The Developmental Trauma at the Heart of Masculinity
There’s been a lot of writing about men, gender training, and relationship dynamics. I’ve even done some of it myself. But there’s a piece at the core of it all that I think often gets missed. I certainly didn’t understand it until just a few years ago. There’s a developmental trauma at the heart of masculinity.
What is developmental trauma?
So let me tell you what I mean by that. Most people think of trauma as a specific event that overwhelms your system. A house fire, a car accident, or a physical or sexual assault are examples of this kind of experience, and you can think of them as “shock traumas” because there’s a single, describable situation (a shock) that was too much, too big, too fast, or too soon for that person’s nervous system to handle in that moment. That’s pretty much the textbook definition of a trauma.
There are also ongoing traumas, such as living in a war zone or being in an abusive relationship. They’re not quite the same as shock traumas, but they share the experience of being too much or too big for someone’s system to manage. Any long-term stress can become a trauma if there isn’t room to unwind and restore balance.
These kinds of situations are different from developmental trauma, though. Developmental traumas are experiences we have in childhood, especially early childhood, that can be described as “too little for too long.” For example, if a child repeatedly receives the message that they are a bother, that their emotions are too much or are unwelcome, or that they will be punished if they express certain feelings, that child will likely come to believe that it isn’t safe to be emotionally expressive or vulnerable. Because they received too little encouragement and safety for their emotions, their ability to acknowledge or even tune into and name their feelings might be stunted because those skills never got nurtured.
To be clear, this isn’t about having a single or occasional experience of not being heard. This is about having a baseline of not being attuned to during big emotions, and it’s part of a lot of young people’s lives. That’s the “too long” part of “too little for too long.” There are some pretty common patterns that show up in response to different kinds of developmental traumas, and they can all affect how we move through our relationships. Sometimes, they can result in someone not feeling safe in their body, or not feeling trust that they can ask for (and receive) what they need, or that they have to earn attention instead of being inherently worthy of care and love. There are lots of variations, and the kinds of adaptive behaviors that arise as a result can range from super subtle to glaringly obvious. Part of my work as a relationship coach includes helping people identify and uncover their patterns, so we can find room to change them where possible and figure out how to adapt to them when needed.
Masculinity is policed through developmental trauma
There’s a really common experience that almost all boys and others assumed male at birth go through in US and western cultures. Imagine a young child, maybe 3-5 years old, and he’s running down the sidewalk. If he trips and skins his knees, he might very well start crying. When that happens, the odds are high that whoever picks him up to comfort him will say something like, “Why are you crying? I thought you were a big boy.” Whether those are the exact words or not, the message is that there’s something wrong with his tears and he’d better stop. That is the seed crystal for his developmental trauma. For the past 35 years, I’ve been talking with people of all genders, sexual orientations, and backgrounds about these topics, and this story is consistently familiar to folks, even if the details vary.
There are at least two primary problems that come from this. First, this boy is learning that if he expresses emotions, he will be judged and shamed. That little kid doesn’t have the discernment to figure out whether there are some feelings that are allowable. He’s going to shut them all down, especially since (as Brené Brown observes) “we cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.” For that boy, the safest bet is to “man up” and stop having feelings because that’s how he can keep the positive regard that he needs from trusted adults. That is always going to be the most important thing because his life depends on those grown-ups. Kids know in their bones that they need an adult to take care of them, so if it becomes a choice between having emotions and survival, he will almost always pick survival. This is a big reason why so many adult men don’t know how to feel, name, or talk about their emotions.
Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term “masculinity”) is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns. He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder.”
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
But it’s not just the emotions in that moment that get turned off. If he can’t allow himself to have feelings, he’s never going to be able to learn the emotional tools and skills that are essential to having healthy relationships. His emotional intelligence will be reduced or stunted, and his interactions with others will suffer. When he gets older and big feelings arise, his limited capacity will mean he’s quick to get overwhelmed. Difficult interactions will become too much and he’ll get triggered into a trauma reaction of fight/flight/fawn/freeze, which will take over the situation. This is one source of abusive behavior, and it can cause real harm to the people around it.
