Boys and men are experiencing a ‘crisis of connection,' expert says

My mind repeated what I had said many times before as I learned of another shooting perpetrated by a young man, this time at a weekend rally hosted by a former president. I was angry because another shooting had come into our lives. I live in a city where there was a mass shooting during a major event. That day, I quickly checked with neighbors, family, and friends to make sure they were safe. I have two sons, and I’ve wondered what the difference is between them and the juveniles under arrest for these shootings. Is there something more that I need to do? What is the world of these young men that makes violence on such a scale seem an appropriate response? What are we all missing?

‘There’s another story to that,’ said a professor of developmental psychology. The professor, who has been conducting research on the social and emotional development of teenagers for nearly four decades, realized that boys were ’telling what I’m calling a thick story, which is a story that reveals their full humanity.’

For the professor, thin stories are surface-level understandings of boys and men that play into stereotypes and clichés. By a thick story, she means obtaining an in-depth understanding of our boys and young men and the culture that leads to violence.

I sat down with the professor to discuss her book and find out the questions we aren’t asking. I, and many other fathers, don’t want excuses for the inexcusable. We want to know what can be done so we never have to be here again.

CNN: What are we getting wrong in the conversations about shootings? What don’t we understand?

Prof: We don’t know how to deal with it. We don’t understand it. We think there must have been something wrong with his parent or them. We don’t see the water in which we swim, and as long as we don’t see it, we don’t feel like we can do anything about it. And the positive message that I’m trying to communicate is once you see it, once you see that it’s a culture that clashes with our nature, we already have within us the capacity to solve our own problems.

CNN: You say in your book that boys and men are in a crisis of connection. Explain what you mean.

Prof: As boys get older, and as many people at this point get older, we disconnect from our soft sides because of a boy culture that doesn’t encourage and support those skills. You need your ability to listen to yourself and others with curiosity about what’s going on… You need your emotional and relational intelligence, which is your soft side, to be happy and connected to yourself and others.

CNN: What are some of the effects of this lack of connection?

Prof: We start to disconnect from ourselves because we can’t express our soft side, which is natural and necessary for connection. Hence the depression, the anxiety, the loneliness. Sometimes we develop a sense of alienation in isolation that builds into anger.

You have to be willing to be vulnerable and soft to be connected to other people. So, once you’re not willing to do that, you have a hard time with other people. Then that can lead to anger and frustration.

What mass shooters reveal to us is the root of the crisis of connection and the root of violence. I am arguing in the book that this (crisis) leads those most isolated to a kind of mental illness, which essentially is delusions of power. What if they could get on top of the hierarchy of humanness? If they can only get to be among those guys who are valued, then they will have arrived. And oftentimes in their isolation, anger, and mental illness, they convince themselves that they kill people who they perceive to have done them damage.

They’ll get on top of the hierarchy by believing their actions say, ‘I’m powerful and you’re not.’ So, in their mental illness, they convince themselves that this violence will get them on top of the hierarchy.

CNN: You brought up this idea of the hierarchy of humanness. How does this work with the isolated loner who commits these senseless acts of violence?

Prof: They’re (the mass shooters are) putting themselves on top of the hierarchy by flipping it and by putting who they perceive to be on the bottom. Nobody wants to be on the bottom. Whether you’re poor, White, or a person of color, I don’t care what your identity is: Nobody wants to be on the bottom. Many mass shooters believe they live in a culture that doesn’t value them or have those relationships, and it potentially leads to mental illness and then to violence.

It’s an unreal sense of reality that they can get on top through violence. We have a crisis of connection (and of disconnection from the self), and one of the symptoms is a mental health crisis. The crisis of connection is fundamentally caused by boy culture that privileges the hard over the soft, over feeling, over stoicism, over vulnerability, autonomy, over connectedness, when in fact we need both sides of our humanity to survive.

But secondly, the hierarchy is about being hard over soft and not caring and not listening and not valuing friendships and not doing anything when boys aren’t having good friendships and just ignoring it and saying it’s irrelevant.

CNN: Is there any sort of solution that we, as a society, can begin implementing?

Prof: It’s a matter of creating a culture that aligns with our nature and our needs. Sensitivity and stoicism work together. We have to recognize the culture in which we swim. We have to recognize that we’re doing it to ourselves. It’s not someone’s fault. It’s the culture that we have created together. But the point is, is that we’re all perpetuating this culture that’s getting in the way.

Next, we have gendered and sexualized what is simply human. We have gendered thinking and feeling. So, thinking as masculine and feeling as feminine, stoicism as masculine and vulnerability as feminine. We have gendered what is fundamentally human.

We have the capacity to listen with curiosity — What can I learn about you from you? But also what can I learn about me from you? — and so to look at each other with wonder… This natural relational intelligence is in some ways the root of cultural change. And once we begin to do that (actively listen with curiosity to each other), we begin to see ourselves better, and we begin to see each other better outside of a set of damaging stereotypes. We begin to see our common humanity, not just our similarities but our differences, and we start to see people as we see ourselves.