Another mass shooting?

Waking up this morning to the news of yet another mass shooting in our country was a reminder that it isn’t just women who must free themselves from patriarchal perspectives, but also men. These shootings are almost always by men. But why? What patriarchal socialization has taught us is that emotions are an aspect of the self which needs to be suppressed, denied, and/or condemned. Women alike are supposed to “be quiet and stop crying”, “just smile and bring me a whiskey”.... while men are to “suck it up and be a man”, “don’t be such a pussy”, “f*ck your feelings.” When we stop using this language, we will see change.

The patriarchal denigration of emotions has brought us to this very point, where we see a widespread inability to understand energy in motion/emotions and to know emotions as a natural order of our inner being. We instead are buying guns at Walmart and taking out our disturbances on everyone else.

Without feelings what would we be? Sociopathic. That’s what we would be. So, embracing emotions, learning from them, and then letting the energy be released from the body in a healthy way (e.g. crying, talking) is of our natural state — the mind/body is self-regulating and knows exactly how to heal itself, we just have to get out of its way and open ourselves to it.

When we don’t feel our feelings, learn from them, and then release them, the energy becomes clogged and festers within us which then manifests as even more disturbances (either psychological or physical, usually both).

I think of it as an obstruction to the natural flow of energy. When we condemn and suppress emotions we restrict the natural flow of energy. It’s ok and natural to feel emotions, this is why we are equipped with them to begin with — they are here to teach us something, or to reveal something. So we owe it to ourselves and to each other to embrace the idea of understanding why they arrived to disturb us in the first place.