Basics Of Male Self-Development
The process of self-development for men comes with crucial insights that young men are hardly ever told about. Episode 1: Your parents
Naming these insights lies is one way of putting it. Calling them disappointments or disenchantments would be another. Whatever it may be the one thing all three of them have in common is that they are all entities you believed were impeccable. Seeing how flawed, deceiving, corrupted and ultimately: how harmful they really are will allow you to break free from false beliefs thus taking your self-development to another level.
As you might have noticed, we here at Euromentravel.com we do not believe in specifics, but rather in essentials. Be that the essentials of a travel packing list, some timless and thus essential gift ideas for men or even the essentials that should go into your toiletry bag.
With this approach in mind we are introducing you to three disenchantments that have an essential, almost universal character to them. Knowledge that might have been presevered in non-developed cultures by word of mouth or rites of passages seems to be lost in our modern industrial society. By bringing some essential knowledge back in we are seeking to bring male self-development back to a more universal level. This will allow you to get to the root of things rather than giving out advice that will eventually fade away after time has passed or after other contemporary problems have pushed their way to the fore.
Here is one misconceptions that every young man has to come to terms with in order for him to be the best man he can be.
1. Your parents
As humans we are programmed to start life with a high opinion of those who are supposed to take care of us. Sadly, and these days probably more than ever before, this advance in trust is betrayed by parents who have a hard time finding and maintaining their place in society themselves.
Being around, but not ‘there’
First, it is not only the capitalist rat race that is contributing to most parents never giving their children what they need in terms of interest and affection. And even if they appear as caring and interested to the outside, namely to their peers to whom they seek to keep appearance, parents all the more fall short in doing their job right. The early James Dean movies are a vivid example of how a Rebel Without A Cause is created purely by parents who are there, but not attending.
A feminized society
These days a second, seemingly stronger and more brutish force is coming down hard on young men. Namely the fact that a higher degree in social differentiation and interdependence evokes the feminization of society. The more work, labour and the preserverence of life is taking place in an automated, machine-like fashion the more classic male virtues of risk-taking and acting out conflicts instead of swallowing them down or talking them away are being surpressed.
In a feminized society men have forgotten how to express their masculinity – or face retribution if they openly do so – while women confuse themselves with men in terms of physical strength and mental entitlement.
This reversal of sex roles shows in the dating and mating culture where men are clueless on how to approach and deal with women while women become masculine and aggressive to such an extent that a good deal of restraining orders these days are ordered against women, not against men. It is the same men and women who then become parents. Forcing their own incapabilites onto their offspring the vicious cycle is repeated over and over again ad infinitum.
Father wound
As much as I wish for any man to have an attentive father who will take you by the hand, teach you what his father has taught him so he can make you resilient to the hardship of life it is much more likely you will have an insecure, weak-willed or even absent father. Or, as it is en-vogue in any feminized society, you will even have no father at all. Be that on part of your father himself who sees no merit in fulfilling his fatherly duties or be that on part of your mother who actively tries to undermine her children’s relationship to him.
As a man it might take you a decade or more before you are able to realize that growing up with ab absent father left you hurting. The father wound caused by an absent father is something young men only get to experience in their advanced adolescence. That is, if they experience it all and not fight it with outright denial – or simply try to drown in a drinking habit or any other kind of addiction.
A mother wound?
On the other hand, the pedestilization of women in a feminized society makes them the Western version of a holy cow,
i.e. morally untochable. This moral freepass reaches its climax when it comes to the mother role where women are seen as heroic and caring almost regardless of what they are actually are. And as we all know, reality often looks much different than the projected ideal type of a woman/mother. A father being absent, ruthless or brutal might be socially acceptable as this is something that is ‘allowed’ to happen. But a mother being just the same, namely failing in her motherly role? Unthinkable.
In that sense and on a more structural level Eminem’s open approach to his own upbringing has contributed more to an open discourse on male self-development than most books ever could. In their very own way, women/mothers can be as harmful as men, if not even more harmfu as the harm they do is done not outright physically, like most fathers cause harm, but subtely and in silence.
Your parents
Not freeing yourself from an idolized view on your parents is something that will ultimately hold you back. Sometimes even for the rest of your life. In that case it wouldn’t actually be holding you back as you are simply reliving a negative pattern that most likely has been inherited over generations. Sigmund Freud invented the term of Neurosis for that, only he did not see that certain types of Neurosis are socially accepted in certain types of society. In our present Western society, it is the modern man speaking out against a feminized society and the institutionalzed hinderance of male self-development that is more and more considered “neurotic”.
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