tolerate people of all identities because compassion, patience and curiosity are built right into our higher nature. When people receive patience, touch, interaction and kindness they naturally become warmer and more loving. Beyond base survival instincts, the stages of human development are about humility and collaboration.

That is good news.

In a paper I wrote for the American Journal of Men’s Health I researched how a program working with male soldiers somehow had a track record of nearly zero dropouts and zero suicides. This is unheard of in work with traditionally socialized men. Shocked Pikachu face—it was by working with their socialization instead of trying to shame it out of them. It was done by pulling up a chair at the table of society and inviting them into productive collaboration.

The irony is that the rigid and often excessive hypermasculinity reduces tremendously when it is approached with care and openness. In my own work with the Canadian Armed Forces, even the most hardened of soldiers—privy to trauma worse than any movie I’ve seen—appear a lot more like soft and playful children once they can tell their stories free of judgment. Like the great Dr. Carl Rogers famously said, “It is the curious paradox that when I accept myself fully, I change.”

I don’t recall Dr. Rogers saying, "…Unless of course you are male. In that case, you must self-reject and apologize for being yourself.”

Back To My Dad

Like I said, a month back when I visited my dad I was inspired by how he carried himself. Both him—and to a degree his friend—showed a number of qualities that have been forgotten, devalued or even vilified. This is too bad, because I found them useful counter-ballasts to my own overly intellectual way of being.

Part II will feature a list of classical virtues I saw in my father and his friend. I propose these as masculine counter-parts to the much needed sensitivity society has begun to encourage in the last few decades. I see rooms for all aspects of personality, and so let it be time to revisit some gems we’ve forgotten.

As with all my writing, I’ll do my best to pose the other side as well. I’ll share what happens when these qualities exist in excess (as indeed they often have). Nothing is so simple as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ so much as it has its own time in the sun. Regardless of what gender expression feels natural to you, masculinity is an enduring archetype that we need to find a personally healthy relationship with.

Getting out of non-dual thinking means the wisdom to know when and where to portray which of the limitless roles we play in this endless journey.

See you in Part II.

Please do not tell my dad I wrote this. I can’t imagine he’d like that I made him a public example, though I doubt that he’d be surprised I wrote a three part essay based on us shooting the shit for three days.

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Carson Kivari directs Thrive Downtown Counselling Centre—a major North American destination for psychedelic integration therapy. He gets ideas for articles that start as simple quick reads but end up as long form essays. He thanks his friend Rhys for proposing he break up articles into smaller ones, otherwise you’d have to call in sick tomorrow because you’re still reading his essay.

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