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.