The second big consequence of these patterns is that this adult man will find other people’s emotions intolerable, too. If his partner has big feelings, our hypothetical guy could easily feel overwhelmed and try to find a way to solve or fix them in order to make them go away. He might mansplain why his partner shouldn’t feel this way. He might try to convince (gaslight) them that those feelings aren’t a big deal. He might blame his partner for feeling that way or try to control how they feel by yelling at or punishing them. He might withdraw, change the topic, or otherwise disengage. His developmental trauma around his emotions limits his resilience in the face of his partner’s emotions and he’s faced with a choice: experience how unsafe he feels internally in that moment, or try to control the external situation to find a sense of safety.
Anyone of any gender might seek to control their partner in order to find safety when they feel overwhelmed or triggered. But the way that boys and men are so often judged, shamed, and abused for expressing emotions is consistent across communities and demographic groups, so these patterns follow some pretty solid trends. There are also clear patterns in how boys and men are given permission to be angry, controlling, or violent. And if this hypothetical man has a son, his discomfort with his own emotions will almost certainly result in his giving his child the same messages about his feelings. Rinse and repeat.
It’s also worth mentioning that men aren’t the only people who reinforce this pattern. I’ve certainly spoken with plenty of women who say that they want their boyfriends or husbands to be more comfortable with emotions, but as soon as their male partners actually show vulnerability or weakness, these women feel unsafe because their partners aren’t being the big, strong man they want. They usually end up shaming their partners back into silence. Sometimes, when women say they want men to be more emotional, what they mean is that they want their partners to be more supportive of their feelings. That’s different from wanting the men in their lives to be more expressive about their own feelings. That also ripples out into how they interact with their sons.
I want to make it clear that nothing in this is inherent in masculinity. My dream is that we have a world one day in which we’d know what masculinity looks like when we don’t define, reinforce, and impose it through trauma. But that isn’t the world we currently live in, and even boys whose parents don’t actively enforce their sons’ gender in these ways are still surrounded by it. If you’re in a room full of people smoking cigarettes, you don’t have to smoke yourself to smell like tobacco when you leave. For the moment, the best we can achieve is reducing or minimizing the impact of our cultural attitudes, and hope that it will lead to further change in the future.
Healing this hurt
I’ve had men ask me sometimes why they should have to deal with this. They’ll tell me that they have their anger under control or that they know how to avoid triggering situations, so that should be enough. While I agree that managing the trauma reactions is far, far better than simply letting them run wild over other people, I don’t think that’s sufficient. It’s not enough because sooner or later, something will happen that will be bigger than your ability to manage, and then all of the trigger reactions will come spilling out. So although managing the trauma is better than not doing anything, it’s really only a first step.
The next step is about learning to heal these wounds. It’s not an easy project, and it often takes longer than you expect or hope, but the advantage is that when you have, you don’t need to keep managing things as tightly. Healing is an investment of effort, with the goal of freeing up your emotional and energetic resources when you come out the other side. Not only is that a net-positive, but it also means you’re much, much less likely to take your trauma reactions out on other people. You’ll become a safer person to be around, which will dramatically improve all of your relationships and connections with other people, especially your romantic and sexual partners.
The challenge in healing a developmental trauma is that the wound comes from such an early age. Children experience and perceive things differently than adults, so it’s pretty common for talk-based approaches to be limited or ineffective when it comes to exploring these early hurts. The recent growth of somatic coaching and therapy modalities is a testament to the fact that we need more than to talk about these experiences. We need to feel into them so we can give ourselves the healing we need.
This can be tricky because when people go into a trigger from their childhood, they often revert to the emotional age they were at when the original event happened. I’ve seen plenty of men behave like a young child when they get really upset or triggered. I’ve done that, too. But when a child gets angry and throws a toy across the room, it’s not likely to cause too much damage. The toy is probably soft and he can’t throw that hard yet, anyway. When an adult man reverts to this child-like emotional state, he can cause real harm. Maybe it’s because he’s physically stronger, or maybe it’s because he has harder or more fragile objects at hand. I know one guy who’s broken more than a half-dozen phones because he gets triggered and throws them against the wall. It’s the same behavior as an angry child, but the consequences for himself and the people around him are far more serious. If you’ve ever wondered why men seem to act like young children (or even, toddlers) when they get upset, this lack of skills around emotions is probably a big part of it.
