I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

by Terrence Real

both disorders have shown that while “major” depression may be more severe in the short term, dysthymia may have devastating long-term effects.

In our culture, almost without exception, boyhood involves being both the recipient and the sometime perpetrator of active trauma. Such boyhood injury operates like a fault line in troubled men, coloring their emotional lives, ready, given the right circumstance, to emerge anew. The wounded boy they think they have long left behind acts like a reservoir of hurt and shame. Precisely to the degree to which that boy is not consciously felt and confronted, a man’s hidden depression will permeate his actions.

Girls tend toward “indirect bullying”: ridicule, name calling, spreading mean rumors. Boys engage in such behaviors as well, but they are much more likely to use straightforward brute force. Girls’ aggression tends to be verbal. Boys hit, kick, and bite.

One reason we are numb to the psychological damage that can result from boys’ violence is that we have been lulled into viewing it as normal, as if it were an inevitable aspect of their development. Active trauma so saturates boy culture that many of us take it as “natural.”

Evolutionary biologists teach us that “dominance aggression”—the kind of aggression apparent in the “alpha” gorilla who rears up to his full height, snarling and beating his chest—is distinguished from other forms of aggression precisely by the absence of violence. Dominance aggression is in almost all cases limited to an aggressive display.

If active injury in boys is pervasive and flagrant, passive injury is most often pervasive and subtle, as subtle as a father’s refusal to check the skates of his crying son, as subtle as a birthday card.

Had little Ben been victimized by a greeting card? Well, actually, yes, if only in a very small way. The card was a perfect instance of “masculine” role inscription, presenting boys as consumed by anger and aggression and implying by its tone that such behavior is not merely tolerable but somehow a source of pride.

Understanding that innumerable small acts of passive trauma are driven by images of masculinity requires of us an act of conscious deliberation.

Block found that both mothers and fathers stressed achievement and competition in their sons, encouraged boys to control their emotions, emphasized independence, and developed a tendency to punish boys.

Fagot found that parents gave significantly more favorable responses when their children conformed to “same-sex preferred” behavior and actively discouraged “cross-sex preferred” behavior.

Boys were encouraged to play by themselves and discouraged from staying close to the parent.

For decades, feminist scholars and social researchers have patiently built up a body of evidence showing the psychological damage done by the coercive enforcement of gender roles in girls. But what about the damage to the psychological development of boys? If traditional socialization takes aim at girls’ voices, it takes aim at boys’ hearts.

The invitation may be, and often is, coercive—accompanied by heavy pressure to accept and no mention of an alternative.” “Mama’s boy,” “faggot,” “pussy,” “wimp”—no boy I know of has escaped the experience of such ridicule. No man I have treated has fully eluded the taste of the lash one receives if one dares not accept masculinity’s “invitation.”

remember, from the earliest age, teaching myself how to disassociate, consciously schooling myself in the art of leaving my own body to hover somewhere close to the ceiling.

For more boys than one might care to imagine, being “brought up right,” means active trauma. But even boys who begin in a nonviolent atmosphere may find the enforcement of the masculine role ratcheting up if they dare try stepping outside of it.

In that moment, I witnessed a pure instance of cultural transmission through passive trauma.

For most boys, the achievement of masculine identity is not an acquisition so much as a disavowal.

dangerous, reckless quest for “balls.” Despite Freud’s talk about castrating fathers, it is the emasculating mother who looms larger than life in our culture’s imagination. The assumption in all this is that women in general and mothers in particular can “feminize” a male, robbing him of his masculinity.

This “scientific” explanation of the cause of homosexuality has about as much empirical support as the theory of the four humors. It harks back to the days when psychiatry listed homosexuality as a disease, and when therapists “treated” thousands of men—some volunteers, many brought by their families—for the “perversion” of being gay.

These images of castrating mothers and sissy boys are grotesque, revealing our culture’s irrational fear that holding the door open to “the feminine”—and to females—will “turn” our sons into castrates,

Recent studies indicate that boys raised by women, including single women and lesbian couples, do not suffer in their adjustment; they are not appreciably less “masculine”; they do not show signs of psychological impairment. What many boys without fathers inarguably do face is a precipitous drop in their socioeconomic status.

The boys who fare poorly in their psychological adjustment are not those without fathers, but those with abusive or neglectful fathers.

“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.” So read the opening lines of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, a novel that has become the very emblem of alienation.

When a boy rejects his mother’s authority because she is “only a woman,” when a mother shrinks from the full exercise of her parental rights and responsibilities, both play out the values of patriarchy.

Such literal thinking misses the point that boys must work out “separation” with the people they are “separating” from. There is no way they can work it out on their own. And the current notion that mentors—“male mothers” as Bly calls them—must help the boy “leave” begs the question of why he must “leave” at all.

