There is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time now and, if I’m honest, I’m still not completely sure where it’s going to lead me.
It started as an attempt to understand insecure men and why so many of us struggle with equality, particularly in our relationships with women. Over time it became an exploration of the patriarchy and the hidden beliefs it teaches boys from a very young age. More recently though, it has become something much more personal because the more I’ve tried to understand insecure men, the more I’ve found myself having to understand the man I used to be and, perhaps more uncomfortably, the parts of him I can still occasionally recognise today.
If you had asked me for most of my life whether I was an insecure man, I would have said “No” because it simply wouldn’t have crossed my mind that it might have been true.
I was comfortable standing in front of hundreds of people, I could walk into a boardroom full of strangers and lead a conversation without thinking twice about it and I could talk with utter confidence about subjects I had absolutely no right to.
People trusted me, sought my advice and paid me to help them solve their problems. I don’t think anybody who knew me professionally or personally would have ever described me as lacking confidence or being insecure and neither would I because I had learned to perform confidence superbly. It had become my survival and coping strategies from early boyhood as protection from a highly abusive alcoholic father.
Looking back now, I think there were two reasons for that.
The first was that I’d completely misunderstood what insecurity was.
To me, insecure people were the quiet ones. Surely they were the people who lacked confidence, the ones who held themselves back, doubted themselves and looked like the were worrying what other people thought. They certainly weren’t the people standing at the front of a room speaking to hundreds of people or walking into a boardroom full of strangers without the slightest hesitation or holding centre stage and being the life and soul of the party.
I’d created a picture in my head of what insecurity looked like and I simply didn’t recognise myself in it because I’d crafted a persona specifically not to.
The second reason is one I’ve only really begun to understand recently and that is that I never allowed myself to ask the question until only very recently.
As I’m writing this, I don’t remember ever wondering whether I was insecure because, from early boyhood, I’d already learned that insecurity and vulnerability were dangerous for me, that they weren’t things men admitted to and they certainly weren’t things men ever showed in public.
Somewhere along the line whilst growing up I’d become convinced that if you looked uncertain, frightened or vulnerable you risked being judged, ridiculed, excluded or harmed. Whether that would actually have happened is almost beside the point because, by then, I’d already learned that it would, it had become a conviction.
The more I think about that, the more I wonder whether that’s one of the patriarchy’s cleverest tricks. Not simply teaching boys to hide their vulnerability from other people but teaching us to hide it from ourselves, which leads to one of the core wounds boys learn very quicky:
If we show emotional vulnerability or uncertainty then we will not be accepted so we will not be loved. From there is a very short step to:
I am not lovable.
And there it is, the core wound that sits at the heart of almost every man raised in the patriarchy because it is the core wound that was learned in boyhood.
It also explains something else I’ve discovered through my work. So many women find themselves unable to reason with the adult man standing in front of them because, in that moment, his boyhood wound has been triggered. It may be a 35, 45 or 55 year old man standing there but it is often a 7, 11 or 14 year old boy reacting to the situation he’s experiencing.
This insecurity, which I learned as a boy and then as a teen and young man learned to compensate for, and when I say compensate for I mean bury and hide, arrested my emotional development in that specific experience, which is why when the adult man was triggered, it was my 7, 11 or 14 year old that reacts.
The reason I think this matters, isn’t because it’s my story. It’s because I’ve seen the same pattern repeated hundreds of times through my work. A woman speaks to the adult man standing in front of her. She uses logic, reason and explanation because she’s talking to an adult.
The problem is that if his boyhood wound has been opened up, that’s not who she’s talking to anymore. Without either of them understanding what’s happening, she unintentionally pushes further into the wound, which triggers him and so he reacts from the emotional age it happened at rather than the adult he now is and so they both walk away feeling frustrated, angry or resentful.
When I started writing this article I thought it was about insecure men and equality. Then I thought it was about the patriarchy. Now, I keep coming back to a different question altogether.
What would I do if nobody needed me?
That’s not a question I’ve ever consciously asked myself before. In fact, I’ve just written it and found myself staring at it for a couple of minutes because it feels as though it’s come from somewhere much older than this article.
When I look back over my life, I can see that so much of my identity was wrapped up in being useful and thus, in my frightened and insecure mind, needed. I wanted to be a good partner, a good father, a good leader and a good friend, somebody people could rely upon and, more importantly, someone people wanted.
None of those things per se are unhealthy, I still aim to be those things today. The difference is that back then, they weren’t simply things I wanted to become, they were the way I measured my worth and value. I had to be doing things to be valuable or worthy of affection.
I had to be generous and give everything I had in order to be liked and wanted. I had to be funny and entertaining in order for people to want to be around me and to include me.
That meant buying people gifts that I’d inevitably over explain because I wanted them to understand the thought that had gone into them. It meant writing ridiculous poems and sliding them under friends’ doors at university so they’d come back, laugh and, hopefully, feel good about themselves. It meant always being available when somebody needed to talk because, somewhere along the way, I’d discovered I was actually really good at listening.
Looking back now, I can see what was happening. Those things got me invited into people’s lives but, more often than not, only when they were struggling. I’d become the person people turned to when they were unhappy, confused or in difficulty. Then, when life picked up again and they naturally gravitated back towards the people they laughed with, celebrated with and simply enjoyed being around, I’d quietly find myself left behind.
I never understood it at the time. I just remember thinking, “What have I done wrong?” or projecting my insecurity onto them thinking thoughts like they were ungrateful. I couldn’t see that I’d taught people what my role in their lives was. I’d become valuable because I carried things for them and took them off them, who needed to do these things because that’s when I was needed and wanted. I hadn’t realised that I’d never really shown them the person underneath who simply wanted to be alongside them when life was good as well.
I thought that perhaps I was trying to become a man nobody would ever leave and I think that’s true, I just don’t think it’s the whole truth.
The deeper truth is that:
I didn’t know who I was without those roles because I didn’t believe I had a worth or value unless I was doing something to deserve it or prove I was worthy of it.
If I wasn’t being useful to somebody, solving somebody’s problem or carrying something for somebody else, who exactly was I and why would they want me around? Strip away the role of partner, father, friend, supporter, listener or leader and the person people turned to and I didn’t have had the faintest idea about what or who was left.
That’s why being needed became so important because being needed was simply the closest I ever got to believing I might have been lovable.
All of which has finally made me realise that for the majority of my life I have been searching for and trying to become lovable, able to be loved and worthy of love.
Now, if you ask many boys, teens and men of a manosphere persuasion if they want to be loved, you get many different answers but they all pertain to being needed in some way, be that in a financially, physically or psychologically controlling way.
To me, having sat with this ever since my partner at the time uttered those pivotal words to me that got me to finally confront the man I actually was, rather than believing myself to be, when she turned to me one day and quietly said: “I hope our daughter never meets a man like you and I hope our son never grows up to become one” this points immediately to a man carrying this core wound.
To the men reading this or witnessing it in another man, this is a moment to call them on it and to support them see it and move through it with your support and help.
To the women reading or witnessing it in their partner or potential partner, it is a huge red flag that this is a man with a serious core wound and one that is unlikely to be able to offer you anything remotely resembling an equal or stable partnership at this time (see my earlier article https://jamesdakin.substack.com/p/when-did-being-in-a-relationship)
All of which leads me to conclude that we must reach out to boys and teens to support them learn and understand that who they are is every bit as valuable as what they do and that without it, what they do will always be more about performing and proving than about being.
Until they learn that, women will never experience their greatest gifts and they will never experience true freedom and happiness.