This piece crystallises a bunch of stuff about the emotional pain I came into very vivid and unbearable contact across the Spring months this year. The pain arose when I found myself in a new living situation which turned out to be horrible. The shock of this - that I had no inkling prior that it was going to be horrible - woke me up to two things: (a) I really don't prioritise important and unavoidable needs, and (b) my current social circle especially my close circle of 15 or so friends doesn't meet those needs.
I quite quickly found the connection between (a) and (b): my needs are not met in my current close friends circle because all those existing relationships have been built by a version of me that keeps my core needs hidden, even from myself.
The principal basic needs which are not met, what I call "core human needs" are needs for touch, for co-regulation in daily life, and for energetic "holding" i.e. the sense that my wellbeing and my thriving are of central importance to another or close others.
The horrific period of unbearable pain I experienced over the last few weeks arose because, through support of my therapist, I came directly into contact with how powerful those needs are and how excruciating it is when those needs are unmet. They have been unmet most of my life, and as a result my entire nervous system is in a state of chronic starvation.
In addition, in my current situation there are no readily available pathways I can move along to meet those needs: they can only be met relationally, and of course it takes time to build relational spaces which meet those sorts of needs. Finally, through some connected circumstances, I've also learned that our current binary-gender culture makes it even more difficult for me to meet touch needs because touch from people read as male is commonly perceived as dangerous.
Over Spring this year all these aspects of my current life broke upon my awareness like a massive dumper wave crashing onto the beach.
I've processed the experience enough now that I've managed to draw out and define some very doable concrete steps I can take towards significantly changing my life situation, both my living arrangements in Birmingham and my relational landscape.
This is really wonderful and I'm profoundly thankful to have got to this place. And I'm aware of how incredibly crucial it has been to come into such direct and raw contact with the pain - to actually be with it directly and to experience it really fully in my body. I notice that even though it now feels I have a clear pathway of actions to take I also have this very vivid feeling-sense that the pain continues to be a vital companion in this next phase - that the pain is in a sense an integral part of going forward.
This is not about wallowing in pain or flagellating myself: it is so intensely unbearable that I've realised that I quite readily dissociate from it, and also that the dissociation is not just OK but "the system working as intended": I simply cannot operate day-to-day in that level of suffering.
Rather, what is important is to acknowledge the pain as a valued partner in stepping forward, and to acknowledge the immense value it brings. That value is in letting me know how my life really is, and also what it is like to be in my life now. At one level this is shocking: at the surface level so much of my life is wonderfully rich relationally, and also comfortably privileged. But what the pain keeps me alert to is the core human needs which are not being met in my life, that these needs are very much integral to who I am, and that the pain which arises entirely organically when they are not met highlights how natural and legitimate those needs are - how valid and ordinary and essentially human they are.
The pain thus is incredibly vital information about who I really am - in my entirety. It helps me to gradually build a new and far far richer picture of who I am, which includes not just what is not there, what is absent and missing but, because it is significantly changing the whole frame of how I see myself, it also contributes to me seeing afresh what is actually there - what is present that I have undervalued, in the same way that the pain is actually there but I have not noticed it, undervalued it.
I've undervalued the pain because there's a huge amount of cultural support to normalise violence and abandonment, and not recognise the emotional responses we actually have when we experience them.
I've undervalued my capabilities and gifts for fear of being even more powerful and therefore more dangerous and being repelled even further from human contact.
But another element of the pain that is immensely significant to me is its political importance: What I'm experiencing, i.e. the pain of unmet needs for touch, for co-regulation in daily life, and for energetic "holding", is incredibly common in Western culture. But more than that there is a gendered dimension to this, i.e. that people assigned male have a far greater risk of experiencing it and in fact living with it their whole lives than people assigned female. Many women also experience similar isolation and pain because those needs are unmet. But for men it is incredibly common, by far the predominant pattern.
In other words one aspect of what I'm experiencing is that this is what it's really like inside masculinity. The overwhelming and unbearable pain that is such an integral element in my life is there very largely as a result of being assigned male and the resulting masculinity socialisation. As a 2 year old I was ejected from my mother's lap cos I was "a big boy now" who doesn't need hugs and isn't vulnerable or scared. Between ages 7 and 14 I was not touched at all, had no physical contact at all with other humans (except for being in 2 fights at school), and no-one noticed because boys just don't have those sorts of needs. Then in mid-life I found I became cripplingly disempowered in sexual relationships with women because I'd been socialised to displace core emotional and relational needs onto sex with a woman, leaving me beholden to her for meeting those needs.
