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

by Terrence Real

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

“A drowning person will grip you,” my father told me, “if you get in too close. They’ll pull you down with them. You should throw them something, a rope, a life preserver. But don’t touch them, don’t go in after them.”

His violence should have pushed me away from him, and consciously it did. But in some more primitive way it only drew me closer. As he raged, out of control, even as he beat me, I never lost touch with him. It was the vortex of his pathos, his insanity, his hurt that overwhelmed me, filling me, more than the physical pain, with black despair, with torpor. I couldn’t wait for the ritual to end so that I could take to my bed, pull the covers up over me, and sleep.

“I don’t give a shit what you did, do you understand? You were a kid. Your mother was dead; your father was gone. You didn’t deserve it, okay? Don’t you get it? You didn’t deserve it.”

In the middle of the journey of our lives, I found myself upon a dark path. —DANTE

All men are sons and, whether they know it or not, most sons are loyal.

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.

Physician John Rush spoke in an interview about the stain of “unmanliness” attached to the condition and its possible consequences: [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. One of my friends says, “Depression? Hell, boy, that’s wimp disease.” Wimp disease? Oh, yeah, it’s wimp disease. And I guess the ultimate wimp kills himself.

Men’s willingness to downplay weakness and pain is so great that it has been named as a factor in their shorter life span. The ten years of difference in longevity between men and women turns out to have little to do with genes. Men die early because they do not take care of themselves. Men wait longer to acknowledge that they are sick, take longer to get help, and once they get treatment do not comply with it as well as women do.

Everywhere in his life, the prohibition against bringing his vulnerable feelings into the open fosters behaviors that leave him and the people around him ever more disconnected. An unrecognized swell of abandonment washes over David when Elaine does not respond to him and causes him to wall her off in subtle retaliation—throwing the couple into an escalating cycle of alienation.

Narcissus did not suffer from an overabundance of self-love, but rather from its deficiency. The myth is a parable about paralysis. The youth, who first appears in restless motion, is suddenly rooted to one spot, unable to leave the elusive spirit. As Ficino remarked, if Narcissus had possessed real self-love, he would have been able to leave his fascination. The curse of Narcissus is immobilization, not out of love for himself, but out of dependency upon his image.

Yet, in an initial meeting with the family, Thomas’s grown children revealed that they did not, in fact, feel great hostility toward their father. They just didn’t feel much of anything. Having flourished throughout childhood, in a close, loving relationship with their mother, the girls had learned to grow up without him. One daughter described Thomas as an “occasionally visiting autocrat”; another called him “a blank check and a smile.”

“Tricia,” I ask, “how much do you know about your father’s childhood?” “I don’t know anything really.” She reaches out for a wad of tissues. “I just know . . . Oh, God, I don’t know . . .” “Sure you do, Tricia. Go on,” I urge. “I just . . .” she stammers. “I’m not sure, exactly. The thing is . . . I just know it was bad!” Tricia folds in on herself. For no reason she could begin to articulate, she bends forward and cries. Thomas glances at his daughter, worriedly. He looks at her sideways, afraid to meet her full in the face. “That’s yours, you know,” I tell him. He looks up at me. “That pain she’s expressing right now,” I explain. “It’s yours.”

Liriope, the mother of Narcissus, once asked a sage if her son would enjoy a long life. “Yes,” came the ironic reply. “So long as he never knows himself.” Like Narcissus, covertly depressed men do not dare know themselves; the man’s own experience, the pain of depression, is avoided. It is managed and denied.

In his classic paper “Mourning and melancholia,” Freud detailed the savagery of depression’s assault in a tone of bewildered alarm: The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy. He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better. This picture of a delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment, and—what is psychologically very remarkable—by an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.

We begin from a baseline feeling about ourselves that is reasonably positive or at least neutral. The covertly depressed man, in contrast, relies on such external stimulants to rectify an inner baseline of shame. Nondepressed men turn to mood-altering behaviors like drinking, gambling, or sex for relaxation, intimate sharing, or fun. Covertly depressed men turn to such substances or activities to gain relief from distress.

