‘Men are more scared of being scared than being shot’

Why is it so hard to admit I was afraid when I witnessed a police shooting?

“Men are more scared of being scared than being shot,” my friend said, after I told him about the police shooting I witnessed a few weeks ago.

He nailed it. As I’ve processed what happened, I’ve realized that my biggest emotion is anger. But underneath that anger is fear. A part of me was terrified on the street that day. A snapshot image of the police officer running by me with her gun pointed is burned in my brain. She was a few feet from me but didn’t seem to be aware I was there. I felt powerless in that moment—and really, really scared.

That fear seems so deep inside of me, shrouded in fog, hard to access. The anger is right under the surface of my skin. I feel it when I think of the man who nearly got shot for experiencing a mental health crisis in a wealthy neighborhood. My eyebrows furrow. My hands squeeze into fists. There’s no one to fight here at my writing desk, so my mind transforms that energy into righteousness. I want to grab the shoulders of politicians and shake them, yelling: “No! Stop it. Stop spending more money on police. Don’t you see we need to fix the underlying issues that cause crime in the first place? Spend more on health care, housing, education, and good jobs. Stop spending more money on police!”

Why am I struggling with the fear? As my friend said, “Men are more scared of being scared than being shot.”

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I first noticed how big the fear was in group therapy, five days after the shooting.

(Sidenote: Even though I’m a therapist, I’m in a therapy group myself. It’s transformed my relationship, how I relate to my parents, and so much more. I highly recommend joining one. Email me if you need help: jeremy@mohler.coach.)

I told the story to the group, emphasizing how I’d sought out a news crew at the scene to make sure my version of what happened was public. The other group members validated my shock and anger. But then the group therapist responded in a way that surprised me. “I heard your anger and bravado, but I’m curious why you didn’t mention fear,” he said. “I’ve been around gun violence before, and I was terrified.”

A light bulb lit up inside of me. I’d been so caught up in my righteous anger that I hadn’t told the group about my fear. I’d even thrown in a little bravado, in the words of my group therapist. I’d told the story a dozen times—to my partner, to friends, to the therapist I see on my own. I’d never mentioned my fear. I’d written one sentence about it in my first newsletter post about the shooting. Here’s the wild part: Until my group therapist mentioned it, I hadn’t known the fear was there.

I’m not ashamed that I couldn’t admit I was afraid. I’m curious. Why was hiding it away, not only from others but also from myself? Here I am, a therapist who works mostly with men, who runs men’s groups, who writes a newsletter about men, who focuses on this stuff for a living, and I still couldn’t feel or reveal my fear.

I can’t think of a better example of how “traditional masculinity” harms men.

From an early age, “boys are taught to hide vulnerable emotions like sadness, fear, and pain, which imply weakness and are stereotypically associated with femininity,” Dr. Judy Chu, a Stanford University professor of human biology, writes in her book When Boys Become Boys.

My childhood was awash in such lessons. As I’ve explored the fear—and allowed the frozen feeling that accompanies it just to be there in my body for minutes at a time—I’ve unearthed a few forgotten memories. My dad telling me to be tough like Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman when my knee hurt after a soccer game. My mom handing me a Band-Aid and going back to sleep when I cut my finger late at night as a teenager.

The scar that was left on that finger is a fitting symbol for what happens to boys who grow up immersed in so-called “traditional masculinity.” Without stitches, the wound didn’t heal properly. The skin bunches awkwardly, making it harder to fully extend my finger. The lessons boys learn early on stunt our emotional growth. They cut us off from the parts of ourselves that experience fear, sadness, and other vulnerable emotions. We’re less flexible emotionally, caught between “it’s all good, man,” people-pleasing, nice guy-ness and unfiltered, potentially violent anger.

Without access to our more vulnerable emotions, we struggle to develop and maintain close relationships. Intimacy requires trust, which requires vulnerability. Without exposing all of ourselves, it’s hard for people to get in deep and love us. It’s hard for us to express our love in return. We become overly reliant on a romantic partner, especially if they are a woman. Because we’re compartmentalizing our emotions away from others at work, from friends, from ourselves, we tend to unload on the women in our lives. It’s fine to lean on our partner for emotional support. But when we ask them to be the only person to receive our vulnerability, it’s too much. The relationship suffers under the weight of our emotional repression and resulting outsized emotional needs.

To be clear, my struggle to feel and express fear is not my parents’ fault.

They loved (and still love) me. My dad had just worked 40+ hours that week as a delivery driver for FedEx, and there he was spending his Saturday supporting my love of soccer. My mom had to get up in a few hours to go to her high-pressure job as a woman in a male-dominated workplace. As the doctor and trauma expert Gabor Maté says, “When parents are just too distracted, too stressed to provide the necessary responsiveness, that can traumatize the child.” Whose parents weren’t “just too distracted, too stressed” at times?

What’s at fault is the way our society is designed, the legal and policy choices those in power have made to put profit for the rich and powerful over care for all. What’s at fault are our 40+ hour work weeks and lack of public support for parents. What’s at fault is the limited, narrow, contrived “traditional masculinity” men are raised to fit into, which has served the rich and powerful by keeping us focused on working a job and nothing else since the dawn of capitalism. What’s at fault is an economic system that takes parenting and other forms of care work for granted, falsely claiming that women are “naturally” better than men at nurturing and relating to others, and therefore care work is not “real work.”

That’s why we’re so afraid of being emotional, being too “feminine.” In the words of domestic violence researcher Lee Shevek, men are discouraged from expressing emotions in ways that “do not serve to differentiate from women and other marginalized genders,” because that would disadvantage us in the arenas where we struggle and posture for power with other men. We’re afraid to lose the little relative power that our patriarchal, capitalist society grants us. So we keep it all in unless we’re at home with our partner, or with other people who aren’t men.

My plan now is to give attention and responsiveness to the part of me that was afraid in the street that day. I want to let it know that it’s okay to be scared—that it makes so much sense to have felt that way. I want to also get to know the part of me that’s scared of being scared. The one that soaked up all those lessons about being a “real man.” The one that’s afraid of losing power. It makes so much sense that it would be afraid. Having less power is scary. But my sense is that fear is holding me back from the life that I really want. A life with way more connection, intimacy, and joy. Is it worth losing relative power? I don’t know. But I want to find out.

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Now, a question for the comments below: What’s your relationship with your fear?

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