Emotional Safety is a Dying Fad

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I hate having my priorities in order. Why do I listen to all the talking heads who unanimously confirm that when people are on their deathbeds, they want their families around them, and they don’t utter a single word about their careers or their money. Knowing relationships matter more than power and prestige is unhelpful. I’ve been societally conditioned since birth to achieve and accumulate. Now I’ve got to consistently put the people who love and trust me first? What a drag.

What am I supposed to do with a full day of frustrations when I come home to my family in the evening. I interact with thoughtless, careless idiots all day. And I do so with a smile on my face and calm communication crossing my lips as the anger wells up in my heart. I mean, have you met people? There are some real dumb asses out there. And selfish. And entitled. Oh the entitlement. When I keep from punching someone in the neck for an entire day, shouldn’t I be entitled to let loose on my family.

Speaking of idiots, what about the politicians I watch on TV? They remind me of the original Atari 2600 game from my childhood: Pong. No accountability. No solutions. Just lobbing insults back and forth with no intent of ever making anything better. Shouldn’t I have the right to unleash on them? Well, not really them, but am I not entitled to scream at the television screen and watch my kids scatter? Why would I want to waste time teaching my family civility and thoughtful rationality when the world is crumbling. If I can’t do anything about what’s happening outside of my house, at least I can teach my kids to be emotionally dysregulated and terrified inside our walls, too.

With all my work stress and all the global political strife, at least I deserve to relax and watch sports on the weekends. What a great way for me to relieve tension by screaming at bad plays, bad calls, bad coaching, and bad results. Nothing brings my family closer together than having an irrationally tight connection with yet another outcome over which I can exert exactly zero influence. Unless, of course, you consider the influence of my superstition about wearing my team’s logo on my underwear.

At least I know I’m in control when I’m behind the wheel. If I keep the distracted idiots in my rearview mirror, their bad driving can’t hurt me and my family. That’s why I drive faster, and more erratically, than everyone else in the car is comfortable with. Sure, they make exasperated sounds and squint their eyes in terror, but someday they’ll thank me for blowing past all the menaces of the roadways.

It was a waste of my time to read about the new research that correlates emotional intimacy with a 40% increase in sexual satisfaction. Satisfaction is for contented and peaceful losers. I am a hard charger. I’m never satisfied. I’m constantly changing the rules, demanding more, and finding something new about which to be angry. Emotional Intimacy? I don’t have the time nor patience to engage attentively with my wife. Besides, I’m the one who wants and deserves sex, and I get all the best moves from the hours of porn I watch. I’ll tell her when she’s satisfied.

Emotional safety is having a moment like the Flowbee and jazz hands once did. Sure, it might have people’s attention now, but I think Archie Bunker is gonna make a comeback. I mean, Bobby Knight cursed, yelled, and demeaned his whole life and got 83 mostly angry years. Who wants to live to 100 like Dick Van Dyke, all smiley and sober and still making people laugh? Why would I choose that when I can be sour and depressed and free from the burdens of taking any sort of accountability?

Providing emotional safety sounds like a complete mindset shift and attitudinal rewiring for the benefit of the people I’ll be pining for on my deathbed. If I just keep creating anxiety, shifting blame, gaslighting, and manipulating, I can probably get to the deathbed pining sooner.

I love my time in my recliner yelling at the TV screen. My solitude would be ruined by emotional safety, what with my wife and kids feeling comfortable in the common spaces of our home together. I might be able to have a positive impact on their lives rather than passing down cycles of emotional abuse. I have a reputation to uphold. My gender is counting on me. If I don’t do my part, the term, “toxic masculinity,” might go the way of the Flowbee.

Besides, emotional safety is not in my wife’s best interest. How will she stay relaxed and regulated if I am not reminding her to calm down.

Women don’t want an emotionally safe wussy for a husband. I know women, so let me mansplan this to you. The thing women want the most is for a man to tell them to just calm down.

Even better if done while lurching forward, yelling, and preferably with jazz hands.

If you are sober and ready to explore providing emotional safety for your family, even with all of it’s downsides described above, please consider joining us in SHOUT Sobriety.

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