Novelist William Styron describes a relationship between alcohol and depression that, for him, stretched across decades: Alcohol was a central factor, to the best of my knowledge, in my depression. I believe that many people who are by nature depressive, or have a depressive bent, use alcohol throughout most of their lives to, paradoxically, alleviate the depression. . . . You use alcohol as a kind of medication to keep your demons at arm’s length. But all of a sudden I was unable to drink. I developed a severe intolerance to alcohol. . . . In the absence of this mood bath, as I call it, that I would have every day in the evening, now I had a new experience of not having alcohol there to give me that sensation of euphoria. And that allowed the depression to crowd in.

The only real cure for covert depression is overt depression. Not until the man has stopped running, as David did for a moment that day in my office, or Thomas did when he let himself cry, can he grapple with the pain that has driven his behavior. This is why the “fix” of the compulsive defense never quite works. 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.

the defensive structure of covert depression, the ordinary limits of the self are transcended through intoxication in one of two ways. In the intoxication experience that I call merging, the usual boundaries around the self are relaxed or even dissolved, causing feelings of boundlessness and abundance. In psychoanalysis this experience is called “oceanic bliss.” The relaxation of self-boundaries lies at the core of intoxication with drugs like alcohol, morphine, and heroin. Various forms of bingeing—eating, spending, sex—can provide this same sense of expansion.

In severe love addiction, when the love object becomes unavailable, the experience of withdrawal can produce symptoms as horrible as in any drug detoxification, including panic attacks, depression, obsession, psychotic breakdown, stalking, murder, and suicide.

The telephone, for him, was a cipher for being shut out, betrayed, abandoned. To call the feelings that surged up in him mere “upset” was too mild; “volcanic” was more like it; “panicked” might be better still. Jim felt victimized and alone in the minutes before he erupted—as if he were back in the chaos of his own childhood. “I felt,” he says, “as if I could stand there and slit my own throat and she’d just go right on talking.”

In place of healthy self-esteem, Jim had habitually turned to Shirley for comfort. When Shirley, even for a few minutes, “betrayed him” by focusing elsewhere, he found himself becoming enraged. When Jimmy’s defense of merger failed him, he turned to the defense of elevation. Rage never abandoned Jimmy. Like an ideal wife, rage was always available to him, night or day, at a moment’s notice. These are the common dynamics of domestic violence.

Research shows that one distinguishing characteristic of battering men is a markedly increased sensitivity to feelings of abandonment, which can often translate into love addiction. Battering men like Jimmy use connection to their sexual partners to help medicate covert depression. Without acknowledging it, these rough macho guys depend on union with their women to supplement deficiencies in self-esteem. When their partners “fail them,” they are flooded by depression and shame. Rage psychologically and physiologically “medicates” their dip into the experience of depression. Helpless feelings vanish with the illusion of inordinate power.

One wonders if a similar impulse may in part lie behind the universal brutality of boy’s initiation rites into manhood. Perhaps the male community’s tradition of “welcoming” a boy into its midst by hurting him is not just a test to prove the boy tough enough to be worthy of joining. Perhaps it is also a demonstration, a need to communicate the men’s own sense of woundedness, a ritual dramatization of how much pain they all carry inside.

But my father had three hungry people to care for, and so he switched his major from fine art to industrial design. Years later, he told me that a part of him had died on the day he went to the registrar’s office to make the change. Although he would have been horrified to admit it, my father never really forgave any of us—my mother, brother or me—for depriving him of his dream. From early childhood it was clear to me that Dad saw himself as our victim.

Men do not have readily at hand the same level of insight into their emotional lives as women, because our culture works hard to dislocate them from those aspects of themselves. Men are less used to voicing emotional issues, because we teach them that it is unmanly to do so. Even a cursory look at gender socialization in our culture indicates that a man would be far more likely to act out distress than to talk about it, while a woman would have the skills, the community, and the ease to discuss her problems.

To understand depression in men, we must come to terms with the conditions that create it, the ways in which, in the name of masculinity and often with the best of intentions, we betray and deform our sons.

