Men, Are You Trying to Hold Your World Together?
- Jul 22
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 28
Written by Duncan Alldridge, Somatic Leadership Coach
Duncan Alldridge is an experienced somatic and ICF (PCC) certified coach. He’s committed to helping people lead creative, authentic, and purposeful lives that matter. His style is warm and open, and he holds sessions with compassion, intuition, a gentle humour and a deep honesty.
What does healthy masculinity look like in a changing world? This reflective essay explores the social stories men inherit, the absence of modern rites of passage, and the transformative journey beyond performance and isolation. Blending personal memoir with insights from contemporary writers, it examines why challenge, guidance, affirmation, and descent can be essential for men’s psychological and spiritual growth.
Do you find yourself living out a story? It’s tiring you out. It’s endless. It’s unsustainable, yet you endure, day after day. It doesn’t seem like there’s a choice.
Denial and despair are often your bed partners. You try to tell yourself it’s fine, but it isn’t. Maybe you cast yourself in this role a long time ago.
What does a man need for healthy masculinity?
We could say masculinity is a role we play. In society, we live within a story that says, ‘This is the way it is,’ and, if born into a male body, there is an expectation that we will ‘play this part’. In this way, we recognise masculinity as a socially organised construct and acknowledge that it has different shapes. We can perhaps be clearer that becoming a man biologically isn’t socially constructed in the same way. Boys have to learn to live in a developing male body.
Gender fluidity and challenges to traditional stereotypes have softened a longstanding patriarchal definition. However, whatever our relationship to notions of masculinity, it illuminates something that’s important.
Michael Meade speaks to this importance on a ManTalks podcast, ‘How to Man Down’. Whatever your role within your masculinity story, you may recognise that a healthy relationship with yourself while living within this male skin involves a positive experience of one, if not all, of the following, who challenges you, who affirms you, and who guides you.
Shaping yourself within the masculinity straitjacket
JJ Bola writes in Mask Off, ‘Ultimately, masculinity is a performance, that is to say, it is acted out in a way that reinforces the widely held view of what is normal for those born as male.’
Perhaps you’ve struggled to fit yourself into this readily prepared mould? You’ve walked through life with this expectation laid out in front of you. Your life becomes ‘meaningful’ and ‘successful’ as you cultivate the capacities needed to fulfil the role, and how you’ve measured ‘success’ has played out within this matrix.
Yet now, you find yourself defined by a path in life that feels increasingly narrow and lacking in significant depth or inner meaning. You keep telling yourself you will get there, but where is that?
You will be strong. You will suppress emotion for the sake of not appearing ‘weak’. You will provide. Sometimes it feels like you are holding up the world. Who would you be if you let that fall?
Who was I beneath the surface?
Playing out my own version of this role was part of how I came to my knees several times a while back. If I wasn’t holding up the world, and we all have our version of that, I wasn’t playing my part. As I began to accept my ‘descent’ and gradually unpack a crisis of identity, it became clearer that, despite continuing to seek affirmation from my relationships and the world around me, beneath the surface of life, it wasn’t really me at all.
I learned, slowly, that I am just small ‘me’, without the achievements, qualifications, expectations, skills, failures, and responsibilities that I believed defined me, some of which were traditional traits of patriarchal masculinity.
I am just me, a soul given a body to reside in for the briefest whisper of time. It was a relief to be able to begin walking my path differently. It’s never about a destination.
One of men’s favorite go-to responses is to walk alone
A common pattern for many men is that, if you are struggling, you don’t talk about it. Often, men simply get on the bus that comes along in life and go it alone.
“When it comes to men, I think the problem is often that we’re more reluctant to speak up in the first place. One in three men have never had a conversation with a brother, father, or grandfather about their health. The same number would prefer to suffer in silence than go to the doctor about their mental health. So, I think we’ve got to teach men from a young age that it’s okay to feel, to hurt, and to ask for help. Doing so doesn’t make you any less of a man.”[1]
Richard Reeves, in Of Boys and Men, suggests there are structural problems and societal issues that need to be addressed if men are not to become ever more lost, defeated, and angry.
