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Chapter 2- The Problem of Pain

In the last chapter I talked about how men bury emotional pain in their bodies and the burnout that occurs when men numb themselves in the quest of someone else's mission. The burnout comes because men have been taught to ignore psychological and spiritual pain, to numb it, rather than deal with it. The truth is that men have been taught by a flawed training manual to go on the wrong mission, to silently endure needless pain, to be led by wrongheaded older men.

The problem of achieving manhood in any culture always leads to the problem of pain. The healthy initiatory journey of manhood starts with the conscious choice to face the emotional pain in our lives, the necessary inner pain that comes with finding one's own unique mission. The archetypal experience of initiation gives a man the motivation to face that pain, not bury it. Initiation gives a man a place to use his warrior energy well.

Separation

Let me give you an example. The first stage of archetypal initiation is always separation. For thousands of years young initiates in their early teens were suddenly separated from all that was familiar in village life and taken forcefully by elders to a mysterious place outside the village. This sudden separation was a very painful emotional experience. The initiate was exiled for an indeterminate period of time to an inhospitable place to face unknown challenges. Yet the boy knew from early in his life to expect this painful separation. He has seen his brothers or other older boys disappear one morning after he woke up. He knew this disappearance had to do with boys coming back as men. He knew it would be painful. He had faith that his elders would teach him what to do with the pain. He also knew that this was ther way to his manhood.

Today, men often face a similar sudden, forceful separation, an unexpected depressing crisis. Some are separated from their jobs by layoff or firing. Other men find themselves involuntarily in the pain of a divorce, or the abrupt termination of a significant relationship. Some men are suddenly separated from a former lifestyle because of serious illness or accident. Men are a separation waiting to happen.

Most men neither expect these separations nor have any clue as to how to handle the pain. This pain is too hard to ignore or bury. This pain is not the physical pain of a backbreaking job, or the pain of long work hours, or the pain of financial burden that men have been taught to endure. This confusing pain is not covered in the training manual.

For example, statistics show that a man who is rejected by a wife or suffers the rejection of job loss, even if he is not economically suffering, will face a high chance of hospitalization in the following year. In men this separation stress most often leads to heart disease and stroke. Without the proper training, the emotional pain of separation gets dumped into the body, into the area of physical pain that men have been taught to endure.

Separation is always the first step in the initiatory process. Separation is also an inevitable life experience. It immediately forces a man to confront a kind of pain he knows nothing about. The problem of pain in our society is that men are taught to handle physical pain as a badge of courage, like the bad knees of a former star football player. The initiatory emotional pain is another matter. Admission of emotional pain, such as confusion, depression, discouragement, anxiety is unfortunately seen as disgraceful. Shame causes the lessons of separation and initiation to be lost. Crisis becomes tragedy rather opportunity.

The Shame of Pain

Most men come into my office feeling two things. One is the kind and intensity of emotional pain they have never felt before. The other is a deep shame that they are feeling this pain at all.

One of my clients, going through a divorce, had a history of hard drinking and street fighting. He was familiar with the innards of jails when he won his fights, and with hospitals when he occasionally lost. He was very familiar with physical pain and the endurance of sometimes long recoveries from serious injury. He was also a highly successful businessman who was used to marathon hours of work in competing for lucrative construction projects.

After reluctantly joining my men's group he started to trust the other men enough to talk about his experiences in spite of the shame. He had recently been through a sudden and surprising divorce from the only woman he had ever loved. He talked about going 50 years of his life, and a former marriage with many affairs, before knowing what love was about. He talked of sleepless nights and aimless days. He talked of lost business opportunities. He often repeated that the pain of his divorce was worse than any beating he ever had, worse than any jail time or hospitilization he endured. He talked of his confusion in not knowing what to do with his anger and frustration. He had nobody to beat up, physically or through business, to dull the pain. Misguided warrior energy was useless. His former life had no attraction any more. He felt empty inside, except for the pain. Nobody prepared him for this.

The separated man, like the initiate who is taken away from the village, feels miserable, lonely, confused, and afraid: a perfectly normal reaction if looked at from an initiatory perspective. However, from the perspective of modern male culture, these feelings are grossly unmanly. Admitting to them is the ultimate embarrassment. In the modern flawed training manual men are taught that emotional pain is a signal that something is wrong with their manhood. As one man told me, "I'm a wuss if I'm depressed".

This situation is similar to World War I, where the military training manual literally taught that to feel fear meant cowardice. Young men were told that good soldiers didn't feel fear. So, when men did feel the natural fear in war they knew to bury it or feel shame. Many became paralyzed by the shame of feeling fear, their fighting efficiency diminished greatly not by cowardice but by shame. Some died, emasculated by their shame. Others lived lives paralyzed by 'shell shock', their word for Post Traumatic Stress. The Army couldn't understand why they did not have more effective fighters. They didn't understand that as few as 20% of their soldiers ever fired their weapon.They didn't realize the flaw in their manual.

It wasn't until World War II that the Army was forced to change this training dogma to properly prepare men for battle. The Army then officially started teaching that feeling fear, even terror, was normal. A good fighting man performed in the presence of his fear and in spite of it. World War II soldiers were able to be very effective fighting men, in part, because of this change in training.

In a sense most men today are taught by the World War I mind set regarding emotional pain. The rule is that real men don't have fear or anxiety or depression. Real men don't react to separation, don't even acknowledge it. Emotional pain is a sign of cowardice and weakness.

Most often, when men come in to counseling, they are trying to find out how to get rid of the pain, how to get rid of their shame as well as their discomfort. This need to get rid of the pain is a predictable sign to me of the uninitiated, immature man. The need to get rid of the pain is also a sign that a man does not know better. The fact that he is in my office is most often a sign to me that he is a person of sincerity and courage.

My job as a counselor is first to help the man consciously understand his pain and what is happening to him. My job is to help him look past the feelings of cowardice and shame by showing him that his feelings are a natural part of a different road to maturity, different from what he has been taught. I explain that he can show his true courage by consciously moving into the very pain he is ashamed of. I then hope he can get in touch with his hardwired knowledge and motivation to go the next steps of initiation.

I then explain to a man that he is unconsciously in the first stage of initiation, the stage of separation. I explain that it will take a while to negotiate this stage and it will be painful. I often give a man the first chapters of this book to help him understand what he is going through. The first half of this book talks about the complexity of this first stage and the trials of healthy separation. I tell him that he is going in the right direction this time and talk of my hope that he feels the rightness of what I am saying. Then I talk briefly about the further stages in his mission.

Ordeal

The second broad step in the initiation journey is submission to ordeal, submission to the pain of being changed. Every man in our society will come to a time of separation pain that will seem overwhelming. Ordeal is the time in the middle of the pain, in the middle of crisis. It is a time of either tragedy or transformation. Ordeal is a time to be taught important lessons about one's life and life direction. Most men in our society are unprepared for this painful but necessary teaching. The opportunity of ordeal then turns to tragedy. Indigenous men espected Ordeal. Indigenous men were prepared for the pain of transformation.

The boy in indigenous tribes went into ordeal after being separated from the village. When the indigenous boy went into the ordeal he was subjected to many tests that forced him to draw on his inner strength. He was taken away from all that was familiar to him by men he knew only by sight. He was forced to endure ritual pain even though he instinctively looked for someone to take it away. Much of the pain was physical: the shedding of blood, scourging, knocking out of teeth, circumcision and other rituals that I will explain throughout the book. Some anthropologists see this pain as purely a basic warrior training, forming a man to endure the hardships of war as protection for the tribe. For some indigenous cultures this superficial training was and is the case. However for many cultures for thousands of years this ordeal had much deeper spiritual and psychological aspects.

