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

by Terrence Real

Perhaps the single most important discovery that has come from my work with men and their families is the realization that most boys and men have been subject to a preponderance of neither disempowering nor falsely empowering abuse, but to alternations between the two. This sudden switch from “one down” to “one up” and back again leaves boys and men in a perpetual state of anxiety about their status.

healthy self-esteem is the experience of oneself as essentially worth neither more nor less than others, there is precious little training for it in the current culture of boys.

In modern culture, heroism has been stripped of virtually all of its spiritual significance. Removed from morality as well as from human community, heroism in our society has become a secular, individual achievement. Most often, it simply means winning big, whether on the baseball diamond or in the stock exchange. In the same way that we used to speak of a man’s valor, meaning both his worth and his bravery, we now speak of his value, meaning both his worth and the weight of his assets.

While there may be lip service paid to good teamwork, both in the media and the sports boys play at school, most of the attention is given to the few star performers. As a number of sociologists have pointed out, a tremendous discrepancy exists between the experience of those few extraordinary boys and that of the vast majority of young players.

A recent survey reveals that 78 percent of professional football players retire with permanent disabilities, and their average life expectancy is only fifty-six years.

An estimated 60 to 87 percent of boxers retire with chronic brain damage, an effect alarming enough to convince the American Medical Association to demand that the sport be abolished.

The advent of organized sports for boys parallels the growth of Boy Scouts of America and carried much the same avowed ideology. Sports, like scouting, were conceived of as places where boys could fall under the beneficial influence of men, removed from feminine rule.

The lesson many young athletes learn is just a different incarnation of the lesson Frank Riorden learned, the lesson most boys learn in our culture—turn your back on your own needs and vulnerabilities and you become special. Refuse to shoulder that burden and you are less than a man.

But it doesn’t really solve his problem. He tells his brother: “I get [beautiful women] anytime I want, Biff. Whenever I feel disgusted. The only trouble is, it gets to be like bowling or something. I keep knocking them over and it doesn’t mean anything.”

Once we realize that the elusive “masculine identity” does not exist inside the boy’s psyche, but rather that it is a social construct to which the boy must bend and comply, we can understand why it is impossible for most boys to feel secure about it. Being “man enough” isn’t something one has definitively once and for all.

As a thirteen-year-old, my choice seemed either to join Coach Nevins and the rest of the boys in dominance or risk the ostracism of becoming like Eddie myself. I experienced myself as already having one foot in the hole Eddie lived in. I did not feel secure enough within the class to do what my heart commanded me.

“Do it to him or we’ll do it to you.” I now believe such choices are an ineluctable part of boyhood. And the “Sophie’s choice” of hammer or nail, victimizer or victim is not relegated to extreme instances. It is an inescapable part of the game we call “success.”

They learn to betray the humanity in others—the fat boys, the effeminate boys, the Eddies of this world—as a way of protecting themselves, and in so doing they also learn to disconnect from their own compassionate hearts. This is the most fundamental damage of false empowerment.

By forcing him to betray his human attachment, to disconnect from his lover, Smith’s interrogators produced the intended result of a profound disconnection inside himself.

Happy desperately needs to become competent in the world and to find intimacy. Instead, like Frank Riorden, he medicates his pain, not with the demands of a real relationship but with the grandiosity of sexual conquest. Such measures fail because they do not address the real hunger. In fact, by reaching for prowess instead of connection, Happy objectifies those who might provide solace and only succeeds in further isolating himself.

Trauma pioneer Robert J. Lifton has called this process of self-alienation “doubling,” the compartmentalization of self. Doubling is a psychological mechanism for denying or distorting reality, which is shared by both the perpetrator and his victim.

When boys are taught to objectify themselves and others, they learn to turn themselves into a kind of commodity to be weighed and judged, as they weigh and judge those around them.

