> a huge part of it was just a fundamental misread
I think you are on to something in the first part about you yourself learning stuff but in the last part you just put the burden of those around you.
My take is that men in general lack training in identifying/naming their own feelings/emotions. Then when you are experiencing some tough negative emotions you can't express/talk about them and then your secondary emotions come in from this frustration. What emotion that is is personal but often men will go to anger, "it's think it's this thing that is causing me pain so that thing is bad/stupid/wrong" but all along it was your own feelings coming from your own unmet needs that you could have handled yourself if you just had could have named and reasoned about them.
An example of an action I took that one person considered "aggressive" and "abusive": There were three couches, shaped in a U configuration. Ex and friends were sitting on one couch. Someone else invited me over to sit on another couch. I came over, sat quietly for about 60 seocnds, decided, you know, I'd rather be somewhere else, and walked away.
This isn't to say I bear no responsibility in how things played out, but the bits I'm disclosing here, even in context, are wild misunderstandings, and when I explained myself I was met with distrust and suspicion. We were in a rental cabin; physical proximity was unavoidable. It wasn't even clearly distressing to my ex, just her white knight friend.
I think this line that anger is an acceptable emotion for men to express is out of line with reality; it's certainly out of line with my lived experience. Anger expressed by men is punished, sometimes exorbitantly.
Basically you have to learn to express emotions in the right way, and to the right people, at the right time. I had to train my therapist girlfriend not to freak out when I have strong, negative feelings. She would constantly make it about herself (I’m not doing enough, you’re not acknowledging what good I’m doing). There was very limited space for simply expressing how I was feeling, and having it acknowledged without being punished.
You also just can’t expect most people to be skillful listeners, or give good advice. Even if they want to help, you need some pretty darn well developed theory of mind to conceptualize how the other person is feeling, and what would be useful for them to hear.
I’d also comment that you when men are stressed, it is often incorrectly read as anger, and thus threatening. I was in this terrible situation where I was in a vacation cabin rental with an ex and 20 other people- we’d broken like a week before. I was in anguish, but several people misread stonefaced non-emotion as anger and aggression. The fallout ended up being really immense, and a huge part of it was just a fundamental misread (combined with “all men are abusers and liars!” style distrust. It was real dumb.)