I don’t want to talk about it - by Terrence Real
Published:
I don’t want to talk about it - by Terrence Real
Read: 2024-08-10
Recommend: 10/10
I found this book through Outlive by Peter Attia. It is surprisingly well-written, featuring a mix of conversations with his clients and reflections on his own upbringing. The book provides an inspiring perspective on workaholism, framing it as a form of addiction, self-medication, and depression. It also offers insightful commentary on how gender differences are socially constructed.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
One of the ironies about men’s depression is that the very forces that help create it keep us from seeing it. Men are not supposed to be vulnerable. Pain is something we are to rise above. He who has been brought down by it will most likely see himself as shameful, and so, too, may his family and friends, even the mental health profession. Yet I believe it is this secret pain that lies at the heart of many of the difficulties in men’s lives.
Hidden depression drives several of the problems we think of as typically male: physical illness, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, failures in intimacy, self-sabotage in careers.
We tend not to recognize depression in men because the disorder itself is seen as unmanly. Depression carries, to many, a double stain—the stigma of mental illness and also the stigma of “feminine” emotionality. Those in a relationship with a depressed man are themselves often faced with a painful dilemma. They can either confront his condition—which may further shame him—or else collude with him in minimizing it, a course that offers no hope for relief. Depression in men—a condition experienced as both shame-filled and shameful—goes largely unacknowledged and unrecognized both by the men who suffer and by those who surround them. And yet, the impact of this hidden condition is enormous.
Boys, and later men, tend to externalize pain; they are more likely to feel victimized by others and to discharge distress through action. Hospitalized male psychiatric patients far outnumber female patients in their rate of violent incidents; women outnumber men in self-mutilation. In mild and severe forms, externalizing in men and internalizing in women represent troubling tendencies in both sexes, inhibiting the capacity of each for true relatedness. A depressed woman’s internalization of pain weakens her and hampers her capacity for direct communication. A depressed man’s tendency to extrude pain often does more than simply impede his capacity for intimacy. It may render him psychologically dangerous. Too often, the wounded boy grows up to become a wounding man, inflicting upon those closest to him the very distress he refuses to acknowledge within himself. Depression in men, unless it is dealt with, tends to be passed along. That was the case with my father and me. And that was the situation facing David Ingles and his family when we first met.
Addictive choices like hustling or stalking are easy to spot because they are socially condemned and potentially life threatening. Other addictive choices, like workaholism for men or obsessive weight reduction for women, are less obvious because they are not only tolerated by our culture but often actively rewarded. Even the language of addiction in such instances can seem overblown and easy to dismiss. But the persistence of any behavior in the face of known harmful consequences qualifies as an addiction. Just because a supplement for self-esteem is socially rewarded does not mean that it will not have disastrous consequences for the individual who relies on it.
In covert depression, the defense or addiction always pulls the man from “less than” to “better than”—rather than to a moderate sense of inherent value. Defensive compensations for underlying depression can never move one directly from shame to healthy self-esteem, because such a shift requires confrontation with, rather than avoidance of, one’s own feelings. The covertly depressed person cannot merely vault over the avoided pain directly into wholeness, as hard as he may try. The only real cure for covert depression is overt depression. Not until the man has stopped running, as David did for a moment that day in my office, or Thomas did when he let himself cry, can he grapple with the pain that has driven his behavior. This is why the “fix” of the compulsive defense never quite works. First, the covertly depressed man must walk through the fire from which he has run. He must allow the pain to surface. Then, he may resolve his hidden depression by learning about self-care and healthy esteem.
Not wanting to struggle over semantics, I told Damien that while we need not fuss about whether or not he was “an addict” per se, I strongly believed that his relationship to sex and to sexual energy was addictive. He used sex to soothe himself and, in essence, to medicate bad feelings.
Like many adults with abuse histories, Damien’s behavior—insistent sex—both soothed and, in masked form, replayed his trauma.
These boys were replaying the wound, and in a sadly convoluted way, they were comforting one another. There is something dreadful and touching about this story. By carrying on the abuse with one another, the boys were trying to normalize it, to share the burden. One wonders if a similar impulse may in part lie behind the universal brutality of boy’s initiation rites into manhood. Perhaps the male community’s tradition of “welcoming” a boy into its midst by hurting him is not just a test to prove the boy tough enough to be worthy of joining. Perhaps it is also a demonstration, a need to communicate the men’s own sense of woundedness, a ritual dramatization of how much pain they all carry inside.
