Day 11 - 11th Jan
Secret Work
Anam Cara.
I called to you on the Western Shore.
Strange and Amorphous,
Till my voice was raw and ragged.
Spoke you into the wild ferocious sea
So dismissive of me.
Returned across the Burren.
Saw nothing.
Spoke to no one.
Came back through my low door
Collapsed upon the floor,
No more.
I can’t do it anymore.
Niall Campbell
I love County Clare and the west coast of Ireland.
When you stand there, you feel a wildness. The sea is rarely calm on the west coast of Ireland. The full fury of the Atlantic, unimpeded by landmass, crashes relentlessly into the rocky outcrops.
This poem speaks of those times when, as a man, you have nothing left to give—when anger is spent, and so are you. It's about the surrender and peace that comes on the other side of anger, if you have some support and guidance to bring you back to yourself. This is where the Irish concept of anam cara comes in—your "soul friend." It’s the piece that holds you when you are fractured, full of your own victimhood and failings. Every man needs this.
When we are being good friends, we model it for each other, but the anam cara is how we learn to do this for ourselves. Far from being something soft or shameful, it is actually required and attractive. Ask any woman married to a man—she seeks stability from him. Long before financial stability comes the desire for emotional stability. He must be emotionally available, yes, but not as a wild ocean that smashes against her in a capricious, demanding, and unpredictable fashion.
You can’t work as a psychotherapist at the pointy end of things for years without losing people or thinking about old clients who disengaged and never fully explained why. You find yourself thinking about someone and just going, “I hope they’re okay - I hope they are still alive” But of course, that’s neither possible nor ethical. I try very hard to protect the sovereignty of my clients, even retrospectively.
This might sound odd, but I don’t want them to be dependent or enmeshed with me, even in memory. They are their own sovereign individuals, and to worry too much about them like an old clucking hen, I think, in some bizarre way, sullies the memory of the progress they made.
Men statistically engage in less parasuicidal behaviour—which is a sanitised and ethical term for hurting yourself because you don’t love yourself. However, when men do attempt to hurt themselves, they don’t hold back. The ratio of parasuicidal tendencies to completed suicides is therefore higher for men than for women. When I think of male clients I have had, I do worry a bit, whether I like it or not.
Art and its unique expression in every man is a wonderful repository for fury. There is no floor and no ceiling for anger in the liminal space of art. That is as it should be. Anger, not fully expressed within the male psyche, is an absolute disaster. I would go as far as to say that it is one of the major derailing forces we need to contend with. I am not saying that if we get every man to draw a nice picture, everything will be rosy—I am simply saying that we need to have places and spaces where men can sublimate their lives of quiet desperation and turn it into something real and vital. Consumption never had and never will scratch that itch. We need to make something, or we will break something.
Mike Skinner put it plainly enough:
Geezers need excitement
If their lives don't provide them this, they incite violence
Common sense, simple common sense.
Getting a bit of excitement throughout your day, for most men, is like getting a bit of vitamin C. You don’t need it in large quantities all the time, certainly, but if you don’t get any, over time, a type of pernicious spiritual scurvy sets in. Excitement in small doses is a decent way to sublimate excessive anger. It isn’t the answer per se, but as Skinner rightly puts it, it’s really a common-sense decision we, as men, must make: spice up our lives a bit at times of our choosing with voluntary excitement, or involuntarily break stuff at inopportune times—another man's jaw or the trust within our marital relationship. Simple common sense.
Art gives that opportunity. If men are allowed to engage with it on their terms, then it becomes exciting to them. Artistic expression of any type may have been suppressed in such a wholesale way that they have absolutely no idea what they’re missing. It provides an opportunity to engage in deep excitement that is not predicated on a zero-sum game of competition. I think, generally speaking, men need both. I certainly do.
But excitement as a way to sublimate anger is not the end result. I remember one day working in the morning with a 14-year-old boy living in a socioeconomically deprived family with violent and complex behaviours, who was pulling kitchen knives out of drawers and was profoundly psychosocially disabled. In the evening, I was working with a high-flying financier as a mindset coach, who was struggling to suppress rage in his daily life.
I said the same thing to both of them:
"You would rather feel mad than sad."
Both the poor, disabled boy and the wealthy, high-functioning man nodded in silent agreement. Oftentimes, surrender takes courage.