Perhaps emotions you’ve stored up as you’ve walked through life seep out into your relationships, towards your children, and in the way you conduct yourself. This may be especially evident in how you struggle to work with challenging feelings when you come under pressure at work or domestically.
Living in the corridor of life prescribed by the world around you and its idea of masculinity means that the adaptations you have made throughout life, the skilful shifts in behaviour you made to take care of yourself, are still in your body, in your sinews. Unless you learn to work alongside them, they’ll keep knocking you off centre and running your show.
What would shift if you were able to become more present with yourself, more loving, and more accepting?
Men respond to challenge and guidance
There’s a sense, perhaps, of not liking who you’ve become, or at least not very much. Being human means we are all abandoned at some point, in the sense that we don’t get everything we need from our parents. Perhaps you didn’t get what you needed from your father, enough challenge or guidance, and you find yourself distancing yourself from the other men you know. You just don’t know how to connect with them, or the connections feel limp and dissatisfying.
The older men you see may seem to have given up or faded away, or they may be stifled by their own cynicism and fixed beliefs. You acknowledge that there are cultural factors that are polarising. You may seek comfort in your female relationships, in women or mother figures. You may try to numb your pain in other ways, through your addictions. You find that you lack the inner ease and presence to be fully with those you care about.
Engendering trust and love for ourselves and other men is a big deal for many of us.
No one is a problem to be fixed. There are only challenges and opportunities for growth. You may feel yourself holding up your world, unwilling to let go for fear of what comes next.
We are living in times when things have been, and continue to be, falling apart. It can be frightening to discover that the material acquisitions our story tells us define a journey in life are, in fact, hollow. Why wouldn’t we want to hold on to these acquisitions more tightly?
Modern life encourages ascent, but how high do you need to get before you fall?
Modern life and our speed-of-light technological advances tend to be about ascent, going higher and higher. So, what then?
We have very little collective acceptance or understanding of descent. Stories exist in every ancestral culture, yet we’ve forgotten them. Descent is how we learn to confront our unconscious selves and our wounds. What if we were to learn that it’s possible to let go and not know what comes next? In dying, that’s the only certainty we’ll have.
Why would there not be a series of smaller deaths along the way, opportunities to confront our ego?
Often, men simply get on the bus that comes along in life and go it alone.
There’s no conscious rite of passage for young men in modern life. We don’t have a conscious transition into manhood. Yet, in my work, I’ve seen that men benefit from a lineage, a tradition, and a code of behaviour to adhere to and cultivate discipline around. Without the mentor or guide figure and the code, it’s easy to become lost, misled, or lazy.
Collapse, breakdown, overwhelm, depression, heartbreak, divorce, or whatever the catalysts may be are all invitations to travel down to something deeper, to discover who you are beneath the surface, what we might call a deeper self. Down here, there is a compassion for life waiting for you to discover. Here, too, is your feminine energy, a softening of your feeling self, and your capacity to give to the world and others.
There is always another calling.
Start your journey today
If you’re looking for someone who will walk alongside you on the path of challenge and growth you are on, let’s connect. It’s always good to start with where you are, and there are different ways we could work together. If you’re ready to embark on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment, book a 15-minute discovery call with me.
Read more from Duncan Alldridge
Duncan Alldridge, Somatic Leadership Coach
Duncan Alldridge is an experienced somatic and ICF (PCC) certified coach. Before coaching he worked for over 20 years in education as a drama specialist and manager. He taught in both state and private sectors and to a wide range of students. Transitioning from education in 2011, he’s taken team building expertise and leadership coaching to organisations, performed and directed fringe and community theatre, led retreats for men, and worked as an improvisation teacher. He’s led innovative research and performance projects exploring the crisis of mental health, masculinity and male suicide.
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