Men make up close to 93 percent of the prison population, leading one “Men’s Movement” leader to quip that the largest men’s gathering in the United States is San Quentin.
Research on the biology of trauma is beginning to teach us that even apparently mild childhood injuries can produce lasting physiological change. But the harmful effects of trauma often go unrecognized. As a culture historically dominated by male values, we have always tended, and still tend, to deny vulnerability, and consequently, to deny the existence of trauma. Sigmund Freud was the first psychotherapist on record to document patients’ reports of childhood trauma and sexual abuse. In one of the most famous mistakes of the twentieth century, Freud decided that his female patients, often daughters of friends and colleagues, were lying. Freud states flatly that his mind would not accept the idea that the decent men he knew could do the things these young women reported. Consequently, he did what most of us have done throughout history when faced with trauma survivors: he disbelieved and blamed them.
Good parenting requires three elements: nurturing, limit setting, and guidance. A parent who is too absorbed to supply any one of these neglects the legitimate needs of the child.
Believing it a part of his paternal responsibility, my father was no stranger to the manly value of whipping his boys into line. He whipped my brother and me if we dared to rebel. And, conversely, he whipped us if we showed too much vulnerability. Mostly, he whipped us as a proper man should, to keep us corralled and teach us our lessons. For my father, as was true of many men of his generation, pain was a form of pedagogy.
Despite Freud’s talk about castrating fathers, it is the emasculating mother who looms larger than life in our culture’s imagination. The assumption in all this is that women in general and mothers in particular can “feminize” a male, robbing him of his masculinity. It takes other men—fathers, mentors, the tribe—to loosen the apron strings. Manly men, Iron Johns, must flank and encircle, protecting their own.
The intensification of muted feelings can be achieved not just by using drugs but also by using action, by throwing oneself into crisis situations. Risk taking, gambling, infatuation, and rage all trigger our bodies’ “fight or flight” response, releasing both endorphins, the body’s opioids, and adrenal secretions, the body’s natural stimulants. The body’s capacity to release internal medicators when under stress has led researcher Bessel van der Kolk to write about what he calls “ addiction to trauma.” Noting the high prevalence of crisis in the lives of people who have histories of trauma, he hypothesizes that some may seek intensity to “self-medicate” internal pain not by reaching for an external stimulant, but by throwing themselves into extreme states of physiological hyperarousal. Trauma survivors may develop dependency on the release of their body’s own “drugs.” Van der Kolk’s research points the way toward an understanding of the physiological basis for those defenses used in covert depression that rely on behaviors rather than substances.
Now in his early sixties, after a lifetime of hard work, in glorious good health, with more money than he knew what to do with, Frank found himself with six wonderful children, three grandchildren, and a beautiful wife—all of whom thoroughly despised him. For many years, Frank’s business had taken him “on the road” between 50 and 80 percent of his time, and this proved a dangerous place for a guy who was wealthy and good-looking and “just didn’t like spending time alone.” Frank filled his travels with a succession of young women, all of whom he treated well, most of whom he genuinely cared for. Frank believed that, in comparison to his heartless exploitative colleagues, he was a sexually sensitive guy.
I considered Frank a workaholic, but he felt pathologized by that label. In his own eyes, he had done what it takes to become a self-made millionaire. I considered Frank’s relationship to sex addictive, but Frank thought this hopelessly naive. Every businessman he knew had “a little action on the side now and then.” I saw Frank as covertly depressed, still carrying injuries from childhood. He saw me as a “bleeding heart liberal” who wouldn’t rest until I’d turned him into Alan Alda or some other version of a “sensitive nineties sniveler.” Frank had a ready answer for all of my concerns, but the fact remained that this “normal” man had spent his life working most of the time, cheating on his wife, and barely communicating with anyone about anything beyond mundane logistics. He adored his two daughters and criticized his four sons, but only from a distance. Hearing Frank and Dana’s description of the extreme emotional disengagement that had existed between them for so many years, I immediately suspected some form of addiction. Humans can rarely tolerate such levels of detachment for long; it is just too lonely. In a marriage as consistently distant as theirs, there is usually a “third leg of the triangle”—booze, work, an affair—that augments an insufferably empty relationship. Many covertly depressed men, unwilling to face the vulnerability of their own hidden pain, and unable to be intimate with their own hearts, cannot face intimacy with anyone else.
