I would like to begin, today, with an episode from a book by one of my heroes: Lance Armstrong, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France, survivor of testicular cancer, founder of the Live-Strong Foundation (an organization that is devoted to funding cancer-research).
So, it looks as though I’m going to live—at least for another 50 years or more. But whenever I need to reassure myself of this, as I sometimes do, I go out to a place called Dead man’s Hole, and I stare down into it and then, with firm intent, I strip off my shirt and I leap straight out into what you might call the great sublime.
Let’s say it’s my own personal way of checking for vital signs. Dead Man’s Hole is a large green mineral pool gouged out of a circular limestone cliff, so deep into the hill country of Texas that it’s hardly got an address. According to conflicting legends, it’s either where Confederates tossed Union sympathizers to drown, or where Apaches lured unsuspecting cowboys who didn’t see the fall coming. In any event, I’m drawn to it, so much that I bought 200 acres of brush and pasture surrounding it, and I’ve worn a road into the dirt by driving out there. It seems only right that a place called Dead Man’s Hole should belong to a guy who nearly died—and who, by the way, has not intention of just barely living.
I stand there next to a 45-foot waterfall and examine the drop—and myself, while I’m at it. It’s a long drop, so long that it makes the roof my mouth go dry just looking at it. It’s long enough for a guy to actually think on the way down, and to think more than one thought, too. Long enough tto think first one thing, A little fear is good for you, and then another, It’s good for you if you can swim, and then one more thing as I hit the water: Oh fuck, it’s cold. As I jump, there are certain unmistakable signs that I’m alive: the press of my pulse, the insistent sound of my own breathing, and the banging in my chest that’s my heart, which by then sounds like an insubordinate prisoner beating on the bars of my ribcage.
I come up whooping through the foam and swim for the rocks. Then I climb back up and towel off, and I drive home to my three kids. I burst through the door, and I shout at my son, Luke, and my twin daughters, Grace and Isabelle, and I kiss them on the necks and I grab a Shiner Bock beer with one hand and an armful of babies with the other.
The time I ever did it, my wife, Kik, just looked at me and rolled her eyes. She knew where I’d been.
“Was it clarifying for you?” she said.
Lance Armstrong is also the man who, after his fourth, fifth or sixth Tour de France victory said: “I have an unfair advantage over the other riders. I had cancer.”
The Problem
I like this story so much because it helps us focus on the double-edge sword heroism presents us with in a man’s life. Armstrong’s jump into the mouth of Dead-Man’s Hole, his sheer pleasure at being alive as he comes up from the water, and the necessity of repeating this jump many times are as characteristic of heroism as are the solitariness of the jump itself followed by the celebration of victory that does include others who might be tickled by the hero’s exuberance at the moment, but, in a way, don’t quite follow it.
Depending on how we learn to negotiate this need for solitariness and affirmation as boys and men we turn out to be either desperate or confident heroes. The desperate hero is a man who either does not have the courage to start or gets carried away after he’s started or cannot return. Confident heroes are men who can undertake something on their own, struggle with it, accomplish it and then return with pride and humility to the community of others.
Confident and Desperate Heroes
The Desperate Hero
I believe that a fundamental problem of male existence is his inherent solitariness. It’s problematic because, for many men, it all too frequently ends up being loneliness. While I also believe that loneliness and solitude are important ingredients of a man’s existence and well-being, I also believe that a man’s drive to prove himself worthy of being a man propels him more deeply into loneliness than is good for him or those who live with him.
This is problematic for a man amongst men as well as for a man amongst women. Proving his manhood amongst men is, at its very basis, a competitive enterprise. It is a project that is designed to show that I, Man, am different/better/more talented/etc. than other men. When heroism turns to desperation, it is often accompanied by a man’s willingness to step on, hurt, even kill other men.
Desperate heroes, the ones who are likely to compete violently with other men, often turn to women for comfort and to relieve their loneliness. Yet, the desperate hero can never find that comfort there, because the search for comfort from a woman, for the desperate hero, never stops being part of the competitive enterprise of his heroism amongst men. Finding and—perhaps rescuing—a woman are part of the script of desperate heroism as are the fear that this woman might have been co-opted by another man and therefore be out to weaken him, or that another man might take her away, or, surprisingly, that she will get boring and will have to be replaced. The relational life of desperate heroes is often characterized by paranoia and jealousy towards other men and by a pathological need to repeat the conquest and, thereby displace and replace the prized object of affection.
The woman who becomes the object of the desperate hero’s search is often not equipped to deal with his pathology. She is either too enamored with his superficial heroic qualities and too weak herself to be aware of her imminent decline and replacement with another woman or she understands the dynamic and disdains and shames him, triggering anger and violence that might in the end even turn against her.
What the desperate hero can not find is love, nurturing, comfort a place of rest and peace, for the competitive aspects of his search distance him from men and women alike.
When this dynamic does not result in out-right anger, hostility, pathological repetitiveness and violence, it often ends up being a seemingly infinite distance a man perceives between him and his world. He might feel “admired” by his children, partner and friends, he might have attained power and status, he might be a reliable provider but he cannot get close to anyone. And no one can get close to him. The measure of this gap between him and others, often parallels the measure of his success. It is the distance of that which he achieved; for the achieved becomes an obstacle or perhaps a looking glass, through which the man is now seen. The paradox of proving one’s manhood to a community of both men and women is that it removes us from the possibility of being one with that community. Even if we return as celebrated heroes, even if a jubilating crowd is expecting us and is ready to pick us up and carry us a part of the way (all in deference and admiration of the hero’s achievements) we remain other and different.
I find, by the way, that this dynamic holds true in straight and gay relationships. The dynamic of the desperate hero doesn’t change.
Proving my manhood and striving to be a hero potentially distances me from other men rather than help me enter into the healing and supportive community of men and women. Proving my manhood and striving to be a hero distances me from women and men because it creates expectations of achievement on all sides that potentially get in the way of true intimacy.
The Confident Hero
We find four aspects in a desperate hero’s search for selfhood that are, I believe, part of the confident hero’s search as well: the quest itself, solitariness, repetition and external affirmation.
I have no doubt in my mind that boys and men need a journey, a quest, a sense of vision to understand themselves, to be proud of themselves and to succeed as sons, fathers, husbands, partners and friends. I furthermore do not doubt that men need to be alone in order to feel they accomplished that journey or quest. I have no doubt either that they will need this often in order to continue to live healthy lives. However, men’s need for affirmation as the true subjects of their world, i.e., as the ones who can will the world to be a certain way and not another, is immense.
A boy or man, then, might go back and forth often between his need to accomplish something alone and his need for affirmation for what he has or can accomplish.
An example might illustrate this:
Recently, my middle-son Jacob asked me to help him with something he was building. He actually almost nagged me about it. Finally, I turned to help him and asked him to hand me the piece of wood he was working on. But he wouldn’t. I said the following to him: “Jacob, you always ask me to help me and then, when I have a moment to do that, you will not let me help you.” “I know,” he responded.
As the words were leaving my mouth I realized what was going on. Jacob didn’t want me to help him. Of course, he wanted to achieve this by himself. He needed my affirmation that he could do what he had set out to do. My task as his father was not to take over or to show him how it’s done better, but to witness and observe and support in spirit how he was getting it done. And he did get it done.
Another example again from an interaction with Jacob:
Jacob had just gotten a light system for his bicycle and wanted to try it out, i.e., ride around our neighborhood once in the dark. My wife had said no. He was angry and came to me. Knowing she had said no I said, I’ll go with you. “Then I’m not going,” he said and threw himself on our bed.
My impulse was to let him go on his own. We had gone out in the dark before sharing my light system (he in the front with the head-light, me right behind him with the tail-light). He knows the rules and sufficiently understands the dangers. This I said to my wife and she did not object. Off he went and returned ten minutes later immensely satisfied with himself and the world and even more satisfied to be received by us with a sense of awe and admiration for his bravery.
Boys and men, I believe, need this middle. This middle is often so intangibly lost between being either a hero or macho or being a sissy or weakling. They need to be affirmed in their need for solitariness and achievement and yet welcomed back with love and nurturing care when they return.
Heroism and Manhood
All too often a man’s search for heroism and manhood is politically and ideologically exploited by governments, societies and nations. Often such exploitation will take on the characteristics of a kind of war-like situation in which “heroes” are needed to establish a “force”. This could be an army or a work-force. They have in common the promise that they will bring status and recognition to a man’s life. They also have in common the failure to keep that promise. Often men who are part of such “force” are reduced to ciphers whose absence matters solely quantitatively, not qualitatively. They are made to look the same, act the same, think the same. Any show of their individual differences is perceived as problematic and will be punished. Yet, it is not uncommon that boys and men, in search of experiences that will be formative and worthy of affirmation and praise are drawn to precisely these types of environments where they are reduced to non-individuals, to dividuals, if you will. It is also not uncommon that they will return, if they return, from those experiences damaged and lost.
What is a hero? While this is not the central question of my talk today, it is the question we need to answer, I believe, in order to understand
a) why men seem to be drawn to heroism in a peculiarly strong way
b) how men can be led to heroism going down a path of desperation (i.e., hopelessness and destruction
c) how to find the middle between desperation and heroism.
My own distance from heroism is a particular outcome of a particular time and place of birth. 16 years after WWII many Germans began to understand how Nazi-Germany had lived and breathed the air of an inflated sense of heroism. Heroic were those who sacrificed themselves for their country. The men who willingly and singing battle-songs would go to war, the women who gave birth for the “fatherland”, for the race, for the honor of having them die a hero’s death in battle—those are the people who were thought of as heroes.
About five years ago I read for the first time the letter sent to my paternal grandmother after her husband had been shot and killed on the Eastern front. According to the lieutenant who had (hand)-written the letter, my grandfather, Bruno Srajek, died a heroic death, saving others, never staying back, always in the front of row of those who were fighting.
But my grandfather didn’t die a heroic death. He was a medic, got shot by accident and bled to death from a wound to the leg that, likely, no one knew how to care for, if anyone was even around to tend to him that is.
Was he a hero for going to war in the first place? Did he sing songs while marching there? Did he die for the fatherland? No, he did not. My grandfather had been sent to federal prison for a petty theft he was involved in at the German Postal Service, his work. He had the choice of staying in prison for another five to ten years or to “volunteer” for the Eastern front. Nobody knew, not even my grandmother to whom I talked often about this time, what his thoughts were as he was making his choice. What I do know is that my grandmother asked him not to go.
Her wisdom about “heroism”, her intuitive suspicion of Nazi-propaganda and her no nonsense mind-set (i.e., stay away from any large flag-waving ceremonies; don’t join large groups and avoid church at all cost) led her to lead a life of much work, sorrow and grief. She was by many accounts, including her own, a nobody. Yet, this never turned her into a desperate person. She never strove to become somebody in the way Nazi propaganda promised that Germany and Germans would, once again, be a nation others would have to reckon with. Yet, I could tell that later, in her retirement, her life was characterized by a quiet pride of never having fallen prey to the lure of heroism Nazi-style.
But would she have accepted that her struggle against the odds during and after WWII, her succeeding to keep alive two little boys during this time of utter chaos (one with a club-foot, my father, and one with a congenital defect in his digestive tract that prevented him from passing stool in a normal way, his five year younger brother), would she have accepted that this alone could be called heroic?
My grandmother, it seems to me, was a begrudging hero. She didn’t want to be in the lime-light and only did what she felt she had to do. She never even made her ideological differences with the Nazi regime into anything but her own opinion. She wasn’t proving anything to anyone. She just responded to what was needed at the time.
Heroism, for men, is often more than a simple response to certain external circumstances. Rather than just responding to a given situation the way my grandmother did, heroism for a man is a way of proving his manhood. In his book “Manhood in the Making” sociologist David Gilmore describes the difference between men and women in this way:
Womanhood is something that is reached with the onset of a woman’s menses. While there are other things that contribute to being a woman, for example having children, getting married, etc. none of those are really putting in question the essential fact of a woman’s womanhood.
