Emotional Control

I found a post on one of the MGTOW subreddits that I thought might be useful to some of you.

Emotional control is a difficult challenge for many young men.

Whether you’re dealing with anger, anxiety, depression, pride…..

It is important to tame these emotions.

A generous anon by the name of ConvergenceMan shared his strategies for dealing with some of these specific emotions…..

ConvergenceMan:

“A lot of guys, especially in their 20s, struggle with an onslaught of emotions that comes with being catapulted into the real world from the sheltered life of childhood. Today, with growing social tension, along with the insane anti-family, anti-male laws and social norms, it is especially difficult to cope. Many of us turn to video games, porn, drugs, alcohol, etc. to drown out the pain. Nothing inherently wrong with any of those ‘vices’, but consumed obsessively for self-medication, as we all know, this doesn’t really get you anywhere.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is the norm for the experience of men today. If you feel alone, trust me, you’re not alone. We’re just not allowed to show it and get punished severely if we do (made fun of, called gay, women reject us for being weak, family expresses disappointment, even physically attacked by some other predatory human, etc).

But a big part of truly growing as a man is learning to master these emotions, to become more than them.

This is not about hiding your emotions, or numbing yourself as to become emotionless, but understanding where your emotions come from and training yourself to become a whole person alongside them.

As I’ve gotten older and made it through what you might call a “mid-life crisis,” I have gone through a sort of psychological transformation and can describe what this experience feels like.

You become distinctly and objectively aware of emotions as they arise, and although you still feel these emotions – in many cases, they become more raw and intense – you begin to view your emotions as simply another biological process, like being hungry or tired. In other words, you don’t replace your emotion with reason, you learn to respond to emotion with reason.

I won’t go into too much of a science lesson, but there’s a mounting level of research that you can actually rewire your brain to direct emotional stimulus away from the fight-or-flight areas of the brain towards the areas responsible for conscious thought. The clinical term for this is “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,” and research has shown that there are significant physical, neurological changes that happen to the brain structures. From a practical perspective, it works by first understanding where a particular emotion comes from, and then repeatedly exposing yourself to mild forms of the emotional stimulus to rewire the brain.

While I can’t live your life for you, I can give my take on the root causes of our most intense emotions as men:

Rage / anger – This comes directly from our feeling a lack of power. Look at the most angry people; they are the ones who feel the most powerless (examples: incels, Karens, Antifa, Twitter mob, etc). When you get what you need and feel satisfied with life, anger disappears. If you become aware of why you are angry, where you feel a lack of power (lack of money, getting nowhere in life, sexual dissatisfaction, control freaks bearing down on you), instead of just raging, you can learn to use that anger and channel it into creating a plan to gain power for yourself and achieve the satisfaction you desire.

Frustration – This is our emotional response to being unable to solve a problem. There’s a great little video by Deep Look that shows a squirrel trying to open a box to retrieve a nut. He can’t open the box, then he gets really frustrated and starts obsessively thrashing the box everywhere, and it finally comes open. Frustration helps us solve problems by giving us a shot of energy to push the problem over the edge. Because of this, I now see frustration as a positive emotion.

Horniness – As a man, it’s wired deep in your psyche to fuck every young, reasonably attractive female in sight. This is natural, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of it. Look around in nature. Reproduction is the core mechanic of all advanced life. Hell, there are microscopic ancient creatures that have no organs except the ones that allow them to eat, shit, swim around, and fuck. Society wants you to hate yourself for this core part of your humanity, and I think that’s the bigger problem than the horniness itself. In our current society there is extreme social baggage to sex for men. If you’re not slaying pussy left and right, you’re an incel. But if you even look at a woman the wrong way, you’re a rapist. Don’t beat yourself up if you have a hard time dealing with these urges, or feel very confused about what to do with them.

Depression – I’m increasingly convinced that the epidemic of depression in our society is due to constant psychological stress in people’s lives. So many expectations, so many conflicting ideologies demanding obedience, so many external forces squeezing you for control, sedentary jobs that are mentally draining, crushing household debt that was unheard of before the 1950s, endless superstimulation bombarding us with images specifically designed to titillate or make us envious. Our human nervous systems were not evolved to deal with this mental load, and people are cracking under the pressure. People then turn to self-medication, which often just makes it worse, digging the hole deeper. It’s easy to see if this is affecting you – get off the Internet for a few days, stop reading the damn news and social media feed, and see what happens. I dropped Facebook in 2017, and very quickly my mental state improved.

Loneliness / Self-Worth:

This is probably the most insidious and difficult to unravel of all. How can one be surrounded by so many people yet feel so lonely? Why is it that little else satisfies this craving than being loved and desired by a woman? It’s actually quite simple, but very difficult to accept and admit that it affects you.

It’s not just about the desire for pussy. We men have a hardwired, barely conscious understanding of our inherent disposability to the world. Deep down, we know we are worthless to society without our utility. If we were to drop dead, our name would be forgotten the same day, unless we do something to make others remember us. That’s one reason we can get so obsessed with money; money proves our utility with hard numbers and conspicuous consumption, and thus we validate our worth to society, and show that we are superior men. Women, on the other hand, have inherent worth because there is scarcity to their wombs and to pleasure through sexual access with them. They do not need to do anything to earn their value. Their body, their humanity alone, has worth. Whereas our bodies alone are worthless; only our labor and achievements have worth.

So, there is a constant longing one feels, as a worthless man, to have his value confirmed through a precious woman by persuading her to grant him that scarce sexual access. You’re getting a piece, other men aren’t, and that makes you the more valuable man! The longing is 10 times worse if it’s a hot woman. 100 times worse if one of your friends or enemies are banging lots of hot women. For some men, merely a whiff of a hope of sexual access is all they can get, and the perpetual desperate look on their faces is unmistakable. Once you finally come to terms with this, once you wake up and see that this has been happening in your own psyche throughout your entire adulthood, and you figure out how to break through this biological programming to discover the worth in yourself, a hell of a lot will begin to change in your life.

I’ll stop here, before I write a book. I wish you the best on your journey.”

Hope this is of aid to some you struggling with the roller coaster untamed emotions can bring.

I’ll talk to you soon brothers.