Just as for many depressed women recovery is inextricably linked to shedding the traces of oppression and finding empowerment, for many depressed men, recovery is linked to opposing the force of disconnection, and reentering the world of relationship—to the “feminine,” to themselves, and to others. Frank, by remembering himself as a boy and by surfacing the unfinished conversation with his ruined father, reached out in one moment to that father, to his long-dead brother, to his wife, and to his son Steven. I sometimes tell the depressed men I work with that recovery requires dragging them back into the relational —often kicking and screaming, initially. A man cannot recover from either overt or covert depression and remain emotionally numb at the same time; he cannot be related and walled off simultaneously; he cannot be intimate with others before establishing intimate terms with his own heart.
No matter how “up” a man may be today, there is always tomorrow. There is always someone younger, faster, smarter crowding the wings. We raise boys to live in a world in which they are either winners or losers, grandiose or shame filled, or, in the most extreme cases, such as life in some prisons or combat situations, either perpetrators or victims, the rapist or the raped. “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail,” Paul Simon sings.
And the cost they must pay for their glory is high. Just how tough does one have to be? Football star Dave Meggyesy answered the claim that athletics “builds boys” in the following way: Young men are having their bodies destroyed, not developed. As a matter of fact, few players can escape from college football without some form of permanent disability. During my four years I accumulated a broken wrist, separations of both shoulders, an ankle that was torn up so badly that it broke the arch of my foot, three major brain concussions, and an arm that almost had to be amputated. . . . And I was one of the lucky ones.
A recent survey reveals that 78 percent of professional football players retire with permanent disabilities, and their average life expectancy is only fifty-six years. There are sports less physically damaging than football, certainly, but there are also sports that do even more harm, like boxing, the most unalloyed form of aggression as entertainment. An estimated 60 to 87 percent of boxers retire with chronic brain damage, an effect alarming enough to convince the American Medical Association to demand that the sport be abolished.
The lesson many young athletes learn is just a different incarnation of the lesson Frank Riorden learned, the lesson most boys learn in our culture—turn your back on your own needs and vulnerabilities and you become special. Refuse to shoulder that burden and you are less than a man.
when playing means winning and winning means dominating, when sex becomes “knocking them over,” and other people become “common, petty sons-of-bitches.” Glory, perhaps, for a moment. But warmth, richness, humanity? Not much. Nevertheless, if winning is lonely, losing is worse.
Even though I felt bad for Eddie, I had already learned to despise him, despise his pimples and his ugliness, his weakness so close to those parts of myself that I had grown wise enough to conceal.
The need to save one’s own insecure place in the circle of manhood by participating in oppression, or at the least in remaining silent, while the weak fail is one of the principal dilemmas for boys. Fear of losing membership in the clan of winners often costs boys their capacity for compassion. “Do it to her or we’ll do it to you,” threatens the sergeant, only a teen himself, to Private Ericksson, in the film Casualties of War.
Boys learn that the game requires fierce loyalty to those on the inside of the circle. But the outsiders, those judged weak or lacking, one must be willing to betray. Most boys learn the precise nature and extent of the cruelty leveled against deviants, because they themselves experience both sides. They learn to betray the humanity in others—the fat boys, the effeminate boys, the Eddies of this world—as a way of protecting themselves, and in so doing they also learn to disconnect from their own compassionate hearts. This is the most fundamental damage of false empowerment.
The paradox of the grandiose position is that it solidifies the very relational disconnections whose pain it seeks to soothe. Willy Loman’s son Happy desperately needs to become competent in the world and to find intimacy. Instead, like Frank Riorden, he medicates his pain, not with the demands of a real relationship but with the grandiosity of sexual conquest. Such measures fail because they do not address the real hunger. In fact, by reaching for prowess instead of connection, Happy objectifies those who might provide solace and only succeeds in further isolating himself. How much nurture can one get from a bowling pin? Striving for specialness and objectifying others are processes that are intrinsically linked.
My work with men and their families has convinced me that boys and men are fundamentally just as relational as girls and women. They have been taught to turn their backs on many of their relational needs and instead have been stuffed with the privilege of insensitivity. But there is nothing intrinsically “hardwired” about it. Research indicates that when men are placed in empathy-demanding situations, as single, custodial parents or caretakers of the ill or the elderly, they are readily capable of becoming just as nurturant and empathic as female counterparts. The human emotional palette is vast. It isn’t that men have fewer relational needs than women, but that they have been conditioned to filter those needs through the screen of achievement. But attempting to secure connection through performance is a high-risk endeavor. In the competitive marketplace a man can be digested and then thrown away.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with vigorous competition; there is nothing wrong with boys working hard and playing hard. Indeed, there is something wonderful in the feeling that comes from working up a sweat and going all out to defeat one’s opponent on the tennis court or baseball court or hockey rink—so long as the passion falls short of placing the boy’s or his opponent’s self-worth on the line. The difference between the healthy enjoyment of achievement and competition and its unhealthy expression is analogous to the distinction between the recreational and the abusive use of intoxicants. A recreational drinker begins with a baseline feeling of relative contentment and the drug is used as an enhancement. The state he returns to after the drug has worn off is the satisfactory state he began with. The abusive drinker medicates a baseline experience that is painful or empty, and when the drug wears off, the underlying ill ease returns or worsens. Similarly, healthy joy in competition and achievement enhances an already invigorated boy. He does not rely on it to feel worthy, and he is not devastated on occasions of failure. In the same way that performance is not the boy’s ticket to a sense of self-worth, it is also not a ticket to relational connection. Contrary to conventional ideas that link self-worth and self-reliance, in fact it is more acurate to link self-worth and relational connection. Unlike traditional mythic images of the lone, utterly self-sufficient hero, real boys and men need social connection just as much as do girls and women. A sense of self-worth always implies a secure sense of membership—a sense of mattering to someone, of being worthy of intimacy. In a healthy relationship to performance, achievement is a labor of love that exists within the context of secure connection, not an act of grandiosity that takes the place of connection.
There are many ways to describe the experience of depression, many aspects of the disorder one might choose to center on. My focus in treating depressed men has been primarily relational. What kind of relationship does a depressed man have with others? I ask, followed by: What kind of relationship does he have with himself? The answer to both of these questions is often: a bad one.
In the last twenty years, all manner of depressed men have passed through my doorway—young, old, successful, incompetent, kind, and angry. Each one of them has had one thing in common: his relationship to himself was a cruel one. I tell Billy Jodein that I think of depression as an auto-aggressive disease, a disorder in which the self turns against the self. If we were able to take a psychic stethoscope and listen in to the unremitting conversation looping inside Billy’s mind, we would hear harsh, perfectionist judgment matched with bitterness, mistrust, and hopelessness.
To understand the mechanism of empathic reversal, we must accept a disturbing truth—that trauma intrinsically involves fusion between the offender and his victim. In the very moment of damage, some form of unholy intimacy occurs, in part because trauma always involves a failure of boundaries. In active trauma, a child’s boundaries are violated. The parent is uncontained, out of control. In passive trauma, the parent neglects the child’s needs; the boundary between parent and child is too rigid, impenetrable. Both are instances of boundary dysfunction. Most often, childhood trauma results from a layering of both kinds of boundary failure, as in the case of a father who is so stimulated by his adolescent daughter’s sexuality that he will no longer touch her, or the case of a mother who neglects to set appropriate limits on her son’s temper and then blows up at him herself.
When a child is traumatized—by a parent who is either negligent or out of control—his first and most profound response will be to take responsibility for the failing parent. When a child comes face to face with a caregiver’s pathology, that child will do whatever he must to reinstate the caregiver’s psychological equilibrium. A child’s need to preserve his attachment, his willingness to contort himself into whatever shape the parent needs him to be in during such moments represents one of the least recognized, most pervasive, and most powerful psychological forces in human development.
Increased imprinting to abusing objects has been documented in birds, dogs, and monkeys. But of all the species on the earth, human children have the most protracted period of dependency. Children remain at the mercy of adult providers for an extraordinarily long time.
If empathic reversal —the process of taking on the offender’s perspective and losing empathy for one’s own—is the process by which trauma becomes depression, reversing that reversal—reestablishing empathy for the vulnerable child within and creating distance, a healthy judgment toward the offender—lies at the core of recovery. From the first moments a depressed man enters my office, most of the actions I take are aimed at reconnecting the dismembered, pained self and challenging the toxic, internalized offender.
Prozac and its relatives are equally effective in treating both depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders. He observes that this dual effect challenges traditional views, which saw depression and obsessive disorders as two discrete disease entities. I agree that depression is not a discrete entity. It cannot be treated as if it were bacteria or simply a genetic disorder. Anyone who has listened closely to the voices of depressed men themselves would not be surprised to learn that one medication can treat both depression and obsessive disorders. Depression is an obsessive disorder. A depressed person is endlessly caught in the chains of his rehearsed inadequacies.
This perspective enables us to metaphorically draw a line down the center of a piece of paper creating two columns. On one side, we list the “feminine,” the lost boy, overt depression, shame, and victimization. On the other, we list the “masculine,” the harsh boy, covert depression, grandiosity, and offense. The relationship between these two columns at once describes relations between men and women in our changing, but still sexist, culture and also the internal dynamic of depression.
She said that most of us live out our whole lives with a secret conviction that catastrophe lurks just round the corner.
Traditionally, emphasis is placed on the distinction between an abusive use of a substance and a true addiction. In my work with covertly depressed men, the distinction between abusive and addictive dependency means relatively little. Whenever a man turns to an external prop for self-esteem regulation, he is involved in the defensive structures of covert depression. Narcissus at his well is an addict. For simplicity’s sake, I label dependency on any self-esteem “dialysis machine,” addictive dependency. What I call addiction and what psychoanalytically oriented therapists would call a “self disorder” or a “narcissistic dependency” are synonymous.
Russ spreads his hands in a pleading gesture. “I’m tired of people trying to lay their guilt trips on me,” he warns. “I have been a good boy all my life. Worked like a dog, raised five children. I never once cheated on my wife. And, believe me, the opportunity was there. But, here I am, fifty-six years old. Sure, I could go back into the marriage and put up with it, deal with her lack of affection, give up the companionship I feel with Georgina, the things we share, the excitement. But what have I got left? Fifteen years, eighteen years maybe? Don’t I deserve, too? Do I have no right to be happy?” I ask Russ if, over the course of thirty-one years, he ever voiced his dissatisfactions to Diane, ever talked about their sex life, ever told her he needed more affection. Did he address any issue or work in any way to better their marriage? “Well . . .” he grows sheepish. “You know, I had other priorities.” Russell Whiteston doesn’t know the first thing about cultivating and sustaining an intimate relationship. He let his marriage to Diane go to rot and now he drinks in the glow of his new infatuation.
The degree to which a man relies upon addictive defenses to ward off depression determines the degree of his abusiveness or irresponsibility toward others. A covertly depressed man cannot afford to be fully responsive to those around him because his primary need lies in maintaining his defense, his emotional “prosthesis.” It is not uncommon for a man’s need for performance-based esteem to become so compulsive that it not only gets in the way of his relationships, it even gets in the way of his performance.
Edward Khantzian, the father of the self-medication hypothesis, speaks of addictions as attempts to “correct” for flaws in the user’s ego capacities. In contrast to earlier psychiatric formulations of substance abuse as “sensation seeking,” unconscious self-destruction, or obsession with pleasure, Khantzian and others currently writing on the psychology of addiction speak of substance abuse as a desperate strategy for dealing with self “dysregulation.” Khantzian’s research on both alcoholics and drug abusers led him to focus on four cardinal areas of dysregulation: difficulty in maintaining healthy self-esteem; difficulty in regulating one’s feelings; difficulty in exercising self-care; and difficulty in sustaining connection to others.
Traditional socialization of boys diminishes the capacity to esteem the self without going up into grandiosity or down into shame. Traditional masculinization teaches boys to replace inherent self-worth with performance-based esteem. It insists that boys disown vulnerable feelings (which could help them connect), while reinforcing their entitlement to express anger. It teaches boys to renounce their true needs in the service of achievement, and at the same time blunts their sensitivity to reading the needs of others. The damage to self that Khantzian describes can be summed up as damage in relatedness. And if disconnection from self and others creates suffering, then learning and practicing the art of reconnection can relieve it.
