Things get messy when you’ve got all these other guys wandering around with you, experiencing their own version of the wilderness, complete with beliefs, perceptions and baggage totally different from yours. Who are they to you and why does it matter?

We’re Playing Out a Drama

For good or bad, our sense of value and belonging is instilled by our parents, teachers and other caregivers, as well as by society.

You learned early on how others perceive you, including the ways you fell short. That meant you learned what got you love, approval, and acceptance, as well what got disapproval and rejection.

In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz shares how these early learnings became “agreements” in our belief system:

“Children believe everything adults say. We agree with them, and our faith is so strong that the belief system controls our whole dream of life…The result is surrender to the beliefs with our agreement.” (The Four Agreements, p. 5)

If your parents weren’t able to see or understand you for who you were, you got their love conditionally, and with a message: “you need to change something about yourself in order to be okay in my eyes.”

The need to be and feel okay in the eyes of the people you esteem, the groups you want to belong to, the men you want to love you, it all becomes part of the drama you play out.

The degree to which you feel you belong, feel understood and feel loved fuels the intensity of the drama.

The Roles We Play

In When the Past Is Present — Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships, David Richo describes what happens when we’re trying to work out this need to be okay:

“Though most of us want to move on from the past, we tend to go through our lives simply casting new people in the roles of key people, such as our parents or any significant person with whom there is still unfinished business.” (When the Past Is Present, p. 1)

A lot of us as gay men have our fair share of childhood baggage.

When you come out, you’re coming into a community of men who may be broken from trauma, abuse, abandonment, rejection, bullying, or social ostracization.

• The guy you’re chatting with on Scruff or Grinder becomes the dad who abandoned you.
• The gay clique that ignores you becomes the popular kids in school who made you feel inferior.
• The partner who gets on you about keeping the house clean is the mom who nagged your dad to the point of them divorcing.

That’s a lot of “unfinished business.”

Richo goes on to share:

“Anyone who becomes deeply important to us is, by that very fact, replaying a crucial role from our own past. In fact, this is how people become important to us…We make them stars of our dramas. We don’t call them ‘stars.’ We might instead call them ‘soul mates’ or ‘archenemies.” (p. 3)

Tony Robbins describes how peoples’ perceptions of us (whether true or false) often dictate the way they act toward us. Their assessment is strong enough to pull us back into the drama:

“The kind of person other people perceive you to be controls their responses to you. Often this has nothing to do with your true character…we often allow others in our environment who have not changed their image of us to anchor our own emotions and beliefs back into our old behaviors and identities.”
(Awaken the Giant Within, p. 414)

Our Personal Narrative

So many of us are locked in this kind of drama without even realizing it:

• Unable to commit to a date, let alone a relationship.
• Breaking up and getting together again (and again and again).
• Going from one abusive relationship to another.
• Constantly picking fights with friends, husbands, partners.
• Running away from boyfriends whenever they express a need.
• Acting dodgy, fickle, indecisive, passive-aggressive, raging, victimized.

It’s like you’re hypnotized, unconsciously following an ancient script laid out in childhood.

“…we can piece together our childhood history from the crypt of our unconscious. We do this by observing our needs and expectations in relationship and the partners we choose or keep choosing.” (When the Past is Present, p. 13)

At the root of it is a need for love, acceptance, nurture, and belonging, but at the same time the rules of conditional love are still in full force.

Feeling like this can cloud your judgement and good sense. You make decisions counter to what you really want because you’re constantly trying to make yourself worthy of love.

What happens when you feel like you’re not enough, when who you are never stacks up to others’ expectations (even your own)?

You feel like you don’t belong. You feel lonely. You feel inferior.

“The Victim carries the blame, the guilt, and the shame. It is the part of us that says, ‘Poor me, I’m not good enough, I’m not intelligent enough, I’m not attractive enough, I’m not worthy of love, poor me.‘” (The Four Agreements, p. 10)

The narrative still drives you to get your needs met. You seek out ways to make the pain of feeling isolated and alone go away:

• You drink to “bond” with others until one day drinking is all you do.
• You turn to party drugs or harder substances to calm the anxiety of connecting.
• You hookup night after night to soften the lonely, gnawing feeling.
• You work out like a fiend to have the perfect body that no one could ever turn away.
• You’ll binge, spend, scroll, and go from date to date to avoid the emptiness inside.

