The mother/son dynamic is often the first salutary lesson the boy receives where he is the unwitting recipient of never-ending psychological warfare from the woman who bore him, whilst believing she must love him the most. Of all the tragedies he might experience in his life, this must surely be the most cruel.

If she carried her own wounding in the form of negativity towards men (like, “all men are bastards,” “all men are emotional midgets,” etc), whether she expressed it or not, spoken or unspoken, this would have an impact on the boy’s undefended psychology. He might go on to develop a self-loathing of his own masculine essence. Or he might feel that he could never trust a woman because they were inherently contemptuous of the masculine in him. Because his mother is essential to his nourishment, because of his need to receive her intimacy, he might reconstruct himself, so as not to jeopardize the relationship, by becoming amasculine. He can’t allow himself to become the thing she dislikes even if it means rejecting his true nature. The mother gets to mold her boy into the ideal version of the kind of man she craves, and he never evolves into the man he was “destined” to be.

This dynamic is also then encountered in adult relationships. Because of emotional wounding (as well as narcissism and entitlement), modern women demand that his attention be focused on her and her issues. She may not openly do so, but she will have unspoken expectations that he magically fix her. But the wounding that some women carry is such a “bottomless pit,” it will either leave him exhausted or distracted from his own life purpose, or both. Such women feel that he should prioritize her needs above his own long-term goals and the true expression of his life force. She becomes a succubus—a woman who will suck a man’s energy and pull him down.

Men, in general, recover more quickly from physical abuse than emotional abuse, either because nature designed them to be physically resilient or because being able to “take a beating” is an aspect of manhood that is socially normalized. Possibly, it’s part of the warrior aspect of masculinity to take physical injury, hold it, carry it, and move forward with it. Men have no shame in displaying their physical scars—quite the contrary. But no one sees his emotional scars and there is no pride in displaying them in the same way as those physical scars. This is so little understood that it is assumed that when men protect themselves, largely unconsciously, from women, it is because they are deficient in emotional intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The man has simply locked off his vulnerable heart because he knows instinctively that the emotional environment is unsafe, and perhaps he has had many salutary lessons already. In order for men to be vulnerable, there needs to be a reasonable expectation of safety (for a woman to surrender to a man sexually, she needs the same expectation). He needs to be confident that his vulnerability won’t be used as ammunition with which to attack him. Modern women, consciously or unconsciously, are playing a dissonant game with men. They want men to open up and be softer and more vulnerable yet have little to no expectation of themselves as having a sacred obligation to hold his vulnerability with delicacy.