Now Jeffrey has learned to access another part of his psyche, a more mature aspect of self, to both nurture and contain his immature impulses. I call such a healing instance a moment of relational heroism. Relational heroism occurs when every muscle and nerve in one’s body pulls one toward reenacting one’s usual dysfunctional pattern, but through sheer force of discipline or grace, one lifts oneself off the well-worn track toward behaviors that are more vulnerable, more cherishing, more mature. Just as the boyhood trauma that sets up depression occurs not in one dramatic incident, but in transactions repeated hundreds upon hundreds of times, so, too, recovery is comprised of countless small victories.
Pia Mellody has devised a five-point grid that I find practical and comprehensive. It consists of five self functions: self-esteem, self-protection, self-knowledge, self-care, and self-moderation. Since I view these functions as operations rather than entities, the men I work with can be taught how to boost their level of skill in these areas. They can become relationally fit. Jeffrey has now learned a few simple techniques of self management to deal with those uncomfortable moments when he feels rejected and shame filled. Jeffrey can now close his eyes for a moment, breathe deeply, remind himself that, in his fifties, he is too old to be abandoned. He might imagine himself encircling that internal eight-year-old with his adult wisdom, nourishment, and love. “I am enough and I matter,” he might repeat to himself, quieting his rising panic. “Whether I am accepted or rejected, right now, the person whose job it is to cherish me is me.”
“Have you told her about last night?” I guess. Another pause. “I don’t want to upset her.” Joe sighs. Holding the phone away from my mouth, so do I. “Now, here is a guy,” I think to myself, “who not eighteen hours ago was ready to desert his wife and child forever. But today he is afraid to upset her.” “I’ll need to see you both,” I reiterate.
Together, Joe and I begin to map out depression’s influence, the tactics it uses to maintain its assault on his life. As our conversation unfolds, depression begins to take on character; it becomes a personified force, a cruel denominator intent on sucking the life out of him, as it had his father before him. This is a technique called “externalizing.” Instead of locating the problem inside the man, making him a bad or defective person, I help the man relocate the problem as an attack from without. He can then chose to join with me, if he wants, to stand up and beat the enemy back.
At about the turn of the century, the structural changes brought about by the industrial revolution reached into the heart of American families and changed their shape forever. In the previous age of family farms and cottage industries, households were organized equally around the tasks that served the group’s well-being—cooking, education, tending the ill—and also the tasks that produced goods—gardening, raising livestock, making clothes. There was no great distinction between family caretaking and family production. While philosophical role distinctions did exist—women, for example, were the tender souls most suited to care for the sick—in practical terms, the activities of men and women, adults and children, even family members and servants routinely overlapped. The daily life of the household was marked by enormous fluidity in roles. With the industrial revolution, production moved out of the home, and men moved with it into the growing urban areas. As men took on the role of wage earner, women and children became ever more dependent on the man’s salary. It is at this moment that many of the divisions that we now take for granted first sprung into being: the division between work and leisure; between the domestic and the occupational; between public and private life; and the rigid polarity of sex roles. All of these divisions had previously existed to varying degrees in society’s rhetoric. But now, for the first time, they dictated actual behaviors affecting the daily functioning of family life. Men and women’s “separate spheres” moved out of the realm of salon philosophy to shape our most routine and intimate transactions.
For generations, traditional men have been willing to slog their way through combat trenches, dirty, mean jobs, dangerous occupations, to sacrifice their health, even lie down and die, for the sake of their breadwinner roles. Men have enjoyed the “privilege,” as more and more angry voices are rising to say, of killing themselves. In return, what men have been promised is an appreciative, saintly wife—a whore in the bedroom, a kitten on the living room couch, a scintillating cocktail companion, and a damn fine cook and homemaker. This is not a mature relationship. It is what I have taken to speak of with couples as traditional emotional pornography.
While some pornography is deliberately demeaning, all explicitly erotic material is not intrinsically violent toward women. But most pornography does play out in the arena of sexuality a broader male fantasy—a fantasy of women’s boundless, joyful compliance. The one thing never depicted in a pornographic film is a woman criticizing her lover or demanding something different from him. The essence of the pornographic vision of women is that they are so thoroughly “in sync” with the male, that the things that give him pleasure just happen to drive her wild as well.
