ManMade--A Lecture Cycle On Men's Issues

March 31st, 2008: Men and Their Sons—Will you come and wrestle with me?

2008-06-12T11:09:00.000-07:00

This is where it all begins. Even though the passage from boy to men, from men to conceiving boys and then again from boy to man is a circle, this still is where it all begins, where men dedicate themselves to boys. The idea, no the principle, is as old as humans have populated earth. It is the idea that masculinity needs modeling and guidance. It is the idea that such guidance works best when it is ritually and culturally anchored. It is the idea—and by now solid scientific fact—that, without such guidance, boys and men are greatly more likely to become depressed, to become addicted, to become violent, to fail in school, and later in life, to choose the wrong partner, to choose too many partners. In short, men’s guidance for boys is crucial to keeping boys and men from running amok. However, far more encompassing than ideas of culturally and ritually anchoring boys is the idea of men being emotionally connected with boys.
This emotional connection is a two-way street. It affects boys and men alike. Today, I’d like to take the time to look at this reciprocal affectation. Starting with how men affect boys, then moving into how boys affect men I would like to show that the connection between boys and men can be a life-long one and is full of opportunity of nurturing and learning about each other and ourselves.

EMOTIONAL CONNECTEDNESS WITH BOYS

What I mean quite simply with this currently quite popular term “emotional connectedness” is love. When it comes to their sons, men have the great responsibility of loving them. Being truly loved by a grown man—a father, an uncle or grandfather, or simply a friend—assures in the boy so loved the passage into his own manhood. This love is a crucial factor of boys growing up to be solid, honest and moral men. It is as if the failure to love a son might seem to the son like a denial of his manhood. Such boys nevertheless grow up to be men, but the hurt they experienced from not being loved stays with them. Psychologist James Garbarino talks extensively talks about this in his book “Lost Boys.”
He begins his book by introducing a most unusual concept the psychologically and scientifically minded reader: the concept of the soul.

From what I have seen, the more likely course of development is that, when forced to live in hell, the soul withdraws, perhaps shutting itself off from the world outside in a desperate attempt at preservation. Once hidden away, it covers itself with layers of insulation. As the years pass, this protective shell may harden to the point where eventually the soul seems dormant, so out of touch with the day-to-day self has to become even to the tormented person himself.
There are such individuals in our midst, although most of them seem to end up in prisons or mental institutions. Some are violent boys. In such boys, the soul is buried deep under layers of violence and distorted thoughts and emotions. (34-35)

How does the soul survive? Garbarino asks. Conventional psychology has a three part answer: The soul survives in certain individuals due to temperament, resilience and love.
Temperament is the factor that describes the natural differences in sensitivity between children to stress, chaos and abuse. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity. Love “may be the small voice of kindness coming from a relative too weak to change the situation but nevertheless able to fee the child’s soul enough tidbits of love to sustain it during its hibernation, its long winter of discontent.

There is a fourth factor for which, in order to mention it, Garbarino has to take off his psychologist’s hat. This factor is “divine intervention.” “Sometimes” he says, “it seems like an amazing grace that finds the spark in a child’s soul before it dies out entirely.”

So, we can see that there are factors that we cannot control: resilience, temperament and, perhaps, divine intervention. There is the one factor of love. The experience of being loved, at least weakly, but perhaps even unconditionally, will inoculate the boy to the hazards of growing up male in ways that few other things do. If he doesn’t get this love, he will never be able to forget this denial.

In that case, his manhood will either flourish only at night, when nobody else sees it, in angry assertions against nobody and fantastic conquests of people and territories. During the day, such a man will act passively, if not slavishly, to protect himself from the storms and attacks, the crises and catastrophes that he might encounter.

Or he will aggressively demand love and respect and adoration. He will do so during the day and most everyone will fear him. However, when the night falls on him, he will feel lonely, fearful and, yet again, unloved.

A boy who knows himself to be truly loved by a man will not have to steal his manhood like a thief at night or demand it aggressively like a tyrant in broad day-light.

But what is the quality of this “love” of men for their sons, for boys? It is, I believe, a peculiar mix of different aspects of what we might want to call an “intimate relationship.”

Such love is physical.
It might be that this aspect of men’s love for their sons is the most challenging of them all. The cultural and emotional boundaries we have built against such love are endless. To some extent every relationship between two males—whether they’re friends, father and son, grandfather and grandson, uncle and nephew or just business partners—has to contend with these boundaries. What might have still been “allowed” to the 2-6 year old boy, i.e., to race into his favorite adult male’s arms, to hug him passionately, or to look for physical protection from some scare, will, later, gradually but steadily make way for increasingly stunted physical interactions until, in the end, we’re left with a handshake, perhaps, a pat on the shoulder. We call this attitude “hypermasculinity”, machoism or just masculine bluntness. Behind it, though, is nothing but this simple truth of many boys and men: I am afraid to admit to my need of being loved and to show it as physical affection.

Strangely, for me this issue keeps coming back to the same question: Can men love babies? Or, more specifically, can men love baby-boys? How close are they willing to become with that baby-boy in their arms? Are they able to give themselves permission to take in the physical elements of this love? Can they allow themselves to smell their babies, to look into their eyes until their son’s fragile yet strong nature brings them to tears? Can they accept that their hands want to feel their skin, touch every nook and cranny in marvel about vulnerable and yet tough they already are. Can we accept being drawn into this baby-boy’s sphere, a sphere that demands that we make peace with whatever is troubling us in our competitive and bleak male lives, a sphere that only allows love.

Such love is spiritual.
The spiritual love-bond between men and boys is far from being a denial of the physical bond they need to have. Rather, the spiritual bond between them comes from a man’s willingness to be open about that which encompasses him. When a man can talk about the things that truly transcend his comprehension, his power of understanding and of manipulation, when he can express how he feels related to the infinite, then his sons and the boys that are entrusted to him will recognize and begin to trust their own deep rootedness in a spiritual world.

Such love is admiring.
A grown man’s admiration for a younger man or boy is a rare thing. Men are usually and most commonly pre-occupied with not giving other males any advantage. Admiration would clearly violate that principle. And yet, there is so much that men can and really must admire in their sons: alertness, agility, suppleness, speed, depth of convictions, depth of questioning, staying power, power to resist. I truly believe that, if we let them, if we don’t hold them back, our sons can easily out-perform us by the time they’re ten. No, they’re not as strong as grown men are, they haven’t made much money yet, and, of course, they haven’t pursued romantic love yet. But the man who says he can’t see anything admirable in a boy is either afraid of him or so blinded by his own arrogance that he fails to see the boy in his full existence.

I know many men who admire professional athletes. But do they admire their sons? Would they tell their sons “I admire you.”? Why do we have this fear of admiration being the cause of hubris? Why do we believe that showing admiration to our sons would spoil them, make them unuseful in practical life?

Such love is challenging and encouraging
Men can set challenges for boys. Such challenges are not about humiliating the boy, they’re not about putting the boy in his place of being the weaker, less able male. Rather they speak of the belief and faith the man has in the boy that he can do the job, that he will be able to push through what he has been asked to do. Male teachers have an awesome responsibility in this matter. They can learn to communicate their learning goals not just as expectations for their male students but also as belief/having faith that the students will be able to accomplish what is asked of them. This mixing of expectations with faith in the students’ abilities will lend not only optimism to the student but also give him focus and a sense of intent in what he is undertaking.

Such love is boundary-setting.
We, too often, think of boundary-setting as restricting. Especially with boys, we’re concerned with “keeping them from something”. Whatever that “from” might point to. When boys demonstrate “too much” energy, too much aggression, too much of the jokster spirit we tend to react with rigid rules and admonitions. I keep thinking about Robin William’s character of the teacher in Dead Poets’ Society. What are the boundaries that he finds for his students? How does he develop them? He finds them by destroying the rigid system of boundaries that are in place already.

He rips out the introduction of the poetry textbook and encourages his students to do the same.

He stands on his desk rather than behind it and encourages his students to do the same.

He talks to the students about death and the importance of the moment: Carpe diem. Seize the day.

The boundaries for learning are set through activities: shooting a soccer-ball while screaming out favorite lines from poetry

The boundaries of learning are taking out of the class-room into a cave, a womb of learning.

The boundaries are set by the teacher’s absence. He is not part of the cave-meetings.
(this is, of course, a reminder of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s insight that the ultimate moment of teaching comes when the teacher leaves the student to his own devices).

Boundaries are set as resistance and self-determination. If you want to be the King in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s dream. Go for it. Seize the day. Don’t let your father’s judgment scare you.

Such love is honest and frank
Directness, openness and honesty are highly valued male interactional characteristics. Not beating around the bush and being clear about things—this includes being open about expectations (I think you can do better), being open about personal experiences, talking openly about “taboo” issues (sexuality, masturbation, drugs, drinking, etc.)

WHAT MEN LEARN FROM BOYS

We should also understand, however, that while much has been written about the significance of men in the lives of boys, very little is known and even less has been written about the significance of boys in the lives of men. This state of affairs is testimony to our preconceived one-directional sense of development. We think of men as that towards which, or better towards who, boys are developing. We consequently think of men as mentors, teachers, educators and guides. We fail to see the immense impact that boys can have on the lives of grown men. This is the topic I would like to explore for the rest of my talk today.

Let me begin with some theoretical assumptions of my own:

While it is said of men that they often behave in immature and boyish ways, most men have a rather ambivalent relationship with their own boyhood.

This ambivalence could be caused by memories of being bullied, of being behind in school, of not making it in a sports competition, of being the last of the boys to grow a beard, of not having a friend—the possibilities of what might have been painful to a particular man during his boyhood are literally endless.

In a backward projection—i.e., literally speaking in a “re—jection”—men often think of boys as weak, as immature, as in need of formation.

The purpose of such backward orientation often is the intense need of the man to reassure himself of his current strength and achievement. In order to continually feel that way he needs to compare himself to the boy he once was. He can do this by remembering himself or by simply looking at other boys. What he sees is a weaker, smaller version of himself now.

If necessary and under pressure, men will repress their own boy-like tendencies and patterns in order to seem mature and “up to the task.”

What are such “boy-like tendencies?” What I have in mind here, are things like creative playfulness, a strong sense of fairness, getting dirty as an acceptable part of the whole experience, finding boisterous pleasure in success, finding perfection not in matching an ideal, but rather in the concrete outcome of a project, production, being uninterested in impressing girls or finding impressing them at best a secondary benefit, realizing that homework simply isn’t as important as are the various games, books other activities he has in mind for the afternoon. Other less theoretical tendencies are, for example, finding the next tree to pee, being extremely unworried about the fact that this is the fifth day of wearing the same underwear, eating potato-chips for breakfast, lunch and dinner, never tying your shoe-laces, being extremely clear that you’re not impressed with someone else’s “natural” authority.

Many men, I’m afraid, have channeled these boy-like tendencies into a narrow range of activities that include drinking, speeding, having affairs and, if they’re lucky, the occasional outdoor adventure (but most men don’t even get that). In their adult lives men are more likely to live the life of robots and automatons: responsible, reliable and really boring.

The Task of Forgetting Our Boyhood

As strange as it may seem, I strongly believe that growing up to be a man comes with the cultural requirement of forgetting that we were boys. In fact, we often are put on that path long before we are men. Think only of the expression “little man” which is so often used in reference even to an infant or toddler. It may seem strange to think about it as a requirement to forget, because we often see and hear about men who behave in boyish ways. But isn’t that only proof for what I’m claiming here. Being “boyish” is seen as an undesirable way for a man to be in the world. His boyish charm should most certainly not come with boyish actions.

This forgetting includes, as far as I can see, not just the painful events of our boyhood, but, even more so, the happy ones. The boisterous experiences of huge surpluses of energy that went towards building tree-houses forever, playing cowboys and Indians, pulling the occasional prank, racing our new bikes into mud-holes to see who would make it through without falling off, and climbing, climbing, climbing.

A former client of mine described his rejection of his own boyhood in this way:

When I was twelve or thirteen, I had this idea of “threading our neighborhood streets.” A friend and I went out after our parents thought we were in bed and began to tie strings on trees and pull them across streets to tie them to a tree on the other side. It was wool, so it would break easily, but give enough resistance to be felt. Boy, did we get in trouble. My friend was caught by his parents and he fessed up. But before someone could take down the strings someone had already called the police about it and before I knew it they were at my door. I have never felt worse in my whole life. I really messed up there. Everyone thought I was so mature. I had disappointed everyone and myself.

I worked hard with this client to learn to be compassionate and sympathetic towards the boy he was and is. He had internalized the standards of what constitutes a masculine code of behavior, a work-ethic and rules against goofing off to such an extent, it was a miracle that he could tie those strings at all. Another remarkable thing about him was his love for climbing trees.

I love to climb trees, by myself and with others. It’s really the quintessential experience of friendship and a shared experience for me to be able to say to someone, “hey, how about finding a good tree on campus and climbing it. There is something about feeling those tree-limbs, pulling yourself up on them, judging and trusting their strength to hold you . . . it just makes me feel incredibly happy. Really powerful. Connected.

However, this love does not come without ambivalence for him:

I usually don’t tell people about this until I really feel I can trust them. Most think it’s weird for someone who is 23 to want to climb trees. It looks infantile and childish to them. I think it is, really. There are days when I hope that I will grow out of it. Certainly, I wouldn’t want my parents to know that, instead of studying for my exams, I’m actually climbing the Oak tree on Wright Street.

Often men feel pressure to grow up when they find out they’re expecting. Clients have described this period of feeling the need to give up a “vagrant life-style”, needing to “provide”, “quitting the playing and becoming serious,” and—my sad favorite—“telling the boy inside he has to leave now, because there is another boy, a real one, on the way.”
The repression of boy-like qualities in men is a serious problem. It is something that men are exposed to culturally and it is something that men do to themselves and other men as they work on fitting in with the cultural expectations that surround them. Is it even necessary to point out that such repression will always end up failing, only making it more likely that the energy will come out sideways, perhaps in maladaptive and risky ways?

Being with boys—having sons—then, is a chance for men to recover their own boy-hood. This is, in my opinion, a necessary chance. It is a gateway for men to come in touch again with the pains and joys of their experiences as boys. Being with boys is our opportunity to look at what we had repressed for so long. Here are three vignettes of experiences with my sons that demonstrate what I mean.

Climbing Trees and Other Adventure Invitations

Recently, my son Jacob and I were outside shooting hoops. We had played for a while and I was ready to head back inside when he asked me to climb the Lindentree in front of our house with him. My first response was “no.” I felt a bit out of breath, I had some work to do in the house, I simply didn’t feel right—being an adult—climbing into that tree. Also, I felt a bit rusty. The idea of swinging my legs up on those branches, possibly hanging upside down for a while before I could manage to swing upwards into a safe sitting position on a branch, this idea seemed absurd and somewhat disconcerting to me. Yet, I was also intrigued. I had loved climbing trees for much of my boyhood period. I sensed that Jacob’s invitation was more than a simple request by a son to have his father join him (although it certainly also was that). This was also an invitation to re-experience a long-forgotten feeling of power and accomplishment as I was climbing higher and higher into that tree.

I had almost disappeared into the house when I changed my mind. Just the lowest two or three branches I promised myself. I felt uneasy at first. Would I slip and fall? I didn’t really know my body enough anymore to know how to shift my weight best to get to the next highest branch. Once I even lost my foothold and was sure I’d fall. But then I got higher and higher and didn’t stop until I had cleared the top of our house and could look west towards Woodlawn Cemetery and Busey Woods. And as I was up there leaning against the trunk of the tree, feeling the texture of the bark, smelling it, I remembered. I remembered climbing as a boy, I remembered the fear and exhilaration. I remembered how I could barely resist the temptation to climb as high as possible. I realized that this was certainly worth infinitely more than whatever it was I thought I had to do inside the house. It wasn’t only that Jacob had gotten me into a neat small adventure. He had, knowingly or not, gotten me in touch with “Martin, the boy.” Nothing was new in this experience, just almost forgotten. We stayed in the tree for a while, just enjoying the view, not talking much. When we came down again, we agreed that we wouldn’t tell his mother, my wife, about this as she finds the thought of him climbing trees too scary. Knowing I had joined him would probably make her doubtful as to my inclination to parent responsibly.

