VOLUME VI / ISSUE II / FEBRUARY 2022
LIFE COACHING AND EXPERT
WELLNESS EXERCISES A GUIDE TO THE NEW
ALPHA MALE
JUSTIN JOHNSON Wellness contributor @goliathcoaches
V
ULNERABILITY MIGHT AS WELL BE AN EXPLETIVE FOR MEN. EVERYTHING IN US TELLS US THAT VULNERABILITY IS WEAKNESS. My father and I had our biggest fallout when I was 17. Weeks after that fallout, I remember seeing him cry for the first time. What did that do to me as a young adult? My father, being the premier Alpha male man in my life, made me think crying was an emotion that men didn’t use. “Stop crying. Why are you always crying? Look at the cry baby…” However, crying is a human expression. Clearly, anything done in excess can be a problem, and crying is not an exception. What I had developed at page 186
that point in my life, was an excess of holding back my true emotions – and only expressing through anger. I’d get angry and lash out, fighting and being combative toward authority because I had no practiced tools for truly processing the honest emotions I felt. My father did his best with the knowledge he had, so blaming him or my mother for how I acted takes no accountability. He was raised in a time when showing perceived weakness could literally mean your life. In his desire to protect me, he taught me how to hide emotion by the way he responded to emotion. Today, I have two sons and I try to be as vulnerable as I can with them. I want them to see me happy, to see joy and positivity, I also want them to see me cry or even be embarrassed. How are they ever going to learn to process their full range of emotions if they don’t see the premier man in their lives processing? Don’t hide emotions from your kids; more importantly don’t hide from
yourself. You are no less a man because you shed a tear. Emotions are not sexist; we all have them. They are tools that allow us to process situations that may be hard or almost impossible to process otherwise. Why are we so attached to ideas like vulnerability being synonymous with weakness? Why are we so attached to these ideas of Alpha? In many communities, we latch on to the ideals that justify that we are equal to our counterpart. Why don’t we just feel equal? Why do we need something to justify being “man enough”? Since it’s Black History Month, we’re going to look at how exactly this Alpha ideal has taken root in the black community… and why it can be very toxic. Throughout history on nearly every continent – but, for the sake of this article, specifically in North America– the black community was property, without rights or representation. As nations abolished slavery, the United States, too, abolished the practice and ended the slave trade. Not fully recognized