Have You Become Your Own Oppressor…

Most men weren’t taught how to talk.
Not really.
They weren’t taught to name their needs, how to express them clearly, or how to seek to have them met. Core human needs.

Instead, they were taught how to endure.
How to stay silent.
How to push down hurt.
How to wear strength like armour, even if it crushed them. Becoming oppressive rather than protective.

And so, many men became the oppressor of their own self. And oppression often creates a state of war, a war within.
They learned to police their emotions, to swallow disappointment, to tighten their jaw rather than open their mouth. They weren’t shown emotional safety. They weren’t given tools for regulation. They weren’t offered the possibility of self-forgiveness but instead taught to carry self-shame.

So they then carried a constant low hum of disconnection.
From others, yes.
But most painfully, from themselves.

Because when you grow up believing that silence equals strength, you eventually forget what your own voice sounds like. When you’re trained to endure instead of express, you end up tolerating loneliness, anger, and shame rather than transforming them. You confuse suppression with self-control. You confuse punishment with discipline.

This is how men end up living lives of quiet oppression, of self, locked in battles no one else can see. It’s not that they feel nothing—it’s that they feel everything, but without language or permission to release it.

Endurance isn’t evil in itself. There are moments in life when it’s necessary. But when endurance becomes your only strategy, it becomes a cage. You outlast instead of outgrow. You survive instead of thrive. You cope instead of connect.

And if you’ve been taught to always be your own oppressor, freedom feels almost dangerous. Expression feels like weakness. Asking for what you need feels like failure. They are yearned for but they come with a silent expectation that they won’t be heard. But none of that should be true.

Because real strength isn’t found in silence.
It’s found in honesty.
It’s found in the courage to say, “This is what I feel. This is what I need. This is where I hurt.”

Every man carries a story, often unspoken, about where he learned to stay quiet. Some were told directly—“man up,” “stop crying,” “don’t be soft.” Others absorbed it through the absence of example, watching fathers and grandfathers wordlessly endure, never realising that what they were really passing down was their wound. It’s worse still when we are taught it from our mothers, taught to be dysfunctional in our future relationships with a mother… of our own children. The next generation.

Wounds don’t heal through silence. They only fester there. And the cost of never learning emotional safety and expression is paid in fractured relationships, restless nights, a deep hunger for connection that remains unmet because it was never named, never taught.

You weren’t made to oppress yourself.
You were made to live fully, to connect deeply, to be more than a silent stoic… against your own humanity.

The shift begins when you start unlearning the lie that endurance is your only option. When you start recognising that the weight you’ve been carrying isn’t proof of strength, but evidence of what you’ve never been allowed to release.

Those mountains you are carrying, they’re not yours to carry. They were never yours to carry.

And once you see that, you can begin to lay them down.

This isn’t a call to perform vulnerability like a stunt.
It’s an invitation to be honest with yourself.
To stop being your own oppressor.
To learn the language of need.
To become the adult you didn’t have, but could be for yourself and others.

You were taught to endure.
You were not taught to speak.
That was a survival instruction, not a life plan. It’s no longer needed.

Learning to speak is not weakness. It’s a moral act, it’s self-care.
It takes courage to give yourself permission to feel, to ask, to forgive.
It’s the quiet rebellion that changes lives. For now, for you, for those that are yet to come...