Here is the point: I know many men who like to be physically active. They work out, go to the gym, play a sport, swim, cycle, etc. These are all, of course, wonderful ways to keep in shape. Fortunately, more and more men realize how important that aspect of their life really is. But, I hazard to say, that most of those men would never in their lives think of climbing a tree. Why not? Well, partially because it’s not “manly”, it’s silly, and, perhaps, dangerous. But, even more insidiously, because they don’t think of it! We forget about that urge to climb. We need boys to remember. We need them to tempt us to do it again.

Snowball Fight

My son Noah loves the snow. Even when he was a toddler, I can remember watching him from inside our warm living room, while he was jumping around in snowdrifts during a major snow-storm. He was fine then going out by himself and he still is now, although the frequency of it has certainly decreased. This winter, though, he has been on me to go outside with him for a snow-ball fight.

I can’t tell you how much I dislike snow-ball fights. They bring back some of the worst memories of my childhood. Being hit in the face by an ice-ball or taking an ice-ball against the ear, no thank you, I thought. This is not what I want to experience again. But he kept asking and finally, in a wave of feeling that I’d really be a bad father, if I kept denying his wish, I agreed.

Of course, all the old bad feelings came back right away. I was afraid of getting hit. Noah is a strong thrower. But there was something else too. This something I had missed out on as a boy: joy. There was pure joy in being out in the snow, picking up this white stuff and throwing it at each other. Noah ducked many of my balls successfully, but you wouldn’t believe my joy when I avoided some of his throws and—yes, I admit it—when some of my balls hit him. This is the experience I had never had as a boy. Then it seemed that no matter how strong or weak the throw, I was the one who got hit by it.

You can tell, this is definitely something I was afraid of reenacting. Doing it in the most playful way possible, with my own son, was probably the only way I could do it. Had this come up in my men’s group, I might have exempted myself from the activity altogether. There were so many things I was afraid of, Noah helped me to be afraid of one less.

Saying “No” and Meaning It

My youngest son, Gabriel, is only 2 years and four months old. How much could a grown man like myself really learn from him? But there is plenty. Gabriel is usually a very agreeable child. One of his newest expressions when he is told not do something, or to stay away from the hot oven, etc. is a simple “Ah”. Clearly an expression of insight and responsibility, favorably looked upon by every well-meaning adult. “Gabriel, could you please put away that scissors, it is sharp. “Ah”, he says and puts it away. No, we can’t go outside right now, it’s raining. “Ah.” And so on. Does it come as a surprise that his insightful and agreeable nature is balanced by an equally pronounced clarity of when he does not want to do something? Gabriel’s “no’s” are decisive. If he doesn’t want to read a particular book, he will say no. If we give it to him, he will take it and either immediately put it back on the shelf, or, if he is mad about it, simply toss it. If we still don’t let go of the issue, he might even put the item in question into the garbage .

I find this sense of balance he exhibits hugely refreshing. This is a balance between “yes, I accept your reasoning” and “no, I reject your reasoning.” He doesn’t care that we are the adults who should know better. He goes with his own sense of judgment. Yet, at other times, he is clearly willing to let my judgment guide him. In and through this, I am learning how important it is to say “no.” Saying “no” is an adventure of sorts for me. It is something I’m not used to. This little guy is teaching me about a balance I never had as a boy and have struggled to find as an adult. He doesn’t hesitate to say “this idea is garbage, let’s put it where it belongs.” Well, I’m not there yet. But I am getting closer.

Come, wrestle with me

Just a few days ago I had the opportunity to mentor a group of six-grade boys. This is part of a program that runs for ten weeks. It is geared towards boys at risk. These boys wanted to wrestle. They were leaning on each other, they were pushing each other, lifting each other up and there excitement knew no end when the activity of the day—Electric Fence (an activity in which the group has to figure out a way to get every group member safely across the fence—was introduced. The pleasure of physical contact that resonated in these boys and that surrounded them and held them together like an invisible bond was palpable. It reminded me of the many times when my sons want to wrestle with me rather than having me read to them. Every time I have to overcome something in me to let it happen. With the mentoring group, I kept wanting to stop them. With my sons I keep wanting to say “no”. And yet I know how having such a strong physical exchange can create a kind of intimacy with others and self that is life-giving. The boys I know require such intense intimacy. They whither without it and, often in an attempt to make it happen anyway, become aggressive and physically violent.
Conclusion
So, the relationship between boys and men is indeed a two-way relationship of teaching, nurturing and guiding. For boys to have adult men in their lives, men who care about them and nurture their souls, is almost a guarantee that they will grow up to be strong and reliable men, compassionate and with a sense of care for others. For men to have boys in their lives is a way of breaking through the glass walls and ceilings of adult male existence. This existence prioritizes work over play, income over intimacy, and stoicism over emotional expressiveness. In this existence men die early, unhappy and saddened by a life that seems to have ended decades earlier, when they entered the sphere of adulthood for the first time. Men do well to take seriously boys’ invitation to play. Not just because it makes them better fathers, but because it will make them happy and exuberant beyond any imagined happiness that might come from a raise or promotion.
Deeply happy men are men who will see the absurdity of fighting wars, they will understand the value of time spent in conversation rather than pursuit. Happy men will live mindful lives, lives that are an invitation to others to join.

Men And Their Daughters--Utterly Useless . . . Utterly Indispensable

2008-06-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

Father and Daughter (Paul Simon)If you leap awake in the mirror of a bad dream and for a fraction of a second you can’t remember where you are, just open your window and follow your memory upstream. To the meadow in the mountain where we counted every falling star. I believe the light that shines on you will shine on you forever (forever). And though I can’t guarantee there’s nothing scary hiding under your bed, I’m gonna stand guard like a postcard of a Golden Retriever. And never leave ‘til I leave you with a sweet dream in your head.
I’m gonna watch you shine, gonna watch you grow. Gonna paint a sign so you always know. As long as one and one is two.
There could never be a father who loved his daughter more than I loved you. Trust your intuition. It’s just like goin’ fishin’. You cast your line and hope you get a bite.
But you don’t need to waste your time worrying about the marketplace, try to help the human race. Struggling to survive its harshest night.
I’m gonna watch you shine, gonna watch you grow. Gonna paint a sign so you always know. As long as one and one is two.
There could never be a father who loved his daughter more than I love you.
I’m gonna watch you shine, gonna watch you grow. Gonna paint a sign so you always know. As lone as one and one is two.
There could never be a father who loved his daughter more than I loved you.

If there is a parent-child relationship that has been stereotyped beyond our imagination and to the point of utter silliness and unbelievableness, it is the father-daughter relationship. The myth of “daddy’s little girl” continues to pervade the literature with very little objective assessments of the obstacles and difficulties this particular parent-child relationship presents to both parties. Father’s are supposed to be “heroes”, “first loves”, “teachers of humility”, “teachers of pragmatism and grit”, “conveyors of religion and god.” Their function is to bring responsibility, patriotism, friendship and persistence to their daughters’ lives. And, of course, they’re supposed to protect them fiercely and let go of them just at the right time.

None of these in and of themselves would be offensive or raise concern, if, alongside them, we would also make attempts to understand what the factors are that allow or disallow men to provide some of these things. In the current mood of still believing that fathers can “choose” to leave, the general tone of the literature seems to be “get it together and do this, for your daughters.”

In other words, I do believe that men/fathers have indeed far-reaching functions in their daughters’ lives. However, we will not understand these functions well, nor will we be able to promote them sensibly, if we continue to stubbornly insist that a daughter should simply be seen by her father as daddy’s little girl or princess. Who a daughter is to a man, how he will treat her and how he will be able to respect her decisions (her loves, preferences, values, etc.) depends to a large extent on his experiences with women and men in his life. In this context, the gender difference between man and daughter can be both an obstacle and an opportunity. And it will be important to see how it always has potential to be both.

I mentioned during an earlier talk that the subtitle to today’s talk was not my idea, but that of my friend and colleague Michael Trout. I took this line from him, because it intrigued me and seemed to be intuitively right. Somehow men, fathers that is, are indispensable to daughters while, at the same time, completely useless. This paradoxical need and non-need for men must have something to do with gender and sex-roles. It is echoed, for example, in this short essay which I found on the internet:

Men need the contribution of women to nurture our daughters and connect with them. I have curled my daughter's hair and bought her feminine hygiene products, but I am still a man. My daughter needs a woman to show her how to be a woman.
The first female in your daughter's life is still her biological mother. Support their relationship through your words and actions. Don't play custody games or speak in anger.
If your daughter's mom isn't available, find someone — or several someones — who can become your daughter's surrogate mom(s). In addition, let your daughter choose a person to confide in and who will share with you appropriate information of her development. Confidentiality must guard this relationship or it will not function. Besides, the topics they discuss are not as important as their friendship, the key to developing that woman in your home.

But men are not unimportant at all. Compare this quote from the same essay:

Dreaming together opens a panorama of new horizons. Dreaming gives our daughters a kind of blessing. In The Blessing (Pocket Books), Gary Smalley and John Trent describe the five parts to a Jewish blessing: physical touch, spoken words, expression of value, a commitment to the person and a picture of a special future. Have you ever blessed your daughter in this way?
Men Blessing Their Daughters
The idea that fathers can bless their daughters by dreaming with them is intriguing to me. Perhaps it is the absence of strong gender-specific suggestions that make this one different. This is not about appreciation of her femininity, it is not to model for her what a good man should look like. Rather, it is about the activity of envisioning, building a mental landscape of dreams and hopes that, perhaps, can create a kind of closeness between a father and his daughter that few other things can.
The idea of a blessing coming from the father is intriguing to me, too, because blessings are a kind of missive. A blessing is a gesture of “sending out”. When a father blesses his daughter he is sending her out, into the world, perhaps, into her new job, into her marriage and in so doing he is ritually freeing her to go and establish herself.
Does this mean she was his property up to this point? you may ask. That idea would certainly raise some people’s hairs regarding the usefulness or outdatedness of old stereotypes. I don’t think that a blessing implies previous ownership. Rather, I believe, that such a blessing only points to this notion of uselessness captured in today’s title. The blessing says,
“You’re different from me, you always have been. All I can do is wish you well and let you go. This is what I as your father have always felt and what has caused me pain and hurt, long before it was time to utter this blessing. I knew, that at some point, you would leave, would have to leave.”
Fathers, I believe, have to learn to set their daughters free, but not to neglect them. This is, perhaps, the crucial juncture, different from the one a father encounters with his sons. While the latter, by way of gender identity, still provides a kind of indelible connection, the former is dependent a different set of bonds, if it is to survive.

The Daughter’s Perspective
Yet, many daughters not only feel not blessed by their fathers, but they resent their fathers for having controlled them, put them down, treated them with disrespect and condescension. In my practice I see too many women who end up feeling their fathers did not even trust that they could manage their lives, that they could be in control of their lives, be successful and make things work.
It is rarely the case that I meet women who speak of their fathers with great affection. Let me give you one of those rare examples. A woman in her mid-thirties came to me for therapy regarding health-problems and, what she felt are missed relational opportunities in her life so far. She had been engaged to a man who treated her quite badly, however, she had felt unable to leave him. Yet, she didn’t know why she could not leave. A conversation with her father finally made the difference.
“Do you know the story of the little boy who played between piles of poop, he asked her during a particularly hard phone-conversation. No, she answered. Well, he said this boy was playing and playing. He looked so happy, even though he was playing between piles of poop. Someone came by and asked him about it. Well, the boy responded, this is horse-poop. And the other asked, why is that important? Well, the boy said, where there is horse-poop, there is a pony. My client described how her father went on to ask her “Where is your pony?” What are you hoping for?
This is not an affectionate moment that would be easy to understand. There is no gentle violin music in the back-ground that suggests that she is still daddy’s little girl. Fathers talking to their adult daughters about excrement, be that a horse’s or someone else’s, will not make it into the halls of fame of little girls’ daddies. It’s a tough moment, but this father is able to tell his daughter “you love too much.” “You hope too much.” “ You’re forgetting about respecting yourself.” “Save yourself, because I cannot do it.” “Get out, before it’s too late.”
What this father did, viz. act as a respectful mentor to his daughter, is overshadowed by the things that I often hear of other fathers of adult daughters. “It’s your own fault,” “you should have listened to me in the first place,” “I’m sure you’re making it worse,” “Talk to your mother about it,” or “you’ve always been difficult,” “Just put up with it.”
What is most palpable about such reactions to their daughters’ misfortune is the fathers’ anger. Through those words of abandonment and blame speaks a form of disenchantment and grief that can be missed easily. This grief, I believe, is the fruit of too much felt uselessness of the father in the life of his daughter. In effect it seems, the father feels abandoned by his daughter. And, as it turns out, this is an abandonment that started simply by her being a girl, i.e., someone who would not really resonate with him in deep, meaningful ways. For many men, becoming the father of a daughter sets the stage for a re-run of an already familiar drama: Being rejected by a woman. This drama was often enacted for the first time, when his mother didn’t feel comfortable having him really close anymore, it might have continued as a rejection by a girl in middle-or high-school and it begins again (if first only as an assumption) when such a man has a daughter.

Many girls and women repeat the trite and quite formulaic version of “I know my father loves me, but I rarely really felt it.” The women and girls I meet (in my practice and privately) mostly talk about t heir fathers as distant and judgmental, unable really to perceive and feel their way into the daughter’s world. It is odd but also telling that many of the women I have spoken to about their fathers have very little sense that their fathers thought of them as their princess. Sometimes there is a memory of having been daddy’s little girl, but that is old and faded. Growing up got in the way and that put any sense of affection that might have been their between father and daughter to rest. No woman I have spoken to has expressed having received a blessing (in the above sense) from her father. Many remember criticism, teasing and general awkwardness, however. Some even felt that they had moved from daddy’s little girl to daddy’s slave, i.e., controlled by what daddy wants them to do.

Case Study:
The young female is sitting in front of me. Her name is Melanie. She is at that age when I don’t feel sure anymore, if I should call her “girl” or “young woman”. Both sound oddly condescending, to my ears. She is restless, grabs her long blond hair and pulls it through her hands in an attempt to make it as straight as possible. She is almost pulling it down like a curtain. Does she want to hide her face? She is 12 years old, tall and skinny. She plays basketball for her school. Her legs are moving constantly, she often reaches up with both arms, stretching, perhaps in hopes of calming down a bit.
Her mother is sitting next to her. She is looking away from her daughter. I keep remembering a line from my first phone-conversation with her. She said about Melanie: “I wouldn’t want to be her.” I was taken aback by this statement because it showed so much distance. Almost as if her daughter was a character on television, someone whose life she could choose to experience vicariously.

Melanie’s mother and father divorced when she was 3. Her father remarried, her mother is living with a boy-friend. Melanie goes back and forth between their houses.
Melanie is having trouble in school. Her grades have been dropping and it is clear that she is controlling it. She speaks well and with nuance. I don’t have single doubt in my mind that she could be a stellar student, even in math (the subject in which she received 5 Fs last week for missed assignments, sloppy work, etc.
So, I say, how does your dad feel about your problems in school?
Oh, he doesn’t care, Melanie says. He really isn’t home most of the time.
(As it turns out, her dad has two jobs one of which is being the janitor at the very school Melanie is going.)
My step-mother is making fun of me, Melanie confides. When I told them about the math-grades, she said, to everyone else, look at her, there is the stupid one. She won’t make it.
What did your father say, I asked.
He laughed, she said. He made fun of me too, he said when I have kids they’ll be the dumbest kids in town. But, Melanie hastens to explain, he’s only joking. I understand what he means.
What does he mean, I ask.
Melanie is silent, she doesn’t know. He really doesn’t want to hurt me, she whispers.
I turn to her mother and ask “what can you do about this?”
She throws up her hands. “Nothing,” she says, “this is why I got divorced from him. You just can’t talk to him. Besides, Melanie has told me she doesn’t want me to talk to him about this. So, there is nothing I can do. She has to figure it out on her own.”

As I was listening to Melanie describe this situation, it became clear to me that she was protecting her father from the obvious conclusion one had to draw from her descriptions: He is weak, he is clueless, he treats women with less power badly and women with more power with servility. Melanie knows this, but she won’t stop protecting him. Her eyes were asking me, pleading with me, as if she was saying “I’m telling you this only, because I am hoping you won’t think badly of him. I need my dad, even though he is so utterly useless to me right now. Even though he is hurting me right now.
It has taken me a while to understand this point. But I think Melanie is right. She knows intuitively what I and others might only know empirically and cognitively: for a girl to really give up her father is equal to throwing herself to the wolves. Even in the weakened and condescending role that her father has assumed, his mere presence is more likely to ensure that Melanie will be relatively successful in her life than if he were not present at all. Relatively successful means that she will not get involved in romantic relationships too early, that she will not get pregnant as a teen, that she will have some confidence about her potential, will be able to make solid moral decisions and that she will feel a sense of confidence about her future.
Melanie’s father is not outright rejecting her or not caring for her. This is what Melanie is holding on to almost desperately. He doesn’t want to hurt me” she said. And what she means is, it could be worse. And if it were worse, than I would not have any hope whatsoever. So, Martin, don’t be overly critical and take him away from me.
Melanie, in other words, is in the very peculiar position of wanting to avoid identifying the pain her father is causing her for fear of losing the anchor function he has for her, teasing and condescension not withstanding. And yet, it is clear that Melanie will not progress easily without identifying the ways in which her father is failing her.

