When I sit with the boys at the juvenile center, I’m reminded of something we rarely say out loud: our society still raises men for a world that no longer exists.
For much of human history, that expectation made sense. Men were trained like knights to endure violence, suppress fear, and function under constant threat. Armor wasn’t symbolic, it was survival equipment. Emotional restraint wasn’t repression, it was necessary. In a world shaped by war, scarcity, and physical danger, softness could cost lives.
Even now, long after that world has evolved, the training remains.
These boys are young, yet they already understand the emotional choreography expected of them. Don’t break or flinch, don’t cry or confess. Their bodies are still growing, but their emotional armor is already welded on.
And here’s the pattern I’ve noticed over and over:
beneath the anger, beneath the impulsivity, beneath the emotional dysregulation, there’s a deeper struggle they carry. They don’t know how to trust. Not authority, not their therapists, and certainly not each other.
Of course they don’t. Most of them come from homes where trust wasn’t nurtured, it was violated. Homes where the adults who were supposed to protect them were the ones who caused the injuries of abuse, neglect, and unpredictability. Trust becomes a luxury they were never taught to afford.
Inside those juvie walls, it becomes even clearer. You see it in the smallest interactions. They’ll be laughing, joking around, and then suddenly one word, one touch, one misread signal and a switch flips. The playfulness dissolves into defensiveness with each other, sometimes into aggression. It’s not immaturity but survival logic. They are always triangulating risk and always wondering who will hurt them next.
Other times, it comes out in words like…
“I can’t trust anyone in here.”
“Nobody here is looking out for me.”
And they’re not completely wrong. But here’s the tragedy: the moment they stop trusting, they reinforce the very isolation that shaped them. The system is designed this way. It’s punitive, built to punish, isolate, and discipline. All the methods that create MORE armor, not less. Everything opposite to what healing would require. That’s a much bigger conversation about our juvenile justice system and the emotional illiteracy inside it, and one we can explore another day.
And then these boys grow up into men we expect to be emotionally available, communicate openly, and operate with relational intelligence. But HOW? When exactly were they supposed to learn that?
As a woman who has built her own protective layers, I won’t pretend to know the exact reality of a man’s internal burdens, but I do know what armor feels like. I know how it allows you to survive environments and I know how eventually, that same armor becomes the obstacle that blocks connection.
The contract of Strength
Every man, regardless of background, inherits a silent contract of strength. He’s expected to be the anchor, provider, the stabilizer. But this expectation isn’t limited to men with emotional dysregulation or anger issues. It extends to the ones who function smoothly on the outside, the emotionally regulated, steady, reliable men who hold entire households and much of society together.
And we need to think about them too.
Not all men respond to this conditioning with collapse or volatility. Some respond by becoming exceptionally contained. They’re the men who move through their days carrying responsibility, financial, emotional, protective and still feel they can’t fall apart in front of the people they love. Not because others aren’t carrying weight too but because they were taught that steadiness is their role. For them, armor isn’t reactive, it’s a full time job.
How painful must that be?
How exhausting is it to be the stabilizing force for everyone while having nowhere to place your own fears or doubts?
And maybe this is where a metaphor from my world fits. In power generation, like with diesel generators, we work with load management. A generator can handle heavy load, it’s designed for it. But running it at full capacity isn’t a measure of its strength, it’s a shortcut to failure. Even the most resilient machines need intervals of lighter load to recalibrate, cool and stabilize. Otherwise, the wear becomes invisible until the failure is critical.
Even the strongest systems degrade when their only role is bearing load without any discharge.
And that’s the real contradiction we’ve built:
We want more emotionally available men, but we maintain a world that doesn’t give them safe channels to be human. We want men who listen, connect, and feel, but we ridicule, diminish, or invalidate them when it doesn’t match what we’re comfortable with. We expect vulnerability but punish it when it arrives unpolished.
Unarmoring men isn’t about demanding they be softer.
It’s about creating spaces where softness is safe. It’s about becoming people who can witness a man’s emotional truth without panic or judgment.
That leads me to the hardest question of all:
If men dropped the armor tomorrow, would society know how to respond?
Would we embrace their full humanity, or would we push them back into the only version we understand?
Unarmoring is not a gendered task, but a collective one. It requires recalibrating the emotional culture we expect men to fit into. It requires giving boys space and tools for trust, connection, and expression, not punishment, performance, and silence.
If we want more gentle men, we have to become a world that doesn’t punish gentleness and if we want men to unarmor, we have to stop pretending they chose the armor freely in the first place.
The real question is no longer whether men are ready to evolve.
It’s whether we can meet them with less control by listening longer, intervening less, and allowing emotional honesty to stand on its own.
prismlab.blog 
Leave a comment