In her book Out of Africa1, the woman, Isak Dinesen, wrote, “As it is almost impossible for a woman to irritate a real man, and as to the woman, a man is never contemptible, never altogether rejectable, as long as he remains a man…
Dinesen in this way calls me out as a man and she is correct to. I am not a man if we use as our measure a maturity scale. On that scale I might be in middle adolescence. I am a man in biological terms, though, as I am an adult human male.
To Dinesen’s point, I have and continue to be irritated by what a woman says. My irritation displays itself by me taking something said personally and I react in a defensive manner, wanting to justify my reaction. At times in my life I have been able to take almost anything said personally and want to defend it. I have understood for a long time that my defensiveness comes form my deep feelings of inadequacy. I knew this intellectually and I thought because I knew it these feelings would go away in time. This was not the case. As I was denying and suppressing my inadequacy feelings I felt a need to justify them, hence my defensive behaviour. I had an intellectual understanding of what was happening but there was little change in me for many years.
For the past couple of months, however, now that I have started feeling those deeper feelings I sense my defensiveness is lessoning. I may not have been tested much yet but I do feel that I just don’t feel near as defensive as I used to.
When I am defensive it is because I want to get my feelings soothed by another man or woman. In that regard I am asking someone to take care of my feelings. In this way I am attached to a man or woman in an addictive way. To be whole, to have my feelings soothed I need them. This need is an addiction.
I am starting to understand at a deeper level that what I need to do is to deal with my emotions on my own. I do not need an intermediary soul to deal with them for me.
It is not beneficial to bring my strong emotions into a discussion, it does little but to continue the feeling or move it aside until the next time. I would be better for me to deal with my feelings on my own and then have communication when I can be calm and direct.
This harks back to my perception of taking responsibility for everything. I would like to take full responsibility for my feelings and not have then on display, or have an expectation that someone else can help me work them out for me. I think a discussion can take place and be beneficial, but the strong emotion shouldn’t be what is guiding my communication.
An update on my last post ‘addictions’ is that I am finding caffeine to be a particularly difficult substance addiction to curb. I hadn’t realized how much the caffeine has been soothing my deeper feelings. As with human soothing, substance soothing never does the job because the feeling is never felt, it isn’t let to come out, so the addictive behaviour has to be done over and over again.
I do not speak for ‘The Sovereign’s Way’; I am just sharing some of my experience that has come about because of TSW course and my relationship to it. https://thesovereignsway.com/law-for-mankind-options/?link=45555
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Out of Africa, 1937, Penguin Books Ltd.
I think it not so much being emotionless, it is just not to use them as if they are facts in in a discussion. If two people can listen to any emotion but not respond in a way that tries to fix anything I see no problem.
Humans are the only animals that would seek to appear emotionless. I find it a bit strange, a bit Spock- like. Maybe our emotions (which I tie to intuition, which is all that saved me from the jab) are bigger than other creatures, but I am not sure this line of reasoning (to never let your emotions show) is all that healthy. We all wear them on our sleeve as they say. I can see trying to be less reactive about them, but to me they are part and parcel of our humanity, for better or worse.