The Father’s Perspective
It is often said that having a son is difficult for a man because he sees in the son not only an heir to his name, but also a competitor in the making. The assumption, therefore, is that it is easier for a man to have a daughter, because issues of competition simply fall by the wayside. I question this based mainly on my experiences with men who have daughters. While competition is not the first point on the list of difficulties men have with their daughters, the list is certainly quite comprehensive. Here are some things men say about having daughters:
When they’re babies
I don’t want to change her diapers or give her bath or dress her/undress her. What if I touch her in inappropriate ways? What if I get aroused?
I don’t like holding her, I feel too rough for her.
Her mother knows better how to handle her.
When they’re toddlers
I don’t know what to play with her. She wouldn’t like the games I know.
She is avoiding me.
There is nothing she can learn from me.
I hate girl-stuff.
When they’re school-aged to middle-school
She is too girly.
Other mothers look at me weird when I show up with her.
Her friends are more important than I.
My wife tells me I don’t know the first thing about girls.
I worry about turning her into a Tom-boy.

When they’re teenagers
She is too old now for us to hang out.
She is too critical of me.
She believes I’m not cool.
I worry that I’d be attracted to her.
Her values are so different.

Men, so it seems, often have a sizable crisis of confidence when it comes to having daughters. This causes them to give up on their daughters, surrender their care to their mothers and literally give up their own voice when it comes to deciding how their daughters should be raised.
Unfortunately, the literature about fathers and daughters is very unclear and possibly unaware of this issue. While there are many books that describe how fathers should be and act, there is hardly anything that tries to understand or even just describe how it is that fathers have difficulties with the imperative to love their daughters. I would like to propose a few possible perspectives for how to understand men’s difficulties with raising daughters:

a) Men who have such difficulties have themselves experienced a crisis in self-formation stemming from a lack of either maternal or paternal affection or a combination of both. Men who know how to take care of their daughters will either have had a nurturing and loving bond with their mother and/or they will have had a bond with their father that stressed respect and love for females (mothers, sisters, etc.) When neither is the case, men struggle and, often, repeat the crisis of their own upbringing in the relationship with their daughters. Such crisis could result in:
b) Loss of confidence in his own power/skill to nurture
Such loss of confidence in men often looks like anger, but it could also be a strong sense of passivity on the man’s part. He might still play some with his son and engage in some rough-housing and horsing around with him.
c) Lack of affection for females and resulting misogyny.
An example of an experience of missing maternal affection in childhood and its results in a man’s adult relationship with his daughter will be given below. I would like to add here, that, often, such anger and misogyny is actually part of the “daddy’s little girl” syndrome. The little girl is the only stage of female development that some men can relate to without fear. They cling to it desperately and react with strong feelings of anger as their powers to hold their “girl” there are waning.
d) Sense of not being loved by his daughter.
Many men are hoping to be loved by their daughters in ways they weren’t loved or didn’t feel loved by their mothers or sisters or wives. This expectation of being loved can take quite childlike forms: intense jealousy at boy-friends and fiancées the daughter might bring home, discouraging her from taking risks and trying out new things, etc. The male childhood trauma of maternal abandonment can result in strong narcissistic tendencies when such a man is faced with raising daughters.
e) Fear of loving the daughter too much and become sexually abusive/attracted to her.
Having learned that it was not “okay” to be close to his mother, meant that the young male learned his first lessons of fear of incest. This is a particularly strong and resilient issue, because so many men have learned this and fear closeness with their daughters in the same way that their parents feared that being close to his mother would pamper him and make him soft. The distance that is thus created between fathers and daughters can hurt this relationship when it needs comfortable emotional and physical closeness.
f) Men with such difficulties cannot identify sufficiently with this female that is, supposedly, a part of them.
For many men troubles with their relationship to their daughter boil down to incomprehension: How could I, a male, partake in the making of a female? Men struggle with identity issues, in other words. This is not, of course, only a question of x/y chromosomes. Rather, it is an often insurmountable seeming difficulty to understand his own feminine side.
g) Men with such difficulties are embattled by a gate-keeping spouse who won’t let them near their daughter.
This is what all the insecurities and questions that men might have about having a daughter finally bump into: a mother who says You have no idea how to do this right. She is a girl. Let me handle this. Far too few men fight this and end up being far removed from their daughters’ lives.

To sum up this point:
The developmental crises that precede father-daughter difficulties can be traced back to the father’s early childhood and upbringing. These crises often take place in the form of some kind of early childhood abandonment or break with mother and can be reinforced by an absent or uncaring father. While these factors also contribute to men’s inability or unwillingness to care for their sons, they seem to be significant in particular as men get ready to care for their daughters. Maternal abandonment of a son without a strong father who actively counteracts such abandonment with care and nurturing and positive messages about women can result in disastrous results for the son as he is becoming a man and, possibly, the father of daughters.

Case Study II:
Burt a man in his sixties was one of two children; his two years younger brother remains the person he feels closest to. Burt describes his upbringing as cold and without care. His father was frequently on business trips, though sometimes, Burt says, he made breakfasts for him and his brother. His mother, a concert pianist, had hardly any time for her children and got the information she needed about raising her sons from a book on child-care which was prominently displayed on the mantel in the living room. Burt has become increasingly aware of his anger, hurt and pain about his loneliness as a boy. Burt has been through three marriages. He has two children a son and a daughter, from his first marriage. Ten years ago the daughter committed suicide. Here is what Burt said about her:

I don’t care. That bitch, she was a burden on me the whole time. I gave her a quarter million. Burned every single dime I gave her, just wanted to get her drugs and hang out with boys. She didn’t care about me, so I don’t care about her. I’m glad she’s dead. (Turning directly to me to look at me in defiance) I feel better she’s gone. She was nothing but a careless, fucking bitch. She is just like my mom. She didn’t care about me either, just wanted to play that fucking piano and be with Jesus all the time. When she was dying she was lying on her bed, just yelling “I’m coming Jesus, I’m coming.” She didn’t care I was sitting right next to her. I hate them, I just hate them.

Yes, this is an extreme case. But, perhaps, its extremeness does not so much lie in what happened to Burt but rather in the raw and sometimes volatile need to express his anger about his mother and his daughter (and, of course, the other women in his life).
As we listen to Burt, we get a good sense, I believe, of the “uselessness” he is confronted with. He was of no use to his mother. His sense of being important to a female was broken very early. Later he was of no use to his daughter (though he would say he had no use for her), he couldn’t even save her. Neither could the money he gave her. Burt is also obsessed with helping people with money, especially women.

Conclusion:
I have no daughter. I only have sons. In my family that makes me an outsider.
My grandparents have two daughters and one son, my parents, have myself and my sister, my mother’s brother has a son and a daughter. My cousin, son of my mother’s sister has a daughter and a son, the daughter of my mother’s brother also has a son and a daughter.

I never imagined I would not have a daughter. Imagine my surprise. Whoever determines those things must have had the idea that I need to figure out something about boys before I can move on. I am not disappointed. But I wish I knew. Some people tell me I should be glad I didn’t have daughters. Daughters, they say, are simple only until they reach puberty. Then they get complicated in ways that make a father feel rejected and dejected. Perhaps. I have always thought that developmental rejection of parents by their children is more about the children’s attempts to reach out for freedom and independence. It is not, I believe, about the rejection itself.

But it wouldn’t surprise me, if research could show that daughters have to struggle harder for freedom than do sons. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that parents, especially fathers, still have quite strong (not to say conservative) ideas about how daughters should behave, what could happen to them, and how to protect them.

If I had a daughter here is what I would like for her to know:

I’d like her to know the world in as much detail as possible.

I’d like for her to love nature and be comfortable in it.

I like for her to be strong both emotionally and physically.

I’d like for her to understand men.

I’d like for her to value especially those men who can be in touch with both their masculine and feminine sides.

I would like for her to be compassionate towards others.

I’d like for her to be honest.

I’d like for her to be courageous.

I’d like for her to know that her good looks come from within.

I’d like for her to be passionate about something.

I’d like for her to feel respected and respect others.

I’d like for her to be confident.

I’d like for her to love being a woman.

January 28th, 2008: Men and Babies—What Does Primary Caregiver Mean?

2008-01-31T19:59:00.000-08:00

Of course, time-lines matter. A father who doesn’t get involved during the first nine months of his child’s existence, an existence albeit in utero, is likely going to experience a strong sense of lagging behind in his relationship with his child later in life, i.e., after birth and for the rest of their lives/relationship. On the other hand, given that already and still we continue to deal with a strong prevalence of paternal secondariness, it should be stated clearly, rather than fretting about the fact that many fathers are coming late to their children: let’s welcome them when they do come.

Moving from Helper to Primary Caregiver

When my wife was pregnant with our first son, Noah, I was still very much approaching the entire issue of pregnancy, babies and being a father from the perspective of being a helper to her. This meant that, in my mind, my job was to make her comfortable, to make sure she had enough and the right things to eat. It meant that I would trail along as she was going through things like buying baby-clothes, thinking of things the baby would need (such as diapers, some toys, bottles, etc.). With awe and a great amount of incomprehension, but also smart enough not to voice too much of that incomprehension to her, I followed her, watched her change and . . . felt somehow prepared, albeit not ready, for the arrival of our first child.

Like many other couples we also took part in a child-birthing class. We decided to go not with Lamaze, but a natural child-birth class also known as “husband-coached childbirth.” Here I learned how to “coach” my wife, how to count her contractions, distinguish between different kinds of breathing and to guide her into and through different kinds of birthing positions. On a certain level this class was satisfying to me. It gave me lots of information and put me in charge. After all, for most of this experience I had not been in charge and didn’t imagine myself to be in charge again soon.

New research seems to suggest that it is this kind of experience, i.e., exposure to baby things, to the things people do during pregnancy to prepare for birth and infancy, that readies men to be fathers. It seems that even hormonal changes take place during this time, enhancing the father’s emotional ability to care for the baby and the mother. Perhaps this is indeed the case. The thought that a kind of immersion experience in baby stuff might turn men on to fathering is not that strange. However, I can say with some certainty that it wasn’t this immersion that began my journey towards fatherhood and being a primary caregiver. In fact, I felt and still feel I could very well do without 80% of the stuff we were told we had to get in order to prepare for the birth. This includes the birthing class. For while it prepared me for my wife’s birthing experience and how to support her through it, it didn’t really prepare me for my experience, of how I would be affected by the pregnancy and by this baby as it entered the world. It didn’t do anything for my sense of how to connect with this baby that was on the way. The pre-and postnatal connection with this child seemed to be the manifest domain of the mother. Nobody even thought that fathers would have anything of their own, their very own, to add to how a baby is received into this world.

I didn’t question this. I was there to support her. And so I would simply learn how to empathize, understand her feelings, eat apples dipped in caramel syrup, and blueberry and raspberry fruit-bars. I did not have a good experience with this. Sure, I was doing what was expected of me and supposedly this brought me closer to my wife. But certainly it didn’t bring me any closer to my baby. Rather, it made me feel like I would never have a good connection with him, if it meant eating apples dipped in caramel syrup. But again, I didn’t think about it or question it. To me this was what it was. Apparently becoming a father went along with doing things that seemed strange and inauthentic. It seemed unfathomable that fathering could be something that might come from the very bottom of my soul, something that I was meant to do, something that could be as essential to me as is mothering to a woman.

THE ESSENTIAL FATHER

Modern fathering is often seen as a consequence of socio-cultural changes in the Northern hemisphere, the industrialized part of the world. In this view fathering is not so much a consequence of a man’s psychic or psychological propensity for fathering, but rather the direct outcome of things like upbringing, exposure to information about and models of fathering. Men are made into fathers, in other words, they are not simply developing into being fathers.

This view, of course, means that we believe that men have a choice about being fathers. This choice would not only be a biological choice (it is indeed true, men don’t get pregnant and have babies) but it would also be a psychological choice (viz. that men get to make a rational decision: do I want to be the father of this child or not?) Culturally speaking a man’s biological inability to have children combined with his ability to take it or leave it, have led to the concept of fathers as secondary caregivers. Primary care-givers are those who have no choice and who have the biological means to have children, mothers in other words. In this conceptual framework fathering is seen as an act of will not an act of essential determination.

To me this seems like a bad deal. In order to claim some kind of primariness with my children it will be necessary for me to find something regarding my children over which I have no control. Primariness is the reward, in other words, for not having a choice in the matter of having babies. This kind of thinking, of course, prevails throughout the literature, classes and workshops on parenting education. It results in an odd and annoying contradiction: fathers are really quite unimportant as far as the health and well-being of their babies is concerned, but they should welcome and accept their unimportance and move into secondariness. So we’re saying you don’t matter, but don’t you dare leave.

We should also not forget that most of what is asked of fathers in this secondary position has little to do with the baby herself and more with the mother’s need to have a convenient way to access a sitter when she needs a break. In other words, fathers are most important, secondarily, when they succumb to the position of helper to the mother, not as fathers in their own right.

If we want to understand the psychic/psychological potential in men to be and act as fathers we need to understand fathering as something that is inherent in their essence. This means that men don’t need to be trained to be fathers, they don’t need a manual to help them understand how a baby is handled. Rather, fathering is a combined phenomenon of a father’s love and attachment to his baby, his creativity and curiosity, when it comes to finding solutions (what is wrong with using duct-tape to secure a diaper?) and his willingness to persist in the care of his baby (i.e., to not allow tiredness, etc. to affect his wish to care for his baby). In what follows I will attempt to give an account of what might account for the development of such attachment between a man and his newborn.

Observations of fathers during pregnancy: From Outside to Inside

Becoming a father is normally treated as something that happens post birth, for it is only then that fathers are deemed capable of having access to their babies. I question this approach because I am convinced that it puts fathers and fathering at a disadvantage, which, once it has taken place, will engage the father in a continual catch-up game with his children. Can fathers have access to their children before they’re born? What would such access look like? Since such access cannot be established directly, we need to think about what indirect connections a father could focus on with his unborn child.

Successful fathering is dependent on a combination of the father’s ability to be in touch with his baby and being in touch with himself during the pregnancy. This means that fathers need to be “in touch” with their unborn children (sight, sound, touch). It also means that fathers have to feel and understand the simultaneous emptiness they might feel inside themselves as their partners are becoming fuller. Fathers can learn to think of this emptiness as their pregnancy. Or better, since the term pregnancy really should be reserved for the woman, fathers can think of this emptiness as their expectancy.

What follows is a narrative of twelve stages of the becoming awareness of a man’s move into fatherhood. It is really a combination of several men’s comments on how they perceived themselves and their babies during this process. Every stage is divided into two parts: what we say about fathers and what they say about themselves.

Not understanding, disbelief

Often, fathers at this stage are said to have trouble believing that what they’re seeing or hearing about the pregnancy of their partner is real. Pregnancy tests, the doctor’s announcement, even the partner herself informing him, seem not to have the power to change the man’s sense that something new and earth shaking has happened. Men who have just been told that they will be fathers, we are told, act nonchalantly and seemingly unimpressed by this information.

What fathers are experiencing:
I am on the outside. I don’t see, I don’t feel, I don’t hear. What, then, do I know? I am disconnected from what she alleges to be the fruit of our love-making. I am disconnected from the woman herself. It feels awfully scary to be disconnected in that double way? Emptiness is growing in my inside. But something of mine is there. When did it begin? What was that moment of conception like? Was there something different about that moment? Where we different with each other? Did I feel differently? These questions are growing on my inside. And as I feel those questions emerge from within me, I begin to feel attached to something that still seems to be a nothing.

Fear and Loss

We are told that, often, men then move into a phase of disconnection out of which they may or may not emerge before the baby is born. They are acting as if the pregnancy is not really happening. They go out as they used to, work as they used to, want attention from their partners as they used to. And they are seen as quite unwilling to “accept” the pregnancy as fact. In one word, men act as if all they are concerned about is the loss of their freedom.