If we are to come to grips with the extent and the power of the pressures brought to bear on our sons, we must understand that masculine socialization, throughout history and in almost all cultures throughout the world, is inextricably bound up with war. The process of “masculinization” is one potent enough to take my sweet son Alexander, who loves makeup and dresses, whose favorite identity is a magic fairy, and deliver him, a decade or so later, into a state in which he will be prepared to kill and be killed.

philosopher Myriam Miedzian summarizes: Boys are raised to be soldiers. They are prepared from the youngest age to view war as a thrilling adventure. Their play with war toys is great fun without pain. The books they read (and today the TV shows and films they see) focus on exciting violence. In schools all over the world, little boys learn that their country is the greatest in the world, and the highest honor that could befall them would be to defend it heroically someday. The fact that empathy has traditionally been conditioned out of boys facilitates their obedience to leaders who order them to kill strangers.

Trying to connect by going “one up” on someone seems an odd strategy. Yet this is exactly what men are doing when they joke and jostle for position at social gatherings.

But I believe that, underneath, it is really an attempt at connection. In the hierarchical world of boys and men, some degree of power is a necessary security; it ensures against the dread of either subordination or abandonment. Being one up means that you won’t wind up as an Eddie. But power is not the driving force here; belonging is.

The problem for many boys and men lies in the paradox that one must dominate in order to belong. First you slay the dragon, or the other boy. Only then do you win the princess. First the male must renounce the emotive, affiliative mode.

This tripartite cycle—the boy’s renunciation of mother and home, the challenging ordeal and the triumphant return—is such a pervasive design throughout our history that mythologist Joseph Campbell called it the “Ur Myth”—the prototype for all myths, the “Hero with a Thousand Masks.”

Each boy, like Faust, makes a deal with the devil gaining worlds of knowledge and power—the capacity to do—in exchange for his very (relational) soul. The boy’s position in this culture is like that of the “special” child in disordered families. “Special” children function as extensions of self, for one or both parents. They find themselves in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, since they are entrusted with the psychological equilibrium of the parent, and since they become caretakers to their own caretakers, they enjoy inordinate power within the family. But that inordinate power is based, as for Faust, on forfeiting the most precious part of them, their souls, their deepest vulnerabilities and needs.

Those who resist, like unconventional men or gay men, are punished for it. Those who lose or who cannot compete, like boys and men with disabilities, or of the wrong class or color, are marginalized, rendered all but invisible.

Oppressed women sometimes find it difficult to grasp why privileged men feel so pressured.

Since connection is experienced as conditional, since he must prove himself worthy of love, if a man does not succeed, he risks an abandonment he may feel he deserves.

Traditional masculinity rests on such an insecure foundation of wonder, smugness, or dread, depending on one’s position on the ladder. It instills in our sons not healthy but performance-based esteem.

Healthy self-esteem is an inherent, nonfluctuating sense of oneself as essentially worthwhile. Shame states, or failures in self-esteem, are experienced as a sense of not being enough and not mattering, as emptiness, fear, or impotence.

Shame hounds boys and men throughout most of their lives for two reasons. First, since the standard of masculinity against which most boys and men measure themselves is unrealistically narrow and perfectionist, virtually no one feels he sufficiently measures up. Second, since masculinity is conferred more than won, since it represents membership, not a state of being, it is always in danger of being revoked. One can always “go over the side without a ripple.”

When we lose touch with our own frailties we become judgmental and dangerous to others.

What we offer boys in our culture is highly conditional, performance-based esteem, not an essential sense of worth that comes from within. One cannot earn healthy self-esteem. One has it. Performance-based esteem augments an insufficient, internal sense of worth by the measuring of one’s accomplishments against those of others and coming out on top.

There is nothing wrong with a nuanced assessment of one’s own or another’s talents, limitations, gifts, and difficulties. Such discrimination becomes unhealthy when it puts one’s own or another person’s essential worth on the line. Mature people do not question their intrinsic value at a working lunch or a PTA meeting. But most men do, whether they want to admit it or not.

