The title 'Men Don't Cry' is personal to me. It was a core script belief that affected my life and compelled me to seek psychotherapy, as I felt overwhelmed by feelings of grief. It was from this first step that I began a therapeutic journey that has been centered around my identity as a man. I now have a new belief which is 'It's OK for me to be a man and to feel sad' Eric Berne in his book 'What Do We Say After We Say Hello' (1972) said that "a script is an on-going life plan formed in early childhood under parental pressure. It is a psychological force which propels the person towards his destiny, regardless of whether he fights it or says it is his own free will."
When I came to Manchester from Canada in 1992 I was experiencing a lot of fear. Fear in the present and fear about the future. This was very familiar to me as throughout my childhood I had generally felt like a scared rabbit trapped in headlights with nowhere to go, nowhere to run and hide. As an adult I came to believe that I had exhausted all my options. I had become separated from my mother, my girlfriend, my brothers, my friends in Canada and in the process I had cut off from my feelings. However my father who was living in Manchester gave me some of the practical support I needed to start over again and I found, for a while the secure base from which I could work.
So I began therapy, because I didn't want to go through the 'whole thing again'. Going through the 'whole thing again' would mean cutting off from my past and starting a different location, changing careers, homes and making new friends. But as usual the difficulty with this was there followed a sense of having failed, or a belief that somehow I wasn't going to make it in whatever it was I had decided to do. Whenever I was caught up in this process I would experience feelings of anger and depression, and out of my awareness set myself up to be rejected and abandoned by those I felt close to. However as per usual I would leave that behind, and thus cut off my feelings again, pick myself up' and 'start over' on what seemed, at the time, like a different path but would invariable be the same process in a different disguise.
However this time was to be different, this time I was to stay and I moved into a therapy group run by my therapist. Suddenly it was. good to be surrounded with support, perhaps for the first time I was with other people who were expressing similar feelings to myself. As time went on I began to experience a sense of safety, enough to express some of what I had been feeling. tentatively at first, through the help of my therapist I began to say when I was afraid, then I gradually moved into the anger about how life had been for me as a child and on then to my sadness. I was now on a path of expressing the grief about the many losses in my life. It was here that I began to recognize this basic script belief of 'men don't cry'. This was about an early message from childhood and I would need to face some of my feelings of shame of being seen as weak, my fear of others seeing me as over-sensitive, and vulnerable as I expressed these emotions openly in my therapy group.
Through all of this I was coming to see just how I was limiting myself emotionally and psychol6gic Ially in my life. I needed to know why. Why was I holding myself back from being successful, powerful and strong? To answer this question I would have to look back in time to my upbringing, my parents, their generation, and societies general consensus of what a man should be like. Some of my mother's script issues are about Being Strong and suppressing her own feelings, which she passed on to me as a young boy with sayings like "You have to be strong, stand up for yourself, work hard" and "Life is a struggle, and the sooner you know that you are on your own the more equipped you will be to succeed."
My mother who is a successful artist continues to play out her win script about hiding her true emotions and acting unfeelingly, however to me as the observer I can see now how lonely and painful an existence that is. My father who is an architect, seemingly at the time did every thing he could to support my mother and four children while we were growing up. For him also, however, it meant cutting off from his own feelings of anxiety and anger and moving countries in order to support his family, this caused great disruption and confusion in me as a child. Moving countries, meant leaving friends, schools, family and loving ties behind over and over again
The major behaviours I learned from my mother were how to be strong and try hard in life because that is how she was herself, whilst also expecting me to be the same. My father modeled similar traits about hiding his feelings and suppressing his own needs. Throughout my childhood and youth all of that seemed the right thing to do. This behaviour pattern and belief 'men don't cry' goes back generations in my family, for example when members of the family died, went off to war, moved countries, left friends, changed jobs, and even broke up, feelings were too often suppressed.
It is important to grieve for our losses in life and grief is a healthy emotion that if avoided pushes us further and further into our script where it may be familiar to hide feelings. This way of being wasn't working for me because as an adult I kept reinforcing old patterns of not staying around to finish things, not forming close attachments so as not lose them. I pushed against things, rebelled and found that I was constantly failing at the things I wanted to do, and losing possible loving relationships.
As children we compose our own script in response to our parents counter-script or psychological messages. These are unspoken, secret messages and yet are taken on board by the intuitive child, this is where we make major life decisions about how we will view the environment, and how we see other people, and also how we view ourselves in relation to others. In the case of cutting off from feelings, for example sadness and anger, we also repress our needs and wants losing sight of what they are about.
Five years ago I could never have envisaged or deemed it possible that I would be where I am today. It is through the process of self awareness and change that I am becoming more spontaneous, and as Berne said finding true autonomy. It is only now whilst in that process of change am I giving myself permission to express my feelings openly and because of that I have more energy, I love more reliably, I think more creatively. Now I can happily say that I have many close friends with whom I share my true self, my emotions, and my successes.
TOM BURTON
Do you cut off from feelings?
Do you want to change but don't know how?
Do you have trouble believing that you are successful?
Are you feeling lost, empty?
Do you lack energy?
If so phone me on 0161 881 7173
I am a psychotherapist in advanced clinical training in Transactional Analysis.
I work with individuals, couples and I also run a group on Wednesday evenings
with my co-therapist Hilary Holland at the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy.
Contact me about my workshop 'FEELING OK WITH YOUR FEELINGS' that will run in
1997 at the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy.