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

by Terrence Real

The unpleasant fact that must be faced about trauma is that, in the very moment of victimization, a version of the same violence that hurts the child from without comes to “scream out its birth” from within. And that birth is permanent. From this night forward, Tom, if stressed enough, is capable of turning on someone in rage, just as his father did. With chilling irony, Henry’s rage stealthily enters his son through the very door of Tom’s repulsion. Whether called social learning, modeling, identification, or absorbed energy, the raging force surrounding Tom is pulled into his very being, becoming a part of him from this point forward for the rest of his life. There is no escaping this process.

Billy’s self-loathing, his feelings of powerlessness and shame, are the component parts of the disorder we call depression. Billy has learned to despise himself.

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.

“Well, I’m nervous, believe me. But I also feel buoyed up. Like, I feel their energy, man,” he clowns. Some men laugh. “No, really, though,” he continues, “like floating in the ocean.” “It’s called support,” I say. “Well, I like it,” he says. “That’s good,” I say. “It’s a good thing to like.”

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 person is endlessly caught in the chains of his rehearsed inadequacies.

An unhappy, immature, relationally unskilled man on medication becomes, at best, a happier immature, relationally unskilled man.

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. And recovery demands the discipline of reworking that wrong turn, over and over again.

In the poem “Healing,” D. H. Lawrence writes: I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance, long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

The root of the term repentance is to return. 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. “Recovery” seems a paltry word for the mark depressed men set their sights on, their point of return.

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.

Conversely, when a man transforms the internalized discourse of violence, he does more than relieve his own depression. He breaks the chain, interrupting the path of depression’s transmission to the next generation. Recovery transforms legacies.

Therapists working with combat veterans have reported that when a man is subjected to trauma he sustains a double injury. The trauma itself is often compounded by the soldier’s sense of having been “emasculated.” To be a victim, overwhelmed by pain, is synonymous with being unmanned. The therapist must deal with both the injury and then with the further complication of the man’s “crisis in masculinity.”

The violence that abused boys absorb into their being acts like a storage battery, charged with the contempt and shamelessness of the boy’s abuser. The harsh child also takes in the general force of contempt for the “feminine” that is rampant in our culture at large. The discharge of that stored contempt may be a danger to both the boy and to others.

Too often, what fathers bequeath to their children is their own unacknowledged pain, and, in instances of violence, an entitlement to inflict it on others. The frightening reality that must be faced is that when a boy is emotionally or physically abused by his father, one avenue for obtaining closeness with him, for absolving the father and uniting with him, is to become him.

to heal the dynamic of violence, one must repair one’s relationship to the self, learn to reparent the self. One must bolster—or, in some cases, create—a platform of maturity, an internal adult. One must limit the aggression of the harsh child, and nurture, without indulgence, the emergence of the vulnerable boy.

Just as confronting the harsh child involves several generations, so, too, unearthing the lost relational, the vulnerable boy, is both a personal quest and also a drama that may span across generations.

As for most sons of depressed fathers, my profound, mad wish to heal my dad was fundamentally selfish. I wanted to restore him so that I might feel some relief from the burden of his pain inside me.

I was not consciously aware of my longings to rescue my father. I was most aware of despising him—for his violence, certainly, but, more than that, for his ineffectiveness. I knew my father was a loser, and for that I held him in utter contempt. I imagined that when I despised my father for his incompetence in the world, I distinguished myself from him. I did not suspect that, in my very disdain, I was never more thoroughly like him. I judged my father in much the same way he judged his father before him. The raw emotions I thought were unique to me were, in fact, absorbed, unsettled energies from lives before mine.

“Well, Dad,” I say, showing him the ultrasound shot of his soon-to-be grandson, “are you excited about becoming a grandfather?” “No.” Dad cocks a supercilious eyebrow. Stunned, although I should have known better, I pursue. “You mean you don’t care about my having a child?” “Not particularly,” he dismisses me. I can feel the blood rush up into my face. “That’s a hell of a response, Dad,” I begin. He shrugs. I turn on him. “Why not?” I say. “Why not, what?” he asks, blandly. I am shaking. “Why don’t you care?” He looks at me full in the face. “Why should I?” “Because it’s my son, you asshole,” I tell him. He looks beyond me, pauses. “What’s one more bastard in the world?” he asks. It takes all my restraint not to hit him.

Healing interrupts the legacy of depression’s transmission from parent to child.

Traditional socialization of boys diminishes the capacity to esteem the self without going up into grandiosity or down into shame. Traditional masculinization teaches boys to replace inherent self-worth with performance-based esteem. It insists that boys disown vulnerable feelings (which could help them connect), while reinforcing their entitlement to express anger. It teaches boys to renounce their true needs in the service of achievement, and at the same time blunts their sensitivity to reading the needs of others.

Learning to bring the “functional adult” to bear on moments of immaturity is not a one-time ritual performed in my office. It is a practice the man must repeat each day of his life.

Relational heroism occurs when every muscle and nerve in one’s body pulls one toward reenacting one’s usual dysfunctional pattern, but through sheer force of discipline or grace, one lifts oneself off the well-worn track toward behaviors that are more vulnerable, more cherishing, more mature. Just as the boyhood trauma that sets up depression occurs not in one dramatic incident, but in transactions repeated hundreds upon hundreds of times, so, too, recovery is comprised of countless small victories.

In trauma release work, the depressed man forms a relationship with both of the wounded, immature parts of him—the vulnerable child and the harsh child. He redresses the empathic reversal that rests at the core of his depression, identifying with the injured child and disidentifying with the aggressor. In a safe, supportive environment, he reexperiences the pain and the often extraordinary shame of traumatic interactions. Finally, he “gives back”—releases—the carried shame and carried feelings he internalized in such moments, extruding them, unburdening himself of them, often permanently.

Depression freezes, but sadness flows. It has an end.

Paolito modeled for me the healing of the empathic reversal that lay at the heart of my covert depression. He taught me, through his example, to cherish my own vulnerability, and to quietly disregard internalized messages of self-contempt. I know that I owe him my life, just as many of the men I work with let me know that they owe me theirs. The chain of toxic injury can be matched by a chain of grace and restoration.

The essence of recovery lies in the art of bringing a learned and practiced maturity (the functional adult) into relationship with immature, injured aspects of the self (both the vulnerable child and the harsh child). By acknowledging trauma and by repudiating identification with the aggressor, the internalized dynamic of violence is mended; the frozen state of depression breaks up, and simple, healing grief thaws the heart.

Healing for boys and men has, at its core, the skills of reconnection. Until a man has halted the acting out of his distress, dealt with his relationship to himself, and brought his mature self to acknowledge and deal with early wounds that remain very much alive within him, he will be inescapably impaired in his capacity to sustain a fully satisfying relationship.

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

I believe that one first changes the behaviors, then, if one is lucky, the feelings follow. The same thing is true for couples therapy. If a man were to wait until he really felt like learning to be more communicative, the couple and I might sit and grow old together. 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.

Once the victorious knight slays the dragon, he rides off with the beautiful young princess. The man, through his accomplishments, finally wins back the relational riches he himself had been taught to abandon. These relational riches are most often embodied in the smiling, pristine face of an ideal woman who often remains elusive, slightly above, slightly out of reach.

Men have enjoyed the “privilege,” as more and more angry voices are rising to say, of killing themselves. In return, what men have been promised is an appreciative, saintly wife—a whore in the bedroom, a kitten on the living room couch, a scintillating cocktail companion, and a damn fine cook and homemaker. This is not a mature relationship. It is what I have taken to speak of with couples as traditional emotional pornography.

I have found that often, once men understand that the old roles are no longer working, once they submit to the necessity of having to change, they are most often excellent students. Men are raised to be good workers. Once they realize that they must work on themselves and on their relationships, they can usually carry it off.

My father was a brute, a force of nature, as mindless and, in a way, as predictable as some large beast one had the misfortune of disturbing. But the injury I felt from my mother went deeper. It was more a puncture than a gash. It felt more personal and more cruel. Like many children from chaotic homes, even though my father was the flagrant abuser, my most unresolved feelings are reserved for the parent who refused to protect me. While I know intellectually that my feelings toward her might be unfair, they nevertheless remain less forgiving than those toward my dad. My father lashed out at us on impulse, thoughtlessly, but I could watch my mother decide to abandon us. I could feel her waver for an instant between husband and child and then retreat from all of us. I could see it in her eyes.

As I was strapped, I would plead with my mother, at first with words and later, as I grew older, with just my eyes. I would beg her to help me, to get him off me. And I would watch as the light of consciousness left her. Staring straight at me, brazenly, as if in a dare, I could see my mother vacate. It was an oddly intimate moment, almost obscene, as if she were showing me some wanton part of herself I had no business glimpsing. Where did she go? That question plagued me. When she decided to abandon me to him, when the light in her eyes went out like that, where did she go?

“I don’t know if I will live long without him,” my mother told me the day we buried this needed, hated man. And she was right. She did not long survive him.

In covert depression, the man cannot afford to be relationally responsive either, for three reasons. First, his primary allegiance must be to the defenses he uses for self-regulation. Second, intimacy with another will inevitably trigger intimacy with himself—an intimacy many covertly depressed men prefer to avoid. Finally, because relational skills have frequently lain dormant and unexercised, demands for intimacy initially exacerbate the feelings of inadequacy that may already plague him. Despite these dangers and difficulties, nothing positive will happen in a depressed man’s relationships until the net of protectiveness is dropped.

Work with depressed men and their partners has convinced me that men’s much-vaunted fear of women and of intimacy is really not a fear of either. What men fear is subjugation. In the one up/one down, better than/less than, hierarchical world of traditional masculinity, one is either in control or controlled. Vulnerability, openness, yielding to another’s wishes—many of the requisite skills for healthy relationships—can be experienced by men as invitations to be attacked.

Joe comes home late after a long day at the office. After dinner, he wants to go to bed. Barbara, who has been alone with the kids all day, is hungry for interaction. She launches into an account of her day, her feelings and problems. Joe is annoyed; he puts her off with a few terse grunts and heads for the bathroom. Both of them are angry. Neither has negotiated anything. Joe’s caricatured image of his wife, at that moment, is that she is a bottomless pit of emotional need; that anything he does will be wrong anyway, and that she has no appreciation of either his needs or his contributions. Barbara’s equally caricatured imagery holds Joe as an unresponsive cretin. They blame one another, rather than asking themselves what they might have done differently.

The essential shift in question that marks a depressed man’s transformation is the shift from: What will I get? to: What can I offer? Entering into a fathering relationship—to a child, a mate, an art, a cause, to the planet entire—means to become a true provider. Recovery demands a move into generativity.

But for those of us who have wrestled with depression, healing from the wound of disconnection is a matter of urgent necessity. We must learn how to serve, to place ourselves inside relationships rather than above them, if we are to relieve our own suffering.

The blackness inside me is mostly gone now. I feel a touch of it here and there. A bad day now and again, a tickle in the back of my mind, like a threat. But, as I go about my life, I am essentially free of it. That little boy who sat alone in such darkness and pain is with me now. I have learned how to attend to him, be responsible to him, as surely as I am responsible to the others in my life. Knowing his pain, I do not allow him to reach for a drug, or a woman, or one more gleaming award. We have learned to sit quietly together, he and I. We have learned to keep one another company.