Taking (Another) Break From the Struggle

A little over a month ago, I started the painful push toward moving house from one arc of the city to another. Somehow, amidst all that, persistent bullying to which I am being subjected to at work, coupled with a lingering and intensely traumatic event that precipitated that bullying, had left me feeling lower than low. For moments there, I contemplated suicide, not as a wilful intention to die but as an unconventional form of stress relief (see Corrigan, Fisher and Nutt, 2011 for more on that interesting phenomenon). For the first time in many years, I found myself sitting across from a counsellor, joining dots between the cognition and emotions that for me, had gotten so seriously out of whack. Herein, being a man makes retelling the details of that traumatic event that occurred in the middle of 2010 extremely difficult, in that to anyone outside of trauma world, said event would seem impossibly mundane.

We do much harm to men, I think, to whom we refuse to give the benefit of actually listening to their stories and sharing, if not also trying to understand their suffering…