I want to help & understand (former feminist, current egalitarian)

I grew up in a home where gender norms didn't exist. I raised by a single mom who was a 'tom boy".

Crying has never been emasculating to me. It's just something that happens.

Now that I'm in digital psychology and neuromarketing, with years of study in clinical psychology, I can honestly say the problem with men has never been a fear of feeling feminine.

If such fear exists, then it's not the root cause and can't be fixed by telling them to stop. Just like telling a depressed person to stop being depressed won't help them either.

It's the fear of negative emotions which is completely common between both genders.

In every school of behavioral psychology, we learn that the core behavior that continues mental health disorders, like depression and anxiety, is the evasion of feeling negative emotions.

The ability to heal a disorder is directly proportionate to the person's ability to confront painful thoughts and memories.

It's not due to some nameless or cureless disease. The number of biological causes of depression and anxiety is few and far between. They can also be found with a common blood test.

Since these two disorders are very common within the female gender, we can see it's a prevalent issue for them as well.

What causes a lot of confusion is that there are two ways that mental health disorders can be expressed.

There is a direct expression and an indirect expression.

A direct expression is feeling insecure about your weight and forming an eating disorder.

An indirect expression is feeling insecure about your weight and becoming a workaholic in order to achieve success and feel better about yourself.

One is seen as a good quality because it can't be directly tied to the person's insecurity and the other can be directly identified as an effect of their insecurity.

So men, to make up for their lack of comfort with negative emotions, tend to armor themselves by denying its existence. This causes them to become unfeeling and many times unknowingly depressed.

Women don't necessarily deny its existence, but they avoid dealing with the issue. "I don't want to talk about/think about it." This doesn't deny the existence of depression, but they're unable to fully deal with it until their painful memories are dealt with.

This a very watered-down version of the issue. It's far more complex than this.

Self-alienation can cause layer, upon layer, upon layer, of direct or indirect expressions of mental disorders--even mixing them up.

Said this way, the 'fear of crying' affects both genders equally. They're just expressed differently most of the time.

Both genders should be acknowledging the importance of facing painful emotions and being completely honest with themselves.

It's very tiring to hear this being called a gender-specific issue.

/r/MensRights Thread Parent