Manhood, on the other hand, while strongly based on “anatomical maleness” is really much more dependent on acts of manhood. Men have to be brave, enduring, courageous, strong in the face of even impossible seeming obstacles. Men, in short, have to prove their superior manly status as husbands, fathers, lovers, providers and warriors.
In addition, however, men cannot rest with having proved themselves once. They will have to continue to meet challenges and pass tests in order to maintain their status as manly men. Men are never done proving their worth and value, to their family, to their country.
Existence Precedes Essence
Existential philosophy is often described by using the dictum “existence precedes essence.” This means that we are what we do rather than do what we are. It means that we constantly have to “project” ourselves into the world, shape it form it, make something of it in order to live, survive and move on. We must not rest, must not stop being vigilant. If we do, the world will consume us. And eventually it will, for all of us are “running towards death.” While existential philosophy was meant to be a universal, if not humanistic approach to the meaning of human existence, I wonder, if it is not more accurately labeled an approach to the meaning of men’s existence.
The difficulty for men in our culture is their position between their own unwillingness to be done but also an inability to consider themselves done. On a cultural/societal level the former is connected to a societal inability to consider men as being done and having done what it takes, the latter is connected to a societal and cultural unwillingness to accept individual men for what they are individually.
Another way of saying this is that men have to learn how to live with the internal and external imperatives of proving themselves. More often than not they respond to the imperatives not by rejecting them, but by following them and living up to their demand.
Listen to Sam Keen (author of Fire in the Belly) as he describes men’s quest for manhood:
If an anthropologist from Mars were to study Earth culture he would notice something very strange. Everywhere he would find a social obsession with manliness. He would find that manhood is considered a chancy thing, a prize, a puzzle difficult to solve, a test to be passed. Men and women alike constantly exhort little boys to ‘act like a man’, to be muy macho, a big man, a real man, an alpha male. Men live under constant dread of being labeled a sissy, a weakling, a wimp, a queer. Most everywhere they live under pressure, stress, and the constant need to prove themselves by establishing mastery in the arenas of war work, and women, a near universal creed linking manhood with the socially necessary activities of protecting, providing and procreating.
Ronald Levant writes about manhood, in reference to Gilmore’s work:
Manhood. The “Big Impossible,” as the Fox Tribe of Iowa calls it—which is, of course, exactly what it is. In cultures around the world, men’s lives are characterized by this anxious uncertainty about their standing in a fraternity from which exile means shame and humiliation—this desperate struggle to retain a tenuous grasp on a status they can never fully claim.
And, Keen points out, it doesn’t end there. For in order to prove their manhood and worth as members of the fraternity of men, men are likely and willing to engage in the most foolish and incomprehensible deeds simply to demonstrate their courage and bravery.
Said Martian anthropologist would find seemingly irrational rites and informal customs that are designed to turn males into men. He would find men encouraged to fight, drink, brawl, defend their honor, strive without ceasing, and risk life and limb in order to prove their manliness. . . . Everywhere the path of manhood involves artificial ordeals and rites of passage that turn a boy’s passage into social maturity into a second birth trauma.
The question is, if these are the things we value in men, how can we prevent them from becoming what Eli Newberger calls “expressions of masculinity we all deplore—power-obsessed, controlling, self-indulgent, belligerent, insensitive, foolishly risk-taking.” (1) How do we maintain them as “qualities of masculinity we admire—courage, good humor, flexibility, dependability, sociability, protectiveness of others.
Manhood and the Male Script
The Culture of Heroism
Keen’s, Levant’s and Gilmore’s reflections on the issue seem to suggest that men do these kinds of things because of the social pressure to become and be part of the order of men. This raises the question whether, with all things being equal but with social pressure gone, if males would stop to perform in these pseudo-heroic ways. And it is precisely here that I think the argument from social pressure runs into problems. Boys and men will quite likely always be seeking to “prove” their manhood. But what if, rather than calling it proving, and thus making it seem like a thing that is more about external gratification and reinforcement, what if men’s search for manhood is more about a search for internal reassurance? As we saw in the passage from Lance Armstrong’s biography, struggling, tearing, fighting, overcoming, climbing, jumping, enduring might all be ways for men to reassure themselves that they exist.
But rather than simply letting men feel their existence in ways similar to what Lance Armstrong is describing we want men to prove their manhood in this way and we reject the men who can’t. The indecisive, whimpering man who confesses he doesn’t know what to do, how to act, what to think is abhorrent to us. He is abhorrent to himself, too, really and he will do whatever is in his power to erase this sense of weakness and vulnerability and replace it with a sense of manhood and heroism.
This disgust and abhorrence with one’s own vulnerability is a powerful motor to act “manly” and heroically. But often this motor functions in desperation. This is the point, I believe, where we have to begin when we deal with boys’ and men’s bullying, violence on the streets and in schools. We have to understand that somewhere in the make-up of a whole violent event is the desperation to do something heroic, something that will impress and will prove it beyond doubt: I am a man, a hero.
You can see that, while it seems that men should be able to just walk away from proving themselves, they really cannot. Deep inside them rumble the primal voices of the noble fight, of endurance and courage. The more we know about them, the more we can respect their existence and understand their function in a man’s life, the more important it becomes to understand also how they can be exploited and abused by a culture that sacrifices men daily to war, big business and a life of separation and loneliness.
However, the true answers to these questions are quite complicated as they involve understanding both cultural and biological facts about men. In a nutshell the conflict can be described like this: men can’t simply walk away from proving themselves as heroes because their biology forbids them to do that. However, their biology is not strong enough, on the other hand, to simply let them prove themselves independently of the outcome.
The Biology of Heroism
The sources of what I call male heroism and what looks like a continuous quest for a man to prove his manhood may very well lie in the deep past of men’s developmental history as males as much as in an individual male’s development in utero. Our knowledge of fetal brain-development is still very fragmented, but what we do know is that much of what we identify, later in life, as masculine or feminine behaviors are fundamentally determined in utero through short but intensive exposures of fetal brain receptors to certain sex-steroids. This exposure affects a “priming” of neurons and synapses in the brain readying them for later functioning in a certain way. Intensive cerebral exposure to testosterone in utero may, then, make those “individuals more prone to behaviors typical of adult men such as aggression and competitiveness.”
The somewhat confusing fact is that, such exposure in the first place leads to a higher mortality rate among males, especially among young adult males, because it precisely increases men’s propensity to act “foolishly” (as Keen calls it). This can be traced through many past and present human cultures. Repetitive aggression and competitiveness, perhaps the main ingredients also of heroism, are inherently related to risk-taking and potential loss of life on the male’s part.
Developmental historians and biologists alike have yet to come up with a coherent understanding of why it might be evolutionarily adaptive for men to act in a way that will quite likely kill them even before they are able to reproduce. On the other hand, it should be observed that the most risky period of a man’s life takes place exactly during the time of his procreative peak, i.e., between 14 and 24 years of age. In other words, it is possible that the principles of selection demand that men confront risky tasks. Those who don’t make it would not have been good contributors to the gene-pool.
Conclusion: Choosing Between Life and Death
My hope is that the last 40 minutes will have helped shape your understanding of heroism as both a necessary and dangerous part of a man’s life. My hope is that you will come to appreciate the great potential for good and accomplishment that lies in the male script for manhood as the great peril inherent in it to inflict damage on self and others. My hope, too, is that you will have come to see that a man’s willingness to struggle, endure and take risks might primarily not have anything to do with heroism at all, but rather is motivated by his simple need to reassure himself of his own existence.
Having said this, I would like to close with a few fragments gleaned from the book The Hero Within by Carol S. Pearson:
Heroes seek life, not death.
Heroes discover the treasure of their true selves.
Every time we confront “death in life”, we confront a dragon. Every time we choose life over non-life and move deeper into the ongoing discovery of who we are, we bring new life to ourselves and to our culture. We may have been misunderstanding heroism as we continue to call killers, i.e., people who seek death over life, heroes.
Is it possible that we have misused the hero-label in order to cope with the desperation of death? Perhaps in a desperate attempt to emphasize that “good will win out” we have called heroes those who have died senselessly who have sacrificed themselves.
In the context of war heroism is a socially acceptable and glorified way of committing suicide.
“Heroism today requires consciousness.” “. . . this is why men refuse to go to war [or] overwork themselves to an early death, or pretend they have no vulnerable feelings.” (8)
“It is important to remember that heroes of myth and legend hardly ever have perfect parents or perfect lives.” (9)
Modes of extraordinary heroism are rare. It is questionable if they should even be called “heroism” because most of them are either born out of extreme necessity or a result of “exceptional talent” and skill.
Monday, May 28, 2007
April 30th, 2007: How Men Cope with Pain—Don’t pity me or I’’ll break
Let me begin with an incident in my family.
As always, my youngest son, Gabriel, had pulled out the plastic inside bucket from his diaper pale and was hauling it through the house. (The bucket is actually never used for diapers, but has merely devolved—you might also say”evolved”—into another of his toys. When Gabriel tried to take the bucket down to our basement, he fell down a few steps and scratched his cheek on the sharp edge of the bucket. He cried, but only for a very short time. Approx. 10 seconds longer than it took to get to him, pick him up and speak to him calmly. He had a pretty bad gash on his cheek. It was bleeding and needed quite a bit of dabbing until the bleeding stopped. Gabriel seemed unconcerned now, not paying attention to the fall, the gash or the scare anymore. He was playing again.
His brother, Jacob, watched with obviously growing fascination. I had a feeling I knew what he would ask me. Five minutes later, after some equally obvious heavy processing, he remarked: “It didn’t take long for Gabriel to stop crying. But that is a pretty bad cut. I don’t think I could or would have stopped crying so quickly. Why did he not cry longer?”
He was right! Gabriel’s reaction and coping with the pain and shock he must have felt during and after the fall was remarkably short. However, I told Jacob: “You had very similar responses to pain and shock when you were Gabriel’s age. And so did Noah.” He had a hard time believing me. How can you not cry in pain and be scared for a while when you have a bleeding gash on your cheek, he wondered.
So, here are some of the questions that emerge from this story:
How did he cope so fast?
How might he have perceived his fall and hurt?
How did my reaction to his fall affect his sense of pain?
How can we make sense of the discrepancy between his felt pain and our perceived sense of his felt pain?
My sense is that, in order to understand his reaction and that of many other males in similar situations (independent of their age), we need to distinguish between how males experience physical pain and how they experience emotional pain. Yes, in many cases both pains are experienced at the same time, but they are, nevertheless, two quite distinct phenomena. I even think it’s possible that we have misunderstood this difference as either to mean that men don’t really experience emotional pain at all or that they should deal with their emotional pain in the same way they seem to be able to deal with physical pain, i.e., tough it out.
And, then, there is a third phenomenon around male pain: it’s about the question of how men feel about the pain they’re experiencing. My experience is that men, almost invariably experience their pain, at least to some degree, as shameful. I will discuss the consequences of this shame in more detail later, after we will have gained a better understanding of the different ways in which men are said to experience physical and emotional pain.
The Difference between Emotional and Physical Pain in Men
Recent findings in the study of the effects of sex-hormones on brain development seem to be suggesting that men’s genetic and physical constitution makes them, overall, less sensitive than females to their own pain and that of others. Central to this suggestion is the realization that the brain does not only respond to hormones associated with the reproductive cycle (estrogens and androgens), but that it is indeed shaped by them throughout all stages of brain development, i.e., the life-time of the human being.
One of the starting points for these studies is the significant discrepancy between males and females when it comes to reports of pain and pain-related diagnoses. Females report pain more often and tend to be more frequently diagnosed with diseases such as fibromyalgia, migraines, etc. Females also tend to be more frequently diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders whereas men are more frequently diagnosed with alcoholism and other addiction disorders.
Here is a summary of some of the research that has been published on this issue between 2002 and 2006.
In an article titled “Autism linked to Male Sex Hormones” published in 2004, Simon Baron-Cohen explains the idea that “autism might be an extreme of the male brain”. Traits of persons with autism such as trouble holding steady eye-contact, social difficulties as well as hyper-focusing are, according to Baron-Cohen, possibly only the extremes of how males behave anyway.
