Anger, disgust and rage need compassion and curiosity
“To live through an impossible situation, you don’t need the reflexes of a Grand Prix driver, the muscles of a Hercules, the mind of an Einstein. You simply need to know what to do.”
Anthony Greenbank imparts this reassuring advice in The Book of Survival, which studies what to do in plane crashes, atomic attacks and all sorts of other catastrophes, including being bound head to toe by rope. The book, released in 1967, became a classic and has been republished many times. Yet it still omits what is perhaps the most deadly scenario of all: being a man, combined with being prevented from seeing your own child.
Male suicide rose by 28% after 2008 to become the biggest killer of men under 45. Three men are lost for each woman. Yet divorced men are 8 times more likely to kill themselves than divorced women. The United Parenting Federation, which campaigns for family law reform, says the suicide rate of parents with Child Maintenance Service arrears is 173 times the average.
It says: “Parental suicide driven by family law is estimated to exceed 2,000 each year, accounting for 40% of all UK suicide, and leaving behind roughly double that number of children to suffer the trauma of premature parental loss combined with the damage to their own long term life chances. Children who lose a parent to suicide are 3 times more likely to die the same way than a child who loses a parent through illness or accident.”
I was ignorant of these horrors until I had my own skirmish in the family courts. Being a therapist, I emerged wondering if I could support other separated fathers to survive the ordeal, and perhaps even recover. The question was, what are separated fathers supposed to do? There was advice available from a practical point of view, most notably the charity Families Need Fathers, which does excellent work coaching fathers on how to navigate family law. But my worry was that pegging your wellbeing to the outcome of your case was dangerous.
As I began working with separated fathers in 2020 with my Ceasefire Method online programme I discovered a pattern. The danger of the situation appeared to be down to a long list of factors that could quickly become overwhelming if not acknowledged and understood. Some of these may be described as happening inside the man who, it must be remembered, is almost unbearably frightened, vulnerable and isolated. There are many more internal and external factors, which I’ll get to another time.
1. Anger. Humans, like other mammals, react strongly if you threaten their offspring. In the protection of their young they will face down predators that would usually intimidate them, or die trying. This state of activation, while being a source of strength, can also lead people into making unwise decisions. It is in a sense irrational, it has to be to enable the parent to fight against the odds. So, in a healthy, adaptive way, the dominant emotion among parents separated from their children is anger and the instinct is to fight.
For men, this coincides with powerful drivers in the psyche known as masculine archetypes, notably articulated in the work of Martin Seager. He identifies core values that appear among men consistently across all recorded history and cultures because, he argues, they are adaptive and essential for the species. Two masculine archetypes are:
- fight and win
- provide and protect
Therefore, when a father decides to make a legal challenge to see his children, we must remember that no conventional deterrent will work. It probably doesn’t matter how much the odds are stacked again him because his very masculinity is being called out. From his point of view he has no choice. He has to fight.
I have met many men who have found themselves marooned in years of family court proceedings that had failed to deliver more child access, and often resulted in less. In those cases a man’s trust in his own anger as a source of energy to protect loved ones leaks away. This can lead to a sense of paralysis, because it may be impossible to see what else can be done. A feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness may come over the man at this stage.
Deep shame may follow if the man feels he has failed as a father and a man. It is difficult to overstate the existential crisis this produces. One understanding of masculinity, which corresponds with Seager’s archetypes, is that it has to be proven through action. The opportunity I discovered here was for a man’s identity to be re-evaluated and re-imagined, specifically within the framework of the masculine archetypes, with questions such as:
- How can I best serve my child in the long term?
- What does good fatherhood look like in this terrible bind?
All men, I discovered, had the answers that worked best for their own circumstances, and I saw relief when they realised that they could divest themselves of shame and feel pride in their growth, courage and strength as fathers. This is where the group element of my work became especially powerful, because the men got to witness each other in this transition. I saw this coincide with a renewed sense of purpose and identity, and an emerging narrative among participants that: “I must look after myself if I am going to be any use to my children in the future, so I can’t afford to let this crisis define me for the rest of my life.”
2. The second factor is disgust. A perfectly natural response when someone you loved (your ex-partner) appears to be attacking the most important person in your life, your child. Disgust removes our capacity to be curious. It’s a wholesale rejection of the other person. It feeds polarisation, and yet I was often surprised at how quickly men were able to shift from disgust to curiosity when invited to reflect on the conflict dynamics at play. I’d encourage them to reflect on the personality of their ex-partner, her attachment style and any traumatic life events she had perhaps not processed. A few were able to feel empathy and goodwill, others felt content to reach a place of indifference. This, I felt, was significant because it meant that the exhausting 24/7 cycle of rumination and bitterness that every man reported could ebb a little, making space for something else.
3. Rage. What has struck many men on my course, once they are a few weeks in, is the realisation that they have been living in a state of shellshock or dissociation for months or years, often going back to well before they separated from their partner. Being in the company of other men with similar experiences, in a confidential, non-judgmental space, and knowing that every man has promised to attend for the full three months (no man has yet dropped out), is what makes this possible. This is because, finally, they feel safe enough to stop numbing out. We anchor this felt sense of safety with breathwork and guided meditation and encourage the men to build an awareness of their nervous system states and learn to regulate themselves in between sessions.
Naturally, with these skills they feel more able to explore their own emotional processes, and with that we come to talk about rage. I feel like this has been a turning point for some men on the course because they realise that therapy is not just “talking about feelings to feel better”. It actually fixes real world problems too.
If a man in the group is looking back over his life and sees traumatic events that he hasn’t processed, and he also sees a pattern of feeling overwhelmed and then behaving in destructive ways, either by blowing up and pushing others away, or by shutting down into depression and withdrawal, then rage has been part of his story. The penny may then drop that what he is doing in the group is real, respectable work to improve his own life and the lives of his children. Irrespective of how bad the immediate situation is, he knows this is worthwhile and it gives him agency and power, which are inversely correlated with despair and suicide.
I’ve found it useful to frame this in terms of the third masculine archetype: mastery over one’s emotions. I see this aspiration among all the men eventually: to regulate their emotions, to reject a victim narrative and behave in ways that serve the long term interests of their children and themselves, whatever the outcome of their court case. In its highest form that means taking ownership of the whole affair without blame and learning to communicate with one’s ex-partner in a way that acknowledges and respects her position, however wrong it may seem. Not easy work. Probably the hardest work any man will ever do. Which is why I am extremely proud of all the men I have worked with on the Ceasefire Method programme so far.