I am, still, on the outside. Hollowness grows inside me while, I suspect, fullness grows inside her, your mother. This is scary. I am not in control. I am losing control of a question that seems to take me backwards, towards infinity.
Again, my fear of being abandoned on the outside takes me inside. It takes me inside to “it” (for I hesitate to call you “you”). It takes me, once again, inside to my own hollow womb. Who are you? Who are you whose absence and presence I feel so simultaneously and so conflictually? Also, I’m feeling nauseated a lot. I am panicking. The worst is I can’t talk about this to anyone.

Ignoring

While in the previous stage men were seen as acting in ego-centric ways concerned only with their freedom, this stage is characterized by a strange sense of settling into the fact. However, in a silent way men seem to continue to pretend that nothing has happened. They are often unwilling to plan, to think about names, or even tell other people about the pregnancy.

I am on the outside. What else is new, right? Naming? How can I name something that is nothing? How can I talk to others about “it”?
And yet, something else is beginning to rise from within me. I know. I know I can’t deny or ignore “it”. Not just because she says it’s real, but also because I know it is. I know you are. I know this, not only because I know something about your beginning. No, I also know something because of how real my hollowness feels. It, this hollowness, is preparation as well.

Anger

If it hasn’t already been observed and happened, it is happening now. During the early stages of pregnancy men often seem consumed by anger, distrust and aggressiveness towards their partners. They complain that their spouses are becoming less and less available and focused on them. She is often distracted, will keep coming back to the baby topic, perhaps (but not in all cases), be less interested in sex.

I am still on the outside. I feel lonely often now. I get angry, because she doesn’t seem to think of anything but you. Of course, I, too, think about you. But my way of thinking about you is so different from hers, it seems. Doesn’t she understand how difficult it is to talk about something that is both so completely unknown, yet so damn real at the same time? Going to the doctor does not help at all. She never asks me anything about this pregnancy and that makes me feel worse, because I wonder, if what I feel really is “normal.” I wish I could be more connected with your mother, so I would know more about you. Yes, I want to have sex with her more than we currently do. It’s because I know, but can’t tell, that being inside of her, has changed its meaning. It now means that I am closer to you too.

Protecting and Envy

As soon as palpable signs of the pregnancy are present (i.e., heart-beats, the woman reports feeling the baby kick, her belly begins to swell, etc.) there is a palpable change in men’s attitudes toward their partner, the pregnancy and their baby. The empirical realness of these changes finally makes it possible to engage the man in the pregnancy with his senses. They now can see, feel and touch the baby, if only indirectly. Fathers often feel a simultaneous urge to protect the baby and mother and to have the baby in their belly. Some fathers feel impatient about their partner’s apparent struggles with being pregnant and fantasize about how easily they would handle the stress of it.

I am on the outside. No changes there. But I have felt you now. Oh boy! What a feeling that was. I have even seen you move, through her belly. The other day I was even singing to you. Some of those songs from long ago come floating back through my mind. It’s amazing! Something strange is happening, though. While in the beginning I thought that I wanted more signs of your true existence, I am no longer sure I care so much about that. And you know what else? I feel suddenly as if I want you to be in my hollow womb. I almost feel as if I could do a better job with you than your mother.

Working hard

Fathers begin to feel more strongly about needing to provide. They will work longer hours than usual, perhaps even take on new project in order to get that bonus at work. They might start to think about building a room, a bed or a toy for the baby. Often this phase falls together with more pronounced activity between the parents to get ready for the child (nursery, clothes, crib, etc.). Men at this stage often feel quite enthusiastic about their relationship and the impending change in their status as men.

I am still on the outside. But that’s okay. Something is growing. Many things are growing. There is something growing between your mother and me, there is something growing in me, believe it or not!. You’re growing, of course. This is a wonderful time.

Parallel Symptoms of Pregnancy

As men are more comfortable with the factualness of the pregnancy they themselves may begin to show symptoms of being pregnant. This still little understood, but widely misunderstood, phenomenon in men is referred to as “couvade”. Couvade or male child-bed, means that a man can exhibit symptoms like weight-gain, swelling of feet, nausea, cravings, depression, anxiety, variety of baby dreams. Men often report a quite strong sense of understanding and sharing their partner’s nesting impulses.

I am still on the outside. Here’s what’s going on. I am anxious for you to be here. But I feel so tired too. Can’t exercise the way I used to anymore. I feel exhausted all the time. I am sure I’m gaining weight. Coming to think of it, that nausea I spoke of earlier, that’s still there too. I feel like her. That’s right, I feel just like your mother. And yet, I don’t.
Something in me feels older (really not in a bad way) but older and perhaps more settled.

Connections with Own Father

Often, it is at this stage when the pregnancy becomes a perceptible thing, that becoming fathers begin to look to their own fathers. How did they father? How did they feel during the pregnancy? Interestingly, fathers don’t seem to look for that connection during earlier stages (not with their fathers and mostly not with friends either).

Still on the outside. Yep. I wonder what my father was thinking about at this time during my mother’s pregnancy with me. Somehow he seems to act as if that never happened. Or is that just my perception? Did he feel any of the things I am thinking about and feeling these days?

Frustration about not being pregnant

Up to this point, many fathers can make up for the emptiness they feel inside of themselves through work, care, sharing, etc. But as the woman’s body is more
and more conspicuously pregnant fathers often struggle with conflicting feelings of envy, rejection, impatience, protection and providing. This can lead to aggravated depression and anger.

Still on the outside. This thing is taking longer than I thought. Your mother is having trouble sleeping and doing other things. Her belly is always in the way. I secretly wish (but really have trouble saying it) I could experience this too. I admit it’s not just about a nice and politically correct way of saying I know what you’re going through, honey. It’s also a competitive thing: I can do this too. There was a time when we loved to make love, but now that’s mainly a thing of the past. It’s too energy-consuming for her. And, frankly, I’m not sure, if it might not hurt you. I feel a little lonely and resentful at times.

Becoming involved/Leaving it

The third trimester is a true juncture for many fathers as it is at this point that many set the stage for how involved they will be for the rest of the pregnancy, the delivery, and the life of their children. Curiously, some men leave at this stage. After some seven to eight months of getting ready and pheriods when it seemed they had gotten used and warmed up to the fact of their impending fatherhood, some men choose to leave their partners and babies at this stage. Men who do so, often complain of the thorough lack of male support. They would like to speak to their father, or at least a father or older man. They miss their friends or would like to have friends who can understand the emotional roller-coaster they’re on.

I am still on the outside and scared a lot, feeling a lot, feeling soft a lot. This is not normal. The other day I was listening to an old song I used to like and I found myself starting to tear up about something I couldn’t really understand. The other part is, though, I’m gearing up. Your mother and I have talked about your birth so many times, we could probably go through it sleeping, if it weren’t for the pain and the general excitement we will encounter in the delivery room. I have to admit, sometimes I feel like running away, though. Everything seems like such a momentous and scary decision these days. I wish there were some other guys to talk to about this. It almost feels as if the other guys are avoiding me now.

Delivery

This is the stage that, nowadays, most men do not want to miss. Whereas just a generation before us, fathers did often simply opt out of this opportunity, fathers now are gearing up for this moment. Interestingly, new research is questioning whether fathers really should be invited into the birthing room. Behind this research is the hypothesized idea that fathers who are present at their children’s birth might not really be able to focus on their own process as becoming fathers, but be preoccupied, if not scared, by what is happening to their partner.

My days in my outside prison are numbered. It’ll be only hours, I think, before you will be here. I can’t wait to hold you in my arms, to see what you look like, feel like, smell like, whether you’re a boy or a girl. Then what? We’ll take you home, I guess. It’ll be strange to suddenly share our place with you. No, I am welcoming you, don’t worry about it. I love you already more than I can say. It’s just . . . how can we take something as precious as you to our home? It’s dirty there, sometimes loud. Shouldn’t we have some kind of care facility at our house, to make sure that nothing will happen to you. I guess we will be this care facility. I guess that’s what I have been getting ready for all this time. But I’m not sure I can do it.

Birth

For many fathers this is a moment of extreme conflict. They are overwhelmed by joy, tenderness, and awe. Overwhelmed also means that they feel fragile, exhausted and weak. But who can they tell about that? It is at this stage, at the latest, that it becomes clear that men should not be thought of as “coaches” for their partner’s birthing experience. If anything, they themselves need some kind of coach or doula to help through the experience.

There you are! I can see your head. I can’t believe you’re really coming out that way. It seemed unbelievable to me right until now. And, you know what, I think I’ll forget it again very soon, too. I am so excited, but I feel bad too. She has done all the work and I feel weak and exhausted right now. It’s not just my tears. I’m used to those by now. It’s my wobbly knees and this urge to just lie down with you and your mother and sleep that scare me.

What then is the essence of fathering? The men who have contributed to this narrative of male feelings and thinking during their partners’ pregnancies have one thing in common, they all fretted about, sang to, got afraid of or even angry at something they couldn’t comprehend with their senses. Focusing on “nothing” that will soon be “something” is a task of the highest spiritual order. It is a quasi-religious experience, one might say, through which men might have access to their own essential skills and feelings about fatherhood. My sense is that much of this essence can be understood through the awareness of emptiness as it grows in a man’s life throughout his partner’s pregnancy. It is almost as if it is this space, this hollowness, into which the baby is born and in which it will live and which it will eventually fill. This means that the more becoming fathers are able to process their own emptiness, talk about it with others and feel understood in their impatience, fear, anticipation, anger and sadness about their impending fatherhood the more prepared they are to be connected with their babies once they’re born.

Conclusion

The idea, I think, cannot be to leave fathers out of the birth experience. Rather, what this narrative shows is that men have their very own story to tell as they’re going through the nine months of their partner’s pregnancy. If we allow this experience to unfold, if we are able to see it as part of the couple’s overall process of getting ready for the baby, then the man’s experience of this process is just as important to the baby’s care post-birth as is the experience of the woman giving birth. Moreover, men who have had the space and “permission” (their own and that of their partners) to explore their own sense of the pregnancy tend to provide for the baby later in ways that are more solidly grounded in their own judgment (rather than being just a copy of what the mother would do). Such fathers exhibit more independence in child-care.

I want to finish with a story told by a grandfather:
Paul and I had been talking about the arrival of this—his first grandchild—many times. Paul was all excited. He and his wife Lucy were poised to go see their son and daughter-in-law as soon as they knew that the child was born. Actually, their daughter-in-law needed to be induced and Paul and Lucy were able to go the day of the planned procedure.

I talked to Paul again two days after the birth. Everything had gone well. He was happy and truly elated about his granddaughter. Apparently, both sets of grandparents were there and could stay in the room right up to the time when the pregnant mother began to push. Then, right after the birth, the women (i.e., grandmothers, sisters, etc.) were allowed in, but the men were not. They got to hold the new baby right after it was born, the men, however, including the father, didn’t get to hold the baby until the following day. Paul told me that the doctors were of the opinion that the baby had to be protected from “viruses and diseases” and shouldn’t see anyone else.

Oh, yeah, I said, we men carry all these bacteria and other bad things around with us, we shouldn’t be let anyone near the baby. Paul laughed, he understood the sarcasm in my voice. I could tell he was both saddened by and resigned to accepting how this particular part of the birth experience had gone. This is how much power we men have he seemed to be thinking. We simply don’t get more. Why should we complain?

I, on the other hand, still can’t get my mind off the palpable sense of disappointment in Paul’s voice and face, despite his deep happiness about his granddaughter (Nobody should say he wasn’t happy. Nobody should say that this had any effect on his overall feelings about this new human life.) But, his face seemed to ask, why? Why would they keep me (and other men of the family) out?

Paul’s experience is, of course, another anecdote showing us how men are still kept away from participating fully in the lives of their children and grandchildren. We know about this, we have begun to see that this is, indeed, happening. What is, perhaps, more complicated to understand about this experience is that it reminds us that men, too, are only now beginning to understand their own feelings about this experience. Paul has a sense that something is wrong here. That there is a dissonance in his experience is undeniable to him, but can’t be easily verified culturally. Did I just feel left out? Did I just feel pushed to the side? Did I just feel unimportant? The quite conspicuous absence of a strong cultural verification of those feelings is troubling to me. Where are the enraged fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers who want to be involved but aren’t? Why are there no protests, no demonstrations, to show hospitals and doctors that men’s involvement with birth is sought for by men themselves? In my experience, the strongest factor working against these kinds of changes is shame. Men are ashamed and embarrassed to admit that they have these feelings. At the time a child is born this shame and embarrassment is in its third phase. The three phases, as I see them in men I have talked to, approximately run like this:
a) hesitation about having children (often out of fear of being displaced); this is laughed about by many because men are seen as still being infantile and immature, unable to “grow up and face the demands and expectations of adulthood.”
b) Pregnancy itself during which men are seen as largely irrelevant because they “are not pregnant.” Men feel left out and unable to communicate their feelings about being an expectant male.
c) Post-birth when men are seen as direly in need of “learning” how to deal with a new-born, while women “know” everything there is to know. There is still a sense that men are bumbling idiots when it comes to dealing with infants and toddlers. Paul’s case showed us that in the 21st century even, men are thought to carry disease into the birthing room.

One last note:

If we’re serious about men relating to babies well, if we will focus on this not first when they become fathers, but rather already when they’re still boys.

For a boy to learn about his capacity for emotional expressiveness is to counter what Heinowitz (2001) calls “the pool of common fears” we men have acquired in terms of fathering.
Only boys who have learned how to express their feelings will be able to express them again when they become fathers.

This is particularly true when it comes to understanding male sexuality. Teaching boys that their sexuality is as much about fathering as a girls sexuality is about mothering is an important part in opening up the ways in which men relate to babies. This means that

a) male sexuality is always also about fathering: “always” means there is never a time when it is not about fathering; “also” means that it is about fathering next to other things that are also true about male sexuality.
b) When we see male sexuality as always also about fathering, we are making a direct connection between his sexuality and his creativity: almost every time a man has an orgasm he also ejaculates. The production of sperm is at least potentially about fathering.
c) This does not mean that every sexual act must be carried out with the intent of fathering a child. It merely means that when we make love to our female and male partners we are participating in the flux of life, whether or not a child results from that act.

If men want to be understood as primary caregivers to their babies, then men are greatly responsible for talking to each other about this nexus, to our children (especially our sons) and to our partners.

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

2007-12-16T17:18:00.000-08:00

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

Father Absence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fathers At The Playground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Fathers Do For Their Sons

1. These fathers were giving their sons space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Space between men and their fathers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Helping the Son grow sure of himself

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

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

4. Fathers Don’t Help Right Away

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

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

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

5. Fathers’ tolerance for pain

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

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

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

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

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

6. Fathers Know How To Comfort/Nurture

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

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

7. What was the cause?

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

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

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

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

8. Confident Comforting

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

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

9. Mother Replaces Father

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

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

10. Fathers Giving Up

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

The Wound

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

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

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

Men and Faith: Church is Rarely an Option

2007-12-07T18:02:00.000-08:00

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

Men in Religious Organizations

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

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

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

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

Faith, Spirituality and Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shameful Faith

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

Sigmund Freud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Merton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men’s connection with nature

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

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

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

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

Faith and Religion Without Shame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-10-31T11:36:00.000-07:00

How Friendship Began For Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men’s Loneliness

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

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

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

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

Men’s Expectations Regarding Friendship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friendship Only Once

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Men Need Friendships With Other Men

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

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

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

2007-09-28T20:17:00.000-07:00

I Want, Therefore I am in Danger of Not Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do not trust a beautiful woman

Do not trust a woman who is clingy

Do not trust a woman who is lost/clueless

Do not trust a woman who is needy

Do not trust a mysterious woman.

Do not trust an independent woman

Do not trust a confident woman

Do not trust a woman who wants sex

Do not trust a woman who does not want sex.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trauma of Oedipus

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

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

Pollack believes that

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

He continues saying that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Biological and Sociological Underpinnings of Men’s Vulnerability

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

The Power of Women in the Lives of Men

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

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

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

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

Women give life.

Women drive decision-making

Women are alluring.

Women move humanity towards new territories, new discoveries.

Men’s Need for Attention from Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unconditional Acceptance

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

August 27th, 2007: Men Loving other Men—It’s Not Just a Gay Thing

2007-09-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

Father Love As A Beginning

It is only gradually that I am beginning to understand the reasons for this paper. Of course, there are social change reasons. The world would be a better place, if men could learn how to love each other. It would be an even better place, if they could learn not to be afraid of loving each other. Children would do better, women would do better, if men learned how to stop living lives in isolation from each other, angry at each other, hopeless to ever have a successful deep and intimate relationship with at least one other man.

But there is more. Most of you know that I have three sons. I always thought that I would have daughters. Having sons, three of them, still goes beyond my wildest imagination. At times I have to remind myself and say it to myself: I am the father of three sons. Aside from it making me feel strong, even protected and unafraid, saying it out loud fills me with deep passionate love for those three boys who will so very soon be men.

Though I suppose there are many boundaries between my sons and me, important ones that have their use and function, I think that our relationship is not defined by homophobic boundaries. When we’re together it is okay to be weak, to be vulnerable, to cry or to laugh out loud, it is okay to ask for a hug, to offer one, to quickly rub the other’s shoulders or simply to lean against the other.

I am very protective of this kind of relating to each other. Even when we argue with each other, and we do have our share of arguments, I tend to look for peaceful loving ways to resolve it. I tend to want to make sure, in every argument, that they know I love them. My wife sometimes thinks I’m too soft on them. I never thought of myself as “soft” only as determined not to humiliate others.

For the sake of not seeming “soft” many men sacrifice their ability to love other men and replace it with something that often comes close to humiliation. It is a competitive way of one-upmanship which sons learn from their fathers early. It is often reinforced with strongly homophobic notions. As we will discuss later on, homophobia literally translated means fear of the same sex. The very fact that homophobia is used in this way suggests to me that there might be a culturally perceived need for men to be afraid of other men, even a need to teach them to be afraid of other men, almost as if we’re afraid that—if don’t teach homophobia—our cultural edifice will inadvertently begin to crumble. And maybe it will, who knows?

Sexual Identity: A question of Essence vs. Existence

Countless are the so-called straight men who have come through my office confessing they either have or have had something for or with another man or other men. Countless are also the numbers of so-called gay men who have had something for or with a woman or women. Men from both groups worry that their incongruence with the relationship patterns of the group they would like to belong to—gays or straights—means that they are now seen as the opposite: a straight man in gay’s clothes or a gay man in straight’s clothes.

If such an encounter with another person falls within that person’s professed sexual identity, we are likely not going to think too much of it. We call it a one-night stand, a new love, attraction, boredom with another partner, affair, etc. In other words, we look at such an encounter simply as a moment in that person’s existence. However, when the encounter falls outside of the boundaries of such sexual identity we trip. We’re no longer certain that we can consider this person in the same way we had up to this point. Though it might have just been a moment in that person’s existence, a blip so to speak, we are now considering him from the perspective of essence., eternity in other words. The essence perspective is easily identified by the word “to be” and its derivatives. He is gay, she is queer, you are bi-sexual, I am straight, etc. However, considering a person from the perspective of essence after they have had an encounter outside of their sexual identity leads to concern and worry.

What is even more complicating is that there is such a thing as a cumulative essential view. This kind of view takes place when a person exhibits repeated existential moments of a certain behavior. For example, if a man has repeated affairs we might consider this as evidence that he is a philanderer. This is a different essential perspective though. It is inductive, whereas the straying from one’s sexual identity leads to a deductive essential perspective, i.e., one encounter changes a person’s sexual identity.

I believe that this sense of incongruity with one’s own sexual identity is especially troubling for men. The firm and seamless fit of a man’s masculinity, i.e., his actions, behaviors, mannerisms and thoughts as a man, this seamless fit with a perceived cultural and social ideal is an expectation that most men have of themselves. We men crave sexual identity and fear endlessly sexual disidentity. Consider for example the male client to whom I suggested he read Ronald Levant’s book Masculinity Reconstructed. My client recoiled from the thought alone believing strongly that such reading would identify him—in the eyes of others and perhaps his own—as gay.

This exemplifies, I believe, what it really means to be “straight”. Being straight means that we are willing and able to walk a very narrow edge of acceptable behaviors and thoughts that—viewed from the outside—give the reassuring sense of our heterosexuality. Being straight means that we always have to be vigilant about how we are perceived. It means that we are in constant need to reassert our heterosexual manliness.

The men that come to my office for counseling, which, of course, in and of itself is already not so straight anymore and suspiciously close to being unmanly all exhibit this kind of vigilance. It can be expressed as a relentless checking of the time and an emphasis on what they have to do afterwards, it can be a detached attitude meant to demonstrate aloofness and control, it can be—as in the case of a 15 year old boy I saw for a while—an attempt to make certain parts of his appearance look more masculine. This boy kept pressing his chin to his chest while he spoke. It took me a while that he was trying to make sure that his voice, which hadn’t changed completely yet, would not slip up on him and make him utter a humiliating squeak.

Difference and Incongruity

Difference among men is more suspicious than it is among women. Go to any average clothing store and compare the range of clothes available to women with the range of clothes available to men and you know that men are meant to look alike. Acceptable colors for men? I call them camouflage colors. Any color-choices away from that and one runs the risk of either being thought of as gay or (as in my case) from Europe.
We have no trouble imagining the lonely woman donning her male lover’s shirts, boxers, socks, etc. But just try and picture the lonely man doing the same with his female lover’s clothes and you’re probably not far from seeing the word “pervert” flash at you.

Examples can be found in every single area of our human lives. They all speak the same message: boys and men must be careful in their choices as they run the very high risk that making extraordinary choices might be seen as an incongruence in their sexual identity. Sexual identity has turned out to hold us hostage in ways that keep men on a very narrow edge of understanding their own manhood and masculinity. Sexual identity is about either/or . While it might be very helpful to a man to be able to say “I am gay” and while it might be equally helpful for a boy’s parents to say their son is gay—helpful because it identifies rather than hides, I worry about those men for whom gay and straight are not easily identified. I worry about men who call themselves bi-sexual because they have no other choice and because simply saying that they have loved or are in love or just love a man is more likely of being interpreted as closeted than as honest. I worry that sexual identity as a concept does not leave room for men to simply be together and love each other.

Identifying Gays: A New way of Reinforcing Straightness

Interestingly, we continue to make this love between men less possible and more unlikely as we continue to be liberated enough to identify and celebrate gay culture. Because no matter how it’s done, celebrating gay culture also has the effect of fencing off gay men from non-gay men. This celebration creates a zoo-effect in which we, who consider ourselves non-gay, can stand outside, enjoy what we see and, at the same time, breathe a sigh of relief that we’re not behind the fence.

Homophobia in Recent Literature on Boys and Men: The Case of Michael Gurian, et al.

Take for example Michael Gurian’s treatment of gayness in his book The Wonder of Boys. Gurian begins—as other writers who deal with boy issues—by sympathizing with the parents.

“Few things are more difficult for parents than hearing their son say, I’m gay.”

While this start into the issue of being gay makes sense from a homophobic perspective, it already recreates what it itself is most afraid of: viz. being labeled, being misunderstood, being misidentified. Of course, it can be a relief to say “I’m gay” as it helps a boy or man fit into a cultural drawer or stereotype. But what would happen, if a boy or man when he comes out says “I’ve fallen in love with a man” rather than saying I’m gay? What if his parents responded by saying “You mean you’re gay?” And what if the son responded “No, I am saying I have fallen in love with a man.”

Furthermore, what would happen if a boy or man came to his parents or friends and said “Mom and Dad, I’m straight.” It would be silliness and in that silliness we recognize the silliness of the confession “I’m gay.” Of course, we don’t read it as silliness when a boy comes to us and says he’s fallen in love with a boy. Instead we think of it as denial. And by “we” I mean us—gay or straight.

So how can we understand Gurian’s insistence on this essential identifier “I’m gay.”?
Much of it has to do with the debate over whether sexual orientation and sexual identity are about biological unchangeables in the human body or whether they are about choices.
The implicit argument Gurian is making is that it is better to recognize the biological grounds of someone’s gayness rather than thinking of them as choices.

One way parents and communities deny the biological fact of homosexuality is to call it “a lifestyle choice.” When a boy or young man comes to them and says “I’m gay,” they say “You’ll change.” Most often, the gay adolescent knows this won’t happen, though he may try to make it happen for a while, even marrying and having children.

This makes intuitive sense, I believe, for if we entertain the idea that a boy or man is choosing whether to be with a man or a woman then we are possibly exposing him to an overwhelming wave of pressure to choose “right rather than wrong,” i.e., choose heterosexually rather than homosexually.

We all can probably sympathize with this position on some level. If we can assert and, possibly, prove that being gay is about a biological condition rather than a choice, then we have successfully rejected the possible interpretation that a gay man is choosing to do something bad. But, as many have pointed out before me, this means that we continue to accept our cultural view of homosexual encounters as bad. The only thing we’re saying is “I couldn’t help it.” It is somewhat like an insanity defense in a murder case. We all believe that killing another person is bad, but when insanity is involved, we back of and allow the person to say “I didn’t choose to kill that person, I just couldn’t help it.”

Again Gurian quoting a father:

Why do people go on about life-style choices? Who in his right mind would choose to be gay? You have a higher likelihood of getting AIDS, everyone hates you, it’s harder to get a job, your friends are dying all around you. My son didn’t choose (sic.) to be gay. Like so much else in life it was chosen for him.

I think we all can feel the passionate truth this father is working hard on expressing. My son, he is saying, didn’t choose this. He is not dumb. He is not stupid. He has his wits together. He is not a bad person. And in working out this passionate view of his son’s intelligence he is, more or less, beginning to think of his son as being handicapped. Being gay is not a choice, it is a biological fact and it is, as Gurian points out:

Genetically and chromosomally influenced, with certain families having far more homosexuals in their generational lineage than others; and it is wired into the brain. This wiring has been measured by researchers on autopsied brains.

Well, thank heavens that we have science to measure brains of dead people. And as it is en vogue in much of psychological literature these days, once the brain has been mentioned talk of the hypothalamus is not far off and we can expect a paragraph or two about brain-functioning. So Gurian continues:

The hypothalamus is the mission control of the brain. In the hypothalamus is a bundle of neurons called the “sexually dimorphic nucleus” or “two-shaped nucleus” by biochemists and neurobiologists. It controls, among other things, sexual orientation. In a gay person’s brain, this nucleus is half as large as the companion nucleus in a heterosexual person’s brain and although the research is far from complete it is now clear that somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of our boys have a smaller sexually dimporphic nucleus and a stronger biological tendency toward homosexuality.

I should, perhaps, explain that I grew up in a country that made it its business to autopsy people they were uncomfortable with in order to prove scientifically their biological and genetic inferiority. Aside from the very likely fact that Gurian’s summary is shoddy science I simply don’t care whether or not a person’s brain or parts thereof are smaller bigger, gone or have moved to another part of their body because I believe that at the end of it all we continue to say the same thing we sought so hard to avoid only more strongly: men who love men are handicapped, something in their brain is simply . . . smaller!

And so Gurian continues and with him so many other well-intentioned men who want to write about boys and men but cannot embrace their own potential to love men (platonically or sexually) and instead create a group of people to which they, of course, don’t belong. This is powerfully exemplified in Gurian’s next chapter—Loving our Gay Boys. Gurian waxes eloquent in his defense of gay boys and men. He emphasizes that gays are not more likely to be criminals of any sort. Gays even have unique gifts, he points out, gifts we non-gays would do well to appreciate. And, of course, we also hear about the Zuni tribe and the “special role of the berdache” Little does it matter that the berdache is not gay but represents a third gender that is male nor female. He goes on and on.

Prejudice Against Others vs. Prejudice Against Self

What is wrong here? Well, it’s easy to see that being liberated from prejudice against others might not result in a liberation of being prejudiced against oneself. While we might be able to convince ourselves that it is okay to be gay and to have a smaller sexually dimorphic nucleus, we might very well find ourselves unable to find that same thing acceptable in ourselves. I think what’s wrong and slips easily away if we don’t pay acute attention to it is that talking about homophobia and being against it is easy when it concerns other people. Yes, there are still enough people who haven’t quite graduated from “How to respect people who are different?”, Ethics 101. They should definitely continue learning about prejudice against others. But Gurian seems to have mastered that class just fine. What he doesn’t get into focus at all, in fact what he pushes away, is not the fear of others who are or might be gay but the fear that besets so many men in our culture that they themselves might be gay. For, unfortunately, the fence we draw around gays and their culture is, also one we then experience as an internal fence keeping us out of a realm of things, actions and thoughts that might, if externalized be thought of as gay. This, however, casts a large shadow not only over men who are thinking they might be gay, it particularly disables the possibility of men simply being close to and loving with each other. In one short sentence, identifying gays as gay and as different makes it harder, not easier, but harder for men to love each other. Of course, gays are off the hook now. They can do whatever they want, right? But what about the rest of us?

Scared Straight: Men Being Afraid of Each Other

The question then is, as Robert Minor—a professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas—describes it in his book Scared Straight, if we would not be served better by taking the term “homophobia” at its most basic definition, i.e., not as hatred against gays and gay culture, but as “fear of getting close to one’s own sex.” Listen to a longer quote from his book:

Even so, homophobia is a cultural condition, a major chemical found in the water that surrounds us. It is a conditioned characteristic of everyone regardless of sexual orientation. Essentially it has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Yet prejudices about, and discrimination and violence toward people perceived to be homosexual is a direct result of this conditioning because the existence and visibility of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people embodies the fear itself. (52-53)

Minor explains that homophobia is a “conditioned response” that pervades our culture in its entirety. He points out that our market economy which often advertises products that will bring us close to others is precisely based on the fear of others, i.e., homophobia, which the product in question is supposed to overcome.

How do we become homophobic? Minor believes that homophobia has very little to do with our sexual orientation and much more with how we look at and understand masculinity and femininity.

The definitions of manhood and womanhood homophobia enforces actually strip from us much of who we are as gender roles by which to define ourselves. I want to point out in the process of this discussion that oppression, prejudice, and discrimination directed toward gay people are in reality the mean for installing, maintaining, enforcing, and valuing gender roles which are our conditioned definitions of what a “real” man or woman is in our society. (53)

How does this work? Minor explains that it can happen in several ways, but that it often has something to with finding “causes [of homosexuality] that won’t disrupt the status quo.” Finding, for example, biological evidence that gays are different is less disruptive to the status quo than is what I am claiming in this paper and what Minor is claiming in his book, viz. that all men have the potential to act homophilic, i.e., with love for another man.

Similarly Minor points out that the sociobiology, if not interested so much in hard-wired processes is looking for inherent differences in men and women that might explain different sexual behaviors both toward each other and toward their own sex. Minor criticizes these studies heavily as

not at all helpful improving genetic origins. Instead they actually illustrate that by an early age gender conditioning has already taken hold. By thenj children have been conditioned relentlessly during all their waking hours in all their social environments for those four or five years. (55)

The compulsion to know the sex of a new human being, Minor charges, tell us that adults can’t relate to the baby as a full, open human being with all human possibilities ahead of it. In order to understand and react to the child, conditioned adults just have to know it’s sex. (56)

Once we know its sex, we can begin to pave for it the “straight” path on which it is supposed to be. And if, for some unforeseen reason, this straight path doesn’t work out for him, then there is a queer path which, as we have seen in Gurian’s account, is actually just as straight as the straight path, just smaller, just less traveled.

The term straight itself is problematic. Minor points out how that term narrows down what’s culturally acceptable in male and female behavior.

Straight is a good term for the tight-rope our society wants every person to walk—rigid, up-tight, narrow, self-protectively alert, highly strung. The word is used in anti-drug support groups to describe someone not “using.” It’s used in anti-crime programs which hope to scare youth into a law-abiding lifestyle. It’s been used as an equivalent for honesty in, “Are you being straight with me?” And it’s a part of the Boys Scout’s pledge to describe their standard of morality for real men, and now redefined to exclude gay men. It’s a broad designation for everyone who fits into the conditioning at all levels. Ideally, we are to look, act, think speak and feel “straight.” (124)

Broke Back Mountain: The Story of Two Gay Cowboys or Two Men Who Love Each Other?

So, the issue we are faced with in thinking about men loving men is that the suggestion alone is far from straight. Our culture has reached a point where it can accept straight heterosexuality and straight homosexuality. It can even accept those who sometimes choose to be with a man and sometimes with a woman. This is called straight bi-sexuality. What we have trouble with is “straight love” be that for a man or a woman. A man simply cannot express his love for another man, let alone demonstrate it by hugging him or kissing him or being sexual with him without having to call himself gay or at least bi. Men, therefore, often end up denying themselves the comfort and nurturance they can receive from another man for fear of being called or of thinking of themselves as gay.

