What We Do To Boys

What We Do To Boys

I’m never sure how to answer the query about how trauma, our base coding, affects us. My instinctive response is that it doesn’t affect me. It is me. We are built around it. That initial programming shapes every view. Healing began when I acknowledged that whoever I was going to be before the coding error is dead. I don't grieve her, because she never made it. She was only ever an idea. When we have a pulse, we assume we survived.

Psychological trauma is a cause of death. Addiction. Suicide. High-risk behaviors. Abusive relationships. Violent relationships. Inadequate boundaries for self-protection. Financial losses that weren’t yours to pay.

Abuse is a cause of death, and we pretend not to know so we don’t have to go looking for the abusers. Most likely because we all know, on some level of consciousness, we can’t gather all the abusers. The world economy would collapse. Churches emptied. Schools unstaffed. Hospitals with no psychopathic surgeons. It is baked into how we operate day to day.

Minimize. Normalize. Incentivize.

I think we don’t respond en masse because we know the way we raise boys is abuse in and of itself. We know exactly why they are like this. There is no mystery. Pretending it’s a mystery is a lie. We should stop intentionally creating the myth of manhood in boy children. It’s psychological abuse.

We train them from the moment they can speak. Don’t cry. Don’t be scared. Don’t be too loving. We talk them through detaching from their amygdala altogether. We teach them to bypass it and to funnel everything meant for the amygdala’s process into a militant loyalty to a football team, or if they are a little soft, a favorite band. End of list.

Then, when they are incapable of true connection and self-reflection, and become a silent weight in the mental health of the modern-day home, they can have an internal collapse.

Light goes in. It doesn’t come back out.

We manufacture the base male identity structure like this, and when they learn it, we hate and resent them for being catastrophically absent in their own lives and their own minds and in every relationship they manage to cobble together.

We walk them though detaching from their emotions, bury all that’s human, and try to channel their whole spirit through the existential equivalent of an Excel spreadsheet. By the time they are of age, their minds have been bound like little feet- shaped into something smaller, more controllable, something acceptable. Something that is silent.

It is a spiritual deformity we inflict on them. It is an existential crime.

We have to free us of the unholy constraints of violence that force boys to learn lie before they learn how to speak. Men still trapped in that identity structure can’t see they are in it. They don’t know the door has been unlocked for decades.

The belief is fused to who they are as toddlers, and eventually the lie masks the boy altogether. Millions of men are bound in that belief. Trapped by that belief. Robbed by that belief. And die in that belief.

We underestimate what it means that most men still believe they are more logical, more able, or more objective than women.

That myth has a very high body count— in every demographic.

They do not know the lie of objectivity and logic are based entirely in superstition.

Our country is currently witnessing a catastrophic collapse of leadership in every institution, all buckling under the unfathomable weight of the myth of objective men, NDA’s, transactional worldviews. Extraction is the unstated ordering principle.

They passively assume our leaders must know what they're doing. That power equals competence. That's not logic— it's superstition.

It isn’t reason. Or fortitude. Or stoicism.

It’s fear, despair, and dissociation. And it kills them daily— by their own hand or someone else’s.

Trying to untangle my true self out of the weave of traumas and loves and wins and unbearable loss is a fruitless exercise that doesn’t provide anything I care to have. And men cannot unweave themselves from their training either. Not without intentional and disciplined work.

My mind was scrapped together with the skill set of a child because I was a child. My worldview was set by me as a child. Our personalities aren’t fixed or concrete. We are a patchwork of trauma, theory, and coping rituals stitched together as a child.

Trying to separate anything in America—race, class, gender— is a fool's errand. Every system leans on the others to hold the lie upright. There is no successful patriarchy without white feminine racism. There is no racism without weaponized classism peeling off lower-class men. There is no classism without ableism telling us our value is based on what we can or can’t produce

Our lives are a weave, not a timeline

I try to keep in mind the following when escalating and needing to come down:

America became a democracy with the Voting Rights Act. Our ‘founding fathers’ are MLK, JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, and LBJ, among many others.

• This democracy is only 62 years old. The people who forced it to become a democracy are still alive.

• In the same decade, women got birth control.

• With birth control, the arrangements the species has been living with for tens of thousands of years are simply no longer needed. Therefore, they are no longer viable. We keep looking away. I invite you to stare.

• The existential ceasefire concepts we were raised with (prescribed roles for gender, race, and class) are being blown out of the water at an exponential rate as social media discourse added jet fuel to the speed of the multi-front fight for bodily autonomy for all humans, in every location, and at all times.

This was always destined to be a turbulent time. It was always going to be incredibly ugly. It was always going to be terrifying.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Boys in the seventies, eighties, and nineties were raised for a reality that simply no longer exists, and large numbers seem at a loss—adrift, frustrated, seeking something real but unable to recognize it when they see it. Some will turn to violence and trauma transmission in a desperate attempt to manufacture control. Some will turn to increasing their distress tolerance, name what is missing, put down the myth of manhood, and seek help from one another. They learn that control is a fear response, not dominion, and they release it.

In the meantime, we should stop breaking boys from birth.

We are reaping what we sow. Not on the individual basis, but as a collective. Stopping that would change the world in a way that is safe, impactful, quick, and natural. Traumatic violence would become rare. And we know that.

We seem to not want to know, and in my mind, it’s because we know we are all walking trauma responses, mammals sentient beyond our design, and changing anything feels like opening a hell door to extreme violence.

The violence is already here.

We are its only keepers.

If we diffuse that violence, we can begin the process of discovering what is real, sit in the truth, unashamed and capable of knowing we are loved.

The weave can be course corrected. The fact it can be done makes it a moral imperative.

Pull the thread.