I understand the initiatory physical pain as a part of a larger psychospiritual pain. The ordeal for most indigenous people was primarily an emotional and spiritual ordeal. This is where deep change was supposed to happen, where manhood was formed. Mircea Eliade explains that a "novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation." Wise elders have always said that emotional and spiritual pain is the necessary precondition for that change of inner being to take place.

Psychological pain was brought on in the Ordeal by long periods of aloneness in an alien space, by fear of annihilation from spiritual and physical forces, by enduring ritual wounds with no sympathy or solace, by forced fasting, and by sexual abstinence. The boy was forced to face, alone, the emotional pain of fear, anxiety, loneliness, confusion, powerlessness, despair. Like my pugnacious client, the psychological distress was much worse than the physical pain.

Not all initiatory rituals were healthy. Some cultures disintegrated into violent, destructive forms of initiation. These cultures created warriors only to bring riches and status to the village. As we will see the temptation for older men to use younger men for selfish, power purposes has always been present in human culture. Anthropologist David Gilmore mentions some of these disintegrating cultures in his writing.

However, the heart of the best initiatory rituals carries the ideal of transforming the pain of Ordeal into a new perception of what is most important to a man and to his community. Religious historian Mircea Eliade writes about these transformations from a religious, mythic, and anthropological viewpoint. Joseph Campbell talks of this inner change from a mythic, spiritual, as well as initiatory viewpoint. Louise Mahdi edited a book, Betwixt and Between, that describes many patterns of healthy initiation and their relevance for today's culture. Malidoma Some writes about the depth of initiation and transformation from his own experience.

A transformative ordeal becomes a way for a man to find his deepest values and to live them out in service to those he loves. One of the most important values the ordeal teaches is that the measure of a man is not how much pain he can inflict, as a warrior, but in how much pain he can consciously endure and transform for a higher purpose.

Ordeal and Loss

The Ordeal is first meant to teach new ways to look at pain, especially the pain of loss. Separation brings loss. Initiatory ordeal teaches how to handle loss. In the puberty initiations this is the loss of boyhood and its pleasures. The boy loses the entitled sense of being nurtured and protected by powerful adult figures. He loses an old, carefree lifestyle that he is comfortable with. He loses the illusion that he can indefinitely keep all his options open. He loses the illusion that he can take without giving back.

Robert Bly says that the key to a modern man's growth lies in his grief. If a man is willing to recognize and grieve all the losses in his life, he is well on his way to maturity. If he is willing to accept the losses as part of his need for initiation he will find his manhood. As we will see, in a man's ordeal today, the loss is related to much of what we were all taught manhood was about, especially by our fathers. It is the loss of old training habits as well as the loss of outworn mission successes. It is the loss of most of what we thought would make us happy.

Bly's workshops and seminars aim at helping men start this grieving process in the company of other men. He recognizes the need for initiatory brothers in working through grief. He helps men recognize their initiatory separations and losses and then accompanies them in the ordeal of grief and acceptance. He talks of grief being the doorway to a man's soul.

Many men come into my office and immediately start to cry, sometimes uncontrollably. They then immediately try to shut off the crying or hide their tears. They are ashamed of a natural reaction to their ordeal. They are ashamed of their own grief. They try to stop the very process that will lead to their healing. It is my job to help them willingly stay in their ordeal and ultimately be proud of their courage and their tears.

Ordeal and Identity

The Ordeal also teaches new ways to look at life. In the wilderness, in the middle of his pain, an initiate finds his calling. This calling gives the new man direction and meaning for the rest of his life. It is within the Ordeal that a man finds his new and truer identity. Within the ordeal a man finds a deeper purpose in his life that completes his yearning for manhood.

In the ordeal a man suffers the loss of fulfilling other's expectations of his manhood, expectations that have often become a comfort. Parents, bosses, and friends can provide a secure direction. There is no need to question, judge, or become confused. There is no need to leave the safety and boyhood rules of the village. This is a black and white world of clear answers, even though they're someone else's.

