More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 5 - June 5, 2023
Those in a relationship with a depressed man are themselves often faced with a painful dilemma. They can either confront his condition—which may further shame him—or else collude with him in minimizing it, a course that offers no hope for relief. Depression in men—a condition experienced as both shame-filled and shameful—goes largely unacknowledged and unrecognized both by the men who suffer and by those who surround them. And yet, the impact of this hidden condition is enormous. Eleven
Healthy self-esteem is essentially internal. It is the capacity to cherish oneself in the face of one’s own imperfections, not because of what one has or what one can do. Healthy self-esteem presupposes that all men and women are created equal; that one’s inherent worth can be neither greater nor lesser than another’s. Such a vision of intrinsic worth does not require us to lose our capacity for nuanced discrimination. We can still recognize our gifts
The problem with this well-established psychiatric tradition is that it ignores the effects of gender. In our society, women are raised to pull pain into themselves—they tend to blame themselves, feel bad. Men are socialized to externalize distress; they tend not to consider themselves defective so much as unfairly treated; they tend not to be sensitive to their part in relational difficulties and not to be as in touch with their own feelings and needs.
We begin sending boys the message that they have fewer emotional needs than girls in the very first moments of
If traditional socialization takes aim at girls’ voices, it takes aim at boys’ hearts.
For most boys, the achievement of masculine identity is not an acquisition so much as a disavowal. When researchers asked girls and women to define what it means to be feminine, the girls answered with positive language: to be compassionate, to be connected, to care about others. Boys and men, on the other hand, when asked to describe masculinity, predominantly responded with double negatives. Boys and men did not talk about being strong so much as about not being weak. They do not list independence so much as not being dependent. They did not speak about being close to their fathers so much
...more
The idea that boys must rupture an effeminizing connection to mother is one of the oldest, least questioned, and most deeply rooted myths of patriarchy.
Young men are having their bodies destroyed, not developed. As a matter of fact, few players can escape from college football without some form of permanent disability. During my four years I accumulated a broken wrist, separations of both shoulders, an ankle that was torn up so badly that it broke the arch of my foot, three major brain concussions, and an arm that almost had to be amputated. . . . And I was one of the lucky ones.
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. The ultimate expression of this capacity to turn humans, including oneself, into things is war.
He had never been anything but a thing to them, a thing to put a uniform on and train to kill. . . . They were smooth talkers, men who wore suits and smiled and were polite, men who wore watches and sat behind desks sticking pins in maps. . . . They had never seen blood and guts and heads and arms. They had never picked up the shattered legs of children and watched the blood drip.
The fact that empathy has traditionally been conditioned out of boys facilitates their obedience to leaders who order them to kill strangers.
The tragic bind for boys and men in traditional socialization is that in order to demonstrate themselves worthy of human connection they must perform competitively, they must become winners, which intrinsically demands disconnection, the exact opposite of what they truly seek.
If a man is not a winner, he is a loser. And the cost of losing is more than just the game at hand; it is abandonment.
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.
The human emotional palette is vast. It isn’t that men have fewer relational needs than women, but that they have been conditioned to filter those needs through the screen of achievement.
They throw their grades or their health or even their safety. 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
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.
“You’re not breaking down. You’re
In active trauma, a child’s boundaries are violated. The parent is uncontained, out of control. In passive trauma, the parent neglects the child’s needs; the boundary between parent and child is too rigid, impenetrable.
child’s need to preserve his attachment, his willingness to contort himself into whatever shape the parent needs him to be in during such moments represents one of the least recognized, most pervasive, and most powerful psychological forces in human development.
I agree that depression is not a discrete entity. It cannot be treated as if it were bacteria or simply a genetic disorder. Anyone who has listened closely to the voices of depressed men themselves would not be surprised to learn that one medication can treat both depression and obsessive disorders. Depression is an obsessive disorder. A depressed
Therapy is fundamentally a process that helps people discover how they must live. Depression in men is not just a disease; it is the consequence of a wrong turn, a path poorly chosen.
Repentance, and its companion word, sin, were originally associated with archery. To “sin” meant to miss the mark, and “repentance” meant to return to it.
man who is willing to drop down as far and work as hard as young Billy did is after bigger game than relief from an illness. A man willing to permanently alter the terms of his internal dialogue—to transmute the dynamic of wounded boy and harsh boy, feminine and masculine, shame and grandiosity, inside himself—seeks nothing less than a transformation in the way that he lives, the values he lives by. Such a journey goes beyond recovery. It is alchemy. It is a quest.
By equating pain and vulnerability with the repudiated and devalued “feminine,” traditional socialization places boys and men in double jeopardy. First it requires a wholesale psychological excision, then it teaches men not to admit their ache, like the pain of an amputee, for the lost parts of themselves. It teaches men not to deal with their damage. But, to get to the Grail, a man must pass through the Wasteland. The path to the repudiated, hurt boy is a dark path through pain. Just