In my experience, healing a developmental trauma means connecting to that young child who’s still there inside the adult. There’s often a trajectory where the coach or therapist stands in the adult role and engages with their client’s inner child, so that the client can learn how to do that for themselves. One of my teachers says that we can describe resilience in three more-or-less equivalent ways, which I think is relevant here.
Resilience is:
- Being able to connect with your thinking brain and your emotional heart at the same time
- Being able to connect with your adult self and your child self at the same time
- Being connected with your prefrontal cortex and your limbic system at the same time (if you want to geek out about the neurology of this)
Developmental traumas limit our ability to find resilience. Learning how to hold awareness of both the emotions and the thinking self takes support and practice. It’s often easier to start by having someone else stand in the adult/caretaker/support role at first, with the goal of integrating those skills with practice and time.
Don’t make your partner your only support
In my experience, this is much easier to do with someone other than your partner, if you have one. Your partner has their own needs, wants, and desires and even if they’re a practitioner who does this kind of work for a living, it can be incredibly difficult for them to step into that role in their personal life. Having been the person needing this kind of support, the partner of someone who needed it, and a practitioner myself, I can tell you that you are almost certainly going to have an easier time and get better results if you have professional support from someone who isn’t your partner.
There’s also the risk that, once your relationship becomes centered on emotional caretaking like that, it can be challenging to step out of that dynamic and into a more balanced one. Don’t get me wrong- I think it’s essential for partners to take care of each other. But when emotional caretaking becomes the focus of the relationship, coming out of that can be complicated.
Another hazard that men and their partners often face in these situations is particularly difficult for male/female relationships. Since pretty much every woman or person assumed female at birth has experienced the threat of male violence and/or the reality of it, supporting a man as he delves into his developmental trauma and the emotional reactions that are often at the core of that violence requires a lot of resilience. It can sometimes be hard to be in that role, and while it’s wonderful when partners can take that on, it’s essential that they have the room to set boundaries when they need to. It’s important to have additional people to get support from so that your partner can take care of themselves and say no, without you ending up with no one to talk with.
The limits of therapy
I think it’s crucial to acknowledge that someone can be a therapist, coach, or other practitioner and still not have unpacked their own history around this issue. I’ve spoken with plenty of men who have had years of therapy or coaching and never felt like they could dig into these experiences because their (usually, female) therapist/coach would avoid the topic because of their own wounds. I’ve heard about therapists of all genders who would get triggered and freeze when a male client’s anger arises, or would jump to soothe the emotions instead of exploring them, or would validate a man’s anger without exploring what was going on underneath it. If you’re interviewing a possible practitioner you might consider asking them what challenges they face when confronted with men’s anger.
Even more relevant is that these early developmental traumas happen when we’re not especially skilled with our words. For some of us, these experiences might have even taken place before we learned to talk. As a result, talk-based work isn’t always able to get all the way down to the core of the issue. I tried talk therapy for literal decades because I hoped someone could finally help me. It wasn’t until I worked with a somatic practitioner that I could start to feel my way through this, rather than talking my way around it.
That doesn’t mean talk therapy is useless. In fact, it’s been one of the best resources I’ve ever had. But I think we need to acknowledge where it stops being effective. Healing developmental trauma is one place where that sometimes happens. Fortunately, there are more somatic psychotherapy methods than ever before, in addition to somatic coaching and other modalities. You might find one of those more useful for this stuff, too.
This is deep work
I know it can be hard to contemplate digging into these things, especially when the emotions of that hurt little boy keep coming up. We can only do this when we have a safe and trusted guide to manage the process and hold the many different pieces of the puzzle. The thing is- these wounds are relational wounds, and there are aspects of them that can only be healed within a supportive relationship with someone who’s both trustworthy and reliable. It takes time to grow that relationship, and even when you do, there is no quick fix.
The great thing is that when you’ve done it, you’ll have much more freedom, movement, and energy within your system. You won’t be using your internal resources to manage or control your anger all the time, and you won’t feel the same need to be vigilant about it. That opens up incredible possibilities for your life and your relationships with others, whether they’re sexual/romantic or not. And that is a major win.
As a somatic sex educator and relationship coach, I want to help you find new tools to create the relationships that support you and make you thrive. I offer in-person sessions in Seattle, as well as coaching over video. Get in touch with me to schedule a free Get Acquainted video call. Let’s talk about what’s going on for you and how I can help you make sex easy.