Lost In the Desert
A brief introduction to Masculinity In-Depth.
There exists a feeling that is experienced quite prevalently, I suspect, by a great number of people (the majority of them men) that is often spoken about in an abstract manner. It seems to be a near ubiquitous feature of the modern man, and yet over the years I have encountered very little meaningful discussion around this experience. The reason for this is that it is a difficult experience to adequately describe with words. In way, it is almost like a ghost who inhabits a haunted house - its presence is felt everywhere but it is never seen, it is only spoken about and alluded to.
The experience to which I am referring is that of lacking purpose or direction in one’s life. It is characterized by a lack of clarity around a meaningful vision for one’s future, a lack of a coherent set of motivating forces that serve to propel a man forward with passion and vitality. This feeling is profoundly deep, and is difficult to describe because it is often accompanied by a lack of feeling, numbness, or an apathetic sense of disconnection from the inner world of the man who suffers its affliction. There is usually a sense of “voidness”, “blackness”, or a “dull emptiness” in one’s torso. Many men have described to me the feeling of one’s spirit being “smothered by a wet blanket”.
As if the experience of lacking purpose or direction in life isn’t difficult enough, the feelings described above are often interwoven with feelings of profound confusion and self-doubt. Many are left with the question, “why do others seem to be able to pursue clear, motivating goals, and not me?” Allowed to linger for long enough, this question eventually crystalizes into the conviction that there is indeed something inherently wrong with one’s ability to effectively navigate the world.
When I first sought professional help to address this experience in my own life in August of 2015, my therapist took an approach which aimed to reframe my mental constructs of the experience using techniques from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). It wasn’t until I began my own training to become a psychotherapist many years later that I understood why my initial experience in therapy was so dissatisfactory. Instead of considering the essence of my human experience as a person who was suffering, I was given homework assignments to track my thoughts and analyze how they might be inaccurately representing my reality.
When I left therapy not having had a positive experience, I became convinced that the world of self-help gurus and influencers who promised unlimited abundance and success held the answers I was seeking. So began my strange journey through the wild west of personal development -a bizarre confluence of new-age spirituality, pop-psychology, and free-market capitalism only to find myself in the same predicament which brought me there in the first place. Nobody pointed out that in order to manifest anything I wanted, I needed to have a clear idea of what it was, in fact, that I did want.
During the next four years of wandering the desert in search of who I was with little to no meaningful success, I became aware of a gradual yet consistent pattern of interests, passions, and curiosities that consistently made themselves evident to my consciousness. I realized that my fascination with human psychological transformation, my natural interest in spirituality and non-ordinary states of consciousness, and my desire to help others in the way that I needed to be helped could be combined together in a harmonious manner.
In August of 2015, what I needed more than anything was for someone to simply listen to me. I didn’t need advice. I didn’t need someone to try to fix me. I needed someone to listen to what I was telling them, and for them to hear not just my words, but to listen for the unspoken feelings and deeper experience of my entire personhood. In doing so, they would have borne witness to the transformational capacities of my own psyche manifesting themselves through dialogic process of psychotherapy. As a psychotherapist who now takes this approach in my therapeutic work, Anatomy of Awareness is designed to broadcast the signal to my former lost, depressed, anxious, and confused self: the person you need in your life is here.