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

by Terrence Real

Let the dead pray for their own dead.

The son wishes to remember what the father wishes to forget. —YIDDISH PROVERB

Hidden depression drives several of the problems we think of as typically male: physical illness, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, failures in intimacy, self-sabotage in careers.

Somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of people with depression never get help.

vulnerability to depression is most probably an inherited biological condition.

Girls, and later women, tend to internalize pain. They blame themselves and draw distress into themselves. Boys, and later men, tend to externalize pain; they are more likely to feel victimized by others and to discharge distress through action.

the wounded boy grows up to become a wounding man, inflicting upon those closest to him the very distress he refuses to acknowledge within himself.

[Depression] doesn’t mean I’m weak, it doesn’t mean I’m incurable, it doesn’t mean I’m insane. It means I’ve got a disease and somebody better treat it.

Men’s willingness to downplay weakness and pain is so great that it has been named as a factor in their shorter life span.

Reach out and get crushed by someone.

many of the difficult behaviors one sees in men’s relationships are depression driven.

Society bids many of us to forget about inherent worth and, instead, to supplement the deficiency with external props such as wealth, beauty, status. The greater the scarcity in true self-esteem, the greater the need for supplementation.

no amount of external validation or prestige or nurture can substitute for his own.

Like most covertly depressed men, Thomas had trouble bearing real intimacy with others because he could not afford to be emotionally intimate with himself.

depression is a disorder wherein the self attacks the self.

The covertly depressed man, in contrast, relies on such external stimulants to rectify an inner baseline of shame.

Alcohol, for example, relieves a sense of inner emptiness and coldness by warming and disinhibiting, often making one more sociable.

opioids, like heroin, do not warm one up so much as calm one down, tranquilizing the ferocity of depression, the agitation and self-hatred.

Cocaine brightens a person, giving them energy; it breaks through the numb, dead feeling of alexathymia.

First, the covertly depressed man must walk through the fire from which he has run. He must allow the pain to surface. Then, he may resolve his hidden depression by learning about self-care and healthy esteem.

momentary sense of total abandonment.

The moment of contact with that disavowed pain is the first step toward restoration.

Childhood injury in boys creates both the wounds and the defenses against the wounds that are the foundation for adult depression.

addictions and depression may not be distinct disorders but variants of the same disorder expressed differently along gender lines.

As a culture historically dominated by male values, we have always tended, and still tend, to deny vulnerability, and consequently, to deny the existence of trauma.

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

the traditional setup, girls are encouraged to fully develop connection and relationship, but are discouraged from fully developing and exercising their public, assertive selves. Boys are encouraged to develop the skills of public, assertive action but discouraged from fully developing and exercising their relational, emotional selves.

In short, being a man generally means not being a woman. As a result, boys’ acquisition of gender is a negative achievement.

Just as girls are pressured to yield that half of their human potential consonant with assertive action, just as they have been systematically discouraged from developing and celebrating the self-concepts and skills that belong to the public world, so are boys pressured to yield attributes of dependency, expressiveness, affiliation—all the self-concepts and skills that belong to the relational, emotive world.

The key component of a boy’s healthy relationship to his father is affection, not “masculinity.”

In our culture, expressiveness—even talking in an animated way with great emotional range—is reserved for women.

“They say it takes three generations to heal from trauma. Your dad never made it and you’re in the middle. Let’s see what bringing in your children can do.”

A man cannot recover from either overt or covert depression and remain emotionally numb at the same time; he cannot be related and walled off simultaneously; he cannot be intimate with others before establishing intimate terms with his own heart.

One cannot earn healthy self-esteem. One has it.

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.

Love alternates with contempt.

If empathic reversal—the process of taking on the offender’s perspective and losing empathy for one’s own—is the process by which trauma becomes depression, reversing that reversal—reestablishing empathy for the vulnerable child within and creating distance, a healthy judgment toward the offender—lies at the core of recovery.

Depression in men is not just a disease; it is the consequence of a wrong turn, a path poorly chosen. And recovery demands the discipline of reworking that wrong turn, over and over again.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,”

The degree to which a man relies upon addictive defenses to ward off depression determines the degree of his abusiveness or irresponsibility toward others.

five self functions: self-esteem, self-protection, self-knowledge, self-care, and self-moderation.

Healing from depression unpeels these three layers in three phases: sobriety, the practice of relational maturity, and trauma release.

The cure for states is feelings.

If disconnection lies at the root of the ailment, reconnection relieves it.

Sometimes a man has to get up off the psychological couch and get going, whether he feels like it or not. This is called discipline.

human males are, if anything, more emotional than human females.

any man who has struggled in his life with a deep, core experience of depression will need help not only in learning how to cherish himself, but also in learning the art of cherishing others.