For the covertly depressed man, what lies at the center of the defense or addiction is the disowned overt depression he has run from. And in the center of the overt depression lies trauma. For some men the underlying injuries are blatant and extreme. For others, they are seemingly mild, even ordinary. And yet, for both, the damage in their capacity to sustain connection to themselves and others may be severe. No matter if the injuries have been quiet or loud, depressed men carry inside a hurt, bewildered boy whom they scarcely know how to care for. The moment of contact with that disavowed pain is the first step toward restoration.

little plays. Mostly, what Michael remembers is the

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

The relationship between biology and psychology has never been as simple as the debate about it would imply. Both sides of the “nature/nurture” argument are wrong. The problem stems from framing the debate as if the influence of biology goes only one way—up, from our bodies to our minds. New research shows that the relationship between brain and mind runs in both directions. It has long been accepted that changes in our biochemistry, caused by illness, medication, or intoxicants, can effect our psychological states. But what has been less appreciated, until recently, is that changes affecting our psychological states may alter our biochemistries as well, even the very structures of our brains. Under certain circumstances these alterations can be permanent.

“Be kind to me, Lord,” reads the epigram for the National Children’s Defense Fund, “My boat is so small and the sea is so wide.” A child’s personality and his neurology—the little boat he must navigate in—are still developing. Relatively mild childhood injury can have long-lasting effects because it occurs while the very structures of the personality, body, and brain are being formed—or malformed. A growing body of evidence indicates that a heightened state of arousal—the body’s inherent “fight or flight” reaction to stress—in small children may have permanent physiological consequences. Stressed children have a harder time modulating feelings, negotiating conflict, and “settling down” than other children, and this seems particularly true for males who appear, if anything, even more sensitive than females to injury or deprivation.

Good parenting requires three elements: nurturing, limit setting, and guidance. A parent who is too absorbed to supply any one of these neglects the legitimate needs of the child.

Categorizing such neglect as trauma does not trivialize the nature of trauma. I think not touching a child for decades at a time is a form of injury. I think withholding any expression of love until a young boy is a grown man is a form of emotional violence. And I believe that the violence men level against themselves and others is bred from just such circumstances.

Studies indicate that from the moment of birth, boys are spoken to less than girls, comforted less, nurtured less. Passive trauma in boys is rarely extreme; it is however, pervasive.

The danger lay in Dave’s becoming so intent on protecting his son from the kind of abuse from which he had suffered that he would end up, ironically, doing him harm. This is a common dynamic between father and son.

Girls’ aggression tends to be verbal. Boys hit, kick, and bite. While girls rarely bully boys, boys bully both boys and girls—anyone perceived as weak. But boys’ most frequent and most ferocious attacks are reserved for other males. For most boys active trauma is an integral part of life.

Such subtle shaping, much of it out of the realm of conscious intent, permeates the lives of girls and boys. It is the essence of the socialization of gender. In 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.

The way we see a child will often shape the behaviors we evoke from him. In a well-known study, two educators placed children of average intelligence with teachers who were told that their new pupils were exceptionally bright. This “pseudo-gifted” group uniformly wound up with better grades and better scholastic performances than a matched group of controls. As with intelligence, so too with behaviors—malleable kids live up, or down, to our expectations. Sugar and spice and everything nice is what we expect little girls to be made of. As Ben reminds us, boys may not fare quite as well. By not attending to boys’ relational needs—the need for connection, for nurture, support, the expression of vulnerability—we teach them, through passive injury, that those needs are not quite legitimate.

We begin sending boys the message that they have fewer emotional needs than girls in the very first moments of life. One research team studied parents’ responses to newborns in the first twenty-four hours after delivery. The researchers selected newborns that matched in weight, length, alertness, and strength, so that there were no significant differences between boys and girls. Nevertheless, both mothers and fathers perceived newborn sons as: “more alert, stronger, larger featured, more coordinated, and firmer.” They saw baby daughters as “less attentive, weaker, finer featured, less coordinated, softer, smaller, more fragile and prettier.”

For decades, feminist scholars and social researchers have patiently built up a body of evidence showing the psychological damage done by the coercive enforcement of gender roles in girls. But what about the damage to the psychological development of boys? If traditional socialization takes aim at girls’ voices, it takes aim at boys’ hearts.

