In our world, it takes almost nothing to see male toxicity everywhere we gaze. From the sexual abuse against women that came to light during the #MeToo movement, to the pedophile priests preying on parishioners, to the Proud Boys and insurgents that assaulted the capital to install fascism…it abounds. As a boy, I grew up saturated in a cultural mindset that only, as a man, I can recognize as both passively and actively toxic, the breadth and length of which staggers me. I have to wonder how I have been affected and infected by the toxicity and whether my behaviors themselves are toxic in reaction.
Father’s Culture
I grew up in a Catholic, middle-class household with a father who exhibited moody behavior (at best) and outright emotional violence (at worst). A lot of the details of this I described in a previous post, so I don’t want to languish in that description again. Suffice to say that my father exhibited a lot of toxic behaviors that I watched happen and reacted against to my long-term detriment.
When I say that my father had a lot of personal power, I mean that the sheer force of his personality dominated our household and we lived or died based on his moods. The fact that his moods were often negative and, seemingly, uncontrollable even by himself only made our shifting to accommodate him all the more confounding and random. We were forced to do so because his personal power washed out of him like a fiery tidal wave at the slightest provocations.
As I grew up, I began to realize that I had inherited this…ability…this “force of personality.” Because I had been the victim of his, I rejected my own under the rubrik of “not turning out like my father.” Yet, this rejection of an essential ability in my personality — this ability to organize activities and bring order to things with logical thought; this ability for my voice to be heard and heeded above the voices of others; this sheer ability to lead — lead me toward a submissive place. My father had modelled this ability in such a toxic manner that I sought instead to divest myself of all of my power and into a role of submission, even BDSM-based slavery.
Alas, such a role never fit and never came to fruition because, like it or not, the force of my personality would not be cowed or bound into it. Constantly striving to rid myself of an essential part of myself and constantly failing, only drove me deeper into the attempts.
Toxic Me
Self-denial must be one of the most cardinal of Luciferian sins. Failure to see the truth of ourselves short-circuits our paths toward ascension and failure to accept our own abilities sows the seeds of our failure on a magical level.
When my father’s emotional negativity cowed me, it taught me to hide the force of my own personality so that it would never conflict with his. I modeled this behavior to my primary male authority, which then carried over to nearly every other male authority I encountered. Even when my father no longer quite mattered in my life as an authority figured, I transplanted the behavior to every boss I ever had, every male spiritual advisor to whom I listened, and to every sexual partner I tried to please. All of my behavior was designed to present myself as non-threatening, non-confrontational, and ultimately, less-than.
Yet, my personal power could not be silent while this lessening took place as the lessoning itself conflicted with the truth of it’s force, the fact it existed. The dissonance between knowing how to lead, seeing the value in things other did not understand, being smarter than some people, and still acting as if I didn’t do any of this transmuted into misplaced rage.
Having adopted a submissive attitude toward myself to protect myself from my toxic father generated toxicity in me that I then expressed the way I had seen my father model his own negativity…rage, brooding resentment, and depression.
Realizing this transmutation staggers me. I’ve spent the last several weeks absorbing these facts and being unable to deny my way out of them. In working to not be my father, I had become him for a long time.
This is how masculine toxicity is passed from father to son; I had no doubt that my father had been the victim of it himself from my grandfather. The details would have been different, of course, as my father grew up poor in backwater Louisiana and I grew up middle class in suburban South Carolina, but the transfer itself had to be the same.
Leveling Up
It would be awesome if I could definitely say that I am non-toxic now. Of course, I strive to be. But having only recently understood the true vectors of how the toxicity transferred into me, I can’t say I have disinfected totally. I am sure I have not.
I have a temper. I have destroyed objects in my anger the way my father chopped a thin metal shed to bits with a hatchet. I have snapped at people and been rude to people and suffered my rage at them for stupid, non-consequential reasons. These are toxic behaviors that are easy to spot and honestly, easier than most to deprogram.
But, I also take my failures to heart such that I short circuit my faith, derail my spiritual development, and doubt my experiences. I am quick to feel stupid and delusional when I perceive I have failed an authority figure.
I have set up spiritual powers as authority figures in the first place, so that I could be controlled by them, make pacts with them that I cannot keep, so that I could fail them and be punished. I do this because my worldview doesn’t work without someone to command or control me. This is another expression of how I default to submissiveness when confronted with an authority, as if I need to be protected from them.
Theistic Luciferianism works for me because it deprograms these behaviors. In fact, I can credit my recent breakthroughs in therapy and this idea of levelling up our of the toxicity directly to my Luciferianism. My faith teaches me that I am powerful as I am, that I should strive to improve, and that I should submit to no one.
I am taught that, whatever strength of personality I have, whatever traits of personality I have, that I am meant to have. I am meant to make the most of them. I am meant to constantly improve them. This means becoming stronger, not weaker. This means exercising my power, not hiding it because I’m afraid. This means trusting it to protect me against other people’s power because it can and does every day.
Seeing a fact as a fact — as the fact itself, unembellished by arrogance, unencumbered by fear — is an act of humility. Who am I to deny I am strong, if, in fact, I am strong? How ridiculous it seems to not just accept the truth of myself: I have strength, I have skills, I am worthy as I am? How an abrogation of Lucifer’s teaching us to aspire greater would it be to diminish myself below what I am currently capable of achieving?
My father is not me. I am not my father. Spiritually, we are light years apart. As he descends quietly into the social conservative, Republican party madness that encompassed by Fox News’ talking points, I strive to know myself and act for what I believe without fear and ignorance. Where he hides behind his toxic manly “duty” imprinted on him by his conservative Catholic upbringing, I embrace the opposite and shrug off any religion’s attempts to control my behavior. My father plays a role. I choose myself.
Even so, threads of toxicity run through my mental framework and it will take much time and effort to extract these threads and deprogram them. I don’t paint myself as perfect, only working toward progress.