This is the story of Broke Back Mountain. It is not the story of two gay cowboys who must learn how to survive in a homophobic society. Rather, it’s the story of two men who fall in love with each other and experience, in their desperate loneliness the nurturing comfort of another man’s presence. They cook for each other, wash for each other, sit together, and find that they’re drawn to each other. In an almost stereotypical way Ennis Del Mar says to Jack Twist after their first sexual encounter “you know I’m not queer.” Twist responds saying, “I know.” In a culture that has conditioned us to be open about “our gay boys” we read this statement as denial. Why not be straight forward we ask and admit that you are gay? Ennis Del Mar answers this question heroically, i.e., like a man: “If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.”

But what if “I know I’m not queer” is actually a true statement? What if this is not about finding out that deep inside Ennis and Jack are gay men? What if this is not a dormant truth or essence that could come only in the solitude and quiet of Broke Back Mountain? What if it is as simple as love? What if this love came out at Broke Back Mountain because in a homophobic society there is no other place than absolute solitude for two men to confess their love for each other.

How can it be that our culture cannot permit men to love each other without laying claim to their sexual orientation? Why is it, in other words, that we need to know (and for them to profess) their sexual orientation at the same time? If we could permit it, we would allow for a new kind of love, a love without sexual orientation, a love that simply gives and receives. But, if men were indeed permitted to express their love for each other in all ways possible they would indeed create a disruption of the status quo.

A Last Word About Boys

In his book Real Boys William Pollack describes how boys are kept away from each other and from the possibility of expressing genuine affection and love for one another. The

“gender straitjacket, combined with the absurd link that is often made between boyhood affection and adult male homosexuality, creates a restrictive environment. Boys are frequently pushed away from one another when they exude even a modicum of overt genuine love or affection for one another. This misguided perception—a form of homophobia—is perhaps most regrettable because it may lead us to undermine boys’ friendships before they’ve even taken hold. Ironically, this may, in turn, cause us to doubt whether boys are capable of intimate friendship. And [it might push] some boys to turn to drugs and alcohol, substances that temporarily mute the shame they feel about their genuine longings for friendship, love and affection.

It is clear, I believe, what Pollack wants to say in this paragraph. Boys’ need for affection should be acknowledged and permitted. Allowing it will perhaps even lower their likelihood to become aggressive, drug-dependent or alcoholics later in live. Not allowing this would be, Pollack points out, homophobic. This all makes sense. Yet, the ghost of homophobia, of not allowing men to love each other is well alive even in his lines. For the argument really is that boys’ affection with one another is not about adult male homosexuality. This, of course, means we shouldn’t worry about boys’ affectionate behavior with each other because it’s not like it’s going to end up as homosexual behavior.

This means to me that as long as we think of homosexuality, of gays, as the other—whether it’s the other we need to appreciate or the other we need to avoid—our own thinking and acting will be tormented from within with the fear of becoming the other. We will therefore never be able to love another man because, while we might appreciate and accept someone else’s gayness, our fear of being gay will not permit us affectionately expressive behavior towards other men.

July 30th, 2007: Men and Work—Escape and Stranglehold?

2007-09-06T16:14:00.000-07:00

It would be obvious to expect that what Kathleen Gerson calls “Contending Visions of Manhood” would also be visible in the work domain. First of, what are those contending visions? Most obviously it is the vision of a man as the sole provider for a household, a vision that is, more than ever, in competition with other visions of men. Men might choose to share household obligations and provider obligations with their partner. Men might also choose not to work at all and rely on their partner to provide for them. Another group of men might choose only to provide for themselves and live without the responsibility of a family and dependents. Gerson’s contention is that as men face these different visions of themselves in the work and social world, they are more likely than not to act diversely in response. Gerson argues convincingly that men are less and less likely to simply emulate the jobs and employment situations they witnessed in their parents. Rather, what they saw in their childhoods is merely a “point of departure” for complex and ever-changing attitude towards work.

Men’s Changing Commitments to Work

In her book No Man’s Land: Men’s Changing Commitments to Work Gerson gives an account of how men’s attitudes towards work have changed since the rise of feminism and women’s increasing presence as part of the work-force. One of Gerson’s central themes is the so-called “decline” of the so-called “provider ethic”.

To make sense of men’s lives, we first need to lay some myths to rest. Consider the belief that breadwinning is a traditional or natural pattern with a long legacy. In fact, men’s behavior and our wider cultural ideals about manhood have not consistently conformed to this model throughout American history. To the contrary, the idea that men should provide sole or primary economic support for their households in lieu of participating in domestic work did not develop until the emergence of industrial capitalism and only gradually came to describe the behavior of most men. However much some may mourn its decline, the good-provider ethic has not been a continuous historical pattern. It was the product of social forces that converged in one fleeting era, and its reign as a predominant form of behavior and a prevailing cultural ethic has been relatively short-lived.

Gerson finds that how men work and what their commitments to their work are, is a complicated process not easily understood by way of reference to a cultural stereotype like the good-provider ethic. She criticizes the more causally oriented developmental scenarios of psychoanalytic and social learning theories for being unable to “understand the degree of contradiction in the socialization context of little boys, for not adequately distinguishing between the context and the child’s reaction this context and for overlooking the possibility of change in adulthood.

I am convinced that Gerson’s argument is correct. Men have not only begun to diversify their work-choices, they are also much more willing to consider jobs that bring less of an income (as long as their spouse can provide what they cannot). However, Gerson’s argument does not convince me that men’s attitudes towards work itself have changed. In other words, men’s sense of self and self-worth continues to be wrapped up with the work they do in ways that elude our grasp, if we only look at the different work-choices they make. Yet in other words, men continue to have a hard time with not working. It is difficult for them to take a break. If they do, they are socially ousted as lazy, good-for nothing and generally worthless.

What does Work Mean to Boys?

I am not sure I can answer this question in the general way I have asked it. However, with some individuals in mind, I believe I can answer it more specifically. Given the attitudes towards work of boys I see in my practice and in my own family, I believe that it is possible to make two general distinctions: There is the kind of work boys choose for themselves and there is the work we ask them to do. We normally don’t call the former work, rather we call it play. In this area a boy might choose to build a fort, saw apart a few old chairs and make them into a table, glue together a bunch of plastic-bottles to create his own unique robots. In the latter area we’re more concerned with parental ideas and expectations—rather than choices—of “work” their children should do (chores, errands, etc.).

Here is an exchange with my son about this issue:

M: Remember the time you built all those robots from plastic bottles?

J: Yes, that was fun!

M: Yeah, it was. Do you remember what the most important thing was for you when they were done? Do you remember what you expected from us?

J: (Thinks for a moment) That you wouldn’t just say “put them away.”

M: Right, you had them all displayed in the kitchen for a few weeks before we put them
away because they started to stink.

J: Oh, I had forgotten about that.

M: Do you think you also expected us to say how great those robots were and how well you put them together?

J: (Hesitates for a moment) Not really; perhaps a little. But the most important thing is that they could be there for a while.

M: So, what is the difference between that kind of work you did and when I ask you to do something like picking up all the sticks on the lawn so I can mow?

J: The first one is my choice, the second you tell me to do it.

M: Right and what do you expect from me when you’re done picking up the sticks?

J: I expect you to praise (loben) me.

M: Oh, I see. That’s quite different isn’t it?

J: Yeah, that’s quite different.

Granted, this is but an exchange with my own nine-year old son. Eluding all concerns about scientific validity, I conclude from it nevertheless: praise serves to stabilize and reinforce labor done in response to external expectations of others. Praise is not a necessary ingredient of a self-chosen work process. Rather, in such a process, the emphasis is on acceptance and tolerance of the product. I further conclude that the idea that we need to initiate our sons into a system of praise means that we are in the process of preparing them for a life of labor and work that is not self-chosen in the way the tasks of play are chosen. Praise, like money, can be a bait that serves to keep others doing what they’re doing because it serves me.

My Introduction to Work.

I am the son of a sole-provider father. Yes, it is true, when I was only seven and my sister five, my mother did go back to work. She trained as a nurse and began working over-night shifts at a hospital 30 minutes away from our house. Her income was insignificant on the large scale of our family needs, however, and so, my father’s income from being first a teacher and later a principal always had the weight and import of that of a sole-provider income. My mother, I believe, very much felt how little her income seemed to matter and she liked to point out how her income (which she saved not in a bank-account, but in a small box in her wardrobe) had bought us a new couch or new carpeting for the living-room.

My mother has always worked hard, my father did not work, he taught and was a principal. He was, as I said, a sole-provider, but you might have noticed, I didn’t say he worked. I said he was a teacher. My mother was the one who worked. This is not a spoof on teachers and how they don’t work. It is also not a reckoning with my father’s work-ethic. Rather, it is to say that as a man, the son of my parents, I have to say that I did not learn much about work from my father. Most of it came from watching my mother.

My father would leave the house every morning at around 7:25am and return by 2pm. He would have lunch and then take a 1-2 hour nap. After his nap he would sometimes go grocery shopping or mow the lawn. Often he would just make himself a cup of coffee and read the paper or a book. Sometimes, while he was still mostly teaching, he would have a set of exams to read through in the evenings. But that was rare. He never rushed.

My mother, on the other hand, always seemed rushed. She would take short breaks between work at home and work at the hospital. I remember her sighing and moaning often when she was doing house-work. She always said she didn’t like her house-work and did whatever she could to reduce it to a minimum (short of hiring someone to do it for her).

Interestingly, 12 years ago my father was diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer. He almost died from it. He was stressed, despite his “easy” life as a principal. We always knew he was. Managing a group of up to 40 teachers, dealing with their fears and differing senses of fairness was not easy for him. He hated their in-fighting and their need for him to be their mediator. As a family we had shared stories about hearing my father grinding his teeth in his sleep. It was an eerie sound as if the whole house was creaking and shifting. And, perhaps, in a way of speaking, it was. When he took as many naps as he did and seemed to stop working at 2pm, he simply tried to balance his life with extreme measures of stress-reduction when he wasn’t at school.

My mother, hard-working in a different way, found her balance in taking smoking breaks and later also taking short breaks for a “vino” a glass of wine or sherry. I consider both my parents victims of their attitudes towards work and their powerlessness to control the way work worked its way into their lives.

Work: The Mystical Place
I’d be curious to know from you what images the title of this month’s lecture brings to mind. If you are like me, you are imagining men who go to work. You are thinking of men who travel a short or long distance to get to their place of employment. You are thinking, too, of men who are spending a significant amount of time at this place of employment every day. You might also be imagining them in a place strangely forbidding to other family members. When the man leaves the home to go to work invisible doors close behind him through which only faint noises and sketchy images come back to tell us about his work.

More often than not you will also imagine this man at work as someone who is somehow accountable and responsible for someone else. His work is not just for him. It is a service of some kind. He is expected to give himself to and for this service. When the doors of this strange place called work open again, the man you imagine might come out hungry, grumpy, with a head-ache, a problem face or simply exhausted. You might imagine him pouring himself a drink, reading the paper, watching television or even playing with the children or talking to his partner. But he just doesn’t seem the same man that he was over the weekend. Or worse: He doesn’t seem to be himself ever.

Work has done it again: It has taken him away from himself, unable, it seems, to give him back to himself at the end of the day.

Let’s talk about some things you’re not imagining as you think about the title.

When you hear the title “men and work” you are likely not imagining a man who goes grocery-shopping. You’re also not imagining a man who is doing yard-work. You don’t bring up images of a man who fixes up the house, you are not thinking of a man as working when he interacts with the children, fixes their bikes or dinner for them. And while you would readily concede that all these things could be called work, you wouldn’t call them “working”. If someone called for this man and you picked up the phone, you wouldn’t say “he is working” or even “he is at work” you would say “he is mowing the lawn” “playing with the kids”, etc..

This is not to even mention the things you don’t imagine at all like a man changing diapers, scrubbing the kitchen floor or buying clothes for and with the children.

The Double Standard of Work: What is and what is not work

American men and women (and with them likely most industrialized nations in the West) have managed to divide work neatly into a set of activities they call work and another set they do not call work. However, while women, largely through the forces of feminism, have been able to claim house-hold related activities as work, men have not been able to claim the same title for the things they do in the house. It is not so much that men don’t work at home. Rather, it is that their home-activities lack the status of “work”.

To say that a man is working or at work is, it seems to me, to say that he is engaged in something larger than himself. He is in a way moving the world, making the world a better place and, in so doing, bringing home the sustenance that is necessary for his family to survive. This is another way of saying that a man who just works for himself (i.e., who produces things that are simply for his own consumption) or a man whose work productivity does not benefit a family or similar group, that such a man really is not working at all.

There is an underlying mythic component to work. Work must not be for itself,i.e., for the man who is doing it; rather, it must be for a purpose outside of himself.

Listen to John Eldridge as he describes this point:

The way a man’s life unfolds nowadays tends to drive his heart into remote regions of the soul. Endless hours at a computer screen, selling shoes at the mall, meetings, memos, phone calls. The business world—where the majority of American men live and die—requires a man to be efficient and punctual. Corporate policies and procedures are designed with one aim: To harness a man to the plough and make him produce.

Eldridge continues to say that ultimately a man’s soul refuses to be harnessed in this way. Men, he believes, will realize that they are not a “mechanism” or cog in an apparatus from which they cannot escape. While I believe that men certainly have the potential to realize these things and while I believe that it is within their power to disconnect themselves from merely being seen as mechanisms, I cannot be as optimistic as Eldridge I believe that men are deeply “hooked” into this way of thinking. Without some serious re-thinking of their own role and aspirations, of their values and things they might heretofore have considered as virtues, they will not be able to distance themselves enough to become free.

The Lure of Work

Why is it that men seem so easily drawn and hooked by work? Why is it that men seem to have a hard time imagining themselves in a place of rest and comfort, perhaps a hammock in the summer or a comfortable chair or couch in the winter? What happens when men just sit, by themselves or with other men, to their sense of well-being and self-worth? Somehow the promise of work must succeed in convincing men that it is worth their while to sacrifice themselves to it. Work promises, I believe, what men look for so desperately, a sense of pride, worth, being a hero showing endurance, skill and capability. Work for men is a rite of passage and a daily ritual without which they will never be seen or valued as real men.

I know very few men who know how to be lazy. It is almost as if laziness is an art, a skill which to accomplish is a lofty, if not impossible, goal. Of course, I wish there were a better word for it. Lazy sounds so . . . well, lazy!

This may be hard to understand. Aren’t there plenty of men whose spouses complain about their men’s laziness? Aren’t there enough men who seem to avoid tasks at home and at work that seem to hard, too complicated, too demanding? Yes, there are plenty of those. However, I tend to think of their alleged laziness not so much as the kind I have in mind here. Their’s is a kind of reaction formation. A rebellion of sorts against the relentlessness of work itself. The laziness I have in mind is the kind that might be called joyful and rich inactivity.

The Silence about Work

Most of the men who come to talk to me don’t talk about their work. Of those who do talk about their work only a small percentage will talk about content issues: problems with colleagues or a boss, not being able to meet a dead-line, competition with others. Most will let things suffice by mentioning what it is they’re doing. No one, so far, has ever talked to me about not wanting to work. No one has ever said to me “all I want to do is go on a long vacation”. Similarly, no one has mentioned anything about lounging around on a weekend or holiday, wanting to be lazy or needing to forget work. As one of my clients put it:

“Not wanting to go to work tells the whole world I am depressed. But I don’t want the whole world to know this. So I keep working, I might even work more just to hide how I’m really doing. ”

At the same, not talking about their work also means that few people have talked to me about how passionate they are about their work. I am waiting still for the man who will come to my office and tell me he is energized and rejuvenated by his work; a man who will say my work makes me a better husband, partner and father. This would also be a man who can say “my work is meaningful beyond the income I receive from it. It is meaningful not only because it and the income it receives serve others, but also—and most importantly—because it serves me.

Interestingly, too, it does not matter whether those men are single, married, in relationships, whether they have a traditional house-hold with strict role-divisions, whether they are single providers or part of a dual-provider household, it doesn’t matter, if they inherited a three-generation family business, worked their way up from washing dishes to being millionaires or if their work just fell into their lap by accident, white-collar, blue-collar, farmer, driver, industry worker, teacher, therapist. . . they don’t talk about it.