Maturity and connection are set up as choices that exclude one another.

As devastating as the disconnection from the mother may be, it is merely the beachhead of a larger social mandate, the instruction to turn away, not just from the mother, but from intimacy itself, and from cultivating, or even grasping, the values and skills that sustain deep emotional connection.

If the tie to the mother is the first disconnect on the road to manhood, the tie to oneself is the second. A boy’s disavowal of the “feminine” in himself falls into two spheres: rejection of expressivity and rejection of vulnerability.

Frank Riorden began to divest himself of his father’s pain and shame that afternoon in my office. In its place he attended to mending the wreckage he had made of his life.

By internalizing the value of invulnerability and the devaluation of dependency, boys like Frank learn to reject comfort and connection in an ongoing manner.

Frank desperately needed comfort from somewhere. Yet he could tolerate receiving it only in situations in which he retained almost total control, as with his young women.

Linguist Deborah Tannen, analyzing women’s “rapport talk” versus men’s “report talk,” found that a vital component of conversation

Finally, to the degree to which a man learns to “be strong” and to devalue weakness, his compassion toward frailty not just in himself but also in those around him may be limited or condescending. In this and many other ways, the loss of expressivity and the loss of vulnerability inevitably lead to diminished connection with others.

for many depressed men, recovery is linked to opposing the force of disconnection, and reentering the world of relationship—to

“feminine,” to themselves, and to others. Frank, by

My work with depressed men has led me to turn the conventional thinking about sons and their fathers on its head.

Sons don’t want their father’s “balls”; they want their hearts.

The final steps in the process of molding boys are practices that reinforce the boy’s grandiosity, his male privilege, his “better than” position. Relational impoverishment creates the insecure base for the feelings of shame, worthlessness, emptiness that haunt many men and, at their most extreme, blossom into overt depression. When we reinforce a boy’s grandiosity, we invite him to escape such pain by flights into addiction or the illusion of dominance.

In patriarchal cultures throughout the world, female initiation rituals reinforce women’s deference to men.

Boys’ initiation rites, by contrast, are not about captivity. They are about pain and the boy’s capacity to bear it. A provider, hunter, warrior must be tough. What toughness requires is the capacity to separate from one’s own experience; to ignore fear and pain, in the service of doing what needs be done, despite severe hardships.

After being taken from their mothers and publicly beaten, Sambian boys are forced to practice fellatio on the older men, who think ingested semen will make their boys strong.

Such traditional rites of passage, currently romanticized by some in the Men’s Movement, leave many boys maimed or dead. But if the child survives, his wounds did not cripple him, as a girl’s wounds do; rather, they transform him.

In modern culture, the pattern of the wound that transforms has moved largely from the physical realm to the psychological. Boys learn to forgo much of the emotional and relational richness that is their birthright, gaining in its place the unfettered development of public assertive action. Males enjoy the privilege of assumed superiority.

contemporary children’s lore—the stories we tell them, the books they read, the television and movies they digest—the boy is almost always the pivotal character. Males are bigger, stronger, more daring, and more interesting. From Star Trek to Sesame Street, male characters take center stage.

The theme of the powerful disconnected male proving his worth through the violent rescue of the dependent female is a drama endlessly replayed in our culture.

It is this pervasive social influence which belies our attempts to raise our children differently than we were. Many, myself included, have made great efforts to keep their sons and daughters out of the traditional mold.

Even if we do not allow our boys to watch The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers or play with GI Joe, are we really going to forbid the male rescue dramas, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker? Will they never hear of Robin Hood saving Maid Marion or of Lancelot’s great feats for Guinevere? How much of Western civilization should we be willing to lop off for the sake of political correctness? And while there may be a particular, rather rarefied segment of the population that carefully screens the effects of such cultural influences on their daughters and sons, the majority of parents do not.

Efron found that “the single best predictor of how aggressive a young man would be when he was 19 years old was the violence of the television programs he preferred when he was 8 years old.”

These circumstances bring to mind a distinction first made by trauma expert Pia Mellody, which I have found helpful in work with depressed men—the distinction between disempowering abuse and falsely empowering abuse. Disempowering abuse is the kind of abuse one normally thinks of. It is characterized by a major caregiver shaming a child, placing him in a one-down, less-than, or helpless position. False empowerment, by contrast, lifts the child up to an inordinately powerful position, pumping up, or at the least not appropriately checking, the child’s grandiosity. Mellody’s insight is that both styles of inappropriate parenting lead to disorders of self-esteem.

Disempowering abuse leads to overt depression, falsely empowering abuse leads to covert depression.