How Society Gaslights Men Into Thinking They Don’t Have Trauma 🧠
The six invisible wounds that explain male anger, detachment, and silence. (10min Read)
TL;DR Summary
Most men have trauma—they’ve just been trained to call it something else.
Six invisible wounds get disguised as “discipline,” “drive,” or “being chill.”
Anger, control, and detachment aren’t character flaws—they’re nervous-system strategies.
Healing starts when men stop performing “fine” and start remembering they’re human.
The Great Male Gaslight
Here’s a fun cultural trick we’ve played for generations: convince half the population that pain makes them weak, then call them emotionally unavailable when they can’t talk about it.
Brilliant, right?
Gaslighting, in psychological terms, is when someone denies your reality so persistently that you start doubting your own perception.
Culturally, we’ve perfected that art with men.
“You’re not hurt—you’re just soft.”
“You’re not anxious—you’re lazy.”
“You’re not traumatized—you’re dramatic.”
Surprise, surprise: when you train men to mistrust their own pain, you get generations of guys who swear they’re fine while quietly unraveling in slow motion.
“Fine” is not an emotion; it’s an autonomic state.
It’s the body stuck halfway between fight, flight, fawn, and freeze, calling it Tuesday.
The result?
Millions of men whose internal alarms have been blaring for decades, but who think the noise is just “life.”
Today, I will be exploring the six core wounds that men struggle with in silence, and of course, what they can do about each of them.
Let’s dive in.
Wound 1: Emotional Neglect — The Training Ground of Silence
Little boys don’t stop crying because they run out of tears; they stop because nobody comes.
Each time a feeling gets dismissed, “You’re fine, toughen up,” the brain’s emotion-tracking systems (insula, anterior cingulate) dim down.
He learns connection equals correction.
By adulthood, he’s fluent in stoicism, allergic to vulnerability, and praised for composure.
But inside, his nervous system hums like an overworked engine that’s never cooled down.
This wound breeds emotional invisibility: the man who can hold everything together for everyone except himself.
He doesn’t need to “open up.”
He needs someone safe enough that his body finally believes it can.
Wound 2: Humiliation & Bullying — When Shame Becomes Armor
Every boy remembers the first time he was laughed at for being too sensitive, too small, too different.
That moment doesn’t just sting; it wires the amygdala for social threat.
Shame becomes the body’s smoke alarm: constant, shrill, impossible to shut off.
So he builds armor, sarcasm, bravado, achievement, and perfectionism.
He learns that domination equals safety, that control keeps humiliation away.
Fast-forward: he’s the man who can’t stand criticism at work or teasing from his partner, because to his nervous system, mockery still equals exile.
Evolution makes sense of it: in tribal times, rejection meant death.
Today, that same wiring kills intimacy in his relationship.
Wound 3: Sexual Violation & Boundary Collapse — The Body that Stops Belonging to You
Almost no one talks about this one.
When men experience sexual abuse, coercion, or even early boundary violations that leave them frozen, the shame is radioactive.
Ninety percent never tell a soul.
The body dissociates to survive, numbing through alcohol, humor, or endless work.
Oxytocin pathways that should signal trust go offline; touch feels confusing, intimacy unsafe.
He may chase sex to prove power or avoid it altogether to feel control.
Either way, it’s not desire, it’s defense.
And again, none of this is weakness.
It’s a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do: shut down what feels life-threatening.
The wound here is disembodiment, the quiet conviction that your body stopped being yours a long time ago.
Perfect — here’s Part 2 of the full blog, written in the same tone and rhythm, completing all six wounds and moving through how they show up and how to start healing them.
Wound 4: Work & Performance Trauma — When Achievement Becomes a Survival Strategy
Some boys learn early that love is performance-based.
You get praised when you win, ignored when you rest.
So you learn to equate worth with output.
That same wiring follows you into adulthood.
Now you’re “driven.”
You’re the guy everyone calls reliable, successful, unshakable.
Except you are shaking, just very quietly.