‘Agencies of socialization’ cannot produce mechanical effects in a growing person. What they do is invite the child to participate in social practice on given terms. The invitation may be, and often is, coercive—accompanied by heavy pressure to accept and no mention of an alternative.” “Mama’s boy,” “faggot,” “pussy,” “wimp”—no boy I know of has escaped the experience of such ridicule. No man I have treated has fully eluded the taste of the lash one receives if one dares not accept masculinity’s “invitation.”

James remembers riding home with his dad from his music lesson. He is seven or eight. His father asks if he likes his new music teacher. James not only likes him; he’s thrilled. “I’m real sweet on him, Dad,” he tells me he replied. His father punches James hard in the arm, as if in fun. “Do not say ‘you’re sweet’ on a man, James. Girls say that.” “You hurt me,” James protested. “I meant to.” “But, why?” “That’s just spice, James. That’s so you’ll remember. Now, do not whine about it. You’ll be sounding just like a girl again.”

In many homes, violent fathers pass on active trauma to their sons as if toughness were a gift, a necessary initiation.

To this day, as I fall asleep, I will sometimes start, hearing in my mind the harsh call of my name, feeling the quick thrill of terror rush through my body, now close to forty years later. I remember the crash of the door swinging open, jarring me from sleep, and my father, silhouetted against the hall light, panting, his face flushed with rage, pulling me out of bed by the hair (“Oww, Dad. DAD!”), and dragging me off with no words, too disgusted for words, to the offending messy towel or capless toothpaste. “How many TIMES must I tell you?” my father would shake his head sorrowfully, bewildered, as his huge hand, disembodied, crashed down on me.

And then eventually enough blows would have fallen and the ritual would be over. I was allowed to go to my bed, or sometimes, I was forced to stand at attention in the center of the living room, with my pants still down, my hands clasped behind me, until my legs shook. I remember, from the earliest age, teaching myself how to disassociate, consciously schooling myself in the art of leaving my own body to hover somewhere close to the ceiling. Looking back, I can recall it all clearly from an aerial view, my father’s face suffused with blood, purple with exertion, his eyebrows drawn in concentration. The boy bent over, his pants at the ankles, like an embarrassed spectator, turning away. The whiteness of the boy’s skin.

Mostly, my father’s aim was good, but at times anger would get the better of him and he would grow sloppy. Then the belt would land on the small of my back or the backs of my knees. That would bring me down from the ceiling in a hurry. Most often, though, after the first few blows, the pain would mean nothing to me at all, until the numbness and disassociation wore off a few hours later. Then, I would have trouble sitting, or sometimes even lying, just as my father had threatened I would. “I’m going to beat you so you won’t sit down for a week.” And, though I did sit down for fear and shame, I would often secretly wish that I hadn’t. “What are you making faces about?” “Nothing, Dad.” “A little tender?” “No, Dad.”

There were no broken bones, no scars—some bruises, a few welts here and there, but nothing anyone would notice. Physical abuse? If you had said these words to my father, if you had said them to me, we would have laughed in your face. This wasn’t abuse. This wasn’t even a beating. My father knew what a real beating felt like. And he was right about that. What he dished out to his son was nothing compared to what he himself had received. And so the chain goes, across generations, link to link. Whether he knew it or not, my father was...

young naval ensign, Kevin Manheim, broke the “do not ask, do not tell” code of today’s military by informing the men of his unit that he was a practicing homosexual. Some of those men responded to Manheim’s break with the traditional masculine role by stomping him to death.

Even within the supposedly enlightened atmosphere of a college community, the amount of stir my son’s dresses has caused among our friends has surprised my wife and me. “Experts” we have known for years, psychologists who lecture around the country, have offered unsolicited advice about our “problem.” People have expressed great concern about Alexander’s impending “gender confusion.” Helen, Alexander’s day care provider, gave us characteristically blunt advice, not about how to handle our son so much as how to handle our friends. “If it was Alexandra and not Alexander,” she told us, “and if your daughter showed up in a hard hat and a tool belt instead of a dress, those same people bugging you now would be cheering you on. You just tell them not to worry about it.”