In an article titled “Revenge Replaces Empathy in Male Brain” a team of British Researchers is credited with finding that males seem more likely than females to experience a condition they call “Schadenfreude” (i.e., one’s relief at someone else’s deserved misfortune).
Meir Steiner and her team at McMaster University are finding that early exposure to higher levels of testosterone seems to affect pain-sensitivity and morphine sensitivity in males and females.
Jon-Kar Zubieta at the University of Michigan has been studying gender-differences in response to pain-stimulation. He has found that men seem to be able to release higher levels of endorphins and enkaphalins that tend to suppress strong sensations of pain. However, during higher levels of estrogen production in the female reproductive cycle females ability to suppress pain matched that of males and, in some cases, even surpassed it.
Lisa Galea at the University of British Columbia has found that different levels of estradiol in the male and female brain affects both brain-development (specifically, development in the memory related parts of the brain (dentate gyrus)) and the preservation of newly formed brain-cells. Whereas in males estradiol’s protective function of brain-cells is only temporary, it seems to last for a life-time in females. These findings might have implications for males ability to retain information specifically also about painful events.
Empathy centers in the brains of female participants lit up just as they had when they watched the "fair" players endure pain.
"However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain," the researchers noted.
What's more, "this effect [in males] was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge," they added.
These reward areas include more primitive brain regions such as the striatal system[1] and
the nucleus accumbens,[2] they said.
This means that "for men, at least, the brain's reward system is activated when there's punishment of the bad guys," said neuroscientist Dr. Paul Sanberg, director of the Center for Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa. "These are the same areas that are involved in reward for drugs and other things we want badly."
In fact, a similar brain-imaging study reported in Science last August found that revenge activates neurological centers linked to other strong urges, such as cocaine abuse or sexual attraction.
I believe that this research has great potential to explain the relatively short period of time it took Gabriel to recover from the pain of his fall and the scratch he sustained in the process. But it would be too easy to assume that his quick “recovery” also meant that his feelings about the fall had returned back to normal. In fact, even though he seemed okay and went back to playing he seemed just a tad more clingy and more easily frustrated for about two hours after the fall. Clearly, his emotional resilience had not yet returned to its pre-fall state. He seemed to feel more threatened by being alone, more vulnerable and unprotected, perhaps.
My observation about Gabriel, my other sons as well as many other boys in similar situations was that they seemed to perceive the absence of someone who recognized their mishap as more painful than the actual pain they were in. But, and I consider this to be crucial, someone recognizing the mishap did not mean, and still does not mean, that we could simply shower them with compassion, soothing sounds and a surplus of loving care. Nor does it mean that they would want to be held more than before. They resented that and more than once I had to learn that too much of that kind of recognition might lead to a quick change from needing recognition of some kind from me to being extremely angry at me.
Compare, for example, this situation I observed at a local day-care:
A four year old boy is hurt while playing on the jungle gym.
He cries and is holding his left leg.
Soon a female adult notices him, approaches and asks in a somewhat anxious voice: “What happened?”
Interestingly, the boy moves away from her. He is still crying but, strangely, seems to be aggressive at the same time.
The adult, not noticing his change in mood apparently, pursues him and grabs him: Don’t run away, let me look at your leg. Perhaps you need a band-aid.”
The boy growls at her, then hits her hard on the hand she is using to hold him.
The adult gets mad. She had let go when he hit her, but now grabs him again, harder and puts him in time-out without further tending to his leg.
Later, she discusses this incident with the boy’s parents questioning whether they have noticed an increased tendency in the boy to be aggressive with females.
The obvious question arising from this is “could it be that for boys too much care and compassion is perceived as threatening, perhaps even as more dangerous as the actual pain, threat or embarrassment”? But, one might ask, isn’t it intuitive to say that someone who fell or hurt himself in some other way will require and be open to being doted on? Won’t they welcome the loving, even if at times exaggerated attempts of their parents to “fix things”?
Most men I have come to know in my work and socially would agree with this boy’s reaction. It is okay to have someone recognize their pain. It is okay for someone to say they noticed. But it is not okay to have someone gush about it. That, actually, is uncomfortable and angering. Gushing and an exaggerated worry about health and related issues, in fact, seems to sent many boys and men directly into denial about even minor pains they might perceive.
Compare this anecdote from an interaction with a client I call Ted. As a child Ted had been severely and for many years abused by his father. It was Ted’s second session with me. We had begun to talk about his family of origin and he was in the process of explaining to me how his father executed corporeal punishment for Ted.
Ted: He would pull his belt out of his pants with a kind of grandiose gesture. Then let the belt snap a few times making a loud cracking sound.
Martin: You must have been so scared!
Ted: Actually, I was used to it. It was his ritual.
Well, so he would ask me to lie across a chair and begin to strap me. Always, he counted his blows. But I never knew how many I would get. The most I remember was fifty.
I could tell Ted was getting upset and felt it was necessary that I understood.
Martin: You must have been in a lot of pain.
Ted: Not really. (Squinting, swallowing). Continuing in a terse voice:
I just felt like killing him.
I made the same mistake twice in this exchange. I “overstated” what seemed “obviously” to be going on for Ted, both at the time of the beating and at the time of our session. I was fortunate that Ted didn’t just get up and leave thinking I would never understand him well.
To be sure, overstating doesn’t mean that Ted wasn’t scared or that he wasn’t in a lot of pain at the time of the beating. Overstating means that I zeroed in on those emotional and physical elements in a typical therapist’s fashion. In the process, I came close to suffocating Ted emotionally with the feelings and sensations from his relationship with his father. Ted needed space. He needed for me to be a good listener, but a matter-of-fact one, not one that would amplify his own feelings.
Problems with Mirroring
It took me a while to understand this, however. I blundered into similar situations with Ted a few times more before, one day, he stopped, looked at me and said:
“I hate telling you these things, because when I’m done and see your reaction I usually feel worse than I did before.”
I was just getting ready to make some smooth remark about how therapy often makes you feel worse before it makes you feel better, but I stopped myself. “when I’m done and see your reaction” he had said. So, I was “causing” him to feel bad? It almost angered me, to be confronted with what felt like Ted’s imperviousness to my well-meaning reflection on his pain. But there was not doubt he felt more in pain now than he did when he came in. What about mirroring, I thought? Am I not supposed to reflect back to him his emotional state? Is his reaction to me not simply the denial of his own emotional fracturedness?
It gradually dawned on me that I had not simply mirrored his own emotional state. Had I done that, I would have not “forced” the issue, but rather, like a real mirror, reflected back his own quite matter-of-fact narration of these incidents with his father. Quite likely I had not even necessarily exaggerated the pain he once and still felt about this, but I had minimized his ability to cope and deal with his pain. I had missed that, in telling me his story, he was demonstrating to me how he had been coping.
Mirroring someone’s pain is like taking a picture of that person at his worst moment. Boys and men I have found, hate, truly hate, looking at those pictures of themselves. Proceeding with that strategy becomes counterproductive fast as—in an attempt to show that they can “deal with it and cope”—men will often respond by hardening the wall of stoic determination they first created to protect themselves from the immediacy of their own pain. Ted’s responses to me—stoic remarks such as “not usually”, “not really”—highlight this phenomenon. He was determined not to let me handicap him, “make me weep” (as he said on another occasion). And, I believe, he was even more determined not to allow me any “Schadenfreude” at his at his expense.
What Can Take the Place of the Mirror?
My sense is that this strong reaction to “gushing” is, at least in part, caused by the perceived threat it presents to the man’s ability to prevail despite his pain. “Just because I’m crying doesn’t mean I’m weak. Don’t make me weak, don’t weaken my resolve to be strong.” It is my strong sense, too, that men’s strong need to retaliate, i.e., to cause pain to that which has caused them pain, is partially related to the reassertion of one’s self and one’s strength. You will likely be able to recall scenes from movies, books and plays where male characters, in a fight for dominance, are confronting each other “to the last”. In other words, even if they will have to suffer the ultimate pain, death, they will suffer it heroically, i.e., with honor and assertiveness.
It is quite likely that, as a male therapist facing my male clients, I have to be aware that simply by virtue of being male I am already a mirror of sorts. As that mirror I reflect back not only what I say back to the client, but also the entirety of the male behavioral code and patterns. I am a potential enemy, a wolf, clothed in the sheepskins of a therapist. For a boy or man to admit to another man that he is in pain, both physical and/or emotional, is dangerous. And, to be perfectly clear about this, it’s not that I am dangerous because I want to know about my client’s feelings. My danger to a male client lies in the possibility of me, a male, using his weakness against him.
Being aware of this helps me see that as a male therapist one of my foremost tasks is to demonstrate that I come in peace, not to attack. My first task is not to understand all the details and ins and outs of that male client’s psyche, but it is to connect with him in a climate of males that honor rather than threaten each other.
The “Lacking” Male
The strong interiority of many men’s emotional life surrounded by the exteriority of their will and determination to survive has led to many false conclusions about who men are emotionally. There has been, for a while, a general sense that men are simply in “denial” of their own pain and that of others. This is a view that is often held by women, but there are quite a few men, too, who have jumped to the same conclusion, essentially criticizing men for denying their pain rather than confronting it.
In her recent book, The Female Thing, Laura Kipnis describes this view as a
“fixation on the idea that men are lacking something, something crucial. Men are emotionally closed, they’re not receptive or empathetic, they can’t access their inner feelings—unlike the women issuing the complaints, whose openness and receptiveness were central to their self-conception. Men have no insides! Everything’s external with them! In other words, the obverse of classic male castration anxiety—you remember, the old story that girls are incomplete in some way, because the boy’s reaction to discovering that girls don’t have penises is the unconscious fear that he might lose his too.”
Kipnis concludes that females who describe men in such terms might in turn be suffering from their own “castration” anxiety, compensating for it by describing men as lacking in emotional wherewithal. If Kipnis is right, one may conclude that men who worry or agree they don’t have feelings or, worse, believe they’re somehow incomplete—that such men are doubly hit by castration issues: they are emotional eunuchs who suffer from anxiety of the potential loss of their penises.
My thought is that we will need to step far away from both our conceptions of female emotions as well as from our female conceptions of emotions in order to understand how men feel and, furthermore, how they cope with negative feelings, i.e., emotional pain.
To clarify: the term “female emotions” means that emotions are largely part of the female way of understanding and dealing with the world. In the traditional way of thinking the term is really a doubling as emotions are thought of as the quintessential way in which females express themselves.
“Female conceptions” of emotions means that whether or not we even identify something as an emotion has, traditionally, largely been defined if a given expression meets the differential criteria of fragility and expressiveness.
Having emotions—especially painful ones—and being male means that what we feel and how we feel what we feel will come mediated in quite sophisticated and complex ways by our strong need to survive. This is why high-stress situations, for men, lend themselves to an even stronger tendency to interiorize their emotions as their need to survive the stress will require their gathering and focusing their energy away from the felt emotions. Self-induced shame may be one of the strategies men use to recover quickly from accidents, pain and embarrassment. The question is, if this connection between interiorizing of emotions in order to survive increasing stress is simply a process that puts emotions on hold. Or could it be that stress survival bears in itself, perhaps, also the possibility of a different kind of processing of emotions?
The Problem of Shame
At its most basic shame is our covering-up reaction to being exposed in ways that leave us feel vulnerable to the attacks of others. I continue to ask myself, if shame is, perhaps, one of the major ways in which men process physical and non-physical pain. Rather than just describing one situation let me summarize situations men have described to me in which they have felt shame:
Hitting your head on a cabinet
Being caught speeding
Not being able to locate your keys
Being involved in an accident (no matter how)
Not making enough money
Not being able to get and/or maintain an erection
Being told that their clothes don’t match
Being told that they are not that important as fathers
Being told that real men cry/don’t cry
Being prevented from fighting back
Being rendered powerless
Not being able to endure pain/stress/adversity
Being stared at for too long.