What’s happening is that you’re trying to take care of yourself, to address the needs, but it ends up making you hate yourself and feel even less worthy.

Your internal belief system, the same one instilled by your parents, becomes what Don Miguel Ruiz calls a “Book of Law.”

“The inner Judge uses what is in our Book of Law to judge everything we do and don’t do, everything we think and don’t think and everything we feel and don’t feel…Every time we do something that goes against the Book of Law, the Judge says we are guilty, we need to be punished, we should be ashamed.“ (The Four Agreements, p. 9-10)

When You’re Not Enough

Psychologist and Buddhist meditation specialist, Tara Brach, calls this “the abyss that locks us in suffering.”

She says it’s like being shot by two arrows. The first arrow is the painful feeling (loneliness, anxiety, etc.). The second one is the self-hatred and blame for having the feeling in the first place (the inner “Judge”).

This turns into a vicious cycle that only makes you feel even more isolated:

“With that fear of being punished and that fear of not getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else…The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough.“ (The Four Agreements, p 7)

When You’re a Threat

When you’ve got a lot of guys struggling with not being enough, it starts feeling like there just isn’t enough to go around.

Insecurity, envy and jealousy grow, fueling resentment, bitterness and the need to mark your turf.

• If I’m nice to you, it’s treated with suspicion. What’s the catch? You must want something from me.
• If I invite me into to my group or introduce you to my boyfriend or partner or husband, you might take him away from me.
• Compliments are off the table because you’re my competition. There isn’t enough to go around. I must diminish you to make myself look better.

When you’re dealing with people carrying the baggage of childhood or adult trauma, meaningful connections and relationships become very difficult.

Everyone is living their own version of the drama, with their own “Book of Law” binding them to various behaviors and coping mechanisms.

Trying to Fix Ourselves

This is why coming out felt like such a rude awakening to me. Here I thought I could finally be myself. I could be with other guys who knew what it was like to be gay.

The warm welcome I expected felt more like “every man for himself.”

My expectations were based on the dreams and hopes of fulfilling what I missed as a kid: love, acceptance, non-judgement, camaraderie. In short, a sense of belonging.

However, the place I thought I was looking for was built out of the narrative running in my head.

Everyone is working out something.

In our attempt to fix what was broken in our past, we use people and things in the present who couldn’t possibly begin to undo the damage.

We want a boyfriend to make us feel secure. Or an entourage to make us feel seen. Or the perfect body to make us feel validated.

We’re still following the rules laid out in our Book of Law.

Know Yourself, See Others, Find Your Place

Authenticity requires self-examination, which is frightening for a lot of gay men.

In fact, being around anyone who is authentic, vulnerable, and comfortable with themselves can feel threatening to someone who has erected walls of self-protection.

Finding your place comes full circle when you are able to see yourself clearly, flaws and all, yet still hold yourself with kindness, compassion and love.

When you take care of yourself this way, you learn that you don’t have to show up perfectly for others, presenting them with a façade in order to manipulate them into loving or accepting you.

Knowing yourself means you have an ability to ask yourself a new question: am I looking at you through the lens of the pain of my past? Or, am I seeing you clearly through the lens of the present moment, the one that we’re sharing right now?

Developing this kind of awareness takes time and practice.

When you accept yourself, you’re able to stop trying to be someone else to be okay in their eyes.

When you’re okay with yourself, the desperation of your need, and all the coping mechanisms that go along with it, begins to lessen.

You become the place you’ve been looking for first and foremost. When you’re at home with yourself, others find it easier to be at home with you.

---

Disclaimer: The information and perspectives shared in my posts, articles, and videos are based on my personal experiences and reflections. I am not a licensed therapist, counselor, or medical professional, and this content should not be considered a substitute for professional advice. If you are experiencing distress, depression, or mental health challenges, please reach out to a qualified professional who can provide the help you need. For immediate support, contact a mental health provider or, if you are in crisis, please call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 (available in the U.S.) or your local emergency number.