Brain damage may represent a radical cure for unhealthy forms of masculinity, but one hopes less extreme measures may lead to change as well. In fact, sociologists have long noted that men spontaneously seem to become more “androgynous” when they hit middle and retirement age. Circumstances like disability or retirement can relieve some men of the burden of performance, allowing relational capacities and concerns to surface.

The great majority of men feel at least as much burdened as enhanced by the need to perform.

Research indicates that when men are placed in empathy-demanding situations, as single, custodial parents or caretakers of the ill or the elderly, they are readily capable of becoming just as nurturant and empathic as female counterparts.

But attempting to secure connection through performance is a high-risk endeavor. In the competitive marketplace a man can be digested and then thrown away.

is painfully clear that the boy needs his father to tell him that he will be loved whether he wins or loses. But the father does not respond.

Fathers, or even school counselors, will often say of a boy’s acting-out behavior, “We think he’s just looking for attention.” To which I say, “Right! For God’s sake let’s give him some! And let’s try our best to make it the kind he most needs.”

People who wonder how so many men can become inured to inflicting pain are blind to the reality that, in the competitive, hierarchical realm of achievement, one cannot win without inflicting pain. Winning means inflicting loss, by definition. Try as he might, Josh could not find a way of fully exercising his gifts without betraying the other boy.

The difference between the healthy enjoyment of achievement and competition and its unhealthy expression is analogous to the distinction between the recreational and the abusive use of intoxicants. A recreational drinker begins with a baseline feeling of relative contentment and the drug is used as an enhancement. The state he returns to after the drug has worn off is the satisfactory state he began with. The abusive drinker medicates a baseline experience that is painful or empty, and when the drug wears off, the underlying ill ease returns or worsens. Similarly, healthy joy in competition and achievement enhances an already invigorated boy. He does not rely on it to feel worthy, and he is not devastated on occasions of failure. In the same way that performance is not the boy’s ticket to a sense of self-worth, it is also not a ticket to relational connection.

A sense of self-worth always implies a secure sense of membership—a sense of mattering to someone, of being worthy of intimacy. In a healthy relationship to performance, achievement is a labor of love that exists within the context of secure connection, not an act of grandiosity that takes the place of connection.

The filtering of self-worth and relational needs through the screen of performance leaves these men and boys in a vulnerable position. Such men risk further alienation if they succeed and the threat of psychological breakdown if they fail.

“It hurts?” I ask. “No, not pain, really,” he answers. “Just pressure. All those thoughts.”

Billy answers easily, “It’s, like, dancing around the boy. You know, beating its chest. Being threatening. You know. Its, like . . . a gorilla.” Over the years, all manner of metaphors for the internal harsh child have spilled into my office—sharks, bloody force fields, Hitlers, monsters. In comparison, Billy’s dancing gorilla seemed almost whimsical, relatively benign. “Is it saying anything?” I ask Billy. “Well . . .” Billy shifts in his chair. “Actually, yes,” he says. Suddenly, all the warmth of the preceding moment drains from his face. Billy sits up straight in his chair. He looks grim. “Billy,” I ask, “what are you feeling, now?” “Nothing,”

Henry Duvall’s depression dissolved when he began to see himself not as inadequate to the legacy of his father, but as transforming that legacy—when he rewrote the story of his descent from a tale of failure to a hero’s journey.

Cold blackness has been my companion for decades. Through my teens and twenties, my unwillingness to sit still inside that darkness drove me into drug abuse, wildly inappropriate relationships, risk taking, and petty crime.

did not have a job in which my earnings were higher than the official poverty line until I was thirty-one. Many of my old friends “in the scene” are either dead or in mental institutions.

The fact that even now he suffers from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gout, “a small ulcer,” and monthly fits of black despair—none of which he will go into treatment for—is something he’d rather not “dwell upon.”

they hit young adulthood. Those who do not turn to face their pain are prone to impose it.