Being told that they’re not allowed to feel like victims/being told that they are victims
This list could truly go on forever. The emotional response to all of the items is shame, i.e., covering it up. Why are men so prone to being shamed? If shame is so prevalent among men, does it have an evolutionary purpose? As it turns out shame about pain, in males, seems to have a twofold purpose: inward and outward.
a) it is supposed to cover up the embarrassment of the initial injury/pain. In this case, pain is often followed by a stoic response.
b) it can also decrease the time it takes the male to strike back at the cause of the pain. In this case the pain is often followed by an aggressive act.
Boys and men learn early that pain, both emotional and physical, means that they somehow screwed up. Boys are supposed to be vigilant, aware, and ready to fend off assaults. If they feel pain it means they have, somehow, failed to provide, for themselves or others, the kind of impervious protective wall they’re expected to build. Some might even go as far as saying that this is not a learned behavior but hard-wired into the male pain-response system. Shame, in one sentence, increases vigilance and decreases recovery time from pain and thereby increases the chances that the protective wall will still be built in time.
This kind of shame, called forth by the internal male response system to pain, is related but different from what happens when males are shamed. When men feel shamed they can feel inadequate in two ways:
a) inadequate in that they overlooked the thing that caused another to shame them
b) inadequate in that they didn’t recover fast enough from their own pain; or are forced to stay with their pain longer than they can bear.
Shame, brought to men from the outside, messes with an already delicate balance of pain and internal shame about this pain. It either puts into question the male’s internal system by asking didn’t you feel enough shame to avoid this pain; or when it comes in the form of too much compassion or sympathy, it is perceived as an attempt to obliterate the male’s internal recovery system and undermines their trust in themselves.
Why Did Gabriel Cry So Little?
a) He is a boy and, given the research discussed in the beginning, his response to his pain might have been mediated by his testosterone.
b) His pain was noticed immediately as was the “bad bucket” that was “kicked” as punishment.
c) Nobody exaggerated concern/care/compassion
a) This means: sometimes painful things happen to me. I am not always safe.
b) Others watch out for me and “bad things” get punished. I am kept safe.
c) Nobody is scared or concerned about what I do. I am trusted to be safe.
My experience working with men and observing many boys at play is that too little and too much care can activate a male’s internal shaming system and reinforce either a stoic or aggressive response. We might be shaming boys and men by expecting they overcome their pain quickly (as in the example of my son Gabriel). We might not be paying enough attention to them, because they avert their eyes more quickly, seem to break eye-contact and not look at us directly. But we might easily overdo it as in the case with boy on the play-ground. Finding the mid-point between not enough and too much care, i.e., finding the point where we don’t present an extra challenge to the males concern with survival and vigilance but instead can provide real care and get to know the male in question, finding that point is a delicate and complicated thing.
[1] Metabotropic dopamine receptors are present both on spiny neurons and on cortical axon terminals. Second messenger cascades triggered by activation of these dopamine receptors can modulate pre- and postsynaptic function, both in the short term and in the long term. The striatum is best known for its role in the planning and modulation of movement pathways but is also involved in a variety of other cognitive processes involving executive function. In humans the striatum is activated by stimuli associated with reward, but also by aversive, novel, unexpected or intense stimuli, and cues associated with such events. Recent fMRI evidence[citation needed] suggests that the common property linking these stimuli, to which the striatum is reacting, is saliency under the conditions of presentation. A number of other brain areas and circuits are also related to reward such as frontal areas.
For sources regarding saliency of the reward pathway(thought to be related to dopamine) one can look to the work of Dr John Salmone (storrs Connecticut early to late 90's) and wolfram Schultz. The ventral tegmental Da neurons that innervate portions of the striatum have long been accepted to be the site of rewarding feeling. Intracranial stimulation ICS studies from the 60's show implants in this brain area will elicit bar pressing form rats for many hours at a time. However the collective works of researchers in the 90's show that blocking Da receptors does not remove rewarding sensations, rather it effects how much the animal is willing to work, more motivation to seek reward rather than reward itself
[2] In the 1950s, Olds and Milner implanted electrodes into the septal area of the rat and found that the rat chose to press a lever which stimulated it. It continued to prefer this even over stopping to eat or drink. This suggests that the area is the 'pleasure center' of the brain.[2]
Although the nucleus accumbens has traditionally been studied for its role in addiction, it plays an equal role in processing many rewards such as food, sex, and video games. A recent study found that it is involved in the regulation of emotions induced by music [3] , perhaps consequent to its role in mediating dopamine release. It also has roles in timing, and has long been considered to be the limbic-motor interface (Mogensen).
As always, my youngest son, Gabriel, had pulled out the plastic inside bucket from his diaper pale and was hauling it through the house. (The bucket is actually never used for diapers, but has merely devolved—you might also say”evolved”—into another of his toys. When Gabriel tried to take the bucket down to our basement, he fell down a few steps and scratched his cheek on the sharp edge of the bucket. He cried, but only for a very short time. Approx. 10 seconds longer than it took to get to him, pick him up and speak to him calmly. He had a pretty bad gash on his cheek. It was bleeding and needed quite a bit of dabbing until the bleeding stopped. Gabriel seemed unconcerned now, not paying attention to the fall, the gash or the scare anymore. He was playing again.
His brother, Jacob, watched with obviously growing fascination. I had a feeling I knew what he would ask me. Five minutes later, after some equally obvious heavy processing, he remarked: “It didn’t take long for Gabriel to stop crying. But that is a pretty bad cut. I don’t think I could or would have stopped crying so quickly. Why did he not cry longer?”
He was right! Gabriel’s reaction and coping with the pain and shock he must have felt during and after the fall was remarkably short. However, I told Jacob: “You had very similar responses to pain and shock when you were Gabriel’s age. And so did Noah.” He had a hard time believing me. How can you not cry in pain and be scared for a while when you have a bleeding gash on your cheek, he wondered.
So, here are some of the questions that emerge from this story:
How did he cope so fast?
How might he have perceived his fall and hurt?
How did my reaction to his fall affect his sense of pain?
How can we make sense of the discrepancy between his felt pain and our perceived sense of his felt pain?
My sense is that, in order to understand his reaction and that of many other males in similar situations (independent of their age), we need to distinguish between how males experience physical pain and how they experience emotional pain. Yes, in many cases both pains are experienced at the same time, but they are, nevertheless, two quite distinct phenomena. I even think it’s possible that we have misunderstood this difference as either to mean that men don’t really experience emotional pain at all or that they should deal with their emotional pain in the same way they seem to be able to deal with physical pain, i.e., tough it out.
And, then, there is a third phenomenon around male pain: it’s about the question of how men feel about the pain they’re experiencing. My experience is that men, almost invariably experience their pain, at least to some degree, as shameful. I will discuss the consequences of this shame in more detail later, after we will have gained a better understanding of the different ways in which men are said to experience physical and emotional pain.
The Difference between Emotional and Physical Pain in Men
Recent findings in the study of the effects of sex-hormones on brain development seem to be suggesting that men’s genetic and physical constitution makes them, overall, less sensitive than females to their own pain and that of others. Central to this suggestion is the realization that the brain does not only respond to hormones associated with the reproductive cycle (estrogens and androgens), but that it is indeed shaped by them throughout all stages of brain development, i.e., the life-time of the human being.
One of the starting points for these studies is the significant discrepancy between males and females when it comes to reports of pain and pain-related diagnoses. Females report pain more often and tend to be more frequently diagnosed with diseases such as fibromyalgia, migraines, etc. Females also tend to be more frequently diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders whereas men are more frequently diagnosed with alcoholism and other addiction disorders.
Here is a summary of some of the research that has been published on this issue between 2002 and 2006.
In an article titled “Autism linked to Male Sex Hormones” published in 2004, Simon Baron-Cohen explains the idea that “autism might be an extreme of the male brain”. Traits of persons with autism such as trouble holding steady eye-contact, social difficulties as well as hyper-focusing are, according to Baron-Cohen, possibly only the extremes of how males behave anyway.
In an article titled “Revenge Replaces Empathy in Male Brain” a team of British Researchers is credited with finding that males seem more likely than females to experience a condition they call “Schadenfreude” (i.e., one’s relief at someone else’s deserved misfortune).
Meir Steiner and her team at McMaster University are finding that early exposure to higher levels of testosterone seems to affect pain-sensitivity and morphine sensitivity in males and females.
Jon-Kar Zubieta at the University of Michigan has been studying gender-differences in response to pain-stimulation. He has found that men seem to be able to release higher levels of endorphins and enkaphalins that tend to suppress strong sensations of pain. However, during higher levels of estrogen production in the female reproductive cycle females ability to suppress pain matched that of males and, in some cases, even surpassed it.
Lisa Galea at the University of British Columbia has found that different levels of estradiol in the male and female brain affects both brain-development (specifically, development in the memory related parts of the brain (dentate gyrus)) and the preservation of newly formed brain-cells. Whereas in males estradiol’s protective function of brain-cells is only temporary, it seems to last for a life-time in females. These findings might have implications for males ability to retain information specifically also about painful events.
Empathy centers in the brains of female participants lit up just as they had when they watched the "fair" players endure pain.
"However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain," the researchers noted.
What's more, "this effect [in males] was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge," they added.
These reward areas include more primitive brain regions such as the striatal system[1] and
the nucleus accumbens,[2] they said.
This means that "for men, at least, the brain's reward system is activated when there's punishment of the bad guys," said neuroscientist Dr. Paul Sanberg, director of the Center for Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa. "These are the same areas that are involved in reward for drugs and other things we want badly."
In fact, a similar brain-imaging study reported in Science last August found that revenge activates neurological centers linked to other strong urges, such as cocaine abuse or sexual attraction.
I believe that this research has great potential to explain the relatively short period of time it took Gabriel to recover from the pain of his fall and the scratch he sustained in the process. But it would be too easy to assume that his quick “recovery” also meant that his feelings about the fall had returned back to normal. In fact, even though he seemed okay and went back to playing he seemed just a tad more clingy and more easily frustrated for about two hours after the fall. Clearly, his emotional resilience had not yet returned to its pre-fall state. He seemed to feel more threatened by being alone, more vulnerable and unprotected, perhaps.
My observation about Gabriel, my other sons as well as many other boys in similar situations was that they seemed to perceive the absence of someone who recognized their mishap as more painful than the actual pain they were in. But, and I consider this to be crucial, someone recognizing the mishap did not mean, and still does not mean, that we could simply shower them with compassion, soothing sounds and a surplus of loving care. Nor does it mean that they would want to be held more than before. They resented that and more than once I had to learn that too much of that kind of recognition might lead to a quick change from needing recognition of some kind from me to being extremely angry at me.
Compare, for example, this situation I observed at a local day-care:
A four year old boy is hurt while playing on the jungle gym.
He cries and is holding his left leg.
Soon a female adult notices him, approaches and asks in a somewhat anxious voice: “What happened?”
Interestingly, the boy moves away from her. He is still crying but, strangely, seems to be aggressive at the same time.
The adult, not noticing his change in mood apparently, pursues him and grabs him: Don’t run away, let me look at your leg. Perhaps you need a band-aid.”
The boy growls at her, then hits her hard on the hand she is using to hold him.
The adult gets mad. She had let go when he hit her, but now grabs him again, harder and puts him in time-out without further tending to his leg.
Later, she discusses this incident with the boy’s parents questioning whether they have noticed an increased tendency in the boy to be aggressive with females.
The obvious question arising from this is “could it be that for boys too much care and compassion is perceived as threatening, perhaps even as more dangerous as the actual pain, threat or embarrassment”? But, one might ask, isn’t it intuitive to say that someone who fell or hurt himself in some other way will require and be open to being doted on? Won’t they welcome the loving, even if at times exaggerated attempts of their parents to “fix things”?
Most men I have come to know in my work and socially would agree with this boy’s reaction. It is okay to have someone recognize their pain. It is okay for someone to say they noticed. But it is not okay to have someone gush about it. That, actually, is uncomfortable and angering. Gushing and an exaggerated worry about health and related issues, in fact, seems to sent many boys and men directly into denial about even minor pains they might perceive.
Compare this anecdote from an interaction with a client I call Ted. As a child Ted had been severely and for many years abused by his father. It was Ted’s second session with me. We had begun to talk about his family of origin and he was in the process of explaining to me how his father executed corporeal punishment for Ted.
Ted: He would pull his belt out of his pants with a kind of grandiose gesture. Then let the belt snap a few times making a loud cracking sound.
Martin: You must have been so scared!
Ted: Actually, I was used to it. It was his ritual.
Well, so he would ask me to lie across a chair and begin to strap me. Always, he counted his blows. But I never knew how many I would get. The most I remember was fifty.
I could tell Ted was getting upset and felt it was necessary that I understood.
Martin: You must have been in a lot of pain.
Ted: Not really. (Squinting, swallowing). Continuing in a terse voice:
I just felt like killing him.
I made the same mistake twice in this exchange. I “overstated” what seemed “obviously” to be going on for Ted, both at the time of the beating and at the time of our session. I was fortunate that Ted didn’t just get up and leave thinking I would never understand him well.
To be sure, overstating doesn’t mean that Ted wasn’t scared or that he wasn’t in a lot of pain at the time of the beating. Overstating means that I zeroed in on those emotional and physical elements in a typical therapist’s fashion. In the process, I came close to suffocating Ted emotionally with the feelings and sensations from his relationship with his father. Ted needed space. He needed for me to be a good listener, but a matter-of-fact one, not one that would amplify his own feelings.
Problems with Mirroring
It took me a while to understand this, however. I blundered into similar situations with Ted a few times more before, one day, he stopped, looked at me and said:
“I hate telling you these things, because when I’m done and see your reaction I usually feel worse than I did before.”
I was just getting ready to make some smooth remark about how therapy often makes you feel worse before it makes you feel better, but I stopped myself. “when I’m done and see your reaction” he had said. So, I was “causing” him to feel bad? It almost angered me, to be confronted with what felt like Ted’s imperviousness to my well-meaning reflection on his pain. But there was not doubt he felt more in pain now than he did when he came in. What about mirroring, I thought? Am I not supposed to reflect back to him his emotional state? Is his reaction to me not simply the denial of his own emotional fracturedness?
It gradually dawned on me that I had not simply mirrored his own emotional state. Had I done that, I would have not “forced” the issue, but rather, like a real mirror, reflected back his own quite matter-of-fact narration of these incidents with his father. Quite likely I had not even necessarily exaggerated the pain he once and still felt about this, but I had minimized his ability to cope and deal with his pain. I had missed that, in telling me his story, he was demonstrating to me how he had been coping.
Mirroring someone’s pain is like taking a picture of that person at his worst moment. Boys and men I have found, hate, truly hate, looking at those pictures of themselves. Proceeding with that strategy becomes counterproductive fast as—in an attempt to show that they can “deal with it and cope”—men will often respond by hardening the wall of stoic determination they first created to protect themselves from the immediacy of their own pain. Ted’s responses to me—stoic remarks such as “not usually”, “not really”—highlight this phenomenon. He was determined not to let me handicap him, “make me weep” (as he said on another occasion). And, I believe, he was even more determined not to allow me any “Schadenfreude” at his at his expense.
What Can Take the Place of the Mirror?
My sense is that this strong reaction to “gushing” is, at least in part, caused by the perceived threat it presents to the man’s ability to prevail despite his pain. “Just because I’m crying doesn’t mean I’m weak. Don’t make me weak, don’t weaken my resolve to be strong.” It is my strong sense, too, that men’s strong need to retaliate, i.e., to cause pain to that which has caused them pain, is partially related to the reassertion of one’s self and one’s strength. You will likely be able to recall scenes from movies, books and plays where male characters, in a fight for dominance, are confronting each other “to the last”. In other words, even if they will have to suffer the ultimate pain, death, they will suffer it heroically, i.e., with honor and assertiveness.
It is quite likely that, as a male therapist facing my male clients, I have to be aware that simply by virtue of being male I am already a mirror of sorts. As that mirror I reflect back not only what I say back to the client, but also the entirety of the male behavioral code and patterns. I am a potential enemy, a wolf, clothed in the sheepskins of a therapist. For a boy or man to admit to another man that he is in pain, both physical and/or emotional, is dangerous. And, to be perfectly clear about this, it’s not that I am dangerous because I want to know about my client’s feelings. My danger to a male client lies in the possibility of me, a male, using his weakness against him.
Being aware of this helps me see that as a male therapist one of my foremost tasks is to demonstrate that I come in peace, not to attack. My first task is not to understand all the details and ins and outs of that male client’s psyche, but it is to connect with him in a climate of males that honor rather than threaten each other.
The “Lacking” Male
The strong interiority of many men’s emotional life surrounded by the exteriority of their will and determination to survive has led to many false conclusions about who men are emotionally. There has been, for a while, a general sense that men are simply in “denial” of their own pain and that of others. This is a view that is often held by women, but there are quite a few men, too, who have jumped to the same conclusion, essentially criticizing men for denying their pain rather than confronting it.
In her recent book, The Female Thing, Laura Kipnis describes this view as a
“fixation on the idea that men are lacking something, something crucial. Men are emotionally closed, they’re not receptive or empathetic, they can’t access their inner feelings—unlike the women issuing the complaints, whose openness and receptiveness were central to their self-conception. Men have no insides! Everything’s external with them! In other words, the obverse of classic male castration anxiety—you remember, the old story that girls are incomplete in some way, because the boy’s reaction to discovering that girls don’t have penises is the unconscious fear that he might lose his too.”
Kipnis concludes that females who describe men in such terms might in turn be suffering from their own “castration” anxiety, compensating for it by describing men as lacking in emotional wherewithal. If Kipnis is right, one may conclude that men who worry or agree they don’t have feelings or, worse, believe they’re somehow incomplete—that such men are doubly hit by castration issues: they are emotional eunuchs who suffer from anxiety of the potential loss of their penises.
My thought is that we will need to step far away from both our conceptions of female emotions as well as from our female conceptions of emotions in order to understand how men feel and, furthermore, how they cope with negative feelings, i.e., emotional pain.
To clarify: the term “female emotions” means that emotions are largely part of the female way of understanding and dealing with the world. In the traditional way of thinking the term is really a doubling as emotions are thought of as the quintessential way in which females express themselves.
“Female conceptions” of emotions means that whether or not we even identify something as an emotion has, traditionally, largely been defined if a given expression meets the differential criteria of fragility and expressiveness.
Having emotions—especially painful ones—and being male means that what we feel and how we feel what we feel will come mediated in quite sophisticated and complex ways by our strong need to survive. This is why high-stress situations, for men, lend themselves to an even stronger tendency to interiorize their emotions as their need to survive the stress will require their gathering and focusing their energy away from the felt emotions. Self-induced shame may be one of the strategies men use to recover quickly from accidents, pain and embarrassment. The question is, if this connection between interiorizing of emotions in order to survive increasing stress is simply a process that puts emotions on hold. Or could it be that stress survival bears in itself, perhaps, also the possibility of a different kind of processing of emotions?
The Problem of Shame
At its most basic shame is our covering-up reaction to being exposed in ways that leave us feel vulnerable to the attacks of others. I continue to ask myself, if shame is, perhaps, one of the major ways in which men process physical and non-physical pain. Rather than just describing one situation let me summarize situations men have described to me in which they have felt shame:
Hitting your head on a cabinet
Being caught speeding
Not being able to locate your keys
Being involved in an accident (no matter how)
Not making enough money
Not being able to get and/or maintain an erection
Being told that their clothes don’t match
Being told that they are not that important as fathers
Being told that real men cry/don’t cry
Being prevented from fighting back
Being rendered powerless
Not being able to endure pain/stress/adversity
Being stared at for too long.
Being told that they’re not allowed to feel like victims/being told that they are victims
This list could truly go on forever. The emotional response to all of the items is shame, i.e., covering it up. Why are men so prone to being shamed? If shame is so prevalent among men, does it have an evolutionary purpose? As it turns out shame about pain, in males, seems to have a twofold purpose: inward and outward.
a) it is supposed to cover up the embarrassment of the initial injury/pain. In this case, pain is often followed by a stoic response.
b) it can also decrease the time it takes the male to strike back at the cause of the pain. In this case the pain is often followed by an aggressive act.
Boys and men learn early that pain, both emotional and physical, means that they somehow screwed up. Boys are supposed to be vigilant, aware, and ready to fend off assaults. If they feel pain it means they have, somehow, failed to provide, for themselves or others, the kind of impervious protective wall they’re expected to build. Some might even go as far as saying that this is not a learned behavior but hard-wired into the male pain-response system. Shame, in one sentence, increases vigilance and decreases recovery time from pain and thereby increases the chances that the protective wall will still be built in time.
This kind of shame, called forth by the internal male response system to pain, is related but different from what happens when males are shamed. When men feel shamed they can feel inadequate in two ways:
a) inadequate in that they overlooked the thing that caused another to shame them
b) inadequate in that they didn’t recover fast enough from their own pain; or are forced to stay with their pain longer than they can bear.
Shame, brought to men from the outside, messes with an already delicate balance of pain and internal shame about this pain. It either puts into question the male’s internal system by asking didn’t you feel enough shame to avoid this pain; or when it comes in the form of too much compassion or sympathy, it is perceived as an attempt to obliterate the male’s internal recovery system and undermines their trust in themselves.
Why Did Gabriel Cry So Little?
a) He is a boy and, given the research discussed in the beginning, his response to his pain might have been mediated by his testosterone.
b) His pain was noticed immediately as was the “bad bucket” that was “kicked” as punishment.
c) Nobody exaggerated concern/care/compassion
a) This means: sometimes painful things happen to me. I am not always safe.
b) Others watch out for me and “bad things” get punished. I am kept safe.
c) Nobody is scared or concerned about what I do. I am trusted to be safe.
My experience working with men and observing many boys at play is that too little and too much care can activate a male’s internal shaming system and reinforce either a stoic or aggressive response. We might be shaming boys and men by expecting they overcome their pain quickly (as in the example of my son Gabriel). We might not be paying enough attention to them, because they avert their eyes more quickly, seem to break eye-contact and not look at us directly. But we might easily overdo it as in the case with boy on the play-ground. Finding the mid-point between not enough and too much care, i.e., finding the point where we don’t present an extra challenge to the males concern with survival and vigilance but instead can provide real care and get to know the male in question, finding that point is a delicate and complicated thing.
[1] Metabotropic dopamine receptors are present both on spiny neurons and on cortical axon terminals. Second messenger cascades triggered by activation of these dopamine receptors can modulate pre- and postsynaptic function, both in the short term and in the long term. The striatum is best known for its role in the planning and modulation of movement pathways but is also involved in a variety of other cognitive processes involving executive function. In humans the striatum is activated by stimuli associated with reward, but also by aversive, novel, unexpected or intense stimuli, and cues associated with such events. Recent fMRI evidence[citation needed] suggests that the common property linking these stimuli, to which the striatum is reacting, is saliency under the conditions of presentation. A number of other brain areas and circuits are also related to reward such as frontal areas.
For sources regarding saliency of the reward pathway(thought to be related to dopamine) one can look to the work of Dr John Salmone (storrs Connecticut early to late 90's) and wolfram Schultz. The ventral tegmental Da neurons that innervate portions of the striatum have long been accepted to be the site of rewarding feeling. Intracranial stimulation ICS studies from the 60's show implants in this brain area will elicit bar pressing form rats for many hours at a time. However the collective works of researchers in the 90's show that blocking Da receptors does not remove rewarding sensations, rather it effects how much the animal is willing to work, more motivation to seek reward rather than reward itself
[2] In the 1950s, Olds and Milner implanted electrodes into the septal area of the rat and found that the rat chose to press a lever which stimulated it. It continued to prefer this even over stopping to eat or drink. This suggests that the area is the 'pleasure center' of the brain.[2]
Although the nucleus accumbens has traditionally been studied for its role in addiction, it plays an equal role in processing many rewards such as food, sex, and video games. A recent study found that it is involved in the regulation of emotions induced by music [3] , perhaps consequent to its role in mediating dopamine release. It also has roles in timing, and has long been considered to be the limbic-motor interface (Mogensen).
March 26th, 2007: Fragile Man—A Look at the Hidden Vulnerabilities of Men
What is a fragile man? Aren’t we dealing with an oxymoron? Men are strong, even the weakest ones are, right? Okay, some of us admit there is something to that fragility. But, as we admit it, we have trouble imagining it. Can we really picture what it means for a man to be “fragile”. Can we picture a man who feels something? Something that is not related to his penis? Can we see him shiver from the slight touch of another’s hand on his shoulder? Can we picture him recoil in horror and wail with grief at the tragedy that has hit his family?
The word “fragile” has a Latin root which means breaking or breakable. Words like “fracture”, and “fragment” but also “friction” derive from it. When we talk about a “fragile man”, we’re talking about a man who is breakable. Have we seen such a man? And, more to the point, can we see him? Let me tell you what I think they look like:
They look like alcoholics.
They look strong and athletic.
They look like domestic violators.
They look like they’re in control
They look like fighters.
They look successful.
They look like tough guys.
They look convincing.
They look like Don Juans.
They look like they’re in a mid-life crisis.
They look like perfectionists (in their own lives and those of others).
They kill in hopes that they will be killed
They look like family men.
It’s a confusing list. Some of the items might make sense to you because we understand the pathology behind them. It makes sense, in a way, to say that an alcoholic is a fragile man. But a “family man” or a successful man? How are they fragile? Perhaps we’re looking at this wrong. Perhaps the word “fragile” leads us to imagine a man who is about to or has shattered into a million little pieces, a man of whom nothings left but a pile of shards. Or perhaps, we’re imagining a man who—in the words of the author Jim Harrison—has had his lid screwed on too tight for too long to prevent himself from letting off steam. When he finally unscrews the lid he finds he has not steam left to do anything.
You see, it’s not easy to recognize them. Because we tend not to even see the average man. We tend to see either the hero or the loser and we might understand that both are fragile and desperate to hide their fragility. In fact there is a kind of masking going on. We might understand that alcoholism, affairs and risky behaviors are masks of depression and anxiety. We might even understand that some men mask themselves by calling what they do “having fun”, being heroes, doing what it takes or “teaching someone a lesson,” being successful. But do we understand what’s going on in the average man? Do we understand vulnerability before it turns a man into a hero or a loser?
I don’t want to talk about heroes or losers. Our culture is replete with polarized images and stories of them. Our prison systems are full of fragile men. Fragile men who have used extreme masking to overcome the pain of being fragile and wounded. Broken men. Broken, often, at an early age. Broken and, yet, often so grandiose. What we have to know about them and remember about their grandiosity is: grandiose on the outside, broken on the inside. Such men often don’t feel they have another choice but to channel their grief and fear into aggression and destruction.
But don’t be fooled, those men cannot be found in the prison systems of the world only. Men who are in pain are all around us. They’re in us. We are them! I count myself in. We are fragile and perhaps broken and broken-hearted in ways we ourselves might not always be able to see or understand and much less be willing to admit.
But, lest you think, this is all about men’s willful and intentional ways of “hiding” their vulnerability. Lest you think that all a man really needs to do is get together with other men and talk about his pain . . . no, it is not just a man’s fault that his vulnerability remains hidden. In fact, it is really not that hidden. The pathology is not simply on his side. The pathology is cultural. As a culture we have remained largely silent, mute and ignorant about how men grieve, how they deal with fear, how they experience happiness and how they feel when they’re nurtured. Have we learned, do we understand, how to listen to and see a man’s pain? As a culture we have yet to learn how to perceive men’s vulnerability.
A look at male vulnerability:
But why should we? Are men vulnerable? Is there really something hidden? Is there something to be learned? I believe that there is. I also believe that it is important to know about it and to understand it. But I also believe that we need to proceed with much care and caution as we attempt to uncover some of it, because simply exposing this vulnerability will likely not do anything but expose the man, shame him and cause him to recede more into the recesses of his own un-knowing.
My questions and observations about male vulnerability are about as old as I am. They began with questions about my own vulnerability when I was a boy. Generally, I believe our chances of understanding male vulnerability and learning how to respond to it in positive ways are higher when we begin early, with boys, rather than with adult men.
When I was 5 years old I took a pretty bad spill with my old scooter. I can still see the beautiful metal bell with the Mickey Mouse design coming at my left eye as I was falling. I remember the sound it made—a dull thud combined with a happy chime. I passed out for a moment and when I came to blood was trickling down my eye-brow, into my eye. I was scared and furious at my clumsy misfortune. I started to scream, abandoned my scooter and ran home. It seemed like a long way home. Two neighbor women who lived in the apartment complex in which my family was renting a small apartment stood by the front-door talking. I remember them shaking their heads in disbelief, tsk-ing me. What is he screaming about? One of them asked the other. I was furious, lived. To this day I wish I could have kicked them. I felt so mad, so alone, so misunderstood and so ashamed. Did they really think I wanted to scream like that? Did they think I didn’t know the boy-code as well as they did? A boy doesn’t scream like that, a boy doesn’t shriek. A boy moans and grumbles out his fear and suffering. But I couldn’t help it!
I realize that my shrieking and screaming took from those women the opportunity to reinforce in me and in themselves the belief that a boy or man should just shut up and take it (like a man). They believed in the fundamental necessity of a man’s stoicism. And they believed that as a boy I needed to learn to act that way. In fact, they reacted with surprise and disgust seeing that, despite being a member of the male species, I didn’t seem to know how to act.
But they weren’t just taken aback by my reaction. There reaction to me exposed a fundamental helplessness and powerlessness on their part, one that rendered them vulnerable and, subsequently, angry. By exposing my pain and shocking vulnerability, I exposed them. I made it impossible for them to say things like “wow, look at all that blood” or “you’re so brave” or “took a bad spill, didn’t ya” or, worse even, “you’re acting like a man”. They couldn’t say that to me, because I wasn’t any of those things—in their eyes. Rather, I pointed, loudly, at my own suffering and said I’m not brave, I’m scared and I want my momie. As members of the female species, whose task it is to praise their male counterparts’ heroism, my reaction had just undermined their role. What was left for them was to think of me as a loser.
My mother did come quickly, comforted me and I remember a certain feeling of glee. Some women, I might have thought, get it. She doesn’t shrink away from my pain and anguish. She doesn’t expect me to hide it and just suck it up. At least, not yet, for the truth is, events like this one and many others when I did scream or cry, did not prevent me from looking to hide my pain, feeling embarrassed by it, feeling vulnerable and weak in the face of my own tears. My mother’s care and readiness to jump to my rescue did not protect me from becoming a man who, like all other men, is more likely to appear like he is in control of himself.
I wonder now: What if my father had been there to comfort me? Had he come to comfort me, pick me up, dab the wound and take me to the doctor, would I have felt differently? It seems to me that his unashamed presence could have given me a sense of permission. It could have been a root of some kind of identification, from man to man, through which it becomes okay to express pain.
Derrick and his father
Emotional Expressiveness in Males
Men tend not to shriek and scream, cry in sadness or anger. In fact many men don’t emote in extreme ways at all. Rather, they choose a patina of stoicism and control. Meaning to reassure others about their continued grip on things men tend to maneuver themselves into impossible emotional dilemmas out which they often choose the path either of inward death or outward destruction. But this type of “reassurance” is not just meant to calm others even more so it’s meant to reassure ourselves about our continued grip on things.
A former client, whenever he was faced with an emotional challenge had developed a habit of responding by first staring down, then clearing his throat, then as if in deep thoughtful reflection, lean forward to pick up a crystal that always lies on my table, lift the crystal to his eye and peer through it into the light. “What do you see,” I asked him once. “Nothing,” he responded.
I have to tell you, we never really got away from that “nothing.” This wasn’t only because he wouldn’t be challenged on this. It was also, because I knew I could not simply challenge him without taking the risk of shaming him. He would have felt exposed, naked and ashamed of himself in ways that would have lowered significantly his chances of understanding himself better. Instead, we talked about “Good Will Hunting”, that movie about a young man who sees “nothing” because his grief has become so overwhelming. Only a counselor who understands grief in men and a male friend who challenges him not to continue to see “nothing” eventually enable Will Hunting to see something instead of nothing. To have hope, to try his luck. I cannot tell you how many men have brought up that movie in my practice.
This is the story my client held on to. He could never say “I am Will Hunting”. All he could do was allow himself to show public sympathy for the character of Will Hunting. All he could do was hope that, some day, he could hope and—in the words of the movie—“go see about a girl.”
Here is another exchange that occurred many years back. The client is mourning the loss of a battle for a woman’s affection.
C (staring down, moving his knees up and down, legs slightly parted): I’m so sad.
T: How does it feel to be sad?
C: It feels weak (Quick look up at me, then down again, legs clamped together, knees moving faster)
T: What’s it like to feel weak?
C: It’s stupid, risky (now he stares at me, knees stop moving).
T: Like something bad’s about to happen?
C: Yeah . . . (frown, then looking down again; knees move again)
I feel like I need to be hard.
T: Because, if you get soft . . .
C: if I get soft, I’ll lose myself (very quietly)
At this point the client’s leg-movements increased he pulled his already tight cap down into his face and clenched his fists.
Rather than paying attention to the words alone, I find it important to look at the physical signs of my client’s vulnerability as well as his frustration with that vulnerability.
C (staring down, moving his knees up and down, legs slightly parted): I’m so sad.
As my client was approaching the moment of expressing his sadness his nervous knee-movements increase. His body is tense, shoulders tight, he keeps stroking his thighs in a forward hand-motion (not unlike a runner warming up his legs for the next sprint). He works hard at seeming relaxed.
C: It feels weak (Quick look up at me, then down again, legs clamped together, knees moving faster)
Then, when he admits his feelings of weakness, his legs clamp shut. His knee-movements are at their highest pace. He is ready to run.
C: It’s stupid, risky (now he stares at me, knees stop moving).
Then all movement and staring down stops. He looks at me, almost in disgust. It’s almost as if he is yelling at himself saying “stop, you moron, you can’t run, act like a man”. For a moment, all nervousness shuts down. He seems determined, ready to face whatever it is.
C: Yeah . . . (frown, then looking down again; knees move again)
I feel like I need to be hard.
He get’s nervous again as the shock of his own yelling at himself subsides. He realizes the shame contained in the confession of his weakness.
C: if I get soft, I’ll lose myself (very quietly)
In a whisper, so that nobody will really know, he admits his fear of being “soft”. His knees move fast again. He is, again, ready to run.
Some men express their pain, frustration and fear in aggressive and often destructive ways. When they can’t do that, when they’re asked to sit and listen in to their feelings, they often get sullen, unable to “read” what is inside. It is almost as if they’re missing completely the signs and symbols of their own pain.
Enter here stuff from Sanders lecture on male depression.
Biological and Gender Vulnerability
Strangely, men’s emotional vulnerability is paralleled by their physical vulnerability. This is often easily overshadowed by the high levels of risk-taking behaviors we see in men.
Men fighting wars
Men kidnapping family members
Men abusing family members
Men speeding
Men beating up other men
Men torturing others
Men using firearms
85% of violent crime in the US and elsewhere in the world is committed by males. However, males only represent roughly 50% of the world’s population.
Facts like these and more might lead one to believe that men are really the opposite of being vulnerable or fragile.
But a second look at male biological vulnerability reveals the following:
Human males exhibit higher mortality than females throughout their lives. At conception, male zygotes appear to be produced in greater numbers than female zygotes, but to be of poorer quality. An investigation of induced abortions in Finland showed that sex ratios of fetuses were highly skewed toward males during the first few weeks of gestation but then steadily became less skewed in later weeks (Kellokumpu-Lehtinen and Pellliniemi 1984). Whatever mechanism was culling males did so early on, perhaps in response to genetic abnormalities. Among low-birth weight and prematurely born infants, too, males are more like to die than girls (Ingemarsson 2003, Stevenson et al. 2000). More research is needed to determine what is killing off disproportionate numbers of male fetuses and male newborns; what is certain is that high mortality is a male characteristic, not only at this state but also during adolescence and in old age. It seems that being male is not good for your health.
Add to this the following list
Male fetuses are more likely to be miscarried than are female fetuses
More male infants die in the first year of life than female fetuses
Perinatal brain-damage,
Cerebral palsy
Congenital deformities of the genitalia and limbs
Premature birth
Still birth
Developmental Disorders
Hyperactivity
Autism
Conduct and Oppositional Disorders
Mental Disorders and Addictions
Males more likely than women to be addicted to alcohol
Despite our apparent physical strength, often superior to the physical strength of women, we are physically vulnerable in ways that in the end cause males to die six to eight years earlier on average than women and to have more chronic conditions than females across the board.
We find, then, that males are both emotionally and physically vulnerable. Physical vulnerability seems to even exceed that of females. However, we also find that men are more likely to hide, cover and gloss these vulnerabilities. Yet these hidden vulnerabilities are dangerous to men. They are the reason why being male might be dangerous to our health. Hidden vulnerabilities, pain, shock, embarrassment and sadness that are kept under a thick veneer of masculinity might be one of the key factors in understanding why men in most industrialized societies are ailing today.
Why Men Don’t Scream:
But the suppression of male fear and anxiety is far from just being a product of cultural circumstances and individual male machismo. In fact, we find these mechanisms of hiding vulnerability even in our youngest males. Similarly, they’re not just something we find in the Brad Pits, the Mel Gibsons and John Waynes among us. No, even the Little Joes, Jack Lemmons and Tom Hanks in our midst behave in this same way. Even when they do scream, they still don’t scream. There is something fundamentally male in the urge to be brave, to take risks, to defy danger and pain. It is appealing to all of us and we will always find ways to act on it.
When we men admit to our concerns about our health, longevity, resilience and ability to withstand the odds we are putting in question our powerfulness. John Eldrige points out what he considers “the” central question “every boy and man is longing to ask. Do I have what it takes? Am I powerful?” And he concludes “Until a man knows he is a man he will forever be trying to prove he is one, while at the same time shrink from anything that might reveal he is not. Most men live their lives haunted by the question, or crippled by the answer they’ve been given.” (62)
Could it be that male aggression and stoicism are symptoms of our constant struggle with these forces of vulnerability that seem to “disease” us? Could it be that aggression is our response to the silent and never acknowledged feeling that we’re weak? Could it be that our fear of death is so great that the only way to fight it is to cause death, to dole out death to others? Could it be that we’re perennially unsure of what it takes to be a man?
Being stoic and toughing things out is profoundly male. Don’t expect men to change that attitude. It is as important to their survival and perhaps to the survival of the human species as it is to breathe oxygen.
Richard G. Bribiescas talks at length about the effects of testosterone on the male. He describes the various “masculinizing” effects of testosterone during fetal development. “Physiologically, the development of male fetuses can be likened to the creation of mutan females” (80). Most interesting, however, is his summary of the effects of testosterone on the male brain: males have a smaller left cerebral hemisphere and a smaller corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve-fibers that connects right and left hemispheres and is responsible for the transfer of raw feelings and sensory data from the right to the left hemisphere. “Why would males evolve a smaller left hemisphere?” he muses. “Adaptive explanations of male brain asymmetry are problematical to fathom. Is it somehow advantageous to be verbally challenged or less capable of recovering from brain injuries or strokes? Unlikely. What can be stated with some credibility is that asymmetry has its costs. It is probable that the asymmetry of the male brain is not adaptive at all but an unavoidable epiphenomenon resulting from the production of testosterone.” (85) “The most likely explanations involve trade-offs with other male hormone effects that may indeed be advantageous.” (87) What are these trade-offs?
Again, Bribiescas: “In humans, testosterone affects the propensity to engage in broad classes of behaviors that we associate with being masculine.”(94) It is known, for example that fetal exposure to testosterone heightens the sensitivity of testosterone recpetors in the brain. This in turn sets up the brain to be more responsive later in adult life to rising testosterone levels in the male body. Such responses include behaviors like aggression, anger and competitiveness.
Fetal exposure to testosterone also seems to prime the body of the male fetus for later physical developments such as increased and rapid body growth, muscle definition and growth, etc. Overall, testosterone seems to ready a male for life of higher risk taking behavior, higher levels of aggression and violence, less verbal emotional expression, less ability to process feelings. Of course, Bribiescas wonders, why selection would have favored males’ tendencies to take high risks over safer ways of being in the world. He speculates that taking risks may have come down to present-day males as an aspect of male bonding. He furthermore suggests that taking risks was a vital part of a males need to demonstrate reproductive fitness. “Staying home under the covers, while surely comfortable and potentially good for survivorship, is not likely to be beneficial for reproductive fitness.
This may explain a lot about why men have such a hard time talking about their worries, weaknesses and concerns in a way that reflects their vulnerability. Doing so simply lowers their chances at reproductive success. It makes them less competitive over against other males who succeed in sucking it up. Men do not like to talk about what ails them. It is not only that talking about one’s health, feelings and other concerns is an embarrassing admission of my own weakness. No, it’s almost as if the admission itself contributes to my felt weakness. As long as I can hide from it, or ignore it, I’m okay.
It is easy to see, I believe, how men’s tendency to suppress their fragility both emotionally and physically became easy to exploit. Unacceptable working conditions—not only in blue-collar jobs, but also in white-collar work situations—are more likely to be tolerated by men who do not like to admit that they’re overworked and stressed. Warfare, still a largely male domaine continues to exploit and foster men’s willingness to take risks and be aggressive. Warfare exploits men’s embarrassment about saying they are afraid—and sends them to fight.
One thing seems beyond all doubt: Codes that suppress male pain, suffering and grieving, both for boys and men, are common in cultures across the board. Their purpose, however, may not simply be the general repression of male anxiety and fear. It is, in a more complicated way, also about the repression of past and present cultural experiences that would be, if expressed, scary.
I believe that my screaming reached even deeper, far down into the cultural abyss of Germany’s most recent chapter in history, WWII. A war that had been hailed as the most heroic and brave chapter in German history had been lost. Moreover, Germans had to accept not only military but also moral defeat. This war was wrong. Yet, nobody, especially not German males, dared to scream out in pain. By screaming I quit being complicit with the collective silence, still prevalent in Germany then. This was a silence about how much blood had been shed, how bad it had been, how scary it was. Without knowing it then, I had started to grieve much more than my unfortunate accident with the scooter. I had started to grieve all the things that had gone wrong in the past.
The word “fragile” has a Latin root which means breaking or breakable. Words like “fracture”, and “fragment” but also “friction” derive from it. When we talk about a “fragile man”, we’re talking about a man who is breakable. Have we seen such a man? And, more to the point, can we see him? Let me tell you what I think they look like:
They look like alcoholics.
They look strong and athletic.
They look like domestic violators.
They look like they’re in control
They look like fighters.
They look successful.
They look like tough guys.
They look convincing.
They look like Don Juans.
They look like they’re in a mid-life crisis.
They look like perfectionists (in their own lives and those of others).
They kill in hopes that they will be killed
They look like family men.
It’s a confusing list. Some of the items might make sense to you because we understand the pathology behind them. It makes sense, in a way, to say that an alcoholic is a fragile man. But a “family man” or a successful man? How are they fragile? Perhaps we’re looking at this wrong. Perhaps the word “fragile” leads us to imagine a man who is about to or has shattered into a million little pieces, a man of whom nothings left but a pile of shards. Or perhaps, we’re imagining a man who—in the words of the author Jim Harrison—has had his lid screwed on too tight for too long to prevent himself from letting off steam. When he finally unscrews the lid he finds he has not steam left to do anything.
You see, it’s not easy to recognize them. Because we tend not to even see the average man. We tend to see either the hero or the loser and we might understand that both are fragile and desperate to hide their fragility. In fact there is a kind of masking going on. We might understand that alcoholism, affairs and risky behaviors are masks of depression and anxiety. We might even understand that some men mask themselves by calling what they do “having fun”, being heroes, doing what it takes or “teaching someone a lesson,” being successful. But do we understand what’s going on in the average man? Do we understand vulnerability before it turns a man into a hero or a loser?
I don’t want to talk about heroes or losers. Our culture is replete with polarized images and stories of them. Our prison systems are full of fragile men. Fragile men who have used extreme masking to overcome the pain of being fragile and wounded. Broken men. Broken, often, at an early age. Broken and, yet, often so grandiose. What we have to know about them and remember about their grandiosity is: grandiose on the outside, broken on the inside. Such men often don’t feel they have another choice but to channel their grief and fear into aggression and destruction.
But don’t be fooled, those men cannot be found in the prison systems of the world only. Men who are in pain are all around us. They’re in us. We are them! I count myself in. We are fragile and perhaps broken and broken-hearted in ways we ourselves might not always be able to see or understand and much less be willing to admit.
But, lest you think, this is all about men’s willful and intentional ways of “hiding” their vulnerability. Lest you think that all a man really needs to do is get together with other men and talk about his pain . . . no, it is not just a man’s fault that his vulnerability remains hidden. In fact, it is really not that hidden. The pathology is not simply on his side. The pathology is cultural. As a culture we have remained largely silent, mute and ignorant about how men grieve, how they deal with fear, how they experience happiness and how they feel when they’re nurtured. Have we learned, do we understand, how to listen to and see a man’s pain? As a culture we have yet to learn how to perceive men’s vulnerability.
A look at male vulnerability:
But why should we? Are men vulnerable? Is there really something hidden? Is there something to be learned? I believe that there is. I also believe that it is important to know about it and to understand it. But I also believe that we need to proceed with much care and caution as we attempt to uncover some of it, because simply exposing this vulnerability will likely not do anything but expose the man, shame him and cause him to recede more into the recesses of his own un-knowing.
My questions and observations about male vulnerability are about as old as I am. They began with questions about my own vulnerability when I was a boy. Generally, I believe our chances of understanding male vulnerability and learning how to respond to it in positive ways are higher when we begin early, with boys, rather than with adult men.
When I was 5 years old I took a pretty bad spill with my old scooter. I can still see the beautiful metal bell with the Mickey Mouse design coming at my left eye as I was falling. I remember the sound it made—a dull thud combined with a happy chime. I passed out for a moment and when I came to blood was trickling down my eye-brow, into my eye. I was scared and furious at my clumsy misfortune. I started to scream, abandoned my scooter and ran home. It seemed like a long way home. Two neighbor women who lived in the apartment complex in which my family was renting a small apartment stood by the front-door talking. I remember them shaking their heads in disbelief, tsk-ing me. What is he screaming about? One of them asked the other. I was furious, lived. To this day I wish I could have kicked them. I felt so mad, so alone, so misunderstood and so ashamed. Did they really think I wanted to scream like that? Did they think I didn’t know the boy-code as well as they did? A boy doesn’t scream like that, a boy doesn’t shriek. A boy moans and grumbles out his fear and suffering. But I couldn’t help it!
I realize that my shrieking and screaming took from those women the opportunity to reinforce in me and in themselves the belief that a boy or man should just shut up and take it (like a man). They believed in the fundamental necessity of a man’s stoicism. And they believed that as a boy I needed to learn to act that way. In fact, they reacted with surprise and disgust seeing that, despite being a member of the male species, I didn’t seem to know how to act.
But they weren’t just taken aback by my reaction. There reaction to me exposed a fundamental helplessness and powerlessness on their part, one that rendered them vulnerable and, subsequently, angry. By exposing my pain and shocking vulnerability, I exposed them. I made it impossible for them to say things like “wow, look at all that blood” or “you’re so brave” or “took a bad spill, didn’t ya” or, worse even, “you’re acting like a man”. They couldn’t say that to me, because I wasn’t any of those things—in their eyes. Rather, I pointed, loudly, at my own suffering and said I’m not brave, I’m scared and I want my momie. As members of the female species, whose task it is to praise their male counterparts’ heroism, my reaction had just undermined their role. What was left for them was to think of me as a loser.
My mother did come quickly, comforted me and I remember a certain feeling of glee. Some women, I might have thought, get it. She doesn’t shrink away from my pain and anguish. She doesn’t expect me to hide it and just suck it up. At least, not yet, for the truth is, events like this one and many others when I did scream or cry, did not prevent me from looking to hide my pain, feeling embarrassed by it, feeling vulnerable and weak in the face of my own tears. My mother’s care and readiness to jump to my rescue did not protect me from becoming a man who, like all other men, is more likely to appear like he is in control of himself.
I wonder now: What if my father had been there to comfort me? Had he come to comfort me, pick me up, dab the wound and take me to the doctor, would I have felt differently? It seems to me that his unashamed presence could have given me a sense of permission. It could have been a root of some kind of identification, from man to man, through which it becomes okay to express pain.
Derrick and his father
Emotional Expressiveness in Males
Men tend not to shriek and scream, cry in sadness or anger. In fact many men don’t emote in extreme ways at all. Rather, they choose a patina of stoicism and control. Meaning to reassure others about their continued grip on things men tend to maneuver themselves into impossible emotional dilemmas out which they often choose the path either of inward death or outward destruction. But this type of “reassurance” is not just meant to calm others even more so it’s meant to reassure ourselves about our continued grip on things.
A former client, whenever he was faced with an emotional challenge had developed a habit of responding by first staring down, then clearing his throat, then as if in deep thoughtful reflection, lean forward to pick up a crystal that always lies on my table, lift the crystal to his eye and peer through it into the light. “What do you see,” I asked him once. “Nothing,” he responded.
I have to tell you, we never really got away from that “nothing.” This wasn’t only because he wouldn’t be challenged on this. It was also, because I knew I could not simply challenge him without taking the risk of shaming him. He would have felt exposed, naked and ashamed of himself in ways that would have lowered significantly his chances of understanding himself better. Instead, we talked about “Good Will Hunting”, that movie about a young man who sees “nothing” because his grief has become so overwhelming. Only a counselor who understands grief in men and a male friend who challenges him not to continue to see “nothing” eventually enable Will Hunting to see something instead of nothing. To have hope, to try his luck. I cannot tell you how many men have brought up that movie in my practice.
This is the story my client held on to. He could never say “I am Will Hunting”. All he could do was allow himself to show public sympathy for the character of Will Hunting. All he could do was hope that, some day, he could hope and—in the words of the movie—“go see about a girl.”
Here is another exchange that occurred many years back. The client is mourning the loss of a battle for a woman’s affection.
C (staring down, moving his knees up and down, legs slightly parted): I’m so sad.
T: How does it feel to be sad?
C: It feels weak (Quick look up at me, then down again, legs clamped together, knees moving faster)
T: What’s it like to feel weak?
C: It’s stupid, risky (now he stares at me, knees stop moving).
T: Like something bad’s about to happen?
C: Yeah . . . (frown, then looking down again; knees move again)
I feel like I need to be hard.
T: Because, if you get soft . . .
C: if I get soft, I’ll lose myself (very quietly)
At this point the client’s leg-movements increased he pulled his already tight cap down into his face and clenched his fists.
Rather than paying attention to the words alone, I find it important to look at the physical signs of my client’s vulnerability as well as his frustration with that vulnerability.
C (staring down, moving his knees up and down, legs slightly parted): I’m so sad.
As my client was approaching the moment of expressing his sadness his nervous knee-movements increase. His body is tense, shoulders tight, he keeps stroking his thighs in a forward hand-motion (not unlike a runner warming up his legs for the next sprint). He works hard at seeming relaxed.
C: It feels weak (Quick look up at me, then down again, legs clamped together, knees moving faster)
Then, when he admits his feelings of weakness, his legs clamp shut. His knee-movements are at their highest pace. He is ready to run.
C: It’s stupid, risky (now he stares at me, knees stop moving).
Then all movement and staring down stops. He looks at me, almost in disgust. It’s almost as if he is yelling at himself saying “stop, you moron, you can’t run, act like a man”. For a moment, all nervousness shuts down. He seems determined, ready to face whatever it is.
C: Yeah . . . (frown, then looking down again; knees move again)
I feel like I need to be hard.
He get’s nervous again as the shock of his own yelling at himself subsides. He realizes the shame contained in the confession of his weakness.
C: if I get soft, I’ll lose myself (very quietly)
In a whisper, so that nobody will really know, he admits his fear of being “soft”. His knees move fast again. He is, again, ready to run.
Some men express their pain, frustration and fear in aggressive and often destructive ways. When they can’t do that, when they’re asked to sit and listen in to their feelings, they often get sullen, unable to “read” what is inside. It is almost as if they’re missing completely the signs and symbols of their own pain.
Enter here stuff from Sanders lecture on male depression.
Biological and Gender Vulnerability
Strangely, men’s emotional vulnerability is paralleled by their physical vulnerability. This is often easily overshadowed by the high levels of risk-taking behaviors we see in men.
Men fighting wars
Men kidnapping family members
Men abusing family members
Men speeding
Men beating up other men
Men torturing others
Men using firearms
85% of violent crime in the US and elsewhere in the world is committed by males. However, males only represent roughly 50% of the world’s population.
Facts like these and more might lead one to believe that men are really the opposite of being vulnerable or fragile.
But a second look at male biological vulnerability reveals the following:
Human males exhibit higher mortality than females throughout their lives. At conception, male zygotes appear to be produced in greater numbers than female zygotes, but to be of poorer quality. An investigation of induced abortions in Finland showed that sex ratios of fetuses were highly skewed toward males during the first few weeks of gestation but then steadily became less skewed in later weeks (Kellokumpu-Lehtinen and Pellliniemi 1984). Whatever mechanism was culling males did so early on, perhaps in response to genetic abnormalities. Among low-birth weight and prematurely born infants, too, males are more like to die than girls (Ingemarsson 2003, Stevenson et al. 2000). More research is needed to determine what is killing off disproportionate numbers of male fetuses and male newborns; what is certain is that high mortality is a male characteristic, not only at this state but also during adolescence and in old age. It seems that being male is not good for your health.
Add to this the following list
Male fetuses are more likely to be miscarried than are female fetuses
More male infants die in the first year of life than female fetuses
Perinatal brain-damage,
Cerebral palsy
Congenital deformities of the genitalia and limbs
Premature birth
Still birth
Developmental Disorders
Hyperactivity
Autism
Conduct and Oppositional Disorders
Mental Disorders and Addictions
Males more likely than women to be addicted to alcohol
Despite our apparent physical strength, often superior to the physical strength of women, we are physically vulnerable in ways that in the end cause males to die six to eight years earlier on average than women and to have more chronic conditions than females across the board.
We find, then, that males are both emotionally and physically vulnerable. Physical vulnerability seems to even exceed that of females. However, we also find that men are more likely to hide, cover and gloss these vulnerabilities. Yet these hidden vulnerabilities are dangerous to men. They are the reason why being male might be dangerous to our health. Hidden vulnerabilities, pain, shock, embarrassment and sadness that are kept under a thick veneer of masculinity might be one of the key factors in understanding why men in most industrialized societies are ailing today.
Why Men Don’t Scream:
But the suppression of male fear and anxiety is far from just being a product of cultural circumstances and individual male machismo. In fact, we find these mechanisms of hiding vulnerability even in our youngest males. Similarly, they’re not just something we find in the Brad Pits, the Mel Gibsons and John Waynes among us. No, even the Little Joes, Jack Lemmons and Tom Hanks in our midst behave in this same way. Even when they do scream, they still don’t scream. There is something fundamentally male in the urge to be brave, to take risks, to defy danger and pain. It is appealing to all of us and we will always find ways to act on it.
When we men admit to our concerns about our health, longevity, resilience and ability to withstand the odds we are putting in question our powerfulness. John Eldrige points out what he considers “the” central question “every boy and man is longing to ask. Do I have what it takes? Am I powerful?” And he concludes “Until a man knows he is a man he will forever be trying to prove he is one, while at the same time shrink from anything that might reveal he is not. Most men live their lives haunted by the question, or crippled by the answer they’ve been given.” (62)
Could it be that male aggression and stoicism are symptoms of our constant struggle with these forces of vulnerability that seem to “disease” us? Could it be that aggression is our response to the silent and never acknowledged feeling that we’re weak? Could it be that our fear of death is so great that the only way to fight it is to cause death, to dole out death to others? Could it be that we’re perennially unsure of what it takes to be a man?
Being stoic and toughing things out is profoundly male. Don’t expect men to change that attitude. It is as important to their survival and perhaps to the survival of the human species as it is to breathe oxygen.
Richard G. Bribiescas talks at length about the effects of testosterone on the male. He describes the various “masculinizing” effects of testosterone during fetal development. “Physiologically, the development of male fetuses can be likened to the creation of mutan females” (80). Most interesting, however, is his summary of the effects of testosterone on the male brain: males have a smaller left cerebral hemisphere and a smaller corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve-fibers that connects right and left hemispheres and is responsible for the transfer of raw feelings and sensory data from the right to the left hemisphere. “Why would males evolve a smaller left hemisphere?” he muses. “Adaptive explanations of male brain asymmetry are problematical to fathom. Is it somehow advantageous to be verbally challenged or less capable of recovering from brain injuries or strokes? Unlikely. What can be stated with some credibility is that asymmetry has its costs. It is probable that the asymmetry of the male brain is not adaptive at all but an unavoidable epiphenomenon resulting from the production of testosterone.” (85) “The most likely explanations involve trade-offs with other male hormone effects that may indeed be advantageous.” (87) What are these trade-offs?
Again, Bribiescas: “In humans, testosterone affects the propensity to engage in broad classes of behaviors that we associate with being masculine.”(94) It is known, for example that fetal exposure to testosterone heightens the sensitivity of testosterone recpetors in the brain. This in turn sets up the brain to be more responsive later in adult life to rising testosterone levels in the male body. Such responses include behaviors like aggression, anger and competitiveness.
Fetal exposure to testosterone also seems to prime the body of the male fetus for later physical developments such as increased and rapid body growth, muscle definition and growth, etc. Overall, testosterone seems to ready a male for life of higher risk taking behavior, higher levels of aggression and violence, less verbal emotional expression, less ability to process feelings. Of course, Bribiescas wonders, why selection would have favored males’ tendencies to take high risks over safer ways of being in the world. He speculates that taking risks may have come down to present-day males as an aspect of male bonding. He furthermore suggests that taking risks was a vital part of a males need to demonstrate reproductive fitness. “Staying home under the covers, while surely comfortable and potentially good for survivorship, is not likely to be beneficial for reproductive fitness.
This may explain a lot about why men have such a hard time talking about their worries, weaknesses and concerns in a way that reflects their vulnerability. Doing so simply lowers their chances at reproductive success. It makes them less competitive over against other males who succeed in sucking it up. Men do not like to talk about what ails them. It is not only that talking about one’s health, feelings and other concerns is an embarrassing admission of my own weakness. No, it’s almost as if the admission itself contributes to my felt weakness. As long as I can hide from it, or ignore it, I’m okay.
It is easy to see, I believe, how men’s tendency to suppress their fragility both emotionally and physically became easy to exploit. Unacceptable working conditions—not only in blue-collar jobs, but also in white-collar work situations—are more likely to be tolerated by men who do not like to admit that they’re overworked and stressed. Warfare, still a largely male domaine continues to exploit and foster men’s willingness to take risks and be aggressive. Warfare exploits men’s embarrassment about saying they are afraid—and sends them to fight.
One thing seems beyond all doubt: Codes that suppress male pain, suffering and grieving, both for boys and men, are common in cultures across the board. Their purpose, however, may not simply be the general repression of male anxiety and fear. It is, in a more complicated way, also about the repression of past and present cultural experiences that would be, if expressed, scary.
I believe that my screaming reached even deeper, far down into the cultural abyss of Germany’s most recent chapter in history, WWII. A war that had been hailed as the most heroic and brave chapter in German history had been lost. Moreover, Germans had to accept not only military but also moral defeat. This war was wrong. Yet, nobody, especially not German males, dared to scream out in pain. By screaming I quit being complicit with the collective silence, still prevalent in Germany then. This was a silence about how much blood had been shed, how bad it had been, how scary it was. Without knowing it then, I had started to grieve much more than my unfortunate accident with the scooter. I had started to grieve all the things that had gone wrong in the past.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
