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

by Terrence Real

Depressed women have obvious pain; depressed men often have “troubles.” It is frequently not they who are in conscious distress so much as the people who live with them.

In the calculus of male pride, stoicism prevails.

many men would rather place themselves at risk than acknowledge distress, either physical or emotional.

The curse of Narcissus is immobilization, not out of love for himself, but out of dependency upon his image.

The only real cure for covert depression is overt depression.

one distinguishing characteristic of battering men is a markedly increased sensitivity to feelings of abandonment,

A university law professor, now years in recovery, saw me with his wife to heal from a time, years earlier, when he was so severely sex addicted that he at first cajoled and then eventually raped her on the day following her double mastectomy.

alcohol both provides relief from depression and simultaneously creates more of it.

the capacity to externalize pain protects some men from feeling depressed, it does not stop them from being depressed;

The flagrancy of childhood trauma does not always directly correlate with the extent of later damage.

active versus passive injury.

Good parenting requires three elements: nurturing, limit setting, and guidance.

from the moment of birth, boys are spoken to less than girls, comforted less, nurtured less.

If traditional socialization takes aim at girls’ voices, it takes aim at boys’ hearts.

The passage from boyhood to manhood is about ritual wounding.

This formula—too much mother and too little father—has been a mainstay in our thinking about “problem” boys for generations.

Being “man enough” isn’t something one has definitively once and for all. It is something one is granted by the community of men whom we experience as watching, weighing, and judging.

The problem for many boys and men lies in the paradox that one must dominate in order to belong.

What we offer boys in our culture is highly conditional, performance-based esteem, not an essential sense of worth that comes from within.

Children internalize interactions. They internalize what they see and what they themselves experience firsthand.

the implicit memory system experiences, the explicit memory system knows and explains.

Recovery from covert depression must involve three layers—the addictive defense; the underlying relational immaturity or disorder of self; and the childhood trauma that set the whole process in motion.

This is emotional pornography—the idea that a good woman is one who is happy to take care of—and leave alone—her breadwinning man.

Just because some human trait is “biological” does not mean, necessarily, that it is acceptable.