The phrases “he is at work” or “he is working” veil one of the best-kept secrets in this culture, it is the secret of how he might feel about his work. It also veils and hides from us his friends, relatives and extended family what he is doing and how he copes with what he is doing. The fact that we’re so clueless is only made worse by the fact that, should we ask a man this question—how he feels about his work—he will in all likelihood answer something along the lines of “oh, I love my work”. He will lie about it. Ask a man how his day at work has gone and he will most likely answer “great.”

Yes, in its most general form his love for his work might be true. But this generality serves only to disguise the details and the real dynamic of stress, hate, tiredness that accompany most men’s employment situations. The generality of a man’s love of his job and work serves to distract us from the reality of the drudgery, boredom and/or pressure he feels every day to succeed at his job. With the aide of such generality we can avoid seeing that many men feel like slaves at their jobs, incomes not withstanding, because, ultimately, how they work and what they produce is not for them.

Work as Alienation from Self

The economist Karl Marx recognized this over a hundred years ago when he began to articulate the consequences of a shift in labor and the need for laborers in an increasingly industrial society. He called what he saw the process of alienation or estrangement :

A worker becomes only poorer the more wealth he produces and the more power his productiveness attains. The worker himself turns into a good the more goods he produces. The more what he produces gains in value, the more he himself loses his value as a human being. Work produces not only goods, rather it produces itself and the worker as goods.

Marx continues saying:

That this doesn’t mean anything else but that the worker puts himself into his work and in the process encounters what he has produced as a strange, different from him, object which contains parts of him (because he produced it) that are now no longer accessible to him.[1]
Marx’s basic point: when we work we lose ourselves. Losing ourselves through work is something that is not easily retrievable, perhaps not at all retrievable.

Work as Moral Pressure

But this connection between work, objectification and loss of self is not even the only aspect of work that holds us captive to it. What is even worse are the moral aspects of work that have made us into slaves. The philosopher Nietzsche, almost a contemporary of Marx’ diagnosed with unwavering clarity the “breathless haste of work” which has spread among Americans not unlike their desire for gold during the times of the gold-rush. This haste has already infected Europe, he believes. One is now ashamed of long periods of rest. To be caught in thought ( rather than be productive) will cause a conflict of conscience; we live like people who feel they might constantly miss something. What suffers most from this haste and this urge to work and to still one’s conscience is our ability to simply be with others. “We don’t have time or energy” to pursue conversation and all otium (i.e., free-time, leisure, ease, peace, repose). The hours of repose are rare and when we are permitted to have them we want to simply stretch out and do nothing. When we think up ways in which to please ourselves we please ourselves like slaves, quickly and, preferably, without losing touch with our work. Nietzsche recognizes that already the inclination to be happy has changed to being called the “need for relaxation”. As it is becoming a need it is falling prey to a tendency to be ashamed of itself. It could be, Nietzsche muses, that we will no longer be able to enjoy our inclination towards a vita comtemplativa (i.e., a contemplative life) without a hefty amount of self-loathing and bad-conscience.

So far about Nietzsche. I would be surprised to know that there is anybody here that will not recognize himself (or herself) partially or entirely in these descriptions. Perhaps that recognition is less cognitive than it is emotional. We know something is off with the way we feel and go about working, but we can’t quite put our finger on it. Doesn’t every body have to work? Nobody else seems to complain about their work, I must be wrong feeling the way I do. Perhaps I need another job, one that helps me make even more money, to feel better about myself. Perhaps, I need to sell my soul completely to feel successful?

Work and Addiction

In my opinion, men are highly susceptible to this kind of thinking. It is a thinking that has addictive traits. There is sense of compulsion in it. And when we begin to see the compulsion we understand why work, to many men, feels like slavery. They feel compelled to do it. The problem, of course, is that some of the compulsion comes from within, not the outside.

The author John Lee is known for his work with men, especially his work with men in recovery. He understands men’s issues with addiction and specifically their problems with work-addiction as interrelated. Ultimately, he believes, addiction is a result of our failure to recognize the child in children and the child in adults. This child, Lee believes, is in constant need for praise and acknowledgement of what he or she is doing. However, we often find ourselves unable to praise our children and adult relatives and friends in truly sustaining ways. Being addicted to work is, from that perspective, a relentless hunt for praise and recognition. Often when this addiction does not produce the desired results, i.e., the satisfaction and peace we so need to survive, other addictions follow. We begin to supplement the lack of praise with alcohol, drugs, etc.

Hope for Men and Boys
If we put this together with the many studies that show that it is especially boys who are not praised enough, that it is especially boys who are, to the contrary, scolded for not paying attention, being too antsy, loud and un-concentrated, we might understand why boys and men in particular seem to pursue praise in the form of hard, self-denying and ultimately self-destructive ways of existing, including work.

However, praise alone is not the recipe for a healthy attitude towards work either. Keeping in mind the interview with my son, it seems reasonable to say that praise is itself a problematic issue when it comes as a stabilizing force for work a boy or man really doesn’t want to do, or doesn’t want to do in this particular way.

Are boys perhaps more likely to become sick and fall prey to the vicissitudes of praise?
What might change, I wonder, if culturally we did indeed begin to nurture male infants and toddlers the way we nurture females? Would strong and rich nurturing and continuous encouragement to find their own true selves rather than fitting in with others’ expectations perhaps allow boys and men to find new approaches to work. Would these approaches leave their sense of self, their sense of others and their health intact? Would work for men actually turn into self-actualization rather than alienation? How would our understanding of boys in class-rooms change, if we could be less concerned with them fitting in and more interested in helping them find their own creative source of work energy? Could we allow ourselves to trust boys’ intrinsic wisdom and knowledge of self? Could we put faith in their ability to use their wisdom to find what intrigues them and to build on that? As my son Jacob pointed out: such boys and men are less in need of praise as they need tolerance and space to see their products, the results of their work, be accepted into the family, class-room or group of which they are a part.

[1] Der Arbeiter wird um so ärmer, je mehr Reichtum er produziert, je mehr seine Produktion an Macht und Umfang zunimmt. Der Arbeiter wird eine um so wohlfeilere Ware, je mehr Waren er schafft. Mit der Verwertung der Sachenwelt nimmt die Entwertung der Menschenwelt in direktem Verhältnis zu. Die Arbeit produziert nicht nur Waren; sie produziert sich selbst und den Arbeiter als eine Ware, und zwar in dem Verhältnis, in welchem sie überhaupt Waren produziert.
Dieses Faktum drückt weiter nichts aus als: Der Gegenstand, den die Arbeit produziert, ihr Produkt, tritt ihr als ein fremdes Wesen, als eine von dem Produzenten unabhängige Macht gegenüber. Das Produkt der Arbeit ist die Arbeit, die sich in einem Gegenstand fixiert, sachlich gemacht hat, es ist die Vergegenständlichung der Arbeit. Die Verwirklichung der Arbeit ist ihre Vergegenständlichung. Diese Verwirklichung der Arbeit erscheint in dem nationalökonomischen Zustand als Entwirklichung des Arbeiters, die Vergegenständlichung als Verlust und Knechtschaft des Gegenstandes, die Aneignung als Entfremdung, als Entäußerung.

Appendix (9/2009)

An article by Alfie Kohn investigates the strategies of praisin/withholding of praise and love as a form of helping our children learn discipline. I have copied the article and am pasting it into the appendix for this paper:

This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.

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September 15, 2009
Mind
When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do as I Say’
By ALFIE KOHN
More than 50 years ago, the psychologist Carl Rogers suggested that simply loving our children wasn’t enough. We have to love them unconditionally, he said — for who they are, not for what they do.

As a father, I know this is a tall order, but it becomes even more challenging now that so much of the advice we are given amounts to exactly the opposite. In effect, we’re given tips in conditional parenting, which comes in two flavors: turn up the affection when they’re good, withhold affection when they’re not.

Thus, the talk show host Phil McGraw tells us in his book “Family First” (Free Press, 2004) that what children need or enjoy should be offered contingently, turned into rewards to be doled out or withheld so they “behave according to your wishes.” And “one of the most powerful currencies for a child,” he adds, “is the parents’ acceptance and approval.”

Likewise, Jo Frost of “Supernanny,” in her book of the same name (Hyperion, 2005), says, “The best rewards are attention, praise and love,” and these should be held back “when the child behaves badly until she says she is sorry,” at which point the love is turned back on.

Conditional parenting isn’t limited to old-school authoritarians. Some people who wouldn’t dream of spanking choose instead to discipline their young children by forcibly isolating them, a tactic we prefer to call “time out.” Conversely, “positive reinforcement” teaches children that they are loved, and lovable, only when they do whatever we decide is a “good job.”

This raises the intriguing possibility that the problem with praise isn’t that it is done the wrong way — or handed out too easily, as social conservatives insist. Rather, it might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment. The primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent’s love. A steady diet of that, Rogers warned, and children might eventually need a therapist to provide the unconditional acceptance they didn’t get when it counted.

But was Rogers right? Before we toss out mainstream discipline, it would be nice to have some evidence. And now we do.

In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear.

It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.

In a companion study, Dr. Assor and his colleagues interviewed mothers of grown children. With this generation, too, conditional parenting proved damaging. Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.

This July, the same researchers, now joined by two of Dr. Deci’s colleagues at the University of Rochester, published two replications and extensions of the 2004 study. This time the subjects were ninth graders, and this time giving more approval when children did what parents wanted was carefully distinguished from giving less when they did not.

The studies found that both positive and negative conditional parenting were harmful, but in slightly different ways. The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn’t even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers’ negative feelings about their parents.

What these and other studies tell us, if we’re able to hear the news, is that praising children for doing something right isn’t a meaningful alternative to pulling back or punishing when they do something wrong. Both are examples of conditional parenting, and both are counterproductive.

The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who readily acknowledged that the version of negative conditional parenting known as time-out can cause “deep feelings of anxiety,” nevertheless endorsed it for that very reason. “When our words are not enough,” he said, “the threat of the withdrawal of our love and affection is the only sound method to impress on him that he had better conform to our request.”

But the data suggest that love withdrawal isn’t particularly effective at getting compliance, much less at promoting moral development. Even if we did succeed in making children obey us, though — say, by using positive reinforcement — is obedience worth the possible long-term psychological harm? Should parental love be used as a tool for controlling children?

Deeper issues also underlie a different sort of criticism. Albert Bandura, the father of the branch of psychology known as social learning theory, declared that unconditional love “would make children directionless and quite unlovable” — an assertion entirely unsupported by empirical studies. The idea that children accepted for who they are would lack direction or appeal is most informative for what it tells us about the dark view of human nature held by those who issue such warnings.

In practice, according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Deci and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.

The last of these features is important with respect to unconditional parenting itself. Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children — whether they feel just as loved when they mess up or fall short.

Rogers didn’t say so, but I’ll bet he would have been glad to see less demand for skillful therapists if that meant more people were growing into adulthood having already felt unconditionally accepted.

Alfie Kohn is the author of 11 books about human behavior and education, including “Unconditional Parenting” and “Punished by Rewards.”

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June 25th, 2007: Men and the Male Body—Neglect and Obsession as a Way Of Life

2007-08-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

Buddhist Prayer for Peace
May all beings everywhere plagued with sufferings of body and mind quickly be freed from their illnesses. May those frightenedcease to be afraid, and may those bound be free.May the powerless find power, and may people think of befriending one another. May those who find themselves in trackless, fearful wilderness--- the children, the aged, the unprotected-- be guarded by beneficial celestials, and may they swiftly attain Buddhahood

I want to begin today’s talk with thoughts on an attempted observation of myself.

As I was sitting down to write up this essay about men and their bodies I was becoming acutely aware of how unaware I was of my own body at that very moment. As I was becoming aware of that, of course, I did become aware of my body.

But I stopped to write

I was sitting on a large exercise ball at my office desk. Balancing my body on that ball should have created some kind of awareness, but it didn’t.

But I stopped to write

Next to me a bag of pretzel-sticks into which I continued to reach.

But I stopped to write

My write hand, if it wasn’t typing, continually reaching to the right side of my scalp to scratch and itch that didn’t seem to go away.

But I stopped to write

My left hand, slightly weaker than my right, starting to ache a little from the concentrated typing.

But I stopped to write

Then I became aware of a certain dryness in my mouth, too many pretzel-sticks, the need for a drink.

But I stopped to write

Again an itch, this time taken care of by my left hand. And another one taken care of by my right hand.

But I stopped to write

It was almost three in the afternoon and I hadn’t eaten anything, not even breakfast. Just those pretzel sticks. I just forgot about bringing lunch. Breakfast was a plan, but then other things happened and I had to leave home to go to work.

I stopped to write for good.

Either Body or Mind: The Yin or Yang of Male Existence

My body is there. It sends me messages continually. It is up to me to respond to them, to ignore and suppress them or to give room to them.

I am realizing as I am writing that I am unable to be aware of my body and think, let alone write, at the same time. It is an either-or situation, perhaps the strongest either-or I have encountered in my life. This either-or gets stronger as my need to finish my work increases. In other words, the more demanding the task, the more I am likely to forget about, if not disregard, my body.

This does not only seem to be the case for mental activity and physical awareness, however. Also, when I am engaged physically, say hammering a few nails, climbing on the roof to clean the gutters, etc. my physical awareness seems to be inversely related to my ability to do what I set out to do. If I force myself to be aware of my body anyway, I risk hitting my thumb with the hammer or slipping and falling on the roof.

However, I do believe that this paradox of functioning and physical awareness is not just a male problem. Women as much as men report that shifting their focus towards physical issues while they’re concentrating on work is likely to distract them from their work. Men and women alike rely on their bodies as the silently functioning vehicles of what we set out to accomplish.

The difference between men and women does not lie in this issue of necessary single-mindedness when we work. Rather, the difference seems to lie in how men take care of their bodies when they don’t have to accomplish anything. Men, it seems, don’t take the time to pay attention to their bodies. In fact, they seem to shun that possibility in favor of more work and more stress. Men work against pain, against symptoms of sickness, against tiredness, against depression and only when nothing will work any longer do they surrender . . . often by killing themselves. The sense of worthlessness and shame that seizes men when they have to surrender to the dictates of their sick or ailing bodies is intense and often unbearable.

Men often seem driven to give all their energy to what they set out to produce. They often are willing to give that much energy until they break, even if the consequence of such self-abuse is the indefinite inability of ever producing again.

Striking also about men and their bodies is the generally restricted ways in which they put them to use. Hard work, sex and working out seem to be the general areas in which men use and are aware of their bodies. In those areas perception of their bodies is further restricted. Hard physical labor often involves just certain parts of the body, often the arms. Sex—despite the existence of erogenous zones all over the male body—often is restricted to awareness mainly of the penis and its sensations. Exercise is often restricted to the large muscle areas: arms, legs, abdomen. How else might men be able to use their bodies? you might ask.

In terms of exercise, men could begin to consider more readily the kinds of activities that don’t simply bulk up the body, but change and affect its overall pliability and health: swimming, yoga, tai-chi, reiki, dancing. With regards to sex a mental effort is needed, because men will have to become aware again of their whole body as a sexual entity, a zone that can be aroused and stimulated in ways that not only match penile sensation, but might be a whole body experience. Precisely because for many men work-body experiences are so restrictive and repetitive, it would be important for them to become more aware of their bodies and more used to their bodies in different motions through exercise and generalized tactile experiences.

Men, it seems have a hard time of understanding the relationship between their bodies and their minds as a yin and yang. This means that they are not just sharing a boundary with each other as do the Yin and Yang. It also means that a speck of mind exists and thrives within body and a speck of body exists and thrives within mind. Men are more likely to live a Yin or Yang life in which body and mind are made to live and act in ignorance from each other.

Narcissus' Legacy

But what are the causes of men’s distance from their bodies?
Before diving into a more analytical account of how men relate to their bodies I would like to turn to mythology and use the story of Narcissus and Echo as a vehicle to understand the male predicatment.

