Prostate problems: emotional and spiritual meaning

What prostate problems are

The prostate is a small gland, sitting under the bladder, that belongs to the male reproductive system. It produces part of the fluid in semen. Because it wraps around the tube that carries urine, trouble there often shows up as trouble passing water.

The most common problem in later life is benign enlargement. The gland grows slowly and can weaken the stream, make you go more often, wake you at night, or leave you feeling that the bladder is not empty. Prostatitis is inflammation of the prostate. It can bring pain in the pelvis or genitals, urinary symptoms, and sometimes fever. It is not limited to older men. Prostate cancer is a separate disease. It often causes no symptoms at the beginning, and it cannot be read off from how you feel emotionally. Any of these pictures needs a doctor. The emotional reading is a complement, never a way of deciding what the gland is doing.

The emotional reading below does not replace this. It offers another layer, for those who feel that this part of the body also speaks about power, direction and what it means to be a man.

The emotional meaning of prostate problems

In the emotional approach, the prostate stands for masculine principle and masculine power. A prostate that is at ease is read as a man who knows where he is going, who listens to his inner voice, who lives his emotions and can let the overflow out, and who can be himself and in charge of his own life. The invitation, when that ease is missing, is to place authority back inside yourself, so that it guides your choices, rather than being carried along by values that are not really yours.

Power, sex and the fear of not being enough

The source links the prostate to a felt sense of social power and of sexual capacity. Because prostate trouble is more common as men get older, the questions it raises are often about that stage. Are you satisfied and at ease in your sexuality? Is there frustration, a sense of impotence, or confusion, including confusion about a wish for a younger partner, and the thought that it might be better to give all of that up?

From there, a harsh self-image can form. Useless. Ineffective. No longer a "real man." Not up to your children, or a bad father. No longer desirable. The source describes an intense fear of failing the sexual norms that society has set, and the pressure to perform that comes with them. The healing direction it offers is to stop measuring your value by sexual prowess, and to look instead at the human qualities you actually have.

There may also be a feeling of being poorly matched with a partner, especially sexually, as if the couple were an awkward mix. Creative impulses and emotions may be repressed. Erotic life may be refused, or love may stay platonic and never reach the body. If you do not know your own needs and desires, it is as if you were disconnected from yourself.

Bowing down

The source plays on words in French, hearing se prosterner, to bow down, inside prostate. The question is whether you feel obliged to kneel before someone, or even before the god you believe in, in a way that humiliates you. Masculine power, in this reading, is not domination. It is the right to stand up from the inside, rather than to live bent to an outer authority.

Work, retirement and the people you still want to protect

The pressure is not only sexual. It can be the pressure of things you must still do, or of things you no longer have to do. Retirement can bring a feeling of being vulnerable about money, and of being useless because you are much less "in action" than when you were in the thick of work. An enlargement of the gland is linked, in the source, with a great grief about a child, or with the impression of losing your power at work or in society.

There is also the question of children and grandchildren, or of any younger person you count as family. You may still see adult children as little and fragile. You may fear they are in danger, morally or physically, and want to go on being their protector, while feeling that you are kept from being close to them. Fear that something serious will happen to the people you love does not keep them safer. The source asks you to trust that they, too, are guided and protected from within.

A deeper note in the same entry concerns a loss of meaning, often when several important love relationships have failed, and often around retirement. Frustration and bitterness turn back against yourself. Confidence in your means, in your image as a father and as a man, has thinned. Creativity, and the right to happiness and enjoyment, feel cut off. This is an emotional picture. It is not an explanation of cancer, and it is not a way to prevent it. Cancer belongs with a doctor.

When the prostate is inflamed

Prostatitis, the inflammation, is read more sharply as disappointment and frustration. It may be about what a partner expects of your sexual performance, or about anger at yourself for not being more "virile," more "performing." You judge yourself old, finished, good for nothing. You may feel you cannot "possess" your partner. Value gets placed on material and superficial things, and emotions are cut off because they frighten you.

The invitation here is specific. Sexuality can change and evolve with time, and still be exciting and whole.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to blame yourself for a gland that changes with age, with inflammation or with disease. Those need medical care. The emotional perspective invites you to look at where your sense of being a man has been handed over to performance, to other people's values, or to a role you can no longer play in the same way.

• Put authority back inside. Ask what you actually choose, rather than what you feel you must bow to.
• Separate your worth from performance. Sexual capacity and output at work are not the measure of a man.
• Let emotions through. The source treats held-back feeling as part of the picture. Feeling them is how the overflow can leave.
• Enjoy with all your senses. Pleasure, in this reading, is not only sexual. Creativity and enjoyment belong to you.
• Loosen the protection. The people you love, including adult children, have their own guidance. Worry is not the same as love.
• Let sexuality change. If it has changed, it can still be whole. Grief about that change deserves kindness, not a verdict of being finished.