In ordeal the boy struggles with finding his own purpose. He is suddenly in a gray world. He must somehow find his answers deep inside himself and deep inside the wilderness. The transformation happens in the wilderness of his own soul, where answers are much harder to come by.

Most of the second half of the book talks of the ordeal. It talks of both the pain and the promise. It talks of what happens on the "other side", the indigenous people's words for the wilderness. It also talks of what men have found on the other side of their pain.

Return

The other side of ordeal leads to the third step of the initiatory process, reintegration or return. Out of the ordeal comes a gift and a new identity both of which are given for the good of the whole community. The return explains the why of the pain, the why of the initiatory journey. It is upon return that the pain makes sense.

The explanation of the third step of initiation is also a typical mythical, as well as religious, theme. Joseph Campbell talks extensively of the heroic cycle in his book Hero with A Thousand Faces. In the heroic journey the hero always returns from his ordeals with a gift, often called a boon. The boon is critical for the spiritual survival of the hero's community. In the hero myth there is always a critical piece of salvation that only the hero has. So the pain of ordeal, according to the heroic myth as well as the initiatory journey, is not only for a man's personal peace but for the good of all those he is intimately connected with. The boon always reinvigorates a dying community.

So the lonely initiatory journey is ultimately for the good of all those we love and touch. The Buddhist belief in the Bodhisattva is an example of the return of a mature man. The Bodhisattva is one who, on the very threshold of enlightenment, turns around to reenter the world to share and teach, and vows that he will not enter Nirvana until all other humans have entered before him. He reenters the world of pain for the sake of others.

The Christian belief also has a core teaching that God so loved the world that he took on the pain of the world in order to teach all people the meaning of conscious, voluntary suffering for the purpose of saving the community of all people. Out of Christ's pain came his own direction and the salvation of the human community.

The return stage is when a man becomes an elder. He becomes a generative man as in the teaching of Erik Erikson. He makes himself responsible for the emotional and spiritual well-being of the generation to come, as well as his whole village. He goes out of his way to give young men a chance for their own manhood. He becomes an active witness to the values he has found in his Ordeal.

The paradox here is that in a dying culture, a culture that has lost its deepest values, the man as hero and elder is not embraced. A mature man is always an enemy to the status quo. He brings new life to a society that has lost its power to go through change and transformation. He brings a renewed and updated sense of values to a society that has lost sight of the most important things. So a mature man most often has to use his lessons of pain not only to endure the rejection of the community but to be a witness to hope through change. Often, it is the witness of his endurance of pain for a higher purpose that is most transformative to the community.

When we talk of this deep personal change, we are in the area of spirituality as much as psychology. We are in the area of mystics and Zen masters as much as mature men and elders. The psychological journey and the spiritual journey are closely tied together. That is why I will be talking of a psychospiritual evolution. And why I will be drawing on elders of spiritual traditions as much as elders of the study of the psyche.

Toward Manhood

So the whole structure of traditional initiation can be seen in three large stages: Separation, Ordeal, and Return. Initiation is always a paradigm of some dramatic, painful change. To indigenous people it meant a significant change of status in the community and ongoing vibrant leadership for the tribe. Today this change has more to do with moving from one internal stage of growth to another. In other words the initiation archetype helps us learn how to grow through the stages of male psychospiritual development: from boy to adolescent, from adolescent to man, from man to elder. Hopefully if enough men go through this transformation we can again have a wise, elder society instead of a modern, elderless one.

I have found that when men know what to do with their emotional pain they show remarkable courage and insight. They take the goodness and strength of the warrior archetype and use it on their inner ordeal. They then use that hardwired sense of purpose for something truly meaningful.

The rest of this book talks about the three initiatory steps, performed in the wilderness of our interior lives. It talks of the pitfalls in each step as well as the opportunities on the journey toward manhood.

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