This poem is about surrender. I was not remotely conditioned to think or speak like this. But I have recently lost friends, and I wonder if they had heard this type of chat more often, things might have panned out differently for them.
Beneath every mountain of a man’s rage is an underground lake of uncried boys’ tears.
The man thinks that if he starts, he will never stop. The little victim inside him thinks the lake is bottomless, but this is the solipsism of a boy. It doesn’t run dry; it just pours itself onto the volcanic magma above, and the resultant steam drives the pistons of his best life. The pent-up locomotion we do not have at our disposal because of this is enormous. This is the real energy crisis.
One of the most useful phrases I’ve found when men are on the cusp of doing something so violent to themselves that there’s no coming back is this:
“It isn’t that you want to die, but that you don’t want to be present in your life. You want to die from your current reality.”
If I get a nod of agreement, then we have a wedge to work with.
Only then can we actually itemise the ways in which their life is truly fucked. And there’s no joke about this—there are times when the spots they’ve gotten themselves into are so bad and so absurd, we actually have to laugh at it. And when there is a laugh, then there is even more of an entering wedge of potential for action which will then drag mood back to the shore.
Those days were more common when I worked in rehabs and trauma centres, but they certainly aren’t absent from the creative space.
Delving into your own unique expression of any description—conceiving a baby, birthing a business, writing a poem, putting it out there, even singing "I Will Survive" at karaoke—all of these require you to show a bit of thigh, to bear a bit of your soul to the world. These are the hallmarks of expression and courage. They are properly scary, and they also uncover things you might not have known were there.
This is why I say that creative coaching isn’t all roses and painting. It’s about getting in amongst it with yourself—not as a navel-gazing exercise, but knowing that personal growth and producing your creative works function as a positive feedback loop. As things come out, we just deal with them. The expedited processing of trauma becomes par for the course, and an improvement in general mental health becomes the standard epi-phenomenon. It’s a pretty amazing side product, and is one of the reasons why i like to focus on creative coaching - because healing is often subsumed within the creative process, is clients are properly supported to understand that this si what is happening.
While I appreciate this is a generalisation, when painful stuff comes up for men, there is often a prodromal phase of rage before there is any sort of integration. Fits of inexplicable rage over seemingly banal things—partners, kids, and colleagues know all about this. It doesn’t make it acceptable, but it does make it understandable.
If you are scared of and running away from the rage of your childhood, what use is it to put on your running shoes and go running a bit more? Can you outrun it? Of course, there’s a time and a place for intensive physical engagement—I do it myself—but sometimes, you need to tell the page, the canvas, or whatever is your current medium:
Abusive childhood? Tell the page.
Inutterably lonely? Tell the canvas.
A raging homosexual, despite what your Plymouth Brethren parents think back on the farm, and angry about that? Tell the open mic at the burlesque club.
Keen to sing Bruce Springsteen and talk about the freight train running through your head? Sing it to your seven Instagram followers.
Could this be an avenue to making another cohort of pathetic narcissists? Perhaps. However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Men are often much stronger, healthier, kinder, and more productive when they engage with this type of personal expression.
When this energy has been earthed, the man is spent, and he rests. There is a refractory period. It comes after expending oneself artificially or hurting oneself physically, sometimes for the last time. When the choice is as stark as this, many men start to realise that it isn’t really a choice at all.
All these actions—calling yourself an idiot for a mistake, punching drywall, screaming obscenities in the car, hitting or cutting yourself, drinking, drugging, sexing, or texting your ex too much—are all forms of self-abuse. They are anathema to the path of your inner artist and child.
No one who loves you wants to see you do this. Sometimes, in desperation, men meet their soul friend—their anam cara.
This is not some nice big brother who comes down from a cloud in the sky—it is that part of themselves that cannot and was not hurt, that loves them still, and will let them restore and revive themselves.
Art can be like a bat signal in the sky for your soul friend. It brings them to you with less brinkmanship and drama. It fosters a deeper, more intimate, and accessible relationship.
Ultimately, art is for art’s sake. Your unlived life needs to be expressed, or it will eat you alive.
It isn’t always about the art or whether it is "any good," but about the unlived life that gets released. That life doesn’t get driven underground, where it festers, boils, and explodes into self-harm and violence, taking too many good men off the edge.
The best antidote to the masculine tendency to live a life of quiet desperation is to make something that is yours, from you, and give it to us. Your soul friend will protect you.