December 17th, 2007: Men and their fathers—Oh, how I long for you

Every boy, in his journey to become a man, takes an arrow in the center of his heart, in the place of his strength. Because the wound is rarely discussed and even more rearely healed, every man carries a wound. And the wound is nearly always given by his father. (John Eldrege, Wild At Heart).

Father Absence

While most men I have seen in therapy enter the therapeutic process with relational issues, I often spend a great deal of time listening to men telling me about their fathers. The stories I hear are often filled with pain, with longing, with anger and hatred, but almost always with a sense of unrequited love. Sometimes these stories are about abuse. But more often than not they are about some form of abandonment or neglect. I hear about men who haven’t received what they need so desperately: their father’s blessing.

This very simple observation led me to a very simple conclusion: Adult men need their fathers. And if those fathers are no longer around, adult men will need at least a word, a blessing, that can help them form and keep a firm positive image of one of the core masculine influences in their lives.

Recently, I had a meeting with an older client he is in his mid-seventies has had several marriages, several children and is suffering from depression. As he likes to put it

“I’ve always been able to bring out the Lion, when things went tough on me. I could just roar or even pounce on things and, with that, felt my strength coming back to me. But now the Lion won’t come so easily to me anymore. I more feel like a Koala bear.”

My client’s history reveals many complicated life-cycle situations: three failed marriages, a daughter committed suicide as and adult woman, his son lives in circumstances that worry my client, several friends have died in the last twenty years . . . We all know how those things can eat away at us, how our life seems to wear thin—and so do our powers of resistance—until we ourselves feel that we’re unable to get up, that we’re dying slowly. So, all of this makes sense. No wonder my client is depressed. But there is an additional issue and this is the one I’d like to focus on tonight.

This issue is the relationship my client had with his father. None, according to him, by the way. “My father was rarely there, but he provided well for my brother and me.” As it turns out, my client’s father died when my client was in his mid-thirties and his father was 62, his paternal grandfather died in his early fifties and my client has not recollection of him at all. My client has, in other words, outlived his father by 12 years and his grandfather by almost 25 years.

“I know I should be happy, he says, but I’m not. I just don’t know what to do with myself. I kind of always expect to die, because he died so damn early.

This client exemplifies well, I believe, what might be one of the less intuitive areas of understanding men. Men, adult men, need their fathers. They depend on them and if they lose them early, they are quite likely to struggle with life issues (relationships, friendships, money-issues, professionally, etc.). So, while it’s quite established by now that boys (and girls) need their fathers and that they will show behavioral and emotional issues, if they grew up with a largely absent father, I am saying that father-absence continues to matter for adult males. It matters in ways quite comparable to how it matters in boys and adolescents.

I believe that much of what this relationship with their fathers will look like is shaped during childhood and adolescence. Fathers who practice connectedness with their sons during those early times will likely stay deeply connected with their sons later on in life.
In my own life, for example, my father and I were never unconnected, but a truly deep connection started about 17 years ago when, at the end of a short and unsuccessful marriage, I went back to visit my parents. My father and I had greeted each other in the usual way, and embrace and expression of our mutual happiness to see each other. But then, all of a sudden we both began to cry, quietly first, then almost uncontrollably. I believe what came to the surface during those minutes was our need for each other at this crisis-point in my life, perhaps it was my father’s recognition that I needed his guidance more than he had been willing or able to see. Since that time our relationship has taken a turn towards more awareness of our need to be available to each other. We have spent uncounted times talking, listening and just being with each other in silence.

But this doesn’t mean that fathers who didn’t have a chance to do the work of connecting with their sons during those times are now out of opportunities to do so. Fathers and their adult sons have opportunities to renew their relationships every day. The real question is what do sons need when they’re adults and what do fathers need when they have adult sons. Today I will mostly deal with the first question. Because I believe that much of what sons need from their fathers is visible already in the early years of the son’s life, I will use two observations of fathers and their sons from the mall to highlight how positive father-son relationships can work.

Fathers At The Playground

About two weeks ago, it was a rainy cold day, I went on an outing with just my two year old. It’s rare that we have this one-on-one time together. We started early in the morning with an attempt to hike around MeadowBrook Park, but gave up after twenty minutes. It was too cold. So, we went to Kopi, my favorite hang-out place. I had a hot tea and Gabriel had not one but two whole raspberry bars. We had a wonderful time. There he was, sitting across from me, pointing things out to me, enjoying his treat in a way that just made me want to feed him more. It feels so good to see our children eat and eat well. It is at moments like these that I start wondering and fastforwarding to the future. How about in twenty years? Will we be sitting in a café like this, talking to each other with him pointing things out to me? How about in thirty? Will he need me? Will I need him? I assume I will not be literally feeding him anymore at that time. But how will I be feeding him then? What kind of nourishment will he need from me when I am 66, 76, 86. I have this overwhelming wish to give to my sons, no matter how old I am. I hope I will be able to do that until I die.

When we left Kopi we had a choice of either going home (we were approaching his mid-day nap time) or going to the Mall. I decided on the mall. Not to go shopping. I am not mad. No, I like spending time at the local mall because one of our two local hospitals gave money to put in a safe playground for children 0-5. Lots of soft and large things to climb on and in. All the items look like things taken from a doctor’s bag and above it all hovers a stork carrying a baby in a blanket. A three feet high wall surrounds this play-ground with only one opening to get in and out. Around the walls are benches to sit and watch the children play. This is where I do much of my observing for parents and their children, particular fathers and their children. This is where I would like to start today.

As I was sitting down I noticed that there were lots more fathers around than I usually see here. Saturday morning, I thought. This is the time when many fathers have time to spend with their children. This is an obvious place to come and enjoy the morning in a relaxed way. All of them were engaged with their children in such different ways. One was talking on his self-phone almost the whole time I was there. A superficial observer might have thought he wasn’t paying attention to his three children. But his eyes were darting around, following the children everywhere. If they disappeared behind something he would get up, while talking on the phone, and look for them. Another father, with only one child, followed his boy everywhere he went. Up the ladder, down the slide, into the tunnel, over the stethoscope and around and around. Another father had noticed that part of the rope had come undone that served as a railing for the steps to the slide. With an earnest face he began to re-braid the rope. He seemed very concentrated on the rope. Did he notice his two sons playing? Yet another father was sitting and just watching his son how he carefully explored the play-ground.

I want to talk about these last two fathers. As it turns out, both of them were not alone with their children, but had come with their spouses. This I learned when both fathers had to attend to their children because each had fallen and was crying. It first happened with the father whose son was exploring the playground. His son fell and was crying and didn’t get up. The dad went and picked him up right away. His son nuzzled quickly against his shoulder and the crook of his neck and, while still crying a bit, seemed comfortable and okay. It looked as if the father was singing to his son. But just a moment later a woman who had sat on the other side of the play-ground got up, walked over to them, took the boy from the father (who released him without resistance) and walked back to the other side of the play-ground where she sat down with him. He was still crying. The father’s hand slid along the arm of the boy as she was taking him. His eyes followed them for a brief moment. Then he picked up a news-paper he had brought, looking up only occasionally to see what his wife and son were doing. She did not release him again to play and soon thereafter they all left.

The other father, the one who was braiding the rope, was still in the middle of doing that when his younger son fell. He, also, was lying on his back and cried. The father looked up from his work, looked at his son quizzically—seemingly thinking “are you really not going to get up on your own?”—and, when he really did not get up, dropped his work, knelt beside his son and gently touched his cheek with his hand. His son kept crying. So, the father picked him, but not by putting his hand under his body and lifting him. Rather, he took him, ever so gently, by the front of his shirt and lifted him up far enough to then use his other arm to support his weight. For a moment his son was floating in mid-air held only by his own t-shirt. Then the father sat down, held his son on his lap, put his hand on his son’s forehead and rocked him. Throughout this whole episode this father had been very quiet. Almost not saying a word. At this point his spouse, who had evidently been shopping, returned. She asked what happened, he told her and she took the boy from him. He, also, released him immediately. He got up, walked around somewhat aimlessly sat down again and looked at his wife and son. Finally, his other son who had been playing with some other children came back and needed his attention.

While I was observing these two, as well as some of the other fathers, my own son, of course, kept cruising around on the play-ground, checking in with me once every other lap before he would take off again. Don’t think for a moment, that I didn’t know where he was or what he was up to.

I don’t want to talk about fathers and their child sons and babies today. Much of this will be reserved for two later lectures in January and March. Rather, what I would like to do with these two stories is to use them as lenses through which we can understand how not only boys need their fathers, but also men. All of the things that are happening in these two stories are relevant for how men and their fathers relate to each other later in life. These stories are mostly positive examples of how this relationship can work. Let’s look at the details.


What Fathers Do For Their Sons

1. These fathers were giving their sons space.

2. Rather than taking them by the hand, and leading them around the play-ground, they allowed them to explore this space by themselves.

3. They were watching but not in a way that could have made the child unsure of himself.

4. They did not immediately rush to their sons’ rescue when they fell.

5. Instead they waited, they checked. And only when the crying lasted longer (I’d say about 20 seconds) did they really tend to the child.

6. Both fathers immediately and naturally knew how to care for their children.

7. Neither father seemed too concerned about the cause of the fall, i.e., neither seemed to think that their children should be more careful

8. In both cases the children were immediately comfortable with the care of their fathers. They were not looking for their mothers.

9. In both cases the mothers took over the comforting, although there was no indication that the father needed them or that the child felt more taken care of with the mother.

10. In both cases the father surrenders right-away, without a fight.


1. Space between men and their fathers

Fathers tend to give their sons more space than mothers. This is not to say that they are less vigilant or attentive. But it seems that fathers are more likely to allow their children to take risks, to figure things out and to cope with pain on their own. Space is a very meaningful dimension between adult men and their fathers as well.

Tom is 35 years old, adopted and struggling with relationship issues and, up until about a year ago, also with severe liver-decomposition. Just over a year ago he received a liver transplant and is doing much better today. At the time Tom told me this story, his voice had become very weak, his skin was a deep yellow, he had lost much weight and it was clear that without a transplant soon, he would die. Listen to Tom describe the relationship with his father (this is on the way to the hospital that eventually performed the transplant):

My father ain’t saying much about me. Every once in a while, on our way to St Louis, he glances at me quickly, but he don’t stare. I’m glad he don’t. He knows how I feel. I know he is worried. I look like death warmed over. He actually talked to me about guns and shootin’. Can you believe it? He knows how much I dig that stuff. Made the drive down there much faster and easier. Didn’t think about being scared anymore. You know, my mom would be on my case, the whole time. Touching me, hugging me, she be’d slobbering all over me. She just can’t help it, I guess. But that’s how she was with my marriage troubles too. Always something to say. It don’t mean a thing to me. Just feels like she thinks it’s always my fault. Nah, when things get rough, I prefer my dad to my mom a hundred times.

Let’s be clear, this client is not saying he hates his mother. He is not making a misogynist comment about women and their ways of paying attention and caring for others. What he is saying is that he is more comfortable with the quiet and less direct ways in which his father takes care of him. And while he never once says anything close to “I needed my father there. I needed him to take care of me.,” it is clear that this is exactly what happened. Tom did need his father on those drives down to St. Louis. Without his father he would have felt lost and forlorn, worried sick. Tom’s father understands his son’s need for space around him. He doesn’t intrude. He just observes, listens and—at the right moment—distracts.


2. Honoring the Son’s Need To Own His Decisions and Ideas

The two fathers I observed on the play-ground, likely without thinking much about this at all, followed a very typical male pattern of watching over their off-spring. It can be summarized as “learn from your experiences.” They did not prevent their sons from jumping and running around, i.e., from exploring their own powers as well as the space and how their powers could work in that space. Rather they watched and allowed things to happen. Perhaps the son would fall, perhaps he wouldn’t. Neither made an attempt to caution the son, slow him down or otherwise intervene before he got hurt.

This is a quite remarkable way of paying attention and watching over one’s children. It assumes that pain of some sort and degree is good for the child. It means that falling is a didactic experience, one from which the child can learn. It also means that, sometimes, the son will actually outperform the father. He will do something and take risks the father would not have taken. This is particularly important for men who lead their lives in ways that seem to move away from the life-styles and life-choices of their fathers. Sons who feel that their father does not honor their choices often struggle with guilt and shame over their difference from their father, no matter how successful they have become with that new choice.

Keith, a 40 year old client, talked about this a lot in his therapy. The first time he felt that his choices had made the judgment of his father come down hard on him was when at age 19 he decided to improve and then sell the car his father had given him. Keith needed the money to begin buying equipment for a business that a decade later should turn him into a millionaire. His father was crestfallen when he found out about the car, though. Keith, though his father never directly commented on the sale of the car, has never stopped feeling guilty and ashamed about it. The fact that he has become a millionaire and that this really did start with the sale of the car doesn’t matter at all. In fact, Keith believes that he should hide from his father how much he really makes because he fears that his father would criticize him for not giving enough of his money to charity. “But we give 10%,” he once groaned in desperation.
Keith’s struggle with his father’s unhappiness about him, despite the clear success of Keith’s life resulted in many secondary issues. Keith was often depressed. His marriage was suffering. He found himself not masculine enough. He behaved in a stand-offish and awkward way towards his children. The need for an acknowledgement by his father of what he has achieved is almost haunting Keith.


3. Helping the Son grow sure of himself

It would be easy to think of fathers as negligent when they don’t pay attention in the close ways we’re used to from mothers. Certainly many of the spouses of such fathers do think there spouses are at least irresponsible and, therefore, resolve not to surrender child-care to their male partners. But what is easily forgotten is that fathers’ ability to stay back and watch, to allow pain to take place is actually helping boys to become sure of themselves. For it is in this way that they are getting an accurate sense of their own powers.

What happens, if fathers cannot stay back? What happens when fathers get in the way by suggesting or, perhaps, even forcing their sons to follow a path that is not of their own choosing? In the case of Keith we can observe that, at times, it is not even the son’s pain that is the issue, but the father’s narcissistic pain that, if projected onto the son, can cause much damage to the soul of the son. Keith had never felt he could really be sure of himself. He lacked assertiveness and often turned to passive-aggressive strategies have his needs met. Keith had trouble relating to other males in friendly and open ways. Instead he often turned to fierce competition with them. Given Keith’s immense success in his business this lack of self-confidence has almost tragic dimensions.




4. Fathers Don’t Help Right Away

Should fathers always stay back? Is that what they do? Not quite. What was striking, too, about the two fathers I observed was the seeming evenness of mind with which they watched their sons after they had fallen. There is no reason to assume that they were paying less attention or even felt less sympathetic towards their sons than a mother might have. Rather, the waiting period after the fall seemed almost deliberate. A watchful moment of silence and patience during which the father, clearly, seemed to negotiate internally how long he should give his son to at least try to get up on his own.

Fathers value and reinforce this kind of independence and self-sufficiency in their sons. The question seems to be “Can you take care of this by yourself, or do you need me to help? This is not a tough question. It is not the question of a man who is interested in getting his son not to show any pain. Rather it’s a loving question meant to strengthen and support the son in his endeavors to stand on his own feet.

So, this waiting period is not to be confused with a silent way of passing judgment. These fathers are not hesitant because they want to get back at their sons or even wanting to teach them a lesson. Rather, this is a way of communicating love by saying “hands-off” at least for a few moments.



5. Fathers’ tolerance for pain

In an earlier ManMade Talk we found that men seemed to be biologically set up to perceive pain in lesser measures and later than do women. Hormonal differences as well as structural difference in brain anatomy and brain-functioning seemed to be at the root of this. However, this doesn’t mean that cultural forces should be pushed aside. Because empathy and sympathy are so much built on the possibility of experiencing someone else’s emotions and feelings because of our own ability to experience and express feelings, it seems like a small leap to assume that fathers’ tolerance for their children’s pain is, at least in part, a result of their tolerance for their own pain.

Not all fathers can do this equally well, however. A middle-aged client who had come to see me for issues in his marriage began talking about his children by saying

I cannot stop worrying about my son. He has made some bad decisions, got himself into a lot of financial trouble. It just hurts me to see him down like this. I know he is mad at himself and embarrassed. I just want to help him. Send him lots of money, but every time I do, it gets burned again.

The more we talked about his son the clearer it became that this client was riddled with guilt over not having been a good father to his son when he was little. He took his son’s business failures as his own failure to be a providing and present father. So, any sign of pain in his son became an indication to him of how badly he had failed as a father. Logically he attempted to erase that guilt at the very first indication that his son was in trouble or in need of something. This, of course, didn’t work well at all. Rather, it only increased the son’s sensitivity to pain causing the father to spin faster and faster to end his son’s pain.

What this client has to learn is how to express his own feelings and emotions before he even begins to project his feelings about himself onto his son. Not an easy task after a life of doing it differently.


6. Fathers Know How To Comfort/Nurture

Perhaps one of the most amazing and heart-warming parts of my observation was to see with how much ease, sincerity and self-assuredness these fathers held and comforted their sons. Despite the almost diametrically opposed ways in which they were doing this both clearly knew what their sons needed and both felt happy and strong enough to give it.

I try to picture what the care from these fathers will look like when their sons are grown. Will they continue to use their voices, words and bodies to soothe their sons’ pain? Will they hug them and hold them tight and even let them put their heads against their shoulder? Will they try, with almost superhuman strength, to lift up the boy by the front of his shirt before pulling him close? It really doesn’t matter how they do it. The pointis that fathers must not forget how they knew when their sons were children. They must remember that comforting them will still be important and can be done in ways quite similar to how they were comforted as children.


7. What was the cause?

We know that men’s problem solving skills tend to lean towards analysis and finding concrete solutions to problems. It is the more surprising that in the cases I observed as well as in clients I have seen analysis seemed to play such a subordinate role. Neither father seemed to have much of an interested in “teaching” his son why he might have fallen. There was no inspection of the troublesome ledge the made one trip. Their was not admonition of the other to reduce his speed while cruising across the playground.

Did these men know that their analytical and problem solving skills wouldn’t do anything but create more pain at this point? Did they know that a father who tells his son why he fell and what caused it will really only succeed in making his son believe that he was just called stupid for falling. This is what happens between men: analysis means “this could have been prevented.” It could have been prevented means “I was stupid to let it happen.” That my father knows why it happened means that I look like a fool in front of him. I know many fathers who trust their son’s inborn skills to analyze, recognize and correct a previous pattern or mistake.

My 15 year old client Eric who had left the public school system and was being home-schooled by his parents felt this way every time his father began to analyze and lecture him about his supposed goals in life. Every time his father started Eric averted his eyes. His father meant well, analyzing the reasons why Eric had needed to leave the public-school system. But every time he did talk about this, he ended up shaming his son in deep and lasting ways. Eric needed his father to know that he could figure this out by himself. He needed for his father to acknowledge that he could be strong, persistent and courageous. But he also needed his father to stick around and not go away thinking his son might have rejected him.

The truth of the matter is, most men can figure out why they are in the situations they’re in. They don’t need their fathers to tell them why. Rather, they need them to tell them that things will be better, that they will be around no matter what, and that they have confidence in their sons’ choices.


8. Confident Comforting

Both fathers seemed confident comforters for as long as the mother wasn’t around. As soon as the mother appeared their comforting techniques seemed less assured.
During family sessions I had with a Latin American family, I noticed the strong bond between the father and son. The son had had troubles finding and keeping a job. He, in his early thirties, and his father, in his late fifties, seemed to get along well. Most striking was the father’s strength of support for and confidence in his son. He showed this support at all the meetings I had with just the two of them. His son was just gobbling this up and showed strong signs of improvement and confidence in himself as a result. However, every time we had meetings with the mother included, the father began to waffle about his son’s abilities. At times he even began to criticize him, analyze his wording of letters of application, etc.

Interestingly, it wasn’t the case that the mother expressed skepticism towards her son. She was a rather quiet woman, actually. But her very presence seemed to make her husband less sure of himself and his ability to comfort his son. He looked over at her more often, waited for her to complete his sentences and avoided looking at this son too long. His confidence and willingness to support his son had made way for almost a sense of embarrassment about his son’s failures (causing him to not even look directly at his son anymore.

9. Mother Replaces Father

It is certainly not the case that many adult men find themselves more attended by and cared for by their mothers. I do believe, however, that the switch in care and comforting I observed in both families on the playground may be part of the root-cause for why men ultimately do not get from their fathers the care and nurturing they need to get from them. Even young and progressive families seem to tend towards a care-taking and nurturing model that prioritizes the mother over the father. It is reasonable to assume that, over time, with enough incidents of surrendered nurturing taking place, fathers will feel themselves to be less and less important and necessary in the care and comforting of their children. They may even feel as if they have forgotten how to take care of their children. From there it is only a small step to understand why they would not think of themselves as qualified to comfort and support their adult children.

In other words, coming through for one’s son requires practice and steadiness. Most fathers when asked about caring and comforting patterns they had with their children during their early and middle-childhood years respond vaguely and mostly with an emphasis on “times when mom wasn’t there.” It comes as no surprise that, later in life, when their sons have grown, fathers are hesitant and feel out of practice when it comes to tending to their sons. Often the hole that exists between fathers and sons as adults was first created during childhood.


10. Fathers Giving Up

Both fathers surrendered. They didn’t object. Their spouse got the boy and they became spontaneously superfluous and unnecessary. The uncertainty runs deep, it seems. All it takes, it seems, is a determined female to show up on the scene to let the male waver and sign over his rights. Fathers give up on their children in many ways. Surrendered custody rights and run-away fathers are only the most extreme cases of such run-awayism. But because our culture still teaches, or perhaps teaches even more now, that fathers are really unnecessary that the job can be done well by mothers alone, fathers often walk away from strong connections with their children. This hurts the children immensely, because the gap between them and their father will likely never be quite bridged again. What would have to go through a father’s mind, I wonder, who at the point that his wife wants to take over, turns away from her (with child in arm) saing “no” I want to do this. Thank you for offering, but leave us alone. How could he muster up this resistance, knowing that later on when his children are adults it will fortify his care and support for them?


The Wound

The quote at the beginning of my talk today talks about the wound almost every boy receives from his father. After having listened to my thoughts on the issue you may have a better idea of how fathers can wound their sons. But while giving space, and holding back advice, allowing for self-determination and knowing how to comfort without being overly emotional are essentials of how fathers need to care for their sons and how adult men will continue to need their fathers, there is one thing, overarching all of these, summed up in a single word: presence. Boys and men alike struggle and suffer greatly when their fathers are absent. Presence is both concrete and metaphorical. Especially when dealing with adult men and their fathers the wish for paternal presence is often cut short by death or sickness. This is why the conversations between adult men and their fathers should not shy away from these topics. Rather, they should give cause and reason to express to each other mutual appreciation. Perhaps a father’s blessing or a son’s expressed recall of a meaningful experience with his father can function in this way.

I want to end today with a quote from the book Papa, My Father by Leo Buscaglia:

The last time my dad and I were together
I was in Nashville, where he and Mom
lived. The two of us were in the car. He
was driving, in his cowboy hat and coat.
We were enjoying the moment. Then I
looked at him chewing on his pipe, and
was suddenly deeply moved. I had to say what
was in my heart. It took a lot of nerve for
me to speak up because he was so reserved.
I said, “I just want to thank you for
being my father. I think you’re the
greatest man I ever met and I love you.”
He smiled slowly before he said,
“yes, son, that’s very nice.”
Dad, I’d like to hear you say it, too.”
“What?”
“Do you like me?”
“Well, I love you.”
“Then let me hear it.” And he did.
Three weeks later he was gone.
–John Ritter

Men and Faith: Church is Rarely an Option

Shame and Men
Before I begin I would like to say something about males and shame. There is overwhelming evidence that boys and men are quite sensitive to being shamed and to feeling the effects of shame. Most males would rather choose solitude than stay in a situation in which they experience shame. Men tend to distance themselves from all kinds of sources of shame. However, in so doing they often move so far away from the things and people that could be vital in their lives that they become emotional loners unable to connect with others. Religion has a particular role in this and in what follows I am hoping to show some of the features of this role.

Men in Religious Organizations

World-wide the numbers of men who are members of religious organizations are dropping. This is not only true for Christian denominations of all colors and tastes as well as the two other major Abrahamic religions (Islam and Judaism), but it is also true for non-Western religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism and the many other religions that have, in the course, of history emerged in the world. It seems that the forces of secularization have had a particularly strong effect on the precept shared by many religions: that of an absolute Other, a God or transcendent being or beings, who have ultimate reign over the world.

I believe that this tendency is detrimental to men as a healthy spirituality is an important part of an overall healthy life. Without faith and spiritual connectedness men lack ways of expressing their thoughts and feelings about death, creation, love, awe, experiences of an infinite nature and others. I am finding in my practice that men as a group seem to have experienced a strong decline of their ability to speak about these topics meaningfully. Their language and thinking seems to have gone through a kind of impoverishment. What’s left is quite often nothing but the next day at work, the next pay-raise, the next conquest of some sort. Men have become restless and yet apathetic, likely to resort to quick quasi religious experiences like drugs and alcohol and sex.

Unfortunately, most religions respond to this decline by shaming and threatening those who are outside of its boundaries. Men don’t respond well to those strategies. Some might join for a while, some might join even for their whole life. However, I have found that even those who stay begin to feel resentful of the very structures they are a part of as they feel that those structures are coercive, shaming, and therefore, a threat to their freedom. This is another way of saying that organized religion has mostly let men down, even when it has rewarded male membership with leadership positions and a powerful visibility of males at the top of their hierarchies. Many of those men lead double-lives. The scandals of sex-abuse in the Catholic Church are only one example of how shaming and threatening can debilitate a church from within. Similar abuses of power within faith structures can be found in religions across the board. Again and again, the riddle of why this happens, why often, too often, men seem to be involved in these abuses, finds its answer in the very shaming and life-denying structures that are set up by many religions. As long as individual religions believe in their own, absolute right to know the one way towards salvation, they will inevitably collide with how many men want to lead their lives today. As long as religions pursue often shaming ways of convincing men (and women) that it is better to be part of a religion (and even better, if they’re, part of the “right” one) than to stand outside of accepted religious structures they will lose male members or only keep those who stand to gain from the place the powerstructures have given them. More and more men report that religious participation to them is either painfully boring or painfully shaming. Neither one of these two are appealing experiences they would like to consider part of their lives.

Again, quite unfortunately, some religions have sought to remedy this by speaking to men about religion in more “male” terms. Somewhat in the vein of war-time propaganda men are now appealed to by talk about “true causes” “the war on x” and phrases like “freedom-fighters” “soldiers of peace”, etc. The truth is that while more men than in previous years might join religious organizations, Christian or other, the promise is illusory that they will be fighting for the true cause, connected with the promise that they will be righteous in the eyes of the God. Ultimately, these causes will prove (and have proven) to be damaging to the male psyche in ways that are deep and lasting. True faith and religiosity in men do not express themselves in a fight or struggle for dominance with others. That men continue to be abused for such purposes by means of religious thought and propaganda is one of the greatest calamities of religious thinking everywhere.

Faith, Spirituality and Religion

Before we can turn our attention to the role faith plays in men’s lives, it will be necessary to become just a bit clearer on what is meant by faith. We are especially in need of understanding why it makes sense to talk about men and faith and not merely about men and spirituality or men and religion.

Though all three terms overlap in significant ways, it is worth pointing out that neither religion nor spirituality carry with them the subjective sense of having a concrete object in the way the term “faith” does. Faith is always faith in something or someone. Faith has an aim. It has intent and direction. Both spirituality and religion, on the other hand, carry with them a broader and wider connectedness with the world. Both can exist without ever expressing a particular faith in anything. Spirituality and religion are general while faith is specific. While many scholars would argue with me on this point, I strongly believe that faith and spirituality can exist without each other. (It is quite possible, in other words, to find a man who has a strong faith, but shows few signs of an overall sense of spirituality. It is equally possible to encounter someone who is strongly connected to the world spiritually, but has little or no faith in a specific being or event or even set of principles.) However, I also believe that faith and spirituality can be especially powerful, if they come together in an individual or a group of people. In this case, they can form a particularly strong religious attitude.

My choice of the term “faith” rather than one of the other two, then, already points to a certain way in which I see men approach the world and the possibility of an absolute that somehow impacts this world. I believe that men are constantly in search of a specific other—an absolute—that will give meaning to their lives, structure their lives and give them stability. Men are in search either of a father or mother and, sometimes, they are in search of both. However, men are also quite suspicious of themselves as they go about this search, always ready to recant and recoil in shame from having been tricked or fooled, or, simply, because they were looking.

A client of mine, for example, used to point to a quote from the Hebrew Bible, the book of Joshuah. The quote was simple “as for me and my family, we will follow the lord.” In his personal life my client was looking at much chaos in his family. His wife was severely mentally ill with a personality disorder. He certainly didn’t expect to be loved by her in any of the ways he had imagined he would be loved by a woman. One of his daughters was beginning to show signs of anti-social tendencies that should a few years later blossom into huge and sometimes terrifying intra-familial conflicts. But this client managed his life with faith. Following the lord for him meant that he would never divorce his wife or leave his family. A stubborn faith one might say, one that didn’t allow him to cry out for the nurturing he so much wanted to receive. Yet, there was shame in this faith as well. He wondered about his constant need for nurturing and love. This factored into great doubts he had about himself and his faith. Perhaps, he wondered, I have just been wrong about this faith thing. Would I be able to build a new, better life, if I followed my need for love? But then, from the perspective of faith, his need for love and nurturing looked infantile and immature, shameful also, and he had to reject it as well. In essence he had become a prisoner of his own faith with no place to move.

And this is my point exactly: a man’s choice of religious attitude, either as faith or spirituality, is often informed by what he feels is more of an embarrassment. When it is about faith it is often about discipline, structure, steadfastness, loyalty and judgment. Yet to need order and structure can also be seen as an embarrassing admission of incompetence, one that men often are not prepared to make. When it is about spirituality, however, admitting that they are believers because they are seekers of nurturing, love and the warmth of a lasting embrace is equally embarrassing because it, once again, sheds shameful shadows on a man’s ability to lead a man’s life.

So, while many men are clearly in need and search of a way to express and reflect on the religious dimensions of their lives, doing so, either through strong faith or spirituality, is fraught with problems for them. For many men religion remains a shameful affair. It is anathema to them and they will reject it in favor of a more self-determined way of life. It is in this way that men often end up with neither faith nor spirituality.

Shameful Faith

In my experience faith or any religious attitude in men is often accompanied by a feeling of embarrassment or shame on the part of the man. Men are certainly more likely to speak freely about work, their upbringing, sex and their relationships than they are to speak about their faith. My overall sense is that faith often doesn’t leave much room for a man to protect his dignity. Concepts of sin, judgment and punishment as well as concepts of eternal love stand in diametrical conflict with what many men think of as their own code of honor. I will first use some of the insights of Sigmund Freud to discuss how this may have come about. I will then demonstrate some of the more subtle ways in which shaming pervades religious discourse by taking a look at a passage from Thomas Merton.

Sigmund Freud

Among his many legacies Freud left us one that certainly was a sign of his time, viz. a thoroughly anti-religious attitude. Since the time of the enlightenment religion in Europe had suffered a decline because, increasingly, it had become something to be seen as a dimension of the human psyche rather than of a reality that is absolutely different from human existence. As such it was only a matter of time until someone would make the claim that the human psyche was just as well off without the construct of religion as it was, perhaps, well off without the concept of Santa Claus.

Most notable in the many critical voices that began to be heard all over Europe, albeit—remarkably—not in America, was the sentiment that religion was a way of infantilizing oneself or keeping others infantilized. Freud was not alone with his opinion. Names like Schopenhauer, Marx, Feuerbach, Nietzsche—to name only a few of the more famous ones—belong into the chorus of anti-religious sentiment. All, more or less, share this view: religion is undignified because it is the epitome of what Immanuel Kant 100 years earlier had called “our self-imposed immaturity.” This is the stream of thought into which Freud sets his foot in the early twentieth century.

Thus, when I go about quoting and analyzing Freud’s work below I am doing so not because I believe that he is the only one who influenced our attitudes toward religion in this way. Rather, I’m doing it because his words, likely quite unintentionally, reflect with such remarkable clarity on the inner struggle I have been observing in men as they go about understanding the coordinates of their position vis-à-vis faith. This also means that it is quite likely that Freud voiced his own misgivings about religion not so much as a scholar but also as a male who had suffered religion in his own life, both as a boy and a man.

So, as we begin to listen to Freud’s remarks I want to invite you to listen to them, in particular, from the perspective of the many things we have learned about men in the last few months. Listen to them from the perspective of what it means to be a man.

In a summary of his book Future Of An Illusion he remarks

I was much less concerned with the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion—with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence of any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

You can see that Freud’s basic assumption was that religion was a regression to a more infantile stage of being. In it we are looking to be nurtured and loved. Why does he think that? His main contention is that an adult would simply no longer experience the kind of helplessness and powerlessness that characterizes the infant’s emotional situation. Freud calls the feelings and needs that arise from such powerlessness “oceanic feelings”. So, while such feelings may still exist in adults they don’t really correspond to a realistic need that any adult might or should have. Religion is, in other words, a construct that does not respond to a true adult feeling. Ideally, adults should no longer have oceanic feelings, but should instead be able to respond to and manage their needs in mature and realistic ways. We might add that Freud probably also includes in this the need for scientific explanations which, since science does a good job at finding them, is no longer a necessary thing needed from religion.

So, given the strong separation of adulthood from childhood, of maturity from immaturity, Freud argues that the only logical explanation for why religion exists at all is that feelings of the oceanic kind have been maintained artificially.

The derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for father’s protection.

The oceanic feeling and its concomitant need for protection are, in other words, a result of an artificial believe in and fear of fate. Here Freud takes us one step further into the emergence of religion, from religious feelings per se to the emergence of monotheism, those religions, in other words, that worship one god. How does he get there?

Freud’s basic argument is that that the “oceanic feeling” in no way satisfies our basic need for real protection. Freud submits that such protection can only come from a “father”, i.e., a strong person that can protect us “from the superior power of fate.” Yet, and this is the true hitch for Freud as far as religions are concerned, such a search for a father is a basic admission of one’s own lack of authenticity and authority. He believes that faith and religion ultimately undermine our dignity as thinking, decision-making beings, for they force us to surrender all real hope for pleasure and happiness and substitute as the only source of pleasure our own “suffering” and “unconditional submission.”

Freud’s critique of religion, then, turns out to be a critique in particular of monotheism, and there in particular of the monotheism of the Abrahamic kind. But, and this is crucial for our understanding of men and faith, Freud’s critique comes as a critique of the father. He identifies adult religion with a prolonged and unhealthy longing for a father. He thinks of such yearning as submission and infantile regression. Any self-respecting person, but especially every self-respecting male should see that longing for a father in this way stands in diametrical opposition to the task and need of one’s independence and self-sufficiency.

Freud’s views are instructive for us, because they give us a frame-work for understanding men in a religious context. Men neither want to be infantilized (a possibility Freud quite certainly associates with a regression to the maternal care of the infant) nor do they normally want to submit to someone or something in order to experience pleasure (a possibility Freud certainly associates with the disciplining hand of the father). Given this polarized view of religion and adding what we already know about men—viz. that they would stay away from both poles—we can see that there simply is no place for men in religion. Of course, if the current wars are an indication of what men choose, if they have to, they are more likely to choose submission and suffering as a form of pleasure than spirituality and oceanic feeling.

This means that for men—according to Freud—contact with religion is always tormented contact. It is always fraught with critical questions regarding his maturity, his will to power and his willingness to go it by himself. The inner psychic conflict that emerges from a confrontation with faith and religion is a conflict that circumscribes a man’s attempts to emancipate himself both from the sphere of the maternal and the sphere of the paternal.

As noted above and corroborated by conversations with men in my practice more men are likely to choose a faith that emphasizes submission and discipline than one that emphasizes universal connectedness, nurturing and love. Male faith is often aware of and afraid of judgment and punishment rather than forgiveness and mercy. Men, in other words, are more likely to choose a harsher variety of faith. One in which they have to prove their perseverance, righteousness and willingness to obey God. Of course, proving this also means that men will not complain while they are out to prove these things. Male faith often carries with itself traits of martyrdom, i.e., a silent acceptance of the pain that has been inflicted on them. Silent it is for religious reasons. Wailing about it would, ultimately, show a man’s weakness and inability to follow God’s will. This, by the way, holds true in all religions that see themselves centered around a God or Gods. It includes, of course, the Abrahamic religions, but also Hinduism, many African religions as well as some American Indian religions. In all of them the man of faith is the man who can endure and bear pain and even uses pain as a means of religious purification.


Thomas Merton

The need for something real and the protection that such connection with reality can have from shame can be seen in more subtle ways in the writings and teachings of many religious men. Take, for example, the case of Thomas Merton



The great theologian and religious mystic in his book Thoughts In Solitude reminds us that

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve. It must, therefore, die. There is no greater misery than to mistake this fruitless death for the true, fruitful and sacrificial “death” by which we enter into life.


Putting this into plain male language I would translate Merton’s passage in this way:

There is no greater failure than to be fooled about what’s real and what is not. If I want to be real I need to do/be in touch with real things. When we are connected with things that are not real, we become weak and will be killed. There is no greater embarrassment than to be killed for something we thought was real that turns out to be not-real. However, if something is a true cause (i.e., real), it’s worth dying for.


My translation of Merton’s words highlights shame as one of the most vulnerable issues in a man’s psychic constitution and in his search for faith. It is simply shameful to be mistaken. Especially when it is about something so important and vital as how to lead a spiritual life or a life of faith. How different could this passage have sounded, had Merton thought of taking out the words “disaster” and “misery” and, instead, said “sometimes it happens that we think something is real and it turns out it is not.” How different could this passage have sounded had he said “no big deal; forgive yourself; understand what went wrong and do it differently the next time. God loves you.” How immeasurably great would it have been, had he chosen to omit the verbiage about death (fruitless or sacrificial) and instead talked about life unambiguously? Such talk, by the way, would have included much attention to the subject of dying. But it would have stayed away from putting a judgment on the kind of death someone dies.

While Merton’s insights about immersion in unreality were clearly not meant to be about men only, they come to have a peculiar application to the state of men and faith. I believe that for many men it is the fear of what Merton calls “immersion in unreality” that keeps them distanced from traditional faith options and in search of a more meaningful, more moving and more invigorating faith.
Unfortunately, men’s need for being connected to something real, often ends up with men choosing suffering and pain over nurturing, war over peace, battle over conversation. Many men are looking for “the true cause” or the “sacrificial death” rather than a fruitless one.

Interestingly, faith for most men is rarely of a solely contemplative nature. Few men are satisfied to simply pray, fast, meditate and then pray some more. However, if they can do these things by causing themselves to suffer significantly, they might be more inclined to engage in these activities. What I mean is this, if men can find enough pain, i.e., a way of competing either against themselves or others in their exercise of prayer, fast and meditation they might feel more inclined to engage in it as an “activity of faith.” Again, we come up against the particularly male way of approaching the world through pain and surviving pain.



Men’s connection with nature

Throughout my practice and certainly also in my own life I have observed that men often are highly attracted to a connection with nature as a link to their own experience of something that goes beyond themselves. It is probably true that more men find something akin to spiritual happiness in nature than anywhere else in their lives (golfing not excluded). What is it about nature that has such magnetic appeal for men?

I think our understanding of Freud’s view on religion can be helpful. While it is possible to live in tune with, if not attuned to, nature, it certainly cannot be said that nature is a nurturing and loving sphere into which a man simply has to let himself fall in order to be saved. Quite to the contrary, the man who encounters nature unprepared will, most certainly, die! Being in tune with nature requires skill, talent and practice—in some cases even a little cunning and trickery. On the other hand, however, nature will never seem like an arbitrary force to which a man simply will have to submit, if he wants to be attuned to it. No, it is precisely this struggle with nature that makes it a masculine environment. Nature is not giving, but it is certainly also not taking. Whether a man emerges from nature with his dignity intact or violated depends solely on him. Nature simply is what it is. It acts in accordance with its own laws. Nature doesn’t judge. Nature doesn’t punish. In a way it could be said that nature lives its own stoic ways and, as such, becomes an example for how many men would like to live.

This, by the way, is quite different from how many American Indian men have looked at nature. To them nature is not a stoic other, but rather an enchanted universe. One in which Gods have to be satisfied, appeased and, on occasion, tricked in order to make it through. Nature in the American Indian view is moral. It responds to the wrong-doings of men and women by punishing it with droughts, storms, blizzards and floods. This is precisely not the “nature” many men are looking for when they embark on a nature experience. To them, nature is about a struggle for survival. In this struggle their force is no different from the force of the wind or the rain. The only question is who will supersede.

Immersion in nature, in other words, is without shame. There is no embarrassment or shame about having fallen into the arms of a nurturing maternal force. But there also isn’t a trace of the shame and embarrassment of having submitted and put oneself into the service of a disciplining paternal force.



Faith and Religion Without Shame

I believe that religion and faith cannot be passed on. They are decisions that are made individually and are part of a person’s ripening sense of the world and its limits and, perhaps, its sense of connectedness to an absolute about which we cannot say much that could be taken as truth by others. Rather, we can only talk about our own experience. Faith is always absolutely subjective.

For example, if I believe that there is a God who sits in judgment of my actions and that I should take this judgment into consideration when I act and decide, I might talk about this to my children, but it would be wrong to force them to frame their own actions in the same way. The experience that there might be an absolute power, benevolent or not, is an experience that can only come out of the experience of the limits of one’s own thinking and existence. I consider regular exchanges about such things with our children part of the way in which we can teach them faith and spirituality without shame.

Such exchanges include three general topic areas which each can have several sub-topics. These areas are
a) the limits of our existence
b) aesthetic experiences
c) ethical experiences
d) a combination of these three

In all cases our exchanges are done best and most effectively when we speak about our subjective experiences rather than some allegedly objective precept that everyone should follow. Above all else, though, it is important that we speak without shame and shaming.

Recently I had a conversation with my two older sons. We had dropped off our van at the shop and were walking the two miles home. It was about 8:30pm, dark and the last part of the walk led across a local cemetery. We drive past this cemetery almost every day. It’s rather large, but stuck between a Meineke and across from a car-dealership and a porn-shop just down the road we hardly pay attention to it. This time we did. As we entered it, we realized that what had looked like just a grassy area was actually crowded with flat tomb-stones, one next to the other. I reminded them that it was important not to step on any of these stones. We walked in farther and found tombstones from two centuries ago, old and withered, the writing barely legible anymore. We thought about what Urbana must have looked like when these people were alive. What were they thinking, feeling, wondering, worrying, laughing about?

Then came the question: Papa, what kind of tombstone would you like to have? I thought for a moment. This is a conversation I had with my father. I know what he wants, actually, a natural stone with just his name carved in it. So, I said to Noah, who had asked the question, I think I’d like something simple. Perhaps just a rock or a cross. Definitely not something carved and polished. And, I said, perhaps my name and birthdate, and a small thing you guys would like to say about me.

I think I would like something that’s shaped like a couch, Noah said, so that when someone comes to visit me there they sit down and talk with me. Jacob chimed in saying I’d like something like a tree-stump. No writing, just something that looks like nature. And, as always keen to match—if not trump—what his older brother says, if someone comes to visit my grave they can sit in the grass.


There is so much to say about this anecdote. But I would like to highlight just a few things that, in my opinion, are meaningful for the development of faith and spirituality in men.

a) as boys they need to have strong connections with their father
b) they need to feel and understand their father’s faith and beliefs.
c) experiences with each other, their father and other friends where reflection about others, past and future times can emerge
d) openness about death, spiritual questions, etc.
e) there needs to be an absence of shame/shaming in how they relate to each other
f) awe and other experiences of the infinite (through music, art, nature, etc.) need to be shared often
g) strong respect for others, their lives, their decisions, their ways of life.
h) A good sense of the balance between passion and task-orientedness on the one hand and the ability to let go on the other.

You might have noticed that I didn’t say anything about God, commandments, religious precepts, rules of holiness, etc. I only spoke about the world and how we live in it. If we can teach boys and men these things, if we can speak convincingly of how living mindfully, can be a way of living faithfully and without shame, then all talk of God and diving will merely be an afterthought, to be thought or not to be thought.

October 29th, 2007: Men and Friendship—The lone hero and the Erosion of Friendship

How Friendship Began For Me



My thoughts about friendship take me back 40 + years, all the way to my own childhood.

I first learned about friendship from books, I believe. And the first models of friendship were not about friendship among humans, boys and men that is. Rather, they were about friendships between a man or boy and an animal.

I remember in particular a book I read in fourth grade about a native American boy and his horse. He had caught the horse from a herd of wild horses, brought it home himself, won its trust and begun to ride it. For him the highest accomplishment in all of it was that he never used any of the rougher methods his peers and elders were suggesting to use. All he did is get the horse used to his scent, touch, and slowly to accepting weight on his back. When the time had come to get on the horses back, the horse did not buck, but accepted him and followed all commands right away. The book spans about 40 years and so I followed them through several separations, adventures and almost missed opportunities. Their mutual loyalty, I remember this clearly, even then moved me to tears.

Around that time I made my first real friend. His name was Victor. Victor became my friend because his friend up to that point, Klaus-Peter Kroeger, had been hit and killed by a car when he ran across the busy street in front of his parents’ house. He and Victor had been on their way to school and Victor witnessed the whole thing. Victor was the third of four children born to a Spanish mother and a German father. He had two older brothers and a younger sister. He was what now we would call a latch-key child. With both parents working, his brothers had to take care of him and his younger sister. They did so with much resistance and the result of it was that Victor had very little supervision. But, as his name so aptly suggests, Victor was a winner.

Up to my friendship with him I had been at the bottom of the class totem pole. Bullied, kicked and teased mercilessly. Victor stood next to me and cheered me on (the only one who did) when for the first and only time I refused to be bullied by a boy nick-named Caterpillar (or the bull-dozer). Ordinarily I wouldn’t have stood a chance. But my rage and Victor’s cheers (and instructions on how to use my fists) gave me superhuman powers. Caterpillar lay on the ground quickly, bleeding from his nose and mouth, crying noisily. The teachers had to pull me off of him. I was punished with a detention. Victor, not having to go home anytime soon, stayed with me. To this day I remember him saying again and again, “gut gemacht, Martin” (you did good, Martin).

Physically Victor would not let anyone mess around with him. Even then I understood that this was a result of having two older brothers who were not always gentle with him. Academically, however, Victor needed my cheering and some instructions (especially in English which we had started in third grade and math). While we never thought of it as an exchange, Victor’s academic confidence grew as my physical confidence did.

My strongest wish for my relationship with Victor was for us to be brothers. We shared this wish I believe. We both had read the adventures of Winnetou, a noble Apache chief, who meets and becomes most intimate friends with a German engineer by the name of Karl. Karl turns out to be immensely strong. He saves Winnetou’s life once before Winnetou even knows that Karl is a friend and not an enemy. Soon, Karl’s strength is legendary and he becomes known by the name of Old Shatterhand, the hand that shatters. Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, or Charlie as Winnetou calls him affectionately, become blood-brothers. They each cut their arms with a knife and then press the wounds against each other while committing themselves to absolute loyalty to and love for the other.

This is what I wanted Victor and me to do. We never did. We were too afraid to cut our arms. When we entered fifth grade he went to the school his brothers were already attending, I went to a school closer to my parents’ home. I had lost my first friend and started into a three year Odyssee until my next friendship finally began. During this time my grades dropped significantly, I became known as a troublemaker, I stopped washing myself regularly, and I tried very hard to get the attention of girls (a very unfortunate mix, by the way). I was in grade seven, still without a friend, that I came closest to having sex, closer than I did for the rest of my adolescence. The loss of my friend, in other words, combined with the change of schools had turned me into somewhat of a lose gun. All of this turned around when, finally, at the end of seventh grade, I became friends with first two then three other boys from my class. You’ll hear more about that later on.

Men’s Loneliness



Many men are alone. No, this doesn’t mean that they are really by themselves. They might even have crowds gathered around them. But they are alone because they don’t have a friend. Once they have reached their career goal, or simply, once they have begun to work, have started a family and are on some kind of path towards retirement, men seem to fall out of friendships with other men. It is stunning to see for how many young men significant friendships with other men are still common until the end of college. While college males lament the fact that many of their so-called friends end up being nothing more than drinking buddies, they also admit to having one or two perhaps a handful of real friends, young men around their own age whom they trust and with whom they have significant ties. However, come graduate school, the first job or marriage, these friendships end. Frequently, they end quite abruptly with those friends serving, one last time, as best-men and witnesses at the man’s wedding.

Often such men can also name about as many close male friends they had from early childhood on, through grade school, junior high and high-school. We are looking, in other words, at life-long experience with friends and friendships that , quite suddenly, comes to stop in many men’s mid-twenties.

It would be easy, too easy, to talk about this lack of significant male friendships in males 25 and older from the many perspectives of male vulnerability we have discussed in the last eight months. If we did that, we would say that males are too vulnerable, too competitive, too homo-phobic, too focused on getting love from women, too immersed in their work, too tough with themselves to make meaningful connections with other men. Perhaps in small ways this is true. But the real problem with this line of argumentation is that it would, once again, blame men for something, this time their very own loneliness. It would be saying that “before you can make real friends you need to change. You’re not going to get anywhere, if you stay the way you are.”

If we go about it that way, we are likely to judge men by a standard that is not their own. We would be saying things like "if you want to have friends you need to show your feelings" or if you want to have friends you should practice how to have a conversation." Whose standard standards these are I don’t know. Some might think it’s a female standard. But I hesitate to say that, because so many men actually use this standard to talk about themselves. It also wold be blaming women for something men should be in charge (afte all, every act of blaming is an act of externalizing internal pain and projecting it on someone else). Suffice it to say that it is a self-blaming, self-denigrating and humiliating standard. One that continually drives home the message that men are insufficient human beings. We are not. It is time, I believe that we stop the vicious cycle of morbid self-criticism and replace it with an honest and open understanding of our limits combined with an equally honest understanding of our capabilities. Male friendships are an example of that.

Men’s Expectations Regarding Friendship


The more I think about it, I am inclined to think that it is not so much vulnerability but high expectations, standards you might say, that are at the root of male loneliness and disconnectedness from other males. What are those standards?

A summary of conversations I have had the privilege to have with a 73 old client might give us a first glimpse of those standards. My client, let’s call him Elmer, came to me after he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer, had had surgery and had fallen into a deep depression. He had the following to say about friends and friendships:

I don’t have real friends anymore. The one and only real friend I had died about
30 years ago in a plane-crash. We both had our license for small planes, you
know. But when he crashed I couldn’t fly any longer. I still miss him a lot. He
was the only one I told about all my issues with women. Then, wham, he was gone.
I do have a lot of buddies now. You know, men I talk to, here and there. Men I’m
friendly with. There is Kurt the car-dealer at the Chevy place, Oskar the banker
who does all my finances and keeps watch over my properties. There is my
hair-dresser. Most of them are actually younger than me, by about fifteen to
twenty years. I don’t know why really. I guess I don’t like hanging out with old
geezers my age. All they talk about is their bad knees and how they’re going to
die soon. That’s not me, not even now, even though I have had cancer.

Elmer, without knowing it, brings in certain standards about male relationships which, I believe, are quite universally true. They are true not only for 73 year old men, but already touch the lives of young boys and adolescents.

Standard #1: Friends now should be like friends then. Men grieve the loss of old friends.

I have found that most men grieve the loss of old friends. Many of them did not go through the trauma of losing a friend in a plane-crash like Elmer. In fact, most of them said their friends were probably still alive, somewhere, in the US. Some even knew where these friends lived. But they grieved their loss nevertheless. In their grieve over the lost friend, their standards for new friendships rose to new levels. A new friend should really have all the characteristics of the lost friend. These men’s grieve, in other words, became an obstacle to forming new friendships. But, and this is most interesting, it also became an obstacle to renewing a friendship with an old friend. It almost seems that the pain of nostalgia over old friendships, the melancholy of lost friendships, is part of the male profile. The older a man gets the more he seems to be saying “I refuse to make friends, unless they’re like my old friend.

I came to understand this quite acutely through observing and questioning my own actions around old friends. Some time in the last 12 years I had begun to surf the internet looking for pictures or hints of news about old/former friends. I would just type names of people into a search engine and see, if I could find any information about them. In doing it, I began to be aware of how utterly disconnected I had become from my past, from my friends, from the places that, in so many ways, molded me.

My initial curiosity turned into heart-ache upon that realization. While my life had always seemed continuous, and logical--detours not withstanding--it became clear to me now that the continuityI thought I had wasn’t so much in my life than that it was given by the fact that time simply kept moving on. Many things had been quite discontinuous in my life. One major discontinuity lay in my loss of a few friends. They hadn’t died, I had just . . . well, not forgotten about them, but pushed them to the side.

I realized, too, that a certain sadness about this had always been with me. A song from my favorite German song-writer Reinhard Mey had, in particular, touched me. In this song he describes how, while slowly getting drunk on cheap red wine he thinks of all his friends. He wonders what they’re up to now, where they might be. He resolves that, though he can’t see them and be with them now, “in a gesture, in a word, they all continue to live within me.”

"In a gesture, in a word they all still live within me." I had never thought of this line as anything else but axiomatic, dogmatic truth. And this truth hurt. It hurt because no matter how present the gesture or word of the particular person, this presence, nevertheless, bespeaks powerfully their absence from my life now. I realized, in other words, that I was grieving the loss of my friends almost as if they had died. And without knowing what I was doing I used the internet to make my old friends present again.

It took courage to go beyond the mere internet search. My friend Lucas, a boy from Holland with whom I had spent a mere four weeks (two in his house in the Netherlands and two in my house in Germany) responded to my e-mail only once. My friends Stephan and Andreas didn’t respond. My friend Calle, short for Carl, did answer. Five years ago we started writing to each other in earnest again. We both had started families and every time I visited Germany I would also make it a point to see him. We continue to write and see each other. I last saw him in June of this year. This weekend he wrote to me that his job had ended. He is in a lot of pain, worried. I feel fortunate to have known him for 36 years and to understand what this loss means to him.

Standard #2: Old friends often are friends with whom a man went through some kind of adventure.

This seems to be an extremely important part of male friendships. Their significance is often accompanied by something the friends went through together, something unusual or extraordinary they experienced together. I have heard men talk about difficult shared mountain-climbing experiences, about out-racing a police-car, about pushing themselves to a limit (sometimes that limit is several nights of studying together without sleeping, sometimes that limit is getting totally drunk together and waking up the next morning without knowing how they got there). Not all men choose all of these, but many males, in my experience, will want to push their limits, together with another man or a group of men, in order to affirm their relationship with their friends.

With Calle, to use him as a good example, this adventure was the rock-band in which we played together. I taught him his first chords on the guitar. We played for about five years before the end of school pulled us apart. He and I, together, dug a deep trench in his parents’ garden which they needed to put in a new fence. In return they gave him the money to buy his first amplifier. This was our adventure, playing music. Expressing everything we felt as teens, all our Sturm and Drang, through music.

Standard #3: Friends should be willing to talk about women/partners.

This is an extremely sensitive issue for most men, because many of the men I have talked to about this issue seem to agree on this one fact: they often feel powerless and overwhelmed with what their partners want and expect from them. Ergo, a real friend is a man who understands women from his own experience. Men who get along with their partners and who might even criticize other men for voicing their frustration about their partners are never going to meet this standard. A real friend understands that living in a relationship is one of the most difficult things a man can undertake.

Calle would spend part of the summer in Italy on a kind of exchange visit. This is where he fell in love for the first time. Her name was Anna. I in turn got to talk about my unrequited love for Corinna. We spent uncounted hours talking about these girls, candles lit, listening to music that would indulge our romantic longings.

Perhaps this is contrary to what the quote from my father is expressing. He seems to think that the friendship is better--purer--perhaps, if wives can be left of the conversations. Perhaps this is an age-related insight, one that is not yet accessible for me. For me, when so much is happening in my relationship, good and bad, I want to be able to talk about it to my friend. Not doing it would, at this point in my life, seem like a denial of who I am and what's happening to me.

Standard #4: Friends should not engage in any kind of morbid conversation with each other.

What do you mean, I asked Elmer. Are you saying you wouldn’t and haven’t talked to any of these guys about how scared shitless you were when you got the diagnosis?

Well, no, Elmer said, I didn’t say it in those words. I just said that it hurt like hell and that I was about to shoot myself rather than having more of it. That was enough, he said. Oskar knew exactly what I was talking about. No need to say more and drag it out.

So, I asked, is this what you would have told your friend who died in the plane-crash had he been alive?

Probably, Elmer said. I might have added what a bastard he is for probably living longer than me. He laughs with a coarse smoker’s laugh. But now I’m the bastard who is still alive, he says and laughs even more (with tears glistening in the corners of his eyes).

Calle and I did not have any reason to talk about death. But it came up indirectly as the issue of age in our parents. When he and I met in seventh grade his parents were 54 and 60. My parents were 34 and 36. I knew then that Calle lived with a sense of limitation that I could hardly understand. His parents simply weren’t as vivacious and outgoing, and therefore not as inspiring to him, as mine were at times. When we first started writing again, his father had passed and his mother was ailing.

Friendship Only Once

Elmer’s words and reflections can help us see that men often view friendship as a once in a life occurrence. If they’re lucky their friends will live a long time and the friendship will somehow continue. Many men do not make friends again, once their old friends have died or moved away. I am reminded of Sean, a 25 year old graduate student, who was still struggling with anger and grieve about a move initiated by his parents when he was 14. He had lost all of his friends in this move and “decided” never to make friends again. Losing a friend can be a traumatic experience for a man, not only if the friend dies violently, but simply because he feels torn away from a few people he had really connected with. Sean dealt with his grieve in quasi-masochistic ways and by attaching himself desperately to a woman who could not understand why he was so clingy.

To make up for the loss men are more likely to choose loneliness, or superficial buddydom, or an intense, sometimes hurtful, relationship with a woman. And even boys often fall into these patterns, acting like old, uprooted trees that cannot really grow again.






How Do Boys and Men Learn about Friendships with Other Men?

How are boys and men discouraged from forming friendships with other men?

A man’s ability to connect with other men is highly dependent on the kinds of connections he had both with his father and his brothers, but also with his mother and sisters. Father absence is a social malady of remarkable dimensions in many ways. But it certainly has one of its most profound consequences in men’s inability to connect with other men. The absent father, the secondary parent, the dead father… all of these share, from the perspective of the son, the disappointing insight “men’s presence cannot be trusted, for men always end up leaving. So why connect with them?”

The story of Oedipus, which we heard about already at our last meeting, gives ample evidence not only of a son who is, unbeknownst to him, drawn to his mother. It also is the story of a son who was, first and foremost, abandoned by his father. His father’s inability to connect with him, his corresponding jealousy of a son who would, some day out do him in almost everything, drove him to abandon his son. Paternal jealousy of a son is not seldom the lever that pries apart the protective parental frame-work around a son.

Brothers play an equally vital role in the way boys and men are able to connect with other males. Roger, a long-term client, grew up with a sadistic older brother who liked to tease and trip him up whenever and wherever he could. Roger is 56, a successful university professor, but has never had a male friend. Similarly, Sam, a 34 year old business men with lots of contacts with men in his professional life, grew up with two older brothers who abused him, but to whom he could not stop looking up. Sam admires many men, even those who try to hurt him, but he has not been able to engage in a significant friendship with another man.

The role of mothers in a man’s developing ability to make friends is equally significant. Mothers can easily delay or stop this process by communicating to their sons that they should spend more time with them rather than their father by discouraging their sons to participate in any kind of activity that looks at all risky. By emphasizing that it is first and foremost the task of the boy to please her, i.e., the woman, rather than himself, i.e., that is the man.

Mothers who in subtle ways send messages to their sons about their father’s incompetence and unreliability are not rare. I am not talking about active ways of putting down their husbands. Rather, I am talking about the small, almost unnoticeable ways in which mothers function as gate-keepers who constantly, by virtue of their gate-keeping, send the message that it’s simply better for the son to be with mom than with dad. This kind of gate-keeping takes place in two parent families as well as single parent (i.e., mother only) families. However, it can be especially strong in the latter.

Jeremy, a fourteen year old client, came to see me, because he had hit his mother several times. It turned out that he could not safely tell his mother that he wanted to spend time with his father. His mother and father were divorced and the father lived three hours south of Champaign. Every time he mentioned it, she would get mad at him and ask him, if he didn’t love her anymore. To make matters even worse she also continually identified every of her son’s misbehaviors as “things that remind me of your dad.” His mother also acts with extreme agitation to Jeremy’s wish to spend time with his friends.
Jeremy complies with her wishes, on the surface. He gets angry because “she doesn’t have any time for me.” As it turns out, despite her wish for Jeremy not spend time with his father and his friends, she—being a single mother of four—in reality doesn’t have any time to spend with Jeremy. Jeremy is essentially alone, alienated from his father and male friends and abandoned by his mother.

There are, and this might be hard to believe, plenty of mothers who feel convinced that too much contact with other males will spoil her son’s ability to really understand and please a woman. This is certainly one of the exaggerated outcomes of 40 years of feminism that started based on the premise that men spending time with other men will turn into predatory enemies of women. Therefore, so goes the argument, it is advisable to limit the contact a boy has with other boys and substitute for it more female oriented times.

B. How are boys and men encouraged to form friendships with other males?

It is clear from the above that first and foremost we need to reconsider how far we have gone to disallow relationships between boys and men. Relationships between males, I argue, are not in the first place discouraged because of how we, as a society, process our own latent homophobic tendencies. I also don’t believe for a second that boys and men are spending less time with each other because they are so vulnerable and competitive that being with other males can only trigger more vulnerability in them. In other words, I don’t believe that the fact that males are quite unlikely to form relationship with other males should be considered a kind of escape. Men aren’t escaping from friendships. Rather, I believe that as a society we have grown increasingly intolerant of boys and men, especially when they come in groups. We are afraid of them. Their energy, their risk-taking behaviors, their all or nothing approach to life is suspect and doesn’t fit in with the tight and regulated schedules we seem to want to live by more and more. We respond to boys by pulling them away from each other, by isolating them, by shortening their recess time and by criticizing them harshly when, once again, in tandem with a friend or a group of friends they have gotten out of bounds. Once they have grown into adult men we expect them to be professionally successful, to have a career, start a family, rather than hanging with their friends. In other words, we continue to isolate them from each other.

So, encouraging boys and men to have friendships with each other means that we begin to talk about those friendships again as meaningful and valuable, to the males themselves and to us as a culture. Encouraging them in this way means that we understand that friendships between males often look quite different from friendships between females. They might be rougher, they might be competitive, they might not be about emotional expression via deep conversation, rather they might be about expressing emotions via actions. For boys they might result in something getting broken, they might even result in incidents of behaviors that one would have to label criminal.

This last point might make some of you feel slightly queasy. Is Martin saying, you might wonder, if we should allow boys to engage in criminal behaviors? No, I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that when boys form friendships with each other they do so in ways that push limits. They should definitely be held accountable when it’s necessary to do so. But the worst strategy to choose would be to pull them away from their friends.

Encouraging boys and men to form friendships can also happen by simply assuming that male-male friendships, at any age, are developmentally necessary. It could mean that we will encourage a young boy to call a friend and hang out with him, it could mean that we question our male partners, if they work much (or do much of something else) but don’t seem to stay in touch with their friends.

Why Men Need Friendships With Other Men

Men need to have close male friends because:
it improves their positive outlook on life
it gives them energy to deal with life stresses
it makes them better partners/spouses
it makes them better parents
it helps them grow far into old age
lonely men are less reliable
it gives them a sense of belonging different from their family
it gives them a chance to hang with people who really understand them
their male ways of emotional expressiveness are mirrored
close male friends will understand a man’s need for solitude and adventure
without such friendship we lose our ability to love others


Friends are not acquaintances. Friends are men who understand your deeper struggles, your fears and joys. Friends are also people who join you in your adventures, who will walk with you to the altar when you get married (and will do so again, if you need to get married again). Friends know the fine-line between vulnerability and courage that all men walk constantly. Friends will not push you off your line.

September 24th, 2007 Men Loving Women—Can I admit I want to be loved?

I Want, Therefore I am in Danger of Not Being

The overarching thesis of my talk today is that men have a difficult time admitting their want of love. Want is a funny word. You might already have noticed it in the way I just used it “admitting one’s want of love.” Commonly we think of wanting something as a way of expressing quite strongly and willfully that we would like to have something. But wanting something can also be used to point to what is lacking like in the sentence “your work is wanting.” So, when I talk about men wanting love I am not only saying that they willfully demand it. I am also saying that they are desperately wanting it, meaning missing it, lacking it and, therefore, looking for it.

The problem with wanting is that when it occurs in a project, an essay or a person we think of it as a flaw. When something is wanting we’re not simply pointing to something that needs to be corrected, something that could be easily adjusted. “wanting” means that something in the most fundamental sense is missing. Without that which is missing, i.e., if the wanting is on-going the thing that is wanting is incomplete, insufficient and, ultimately, not viable.

In other words, using the term “want” in the title of my essay today is implying that we can substitute for it the word “flawed”. Then, the title reads “can I admit the flaw of needing to be loved.” For a man to admit to his wanting love is to admit to a fundamental incompleteness in himself. It is so fundamental that, without it, he is not fully himself. He is limping, on crutches. He is handicapped.

To be sure, though, this admission is more than the average male vulnerability we have talked about in previous lectures. The admission that he needs to be loved is not simply a confession of softness and, perhaps, temporary weakness. Rather, this admission is a straight forward admission of shame. Wanting to be loved, wholly and in our entirety, wanting not to be dismissed or sent away to calm our pain and help ourselves is to say I am shameful. For a heterosexual man the shame of wanting to be loved is at about the same level as is the confession that he loves a man. This is, then, if you haven’t noticed it already, closes the lid of the trap in which heterosexual men and perhaps even gay men have lived for ages. Shame forbids expression of love on both ends, towards men and women. A man, therefore is alone.

I argued in my last talk for changing our paradigm of male love for other males away from a rigid and boundaried understanding. This understanding sections men off into homosexual and heterosexual types. But it will not allow men to simply love each other, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Today I will argue that a man’s experience of needing love from a woman is similarly closed off for him, because as a boy he is supposed to learn that “love” must not be one of the ingredients of his courage, strength, perseverance and character. As a boy he is supposed to learn that the constant supply of love and warmth, a supply that can fuel him as richly as super-gasoline can fuel a Corvette, will run out and that he better learn how to exist and fight without it. A man learns as a young boy to live and accept his want of love as a permanent state of mind, body and soul. He might even think of the feeling of this want as honorable, as masculine and strong.

One might best understand men’s relationship to love by understanding it as specialized form of bulimia. Men might be less inclined to become physically bulimic, but it might very well be said that they know and are willing to go through bulimic patterns, i.e., through patterns of binging, starving and purging themselves with respect to love. So, when a man feels the want of love coming on, when he simultaneously feels the shame of “once again needing to be loved” he might decide to go on a binge. He might go through a string of pornographic experiences, he might masturbate incessantly for a few hours or days or longer, he might start another affair. But when it’s over, he will throw it all up. He might castigate himself, put himself under extreme workout or workstress, deny himself all comfort and love in order to eradicate the last bit of want that led him to his binging. Then, as you can imagine, all starts over again.

For boys to learn to live without love is a tough task. It is insurmountable, really, and in the end all boys and men fail at this task and return to the beginning of something not unlike an almost infantile need for love. Nevertheless the cycle of learning how to live without love is started again and again for most every boy who is born, especially, if this boy is born into our western culture. This cycle begins as an almost imperceptible difference in attention given to boys and girls when they’re infants. It moves on quite rapidly into the toddler years where boys are already expected to control their pain in manly ways and not expect to be comforted. This continues into the early years of schooling when boys’ need for love and warmth and the inadequate and insufficient responses given to them result in restlessness and trouble-making. This, of course, we are increasingly likely to diagnose as ADHD. As boys grow into pre-teens and teens we begin to measure them in terms of their manliness and maturity, we praise them, if they possess them, we ignore them and punish them, if they don’t. By the time the boy is indeed a young man, of course, we have called him that since about the time he was two, he has become thoroughly proficient at denying to himself and the world around him that needs and wants to be loved first and foremost.

Here is the irony: All along this roughly twenty year process we have told this boy in subtle and not so subtle ways that they should look to girls and women for love. We have primed them for being in a relationship in the worst possible way, viz. by bottling up their need for love. The rage at women expressed often by very young, college-aged men has, in my opinion, very little to do with male entitlement and much with not having been loved in meaningful ways for too long. But what man would say that? Instead this is expressed precisely in terms of entitlement. After all, after twenty years or so of suppressing their need to be loved, don’t they have a right to it now? Isn’t the woman who says “no” to them giving them a raw deal? Isn’t she breaking the social contract? Of course, she is not. But that is what it looks like from the perspective of deprivation that’s come with a promise of later fulfillment.

You see that this want and need can and must be hidden quite well. The man who is wanting love might have a quick fling with someone, a tea-room exchange with another man in a strange rest-area bath-room perhaps. Perhaps he will just masturbate as often as needed to maintain his strength and thrust as a man. Perhaps he will drink and seek to still his want for love in that way. And, lest anyone ever will find out a thing about this want, he may add anger and contempt at those who have the potential to love him (which ironically is everyonel he meets), thus saying the opposite of what’s really going on: I don’t need you, go away, you bother me.

One of the main functions of male anger, one might call them malfunctions or maybe male-functions, is to cover up the want, the indelible flaw. When men get angry they want to be loved, but they’re ashamed to admit it. Many men come to this threshold often without ever being able to cross over into real love.

You might wonder why I am speaking in such general terms. Certainly, you might think, this description might fit some men. Some might have a screwed up relationship to their need for love and those who could give it to them. But not all, not the ones I know. I would like to answer this in two ways a general one and a specific one:

The general one: think, look and ask again. Go to the men you think you know and ask them these two questions: Do you feel that you are loved well? If you feel you are not, would you admit it to those from whom you expect most to be loved?

The specific one: Simply think of the men in your life who, in one way or another, have voiced to you their anger, disappointment and dissatisfaction with women and love. Ask yourself this question: What do I know about how these men cope with their disappointment?

Here are some sample opinions about women male clients have expressed in sessions with me.


Do not trust a beautiful woman

Do not trust a woman who is clingy

Do not trust a woman who is lost/clueless

Do not trust a woman who is needy

Do not trust a mysterious woman.

Do not trust an independent woman

Do not trust a confident woman

Do not trust a woman who wants sex

Do not trust a woman who does not want sex.

All of these have in common, in spite of their even contradictory nature, this further statement of the same person: “I know a woman like that. I am attached to someone like that. She is not loving me the way I need to be loved.”

It would be so easy to dismiss these as the misogynist fabulations of a disgruntled group of men. Doing so, though, would be missing entirely the vast anxiety that is contained in these statements. Their inherent misogyny not withstanding, these statements speak of the fear of abandonment and loneliness that can beset men when it comes to spending time in relationships with women. It might be easy, too, to analyze these feelings of men as caused by bad mothering. And although mothering is an important aspect of how men will eventually feel about women, it is not bad mothering but rather the cultural forces that align mothering and fathering in a way that is detrimental to men and sets them up for cyclical and intergenerational empathic failures with women and others.

So far in my clinical experience of about 10 + years there has not been a single male, heterosexual client who has not complained about problems with his partner. In fact, the overwhelming majority of men enter therapy because they are experiencing a crisis in their relationship. The list above only samples some of the reasons that men give why their relationships with women are not working out, but its contradictory nature bespeaks the fact that when it comes to women heterosexual men seem to be able to be suspicious of them in all kinds of ways.

They could complain about problems with their family of origin, with their friends, with siblings, a boss, colleagues, etc. And some of them do bring those issues. But none of the issues is so invariably problematic for all of my male clients than the issue of their relationship with a member of the other sex. This even holds true, by the way, for my gay clients which means even when the relationship is non-romantic does it pose problems that seem to over shadow many men’s lives.

As men go about forming their opinions about women all of them seem to follow a similar pattern of need and aggression. This pattern will simultaneously lead them to desiring a female companion, needing her for comfort and nurturing and grieving her loss/absence while also rejecting her for her unwillingness to be present and available.

The word “simultaneous” is significant because it doesn’t just mean that men love and hate a certain woman at the same time. Rather it means that love and hate, need and aggression might be wrapped into each other in a way that makes it hard for an outsider, or the man in question, to understand the difference. Men seem so utterly dependent on women that they can only hate them for having so much power over them. What is going on?


The Trauma of Oedipus

In his essay The Trauma of Oedipus: Toward a New Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Men William Pollack discusses what he believes to be a basic misunderstanding by Sigmund Freud of the significance of Oedipal structures in a man’s life. Freud had stated so famously about men: where they love they do not desire and where they desire the cannot love. Pollack argues that

To a large extent (whether openly or unwittingly), our psychology of men and the dynamic psychotherapies that emanate from it have accepted either this aggression and desire/conflict-based model or, alternatively, a paradigm of separation/autonomy for understanding and for attempting to treat men’s pain.

Pollack believes that

"Listening to male patients reveals a fissure in their self-systems, one beginning well before the Oedipal Period."

