Question:
Are you happy or sad today ? How so?
Can I help in anyway?
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:
sad, nearly all the time. I was conditioned to block my sadness, so it's frozen, heavy, onerous to me emotionally and physically.
I was diagnosed with "clinical depression" at age 21 and after joining the Adult Children of Alcoholics 12 step program at age 25 I learned the truth that I had been abused as a child.
But being a male victim in American society goes against convention and invites hostility or abuse, so my best option was to get in touch with my anger, to protect myself from being victimized. And now I am very in touch with my anger.
But my sadness is frozen, because as a white anglo saxon male I was conditioned to see crying and sadness as "weak" or even "fatal" on a primal level. Like if I cried in public I'd get beat up physically like on an elementary school playground by other males.
Of course, I had choice in this matter. In the fifth grade I decided I would never cry at school again because it would make me a target of abusive male schoolmates. I can't even cry at a sad movie, even though I am in the dark and hardly anyone will notice me, but even the thought of crying at a movie with a male friend is unacceptable.
It's f*****d up, I know! But in a historically harsh country like America I had to start to identify with my anger in my 20's because I am on social security for a socially disparaged disease, I'm poor, I don't work cause I can't get dignified jobs. I'm too f*****g vulnerable socially to judgment from ignoramuses who are extremely common in this country, so I basically am a recluse who's invisible when he goes out in public.