Why Are So Many of Our Sons "Stone Boys?"

The title metaphor of my new book, The Stone Boys, represents a boy who must become as hard as stone to survive. Traumatized boys and men are especially prone to becoming hardened for many reasons, some neuro-biological and some psycho-sociological.

As I have shown elsewhere (e.g. Saving Our Sons), males often lack the extra female brain connectivity of the mid-brain emotive centers to executive decision-making centers in the top-front of the brain. Males do, however, have powerful access to features in the brain that compartmentalize, lateralize, cut the brain off from emotion, and keep the brain hardened until violent self-destruction. Males who are traumatized often become stone boys—hardened to excess.

But the stone boys metaphor provides more than just reference to hardness. A pebble, boulder, or mountain includes water at elemental levels. Inside a rock is a gradual transformation, sometimes glacial, into soft stream, river, and ocean. In my practice with boys and men, I say, “Healing from trauma involves equal parts stone and water.”

Healing does not require a boy or man to negate the hardness that has allowed him to survive and thrive post-trauma. This helps him channel his hurt and fear into doing good in the world, succeeding, working hard, protecting others, providing for others. We don’t want a traumatized male to give up the stoicism he has created, nor will he give it up easily, since it keeps him alive.

But without some softening of stone into water, this same boy or man will not fully heal. He will not fully enter the path to full personal redemption, the forgiveness of the abuser and forgiveness of himself. Without this gentleness returned to him, without his returned innocence, he will likely create troubles in his relationships.

Much is written about trauma’s effects on us. Of all the signs that a male is living in unhealed and unresolved trauma, I use the havoc he wreaks in relationships as perhaps the best signal of his trauma and internal distress. I will concentrate on it here in Part I of this series of blogs.

Because so much about trauma is available on ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) sites, I will not repeat it. I hope you will take the ACE survey for yourself and for someone you love right now, before reading on in this series of articles. The test only takes a few minutes.

Relational Signs of Unresolved Trauma

I have taken the ACEs test. A victim of child abuse, sexual abuse, significant bullying, and other trauma, I score a 7 on the ACEs test. I didn’t know about ACE when I was a teen, but for about a decade (16 to 26), I was in therapy consistently. Since my marriage to Gail at 28, I have been in therapy sporadically; for the last 30 years, though, I’ve been in a men’s support group consistently.

As I share the relational signs of trauma for you here, I share signs that are not just research-based but personal for me especially in my early adult years of relationship. If you or someone you love fit three or more of these signs, you may need to look carefully at past trauma as a cause.

1. Alienation. A boy or man who has unresolved trauma will often isolate himself, alienate himself from people who love him, and later be ashamed of the isolation, but so depressed, anxious, and locked into the dark corner he can’t get out, and can’t make his way back to other people.

2. Anger. Trauma survivors often lash out with a hair-trigger at simple little things that parents, friends, spouses, peers, or co-workers do, until everyone around him gradually isolate themselves from him to avoid his anger, which gives him back the very alienation we wish he did not feel.

3. Hyper-vigilance. He may live in hyper-vigilance and anxiety that gradually bleeds into his relationships, invading love of parents, then later, spouse and children, causing him to over-react and under-react, gradually erasing the trust others have in him that he will help them feel safe.

4. Excessive Blaming. Without tracking what he is doing, he may find ways to blame other people for his feelings of helplessness and self-blame, projecting his hatred of himself into hatred (or severe dislike, even xenophobia) on others who are different, weak, or even dominant.

5. Imposter Syndrome. He may feel like an imposter, never good enough, never adequate, never able to love and be loved in ways that have permanence; unable to fit anywhere, a feeling that may drive him to succeed in work or games, but deny him a strong self and the ability to fully love.

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6. Shame and Addiction. He may live in shame but not realize it until he sees how shame drives him into addictions, substance abuse, and/or other mental illness; his genes, like anyone’s, are set up for mental difficulties, however, without the trauma, the difficult genes might not get expressed. Because of the trauma, they do.

7. Sexual difficulties. Part of his difficulty with love will likely involve some difficulty with sex, even starting in adolescence—sexual addiction, porn addiction, promiscuity, erectile dysfunction, and sexual anxiety he may battle throughout life, unless he gets significant help.

8. Post-Traumatic Stress. He will likely show some exterior signals of PTS, e.g. difficulty sleeping, or suicidal thoughts and behavior, or self-harm (self-cutting, obsessions with body, body dysmorphia), or dissociative episodes that sometimes involve flashbacks but not always.

9. Gender Dysmorphia. He can also feel, especially as an adolescent and emerging adult, significant confusion about his own sexuality, including gender dysmorphia, uncertain homosexuality, and/or hyper-masculine or negative masculine extremes in self-image.

10. Faking it. In all these possibilities, the people who are relating to him, the people hoping he will “get better” will be met, often, by his hardness. At a certain point, met only with the stone exterior and nothing else, they may give up on him. They may, also, be deceived by him as he pretends to be doing what his spouse or therapist wants, perhaps crying when he is supposed to, confessing what he is supposed to confess, but returning, when alone, to his isolation, obsession, or addiction.

The Brain and Trauma

The two crucial first steps we must take in living with, counseling, and helping traumatized boys and men involve observation and assumption. I follow these in my counseling practice, and each was helpful to me as counselors and mentors helped me in my own healing from trauma.

Step 1: Observe the symptoms I’ve listed above in the person’s life, self-portrayal, or portrayal by those who love him. In working with a traumatized person—in being fully trauma-informed in my counseling—talk with not just the boy or man in therapy, but the people who love him so you can get their observations. If you give them the 10 signs in this blog, they can use those in a journal or observation document.

Step 2. Assume the brain has been re-wired. The human brain, while naturally resilient, is fragile in the face of prolonged trauma because trauma “re-wires” the brain via cortisol (stress hormone) increase. The rise in cortisol is accompanied by rises or drops in testosterone, oxytocin, vasopressin, and many other hormones—as neurochemistry floods and spasms, areas of brain development get missed and other areas amplified.

Pathways important for easy and fluid relationships—pathways between the limbic system and frontal lobe (prefrontal, orbitofrontal)—may not get the development they need during trauma. The boy becomes “adult” chronologically, but is set up to have feelings, emotions, angers, hatreds, fears, risk-urges, impulses, and other experiences in the amygdala (aggression, anger, fight or flight center) that do not get fully vetted by the executive parts of the brain. The diminished linkage can lead to errors throughout life, especially in relationships.

This is the primary reason that males who have been traumatized are more likely than similar females to physically hurt and kill others. Even in utero, the female brain connects the mid-brain to the top of the brain (feeling to thinking) while already in utero the male brain is behind in these connections. Throughout the lifespan, female fail-safes for executive decision-making and impulse control outshine males. Trauma can exacerbate all of this.

If pre-frontal connectivity (executive function) is key to helping traumatized boys and men, how do you increase the linkage after a male is adolescent or already grown?

I will explore this further in Part II.