I understand now that I have these unmet core needs, and those needs are vitally real, and in every sense fully alive and insistently now: they clamour every moment to be met - and there are no immediate or available steps I can take to meet the needs and thus resolve the pain. But to be with intense pain and intense need and to not be able to address it - to meet it or stop it, is literally unbearable. And so I flicker in and out of dissociation in order to manage it.
There's another dimension to this pain as well. I have now had a whole life of 65 years of only short periods when I had enough touch. The pain of coming to face to face with this loss, the grief of it, the scale of the loss in my own life, the loss of years, of decades, is simply overwhelming, and to be honest I haven't yet found a way to be really fully present to it. Or perhaps this sort of pain only comes out very slowly over an extended period.
But it's not just overwhelming emotional pain. Physiologically also my nervous system is in a state of long-term malnutrition and continues to be starved right now. I live in a culture where this type of long-term deficit is so normalised it is not remarked, and I have had to work really hard to recognise it and actually feel it. At a physical level my body and my nervous system are attenuated, unhealthy and in dis-ease, as a result of the long-term malnutrition.
And finally, I now clearly see, feel and experience that I live in a culture, a social landscape, in which I am almost always read as male, and "male" is seen as dangerous, as an object of power and a potential threat - to both women and men. So in addition to my malnourised nervous system and my limited and ridiculously inappropriate toolkit for meeting core needs, I live in a social context which hugely increases the difficulty of meeting those core needs.
And this is what it's really like inside masculinity. This is the hidden bit, the off-stage area, the scaffolding behind the social power and privilege. And this is why the pain feels like a vital partner for me in my new project of stepping forward into my life: going around behind the stage backdrop inevitably involves moving into this pain - because masculinity, like femininity in some ways and unlike it in others, is about denial and restriction: diminishing the full range of human expression to match a limited and fiercely - violently - policed picture of what is acceptable to be "a man". Stepping off the stage where mascy is performed, stepping into the wings and into the whole messy offstage area is to reveal "how the trick is worked", how the "scene" is constructed and also all the other stuff left out or pushed aside.
What I am finding, as I move more and more beyond the realm of masculinity, is the breathtakingly horrific price that I, and millions upon millions of other PAM, pay for being assigned male as a child and living within the strictures of that world. To fully live off the stage, to live in the location where the entire world can be encompassed - to live where, to continue the metaphor, the stage, the audience, the backstage and indeed the entire theatre building are integrated into one's self and one's daily life, is to live with the enormous amount of energy and the excruciating - in reality unbearable - pain of trying to shoehorn a whole person into the artificial and constricted space of the stage in other words the terrifyingly brutal limitations of the social role of "being a man".
This experience of being AMAB, socialised into masculinity, and having lived in masculinity for so long is so foundational in my entire experience of life: it is literally written on my body, through genital mutilation, and workplace injury, and self-harm, and dysregulated nervous system. Reflected in my relational landscape, as rich as it currently is. And seared onto my soul through unremitting emotional pain of unmet core human needs.
The pain I talk about here is the reality of all this. And it feels absolutely vital to welcome the reality and constant presence of the pain in order that I am real - now.
I have to dissociate from it repeatedly, but I am finding I can also be aware that in many moments I am dissociating, and to compassionately and caringly support it in the knowledge of why.
This is the actual raw experience of it, of masculinity in its entirety: the other side of the social power and privilege. This pain and the trauma producing it is the enabler and recreator of that power at the deepest personal level.
I have had in many ways an incredibly normal life. My childhood was entirely normal: white, middle class suburbia, intact family, several siblings still in contact, standard education, and so on. What little direct violence was there, mostly from my mother, was only ever acceptable violence for the time. And my experience with masculinity is also incredibly normal: everything standard, common, everyday. No dramatic events; an unremarkable suburban childhood.
As a teen and an adult my life took a very unusual turn however. Through various forces I have found I want to and am able to uncover this actual direct raw experience of masculinity. And I urgently want to tell people about it, to bring it out into the light, to make it visible, and knowable, and shareable. Not just my personal experience but how incredibly widespread and standard it is, how this pain and its consequences are constantly visible in the lives of people assigned male all around us - if we have the courage to attend.
I want to have it as part of our collective consciousness: that this is a core ingredient in what goes into "making a man". And to have collective awareness of all the massive ramifications of this at the social level: how this constant unremitting pain, the rubbed-raw nervous system, is integral to all the largest social processes in which masculinity predominates or overbears.