Men-boys, your abusive anger is the cowardice of fear and sadness you won’t face

Just as it takes courage to be honest about our sadness and fear, it is cowardice that refuses to honestly face fear and sadness, which manifests in abusive anger. And men, you’re the biggest culprits.

I want to call you man-boys, because, without being able to “go there” into the cauldron of your own stuff—where you alone are raw, fallible and full of moral holes—you cannot hope to progress to manhood. You are grown men, with grown men’s power, a power that scares women and children (and maybe even yourself), and there is a little boy controlling you. You are a lethal weapon with your words and actions and deeds of fury.

A man-boy will project all his own sadness and fear onto anyone who gets sufficiently intimately close to him—yes, his partner, his mother perhaps, or anyone when he’s in this state who contests his version of things. He will turn all his sadness and fear into a full force frontal assault of anger, and it will be all your fault, not his. None of it will be his fault. He will gaslight you as quick as look at you.

The further he gets from being honest with himself about his own stuff, the further the hurt little boy inside himself screams to be heard, the more that man will give went to this insatiable fury. Let the little boy be heard by all means but let his genuine sadness and inextricable fear find their expression. In safe ways.

But he won’t go that course—the inward one—because it is too hard and too painful for him, and it requires great courage and humility to go there and stay there.

Anyone willing to go into themselves and be honest about fear and sadness will experience eventual healing—if only they will bear this pain patiently without spewing it all over everyone else.

Abusive anger is a sign. It’s a sign of dishonesty at its core. Dishonesty would prefer to believe the lie that all one’s problems are other people’s fault. Of course, if we genuinely believe other people are to blame, what else would we have other than a vigilante anger?

Abusive anger sets before itself a target for wrath. Someone will pay, and it is never the person who is so bitterly angry. That person has lost all their insight. They’re self-justified as if they themselves are the only ones to appease. They completely lose their mind when they forget that the law and all humanity sides against them in their unchecked, vitriolic fury. Theirs is a road to ruin, but they are set on taking others with them, blaming them into the bargain.

At its root, abusive anger is a looking away from the inner causes of sadness and fear, and that is because of cowardice—they cannot stand to even face that the source of the problem might be within them, that the trauma that runs deep is causing the angst, let alone admit they themselves have the work to do.

If only there were more man-boys prepared to invest some precious months and years in the work of their recovery. It’s a work in progress, but at least as we admit we might be responsible for this work, we’re helped no end.

The man who is worth his weight in gold—for partnership I mean—is someone who can routinely set himself on his fear and sadness. These things don’t own him. He owns them. He’s able to feel scared and he’s able to cry sensitive tears, not tears wrought only by anger, or an anger that tips into terror.

The man who is worth waiting for takes his responsibility—not least for his emotions, for his actions, for his words, and for every damage he causes.