Your HPA axis (the stress system that manages cortisol) doesn’t know the difference between “earning approval” and “escaping a tiger.”
It keeps pumping adrenaline every time you check an email.
Evolution trained men to hunt, to act, to push through pain for the tribe’s survival.
But modern life rewards that survival mode until it burns you out.
This wound looks like ambition from the outside, but it’s really the body saying, “If I stop, I disappear.”
Yikes.
Wound 5: Racial & Cultural Trauma — Carrying Stress in Stereo
If you grew up in a body or culture that the world reads as “less safe,” your nervous system learned vigilance before it learned peace.
For men of color, that’s not personality, it’s conditioning.
From a young age, you’re told through glances, jokes, or outright threats that you’re dangerous just for existing.
Your amygdala learns to scan every room, your shoulders tighten, your voice lowers, your smile becomes armor.
And therapy doesn’t always see it.
Most models were built around white male stoicism, so when you show up hyper-alert, it’s mislabeled as “anger issues.”
But this isn’t anger, it’s centuries of survival biology humming through your veins.
Evolution kept your ancestors alive by preparing for attack.
The cost is living in a body that never fully relaxes.
The wound here is hypervigilance masquerading as strength.
Wound 6: Witnessing Violence or Loss — The Ghost in the Room
You saw something no one should have to see, maybe as a kid, maybe in service, maybe just growing up around chaos.
You didn’t have the option to fall apart, so your nervous system froze in place.
That’s the dorsal vagal response: the system’s emergency brake.
It numbs pain but also joy. You learn that the only safe emotion is none at all.
Years later, you’re the calm one during crises, the steady rock.
But you also can’t feel much of anything, love, excitement, or peace.
You think you’re stoic, but really, your body just decided feeling was a luxury it couldn’t afford.
This wound leaves behind emotional flatness, a ghost of who you had to be to survive.
When Wounds Wear the Mask of “Toxic Masculinity”
Here’s the part everyone is scared to admit…
Most of what gets called “toxic masculinity” is just trauma in disguise.
Rage? A nervous system that’s never felt safe enough to soften.
Control? The only strategy that ever kept chaos away.
Emotional detachment? The residue of years spent being told feelings are “too much.”
Risk-taking, overwork, womanizing… All different dialects of the same language: I’m trying to feel alive without getting hurt.
So instead of calling it toxic, call it unresolved.
Every behavior we shame in men started as protection.
The armor isn’t the enemy, it’s the evidence.
And let me be clear, I’m not here to say that we should just accept these behaviors and allow them to continue.
I’m saying that we need to realize where they’re coming from so we can start to resolve them at the root, shame-free.
By now, you’re probably thinking, “Ok, dude, but how do I do that without feeling like a you know what…???”
I got you, brother!
How to Dissect Your Own Wounds Without Shame
Alright, so now that we’ve called the armor what it really is, protection, not poison, let’s talk about what to actually do with it.
And I don’t mean “just journal about your childhood” or “try not to get angry.”
That’s like telling a firefighter to calm down while the house is still burning.
What men need isn’t a list of tools; it’s a process for understanding what’s happening inside them.
A map that helps you see these behaviors not as who you are, but as Parts of you that stepped up when no one else did.
This is where Internal Family Systems is so powerful!
Step 1: Notice the Protector, Not the Problem
When you shut down, blow up, go silent, or start fixing everything in sight, pause and say, “Ah, there’s a part of me that’s protecting me right now.”
Not “I’m an asshole,” or “I’m broken.”
Just: “There’s a PART of me doing its job.”
That tiny shift changes everything.
It moves you from being inside the reaction to being with it.
Naming what’s happening activates your prefrontal cortex and calms the amygdala.
Translation: curiosity tells your brain it’s safe, brother.
That’s step one. You’re not the reaction, you’re the awareness behind it.
This may feel weird at first, but this is actually the most powerful step and realization.
Step 2: Ask What It’s Protecting
From the IFS perspective, every “problem” you have is a Part with a purpose.
The anger? Protecting a younger part that once felt powerless.