He continues saying that

"Historical, cultural and economic forces affect parenting styles so as to make it likely that, as boys, men will suffer a traumatic disruption of their early holding environment, a premature psychic separation from both maternal and paternal caregivers. This is a normal male, gender-linked, loss a trauma of abandonment for boys which may appear later in adult men, through symptomatic behavior and characterological defense."

When these symptomatic behaviors and defense mechanisms take place, Pollack argues, men are likely to develop

"empathic disruptions in their relationships (love/desire splits in romance or an inability to commit) as an attempt to unconsciously protect against further loss, limited emotionality with an intolerance of feelings of vulnerability, or to express and bear sadness; which consequently hinders their ability to grieve—to mourn, and to change. These defenses are often incorporated into a syntonic character armor blocking a man’s overt expression of all strong feelings, except anger, and may be maintained and consciously, and valued, as a (false) self-sufficiency."

Pollack has been studying this behavior in much detail and had earlier in his career named it “defensive autonomy.”

Interestingly, Pollack associates these kinds of male defensive autonomy and empathic failure with a misreading of the Oedipus myth both by Freud himself but also by those who, later, used Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex to devise parenting advice and strategies. Again Pollack:

"Freud chose to ignore Oedipus’ earliest trauma, blaming the fantasies of the unconscious. But, in fact, the story of Oedipus is indeed a tale of a young boy betrayed and abandoned to die by his own mother and father [my italics]. It is not Oedipus’ unconscious lust for his mother or jealousy of his father that sets the stage for downfall, but his parents; hurtful rejection of him. The point is not to condemn mothers and fathers but rather to highlight that men may either feel, or unconsciously experience a sense of having been prematurely and traumatically abandoned, betrayed, or hurtfully separated from their primary love objects. Like Oedipus, most men have no conscious memory of this earlier trauma, though their vulnerabilities (especially to shame) in adult life may be the evidence of the unhealed wound. I believe that this normative traumatic abrogation of the holding environment, for boys, comes about due to a complex combination of factors."


In summary, because the Oedipus myth was once believed to describe the unhealthy lust of a son for his mother, it was believed that, in order for men to be psychologically healthy, they should dis-identify from their mothers. In other words, a boy who seemed too close to his mother (and to his father) was eyed suspiciously by others as he had not separated enough from them. Pollack concludes that boys and men are quite likely to reject any sense others could have of them as being close to their mothers because this would conflict with their gender-identity as masculine men.

But can the boy who has mastered the culturally expected task of disidentification really forget his mother or his father? What do they remember about that stage of oneness that once, a long time ago, connected them too their mothers and their fathers? Pollack argues [based on the work of Nancy Chodorow’s book Mothering] that boys’ disidentification is likely accompanied by his parents’ simultaneous attempts to push him out. “Boys are more likely to have been pushed out of the pre-Oedipal relationship and to have had to curtail their primary love and sense of empathic tie” with their primary care-givers.”

The Biological and Sociological Underpinnings of Men’s Vulnerability

What, hopefully, we’re beginning to see is that men’s vulnerability is both a biological and sociological reality. The unconscious Oedipal patterns that may have contributed to the idea that men should dis-identify early from their caregivers, simply because they are men, is reinforced by a sociological/cultural pattern that separates and, as Pollack says, bifurcates role-socialization of boys and men. We have long understood that this kind of separation and bifurcation is bad for women, but we have yet to see that boys and men as well are negatively affected by it. This might be one of the necessary core-insights into understanding the even deeper insight that men are negatively affected by patriarchal structures. It might help us understand that patriarchal structures and men are not one and the same thing. While it is historically true that they were largely created by men, perhaps to maintain and reinforce their own power, these structures have long since turned against men, holding them hostage now in ways that are emotionally hurtful to them as well as women.


The Power of Women in the Lives of Men

Men’s Fear of Women
At a time when we have learned thoroughly the lessons of feminism about patriarchy i.e., the male driven exploitation of women, their oppression subjugation and marginalization, it might be somewhat difficult to conceive of men as being helpless and angry in the face of female power. It remains to be understood, though, if not part of the centuries-old oppression of women is not also the result of male fear of women.

The story of a certain woman, Eve, who is mysterious and alluring and physically partakes in the body of the man who loves her, Adam, is not just a story that is meant to blame women for having “brought sin into the world” it is also a story that bespeaks powerfully men’s fear of women. Eve’s name alone formed of the same letters that also make up the tetragrammaton, the name of God, suggests that Eve’s very being is about being connected to the essence of God. “Essence” is what her name means. Often it is translated as the one who has a womb, who bears children. “Eve” means life and control over life. Later we find out that this is not the only connection Eve has. In addition to partaking in God’s essence she is also connected to the dark force represented by the snake. Her ability to communicate with the snake bespeaks this connection. Adam, on the other hand, is only made of earth, dry ground so to speak. And although the story tells that Eve came second and was formed of the “rib” of Adam, he seems utterly dependent on her moves, her insight and decision. Of course, the story’s purpose seems to be to lay blame with woman for having gone against the will of God, listened to the snake, eaten of the tree of knowledge and seduced the man. Yet, one cannot help but sense a certain naivete and immaturity that surrounds the claim that woman is responsible for the destruction of the paradisical state men and women were once in together. After all, wasn’t it that move precisely that enabled humans to grow and learn and, therefore, to become who they are?

This story, in other words, summarizes well the power of women.

Women are connected to the invisible powers both dark and light ones that fill the universe.

Women give life.

Women drive decision-making

Women are alluring.

Women move humanity towards new territories, new discoveries.

Men’s Need for Attention from Women

A former client of mine described the issue of women’s power in his life like this. This client, by the way, is married, with several children, has never had an affair and states that he would likely not ever have an affair because of the “confusion” it would create:

Women are everywhere in my life. I am not just talking about my mother and sister. I am also talking about the ways in which I look for women when I am out and about. I could be at a café or restaurant, at the grocery store or the library, no matter where I am, I look for women. I know a woman has entered the space I am in without even looking up yet. I just sense it. If I try not to look up, I usually fail. Often I find myself judging quickly whether a woman is appealing to me or not. But even if she is not appealing to me, I might still find myself wondering what it would be like to have sex with her. I might still be trying to get her attention by looking at her for just a moment longer than would be customary, waiting to see, if she sees my face and turns towards me. I just have to see.

I have heard that some men only go for certain features in women. They like the ones with big breast or small breasts, big butts or small with voluptuous bodies or more boyish bodies, long hair or short hair. I can’t say that any of this is true for me. I don’t feel particularly turned off or on by body shapes. What I do know is this, if after checking out a woman, having seen her, having taken in what she looks like, I do get her attention, if she even smiles at me or speaks to me even, I am lost to thoughts of being with her. Then, at the latest, a jumble of thoughts and feelings takes hold of me that both feels good and fills me with a kind of yearning that is almost painful to bear. I feel alive and happy because I got something and also sad and almost angry because there is something I will not get.


I am struck how this description, despite its lingering on physical details and the objectifying ways in which this male seems to look at women runs towards a non-physical moment in which the woman, suddenly, holds all power. This is the moment when she pays attention to him. When her eyes meet his, when she smiles at him, when she tunes in to him, if only for a brief moment, he is lost and “a jumble of thoughts and feelings takes a hold” of him. Most likely none of the women my client scrutinizes in this way will be women with whom he will be in a relationship. In fact, we know that this man doesn’t really want to have a relationship with any of these women. He just wants to be seen by them, briefly connect with them and get their smile. For in succeeding to get their attention, in succeeding to get their smile he can, for just a moment, feel loved and comforted. This is a moment when he feels loved and seen. But since it is a moment that has no material reality, a moment whose impressions will fade away soon, it will have to be repeated.

To me this description is so valuable and intriguing because it helps us understand what I consider the core-issue in men’s at times predatory behaviors towards women: This issue is to be loved. My client might seem non-stereotypical because his pursuit of women is really not a chase or a hunt, it remains non-physical, though he admits that he might fantasize about a physical relationship later. But he captures what many hetero-sexual men seem to be quite unsure about: whether they are loved by a woman.

What, you might ask, is going on in this man’s marriage? This is a complicated issue. Listen to another longer quote:

I love my wife very much. But I can also find myself being incredibly angry with her. My feelings are almost always somewhere on a roller-coaster when I’m around her. There are times when I wish she’d die in a car-accident so I could be free again. Then there are times when I just wish I could crawl into her, be together with her and not feel any separation from her. She is taking care of our children in ways I couldn’t and wouldn’t. But sometimes I wish she’d take care of me more. When I tell her that, she tells me I behave like a stupid child and should grow up. Sometimes she does take care of me anyway, then I get insecure. When’s the other shoe going to drop, I wonder. What does she expect of me, I wonder. Will she accuse me of not spending enough time with her, of not thinking of anything exciting to do? Will she tell me I’m not doing enough around the house? Will she say I should spend more time with the kids? Will she tell me I am not sexual enough with her, get mad at me when I lose my erection, but then also tell me when I hug her or kiss her too long that I’m in the way and too demanding? Lately, I’ve found myself be less and less interested in her. I don’t think I’m isolating myself, but I don’t look at her as much anymore as I used to. I am no longer waiting. But I feel empty inside at the same time. I so much want a fulfilling relationship. I wish I didn’t always feel that I have to do something to be loved and deserve to be loved by her. Deep down, I guess, I feel like she doesn’t love me. Deep down it feels as if I’m chasing her to love me.

So, what’s going on in this man’s marriage is an unresolvable conflict between his dependency on her and his need to reject her as the locus of his dependency. His need for affirmation from her makes it impossible for him to leave. Yet, as he realizes (or thinks he realizes) that he will get this affirmation from her he engages in fantasies about her death or will actively seek moments of affirmation with other women.

Why doesn’t he leave her, you might ask. He admits that he has thought about this many times, but feels overwhelmed by the guilt and shame he feels for entertaining such thoughts. The only way he can imagine himself free again, is if she left him, died or otherwise disappeared from his life. He has to remain passive because, to the degree that he actively pursues his freedom, he will become less worthy of being loved.

Unconditional Acceptance

At the intersection of fear of and dependence on women men are seeking, I believe, to be accepted unconditionally by women, by a woman. The central question a man might ask will run something like this: Will you woman with your life-giving, essential power and with the ability to make or break me simply by seeing me and smiling at me, will you accept me given my condition of weakness that speaks out of these confessions? Of course, many men precisely fail to say it in this way. They are angry, i.e., afraid, they will not confess their weakness but blame women for it, continue to be hostile and, at times try their luck at hostile conquests. But this is what I suspect is going on underneath it all. This is what I am asking you to consider tonight: men who are hostile and angry with women, actually men who are hostile and angry in general, are men who are looking to be unconditionally accepted. They are men who are “wanting”. They are desperately afraid that the hole inside will become bigger and, finally hollow them out completely.