That's men for you Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's healthI must not feel good about myself. If I asked you to write that out a hundred times I think your response would be, well, robust. But it's a message which, I think, many of us have taken to heart.
From Roy Keane to Inspector Morse to those miserable misogynists in Taggart, the heroic male figure is often someone who, we can readily deduce, does not feel good about himself.
Look at those sound-bite interviews after Premiership matches. Have you ever heard anyone standing in front of the camera and saying, "I feel really good about myself and the team because we've had a fantastic victory"?
Not likely. Following a 3-0 victory, the winners stand there looking like men being led to their execution and yammering on about, "Yer, well, we missed a few chances out there today, yer know and we were lucky we got the three goals but we should have got three more blah blah blah." They're not even "over the moon", for heaven's sake.
It's just as bad in Gaelic games. "It was all down to the lads there, you know, but we don't want to get complacent, we're focusing on the next game right now."
Heaven forbid that any of them should actually feel good about themselves. This unwritten law against feeling good about ourselves turns up in the field of addictions as well.
We can all understand that people will reach for whatever they may be addicted to if they are feeling unhappy. But some alcoholics would also say that they experience a strong desire for a drink whenever something goes really well.
It's as if feeling good about themselves throws some men - perhaps many men - into a panic and something has to be done to get rid of the feeling quick. This attitude is partly historical. The whole notion of feeling good about yourself is quite recent.
Certainly I cannot remember such a thing being mentioned even once during my school years in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, if I recall my Christian doctrine classes correctly, any form of self-esteem would come under the heading of "pride" and pride was a sin.
What was wanted, and approved of, was "self-mortification" which includes self-denial, discomfort and generally giving yourself a hard time. If you want to get to heaven give yourself hell was the message.
Religion may have lost much of its authority and Christian doctrine classes may nowadays be bright and breezy affairs with such unfortunate things as hell and purgatory locked away in the cupboard, but the cultural taboo against feeling good about yourself persists.
It seems to me this is more often a problem for men than for women. Women go to personal development classes and they read magazine articles which encourage them to take care of their self-esteem. Men, by and large, do neither of these things.
Men can take pride in their work or their football team but not in themselves. Indeed, a man who feels good about himself and lets it show might be described as "a bit full of himself" and that's the polite way of putting it.
That's all a pity because you're stuck with yourself for the rest of your life and that life would be infinitely more enjoyable if you could tolerate feeling good about yourself. And for others it's much more fun to be around someone who feels good about himself than someone who doesn't.
So remove that taboo from your own mind by being aware that such a taboo exists. Usually, as you go through your day, you will sometimes feel good about yourself and sometimes bad.
Feelings are largely uncontrollable - that's why it isn't an offence to feel like killing someone, it's only an offence to do it - so good feelings as well as bad will come around.
The important thing is that when the good feelings come around, you needn't reach for a drink or a self-criticism with which to kill them. Enjoy them while you have them.
pomorain@irish-times.ie
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.