The control freak? Guarding a part that was humiliated for getting it wrong.
The overachiever? Trying to prove you’re worth keeping around.
These Parts aren’t your enemies. They’re bodyguards that never got the memo that the war is over.
So instead of trying to “fix” them, ask: “What are you scared would happen if you didn’t do this?”
You’ll start hearing old stories in new voices. And that’s when your nervous system starts to loosen its grip.
Step 3: Trace It Back to Its Origin
Once you meet the protector, get curious about when it learned its job.
It might take you back to a classroom humiliation, a dad’s silence, a breakup, a fight, a loss.
You’re not digging up trauma for fun, you’re connecting the dots between the man you are now and the boy who had to adapt fast.
That moment you remember something painful and don’t turn away?
That’s the rewiring moment. The hippocampus is literally updating the file from “danger” to “safe now.”
You don’t heal by force; you heal by accurate context.
Step 4: Feel What That Part Never Got to Feel
Here’s where most guys check out. Because feeling sounds weak.
But what if it’s not weakness, it’s completion?
Every emotion your body ever buried is energy that never finished moving.
When you feel sadness rise, anger simmer, fear shakes through your hands, let it.
Don’t analyze it. Don’t fix it. Just let your body know you’re here now.
These things only last for about 90sec if we don’t re-trigger them.
That’s what regulation actually is: the ability to stay present through what your younger self had to survive alone.
This is what IFS calls “Self-energy,” the grounded, compassionate awareness that can sit with any part without trying to get rid of it.
That’s leadership inside your own nervous system.
Step 5: Give the Protector a New Job
Once that young part of you has been witnessed and gotten some attention, love and validation, it will realize that it doesn’t need to run your whole life anymore.
At this point, you can literally ask it, “If you didn’t have to do this, what would you want instead?”
And it’s wild, those Parts usually want rest. Or laughter. Or connection.
That’s neuroplasticity in action: your brain is reassigning resources from defense to creation.
You’re not becoming someone new; you’re recovering the version of you that existed before the armor.
Step 6: Practice Connection Over Control
You’ll know the work is landing when you can stay open while uncomfortable.
When you can listen without fixing.
When you can rest without guilt.
That’s the nervous system learning safety.
Not the fake safety of control, but the real kind, where you can feel everything and still stay present.
The goal isn’t to delete Parts or kill the protector.
It’s to build enough safety inside that they finally trust you to drive.
The Revolution of Remembering You’re Human
We raised men to build empires and call it healing.
To bury emotion and call it discipline.
To endure everything and call it strength.
But strength without softness is just armor with no heartbeat.
Every time a man decides to feel instead of perform, to rest instead of prove, to connect instead of control, he’s breaking a generational spell.
This isn’t about turning men into something new. It’s about letting them remember who they were before the world told them to shut down.
That’s what “men’s mental health” really means. It’s not about talking more.
It’s about learning to listen to your body, your Parts, your pain, your people.
You don’t have to blow up your life to start. You just have to look at yourself in the mirror and admit: “Yeah, something in me is tired of carrying all this shit.”
That admission? That’s courage. That’s the nervous system opening a window after years of holding its breath.
So this Movember, don’t just grow a mustache.
Grow capacity. Grow curiosity. Grow the kind of strength that comes from knowing every version of you, the protector, the performer, the kid who just wanted to be held, is welcome at the table now.
Because the world doesn’t need men who can handle everything. It needs men who can feel again.
That’s where the healing starts. That’s where evolution begins.
And honestly?
That’s where the story gets good, trust me.
Until next time… Live Heroically 🧠
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Supporting Research
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
Cozolino, L. (2014). The neuroscience of human relationships. W. W. Norton.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score. Viking.
Allen, J. G., Fonagy, P., & Bateman, A. W. (2008). Mentalizing in clinical practice. American Psychiatric Publishing.
Wong, Y. J., & Wester, S. R. (2016). Men’s emotions: A psycho-social perspective. Psychology of Men & Masculinities, 17(2), 115–127.