The archetype of the sexual mother embodies a dream of being limitlessly given to; being perfectly nurtured, as a child is nurtured by a mother; being regarded as a perfect lover, perfect husband, someone’s Prince Charming. This vision precludes a few nasty realities, like the negotiation of another’s needs, doing things wrong and having to learn how to do them differently, struggling with moments of profound loneliness. Society teaches neither member of the couple how to deal with the raw pain that is a part of any real relationship, because it does not even acknowledge the existence of that pain. Stuffed with such romanticism, neither men nor women learn to vigorously negotiate their differences, because true harmony is seen as obviating difference.
There are well-documented evolutionary reasons why males might prefer rearing those who carry their own genes. But I have yet to hear anyone claim that we should accept the inevitability of attack and molestation in blended families because men are just biologically wired for that behavior. There is, in humans, a force whose job it is to ameliorate raw biological tendencies. We call it civilization.
Any woman knows that few strategies serve to “build up” a male more effectively than her own appearance of helplessness. Some women seem willing to keep their covertly depressed men strong by becoming less functional than their partners. Such self-sacrifice does not belong simply to a lunatic fringe. Married women are consistently reported on a number of sociological measures as less happy, less well adjusted, more anxious, more overtly depressed, and generally more neurotic than either married men or single women, while single men are the most at-risk population in the nation for both physical and psychological health problems. The huge discrepancy concerning the effects of married life on men and women has led pioneer sociologist Jessie Bernard to speak of “his” and “hers” marriages. Bernard reviews dozens of studies and government statistics on health and concludes that contemporary marriage appears to be beneficial to the well-being of men and detrimental to that of women.
Most women have no more wish to “emasculate” their husbands than most mothers wish to “castrate” their sons. But neither men nor women have been taught basic skills for the tough negotiation of contrasting needs. Take the most ordinary of examples. Joe comes home late after a long day at the office. After dinner, he wants to go to bed. Barbara, who has been alone with the kids all day, is hungry for interaction. She launches into an account of her day, her feelings and problems. Joe is annoyed; he puts her off with a few terse grunts and heads for the bathroom. Both of them are angry. Neither has negotiated anything. Joe’s caricatured image of his wife, at that moment, is that she is a bottomless pit of emotional need; that anything he does will be wrong anyway, and that she has no appreciation of either his needs or his contributions. Barbara’s equally caricatured imagery holds Joe as an unresponsive cretin. They blame one another, rather than asking themselves what they might have done differently.
Beyond a certain point in a man’s life, if he is to remain truly vital, he needs to be actively engaged in devotion to something other than his own success and happiness. The word discipline derives from the same root as the word disciple. Discipline means “to place oneself in the service of.” Discipline is a form of devotion. A grown man with nothing to devote himself to is a man who is sick at heart. What a great many men in this culture choose to serve is their own reflected value, which they often believe serves the needs of their family, even while their families may be crying out for something different from them.
Yet it is the placing of oneself at the service of a larger context that drives a man deep into his own growth and fullest potential. Studies indicate that while fathering may or may not be necessary for the psychological adjustment of boys, it is highly advantageous for the psychological adjustment of the father. Men who were judged as having warm, nurturant relationships with their children were shown to be healthier, less depressed, and, surprisingly, more successful in their careers. In popular films, there is a spate of lost or damaged heroes who are redeemed by their relationships to real or surrogate sons. This may have less to do with boys’ needs for fathers than with the men’s need to be fathers, to live for something beyond performance, kudos, and acquisition.
Gore’s prescription for the species is recovery: If the global environmental crisis is rooted in the dysfunctional pattern of our civilization’s relationship to the natural world, confronting and fully understanding that pattern . . . is the first step toward mourning what we have lost . . . and coming to terms with the new story of what it means to be a steward of the earth.
“Here’s the blessing.” And, then he pauses. “May you and your brother reach your fullest potential in every regard. My blessing for you is this: May nothing in my past, or in the family’s past, in any way hold you back or weigh you down. If there are any encumbrances on you, I release you from them. You hear me? I release you. I want you to be free. Happy, strong, and free. That is my blessing to you, son.”