Echo was a beautiful nymph, fond of the woods and hills, where she devoted herself to woodland sports. She was a favorite of Artemis, and attended her in the chase. But Echo had one failing; she was fond of talking, and whether in chat or argument, would have the last word. One day Hera was seeking her husband, who, she had reason to fear, was amusing himself among the nymphs. Echo by her talk contrived to detain the goddess till the nymphs made their escape. When Hera discovered it, she passed sentence upon Echo in these words: "You shall forfeit the use of that tongue with which you have cheated me, except for that one purpose you are so fond of - reply. You shall still have the last word, but no power to speak first."
This nymph saw Narcissus, a beautiful youth, as he pursued the chase upon the mountains. She loved him and followed his footsteps. O how she longed to address him in the softest accents, and win him to converse! But it was not in her power. She waited with impatience for him to speak first, and had her answer ready. One day the youth, being separated from his companions, shouted aloud, "Who's here?" Echo replied, "Here." Narcissus looked around, but seeing no one called out, "Come". Echo answered, "Come." As no one came, Narcissus called again, "Why do you shun me?" Echo, asked the same question. "Let us join one another," said the youth. The maid answered with all her heart in the same words, and hastened to the spot, ready to throw her arms about his neck. He started back, exclaiming, "Hands off! I would rather die than you should have me!" "Have me," said she; but it was all in vain. He left her, and she went to hide her blushes in the recesses of the woods. From that time forth she lived in caves till at last all her flesh shrank away. Her bones were changed into rocks and there was nothing left of her but her voice. With that she is still ready to reply to any one who calls her, and keeps up her old habit of having the last word.
Narcissus's cruelty in this case was not the only instance. He shunned all the rest of the nymphs, as he had done poor Echo. One day a maiden who had in vain endeavored to attract him uttered a prayer that he might some time or other feel what it was to love and meet no return of affection. The avenging goddess heard and granted the prayer.
There was a clear fountain, with water like silver, to which the shepherds never drove their flocks, nor the mountain goats resorted, nor any of the beasts of the forest; neither was it defaced with fallen leaves or branches; but the grass grew fresh around it, and the rocks sheltered it from the sun. Hither came one day the youth, fatigued with hunting, heated and thirsty. He stooped down to drink, and saw his own image in the water; he thought it was some beautiful water-spirit living in the fountain. He stood gazing with admiration at those bright eyes, those locks curled like the locks of Dionysos or Apollo, the rounded cheeks, the ivory neck, the parted lips, and the glow of health and exercise over all. He fell in love with himself. He brought his lips near to take a kiss; he plunged his arms in to embrace the beloved object. It fled at the touch, but returned again after a moment and renewed the fascination. He could not tear himself away; he lost all thought of food or rest, while he hovered over the brink of the fountain gazing upon his own image. He talked with the supposed spirit: "Why, beautiful being, do you shun me? Surely my face is not one to repel you. The nymphs love me, and you yourself look not indifferent upon me. When I stretch forth my arms you do the same; and you smile upon me and answer my beckonings with the like." His tears fell into the water and disturbed the image. As he saw it depart, he exclaimed, "Stay, I entreat you! Let me at least gaze upon you, if I may not touch you."
With this, and much more of the same kind, he cherished the flame that consumed him, so that by degrees he lost his color, his vigor, and the beauty which formerly had so charmed the nymph Echo. She kept near him, however, and when he exclaimed, "Alas! alas!" she answered him with the same words. He pined away and died; and when his shade passed the Stygian river, it leaned over the boat to catch a look of itself in the waters. The nymphs mourned for him, especially the water-nymphs; and when they smote their breasts Echo smote hers also. They prepared a funeral pile and would have burned the body, but it was nowhere to be found; but in its place a flower, purple within and surrounded with white leaves, which bears the name and preserves the memory of Narcissus. from Bulfinch's Mythology

It might come as a surprise to some of us, perhaps even an embarrassing surprise, we, men, pay attention to our bodies. This attention might, at times, even be called narcissistic. And why not call it that? After all the person whose experience we use to coin that term was a man, not a woman. It was Narcissus who squatted in front of a stream, saw an image of a beautiful man and fell in love with that image wishing he could be that beautiful. What we don’t know about Narcissus is whether he was already looking for an image—his own or that of someone else—or was he truly surprised by seeing something at all?

In a way it would be interesting to know if—like Narcissus—men just bumble along until they are suddenly thrust into the realization that they have a body, that they exist in that body and that that body has an effect on them—and on others. But even if men are not looking for an image, even if Narcissus wasn’t either, it is clear that finding an image was an intense experience from him. It changed him and his life forever.

There are two most startling aspects to this story. The first one is
a) Narcissus is apparently clueless as to who he is, what he looks like and how he affects others. This, of course, results in his inability to know himself when he sees himself. Even after trying to touch the image and hug it he is unable to understand that the two dimensional representation in front of him is nothing, but a representation of himself.
b) The second aspect is Narcissus’ inability to let go of first the image and, later, the thought of the image.

We see in the story of Narcissus both a denial of physical existence as well as an obsession with that same existence once it was recognized.

Yin and Yang Replaced: Denial and Obsession

Men in our culture seem to be driven by both aspects of Narcissus’ experience: they deny their physical existence while, at the same time, they are obsessed with it. However, unlike Narcissus, denial of and obsession with one’s own physical existence and appearance are not simply reflexive experiences as they are for Narcissus. For men today denial and obsession are part of the code of masculinity. Adhering to that code in the right way will ensure their acceptance into this culture—as men among men and as men among women. Much depends, in other words, on men finding the right mix between denial and obsession. And, here, we return to Narcissus because, strangely, achieving the right mix between denial and obsession is best achieved, if we can pull it off as something that we are not aware of. If we succeed, denial doesn’t look like denial but the ability to tolerate pain, to always be healthy and strong and to be brave at all times. Obsession turns from seeming like an embarrassing preoccupation with oneself to the self-confidence that we are beautiful and certainly superior to others in beauty, strength and courage. Appearing we are either obsessed or in denial is not “cool.”

Unfortunately, most men aren’t cool.

Denial

Perhaps the most common form of physical denial resides in the culture of the “superhero”. Superheroes are not new to our culture. Many cultures have had heroes similar to Superman, Batman, Spiderman, etc. Often these heroes were both human and god and often their physical prowess exhibited only one tiny flaw which the superhero needed to keep secret from all his potential enemies.
In his book The Hazards of Being Male Herb Goldberg diagnoses our culture with an overall tendency towards the destruction of the male body. This destruction is taking place as a process that can essentially be described as fostering in men the illusion of their superheroic invincibility. Three factors contribute to this destruction in his account: intellectualization, macho-rigidity and guilt. All three are instances of the kind of denial that is practiced by men in our culture when it comes to our bodies.
Intellectualization

Intellectualization is Goldberg’s term for an attitude that is basically unwilling to accept insights unless they come from scientific authority. This includes especially also the insights and cues that we get ourselves from our bodies. Goldberg wonders, for example, why it has taken decades of scientific research to convince the public that smoking is indeed bad for one’s health. He asks: “Doesn’t the man who smokes know how it is affecting him and whether or not it is impairing his health? Is he getting no warning signals or messages of discomfort from his body? In other words, it seems clear that we have become so alienated from our bodies that we believe that only an objective scientific, totally intellectualized approach can tell us how a particular substance affects us.

While the term “intellectualization” might be misleading because it suggests insight into something, Goldberg’s use of the term is unambiguous. Intellectualization means that we are out of touch with our bodies and Goldberg believes that many of the instances of men getting seriously ill or even dying “suddenly” could be avoided, if we ended this willful intellectualization. Again Goldberg: “Intellectualization can produce a situation where a man may “feel great” one day and suffer a heart-attack the next. I always wonder when I hear of such instances, where were the body’s messages of distress all during the time it was weakening to the point of this total collapse.”

Goldberg charges that as men we buy into the

fantasy that we will be saved by the brilliance of a researcher, holed up in a cubicle who after years of travail, will have the “eureka” experience, announcing to the world that he has found the “fountain of youth and health” in some chemical compound. We accept that fantasy. However, it seems increasingly clear that : 1) the responsibility for health and long life is one’s own; 2) No authority has better answers than one’s own body; 3) If we get sick, we laid the foundation for it; and 4) We had better explore our physical habits, emotional repressions, environment and interpersonal relationships for answers to health. Even the most brilliant of men seem totally blocked and blinded to seeing that they are the daily creators of their bodily states.

Why would men deny the symptoms of their weakening bodies in the way Goldberg describes? Why would they accept a diagnosis only if it comes from an authority not when it comes from inside of themselves? Why do they have to be convinced by total collapse before they can admit that something is indeed wrong and needs attention?

Macho-Rigidity

Goldberg summarizes macho-rigidity by way of four different aspects: the overall male unwillingness to deal adequately with the fact that they have bodies; their fear of being seen as feminine; their tendency to want to behave and eat like hunter-warriors; and their emotional repressiveness and competitiveness with other men.

“Despite the fact that men, almost from birth on, seem to react more sensitively to stress than women, one researcher discovered that women can perceive the signs of stress significantly more often than men.” Men seem to have no or only minimal awareness of such stress reactions as “face feels hot or flushed,” “nervous stomach,” “sweating palms,” “lumps in throat or dryness in mouth,” “cold hands and/or feet,” “general restlessness,” “general body sweating,” “increased heart-rate,” frequent urination,” “awareness of heartbeat.”

But this lack of awareness is not simply described as the male condition. It is very much an outgrowth of “early conditioning that teaches boys that it is “sissy behavior” to complain of body pains. The idea is that men have to be in control. They are, therefore, encouraged to deny and resist the fact of illness and injuries as long as possible. Again Goldberg: “In the macho-mind a day in bed sick means:

1) His territory is threatened and someone might usurp his position
2) Someone might discover he really isn’t needed or might try to replace him.
3) Each day in bed is money lost.
4) He’s not a capable warrior and doesn’t hold up under pressure.

In addition to these macho-pressures, Goldberg points out that men are generally afraid of their dependency on women. Old messages of not being dependent on mom, but perhaps also messages from mom that, as a boy, he shouldn’t be sick for too long reinforce the need for a man to pretend health and strength at all cost. Moreover, a woman’s way to take care of herself and her body is closed off from the get-go, because, as Goldberg points out, while it is “perfectly acceptable for the woman in our culture to preen and admire herself in front of a mirror and to spend considerable time caring for her body with long baths, stretching exercises, the use of body creams, etc. the male generally feels uncomfortable and embarrassed about giving his body extensive tender loving care.

Women in the process of relating to their bodies in this detailed and extensive way often have a much clearer and more differentiated sense of their bodies than do men. It is easy to see how not tending to one’s body too much can enhance one’s ability to tolerate and not even feel minor pain. Boys and men are taught into a state of bodily oblivion out of which they can be pulled only by extreme pain.

Goldberg’s account of the destruction of the male body also includes a section on men’s eating habits. “This rigidity in the realm of diet is paradoxical. It is paradoxical because many men, particularly white-collar workers, continue to eat as if they were the hunter-warriors of old, and, in the process rapidly destroy their bodies.” Particularly also the on-going equation of meat-eating with manliness concerns Goldberg and he points out that the message that “meat is muscle, a person is what he eats, and therefore he will increase his muscle mass and strength if he eats meat” has a very slim chance of being unlearned.

Last but certainly not least macho-rigidity shows up as a general tendency in men to repress their emotions and be competitive. In a recent fact sheet put out by the National Cancer Institute about the relationship between stress and cancer the connections between stress and cancer are not left in the dark:
While the complex relationship between physical and psychological health is not well understood. Scientists know that many types of stress activate the body's endocrine (hormone) system, which in turn can cause changes in the immune system, the body's defense against infection and disease (including cancer). However, the immune system is a highly specialized network whose activity is affected not only by stress but by a number of other factors.
It is easy to see how men’s inability to express their stress-levels, i.e., their inability to create stress relieve for themselves, might reinforce the destruction of their immune-systems and make them, overall, more susceptible to disastrous health crises such as cancer, heart-attacks and strokes.

Guilt

This is the last of the three factors in Goldberg’s account of the destruction of the male body. It is a peculiar somewhat out-dated seeming argument because it states that men who are married tend to neglect the natural calls of their bodies for exercise, movement and healthy strain in favor of their spouses need for them to stay put have dinner with friends, do the dishes, and play with the children.

While these examples may seem arbitrary it might be important to understand if guilt nevertheless plays a role in how men do or don’t recognize their bodies. For example studies in ADHD seem to suggest that more boys than girls are diagnosed with this disorder. These studies also show that boys’ levels of and need for movement and physical activity his higher than that of girls. Average schools, however, demand levels of physical stillness and attention that correspond more with what girls can do. Boys have to acquiesce to that standard. Is it possible that guilt is used as vehicle to force boys and later men into compliance with this standard?

Obsession

While what has been said so far might suggest that men rather forget about their bodies and ignore them until they can absolutely no longer do so, the opposite is true. Men do pay attention to their bodies, but they often do so in ways that further their unhealthy life-style and destruction.

As has been observed by many, men are captured, enraptured, and obsessed by size. Size matters and allows men to establish hierarchies amongst each other through which strength, accomplishment, prowess, etc. are established and inscribed.
Jack Nichols describes this phenomenon in this way: Men have accepted certain kinds of hierarchies, which fit collectively into the Bigger-Than-Thou Penis Syndrome. These hierarchies are concerned with size and position and they are closely related to all of the games of one-upmanship, status, dominance and control so prevalent in our society.

Nichols quotes an older study by Seymour Fisher that relates size and exaggeration of size to feelings of inferiority and attempts to overcome this inferiority. Men, he concludes, are generally concerned with demonstrating that they are physically and psychologically bigger than others.

I think Nichols and Fisher are right. The well-kept secret about men is that they do spend time in the bathroom, they do gaze at themselves in the mirror, flex their muscles, check the flatness of their stomachs and, yes, take a side-ways look at the length of their penis both in its erect and non-erect state. Men measure themselves, be that the length of their penises, the circumference of their biceps, thighs, chests and wrists. But what is more, men compare themselves to other men.

Social comparison theory has pointed out that men, like women, can get into quite unhealthy ways of treating their bodies and selves, because they are convinced that they don’t measure up to the ideal man’s physique. Men are likely to obsess about their bodies—literally the word obsession refers to a state of being held hostage—and this will drive towards unhealthy behaviors no different from those we have observed in women for quite a while (anorexia, bulimia, body-dysmorphic disorder). In addition, men are more likely to engage in unhealthy amounts of exercising, a tendency to use steroids and other chemical agents to aid in the increase of bodily size. The ultimately disastrous effects of these behaviors are well-documented and do not need to be repeated here.

Men with Bodies

How can men normalize the relationship they have with their bodies? Isn’t there an overlapping area between denial and obsession in which a man can live a physically healthy life? Could we, perhaps, find a “noble middle path” between obsession and denial”? I do not think we can. What men have to do in order to integrate their physical existence into their lives in a healthy way is so different from both obsession and denial that it must be thought of as an entirely new thing rather than the product of denial and obsession. It must be, in other words, something that comes out of a spirit of non-competitiveness. One of the best ways in which this can be achieved is through breath-work. Meditative deep breathing is a process that begins with feeling our breath right at the tip of our noses and continues with an ever expansive sensation of our breathing filling our body until we even feel it in our toes. In this way of affirming our physical existence, men can learn to understand their body as an entirety, a totality in which everything is connected. Whether through mediation, walking, gardening or just taking a bath, breathing and being aware of our breath can help us be aware and connected to our bodies in a fundamentally healthy way.

But perhaps the key to finding a total body experience is not so much in the breathing alone, but in men’s ability and willingness to learn how to live non-competitively.

It is hard to understand what all would be involved, if this really took place. Some might argue it can’t take place and that it is in the nature of men to be competitive. Perhaps those thoughts are on target. What I am thinking of as “non-competitiveness” is not the absence of the fun of competition that comes through sports and play, the excitement of having climbed a steep mountain wall, of having cycled across the country. I believe those to be necessary experiences that are often made better by enjoying them with others. But something about the way in which men compete is less playful and more serious, to the point of hurting and even killing others (or themselves, if they lose). Men’s tendency to think and work in this way, is abused daily by how our economy is structured, the way our military works. We simply expect that men will be competitive enough to beat/kill the other. And we expect that they will do so without regard for their own physical and mental health. Having seen too many pictures of men crippled by the current war in Iraq, I have begun to wonder, if those men had gone to war had they, more consciously, thought of their bodies, the legs, they would lose, the loss of eye-sight, parts of their skulls, etc.

May 28th, 2007: Men’s Isolation: Heroism and Desperation—Looking for a Middle

2007-05-28T06:04:00.000-07:00

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.

April 30th, 2007: How Men Cope with Pain—Don’t pity me or I’’ll break

2007-05-28T06:03:00.000-07:00

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).

March 26th, 2007: Fragile Man—A Look at the Hidden Vulnerabilities of Men

2007-05-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

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.