I Don't Want to Talk About It Quotes

“They have learned not to expect their father to attend to them or to be expressive about much of anything. They have come to expect him to be psychologically unavailable. They have also learned that he is not accountable in his emotional absence, that Mother does not have the power either to engage him or to confront him. In other words, Father’s neglect and Mother’s ineffectiveness at countering it teach the boys that, in this family at least, men’s participation is not a responsibility but rather a voluntary and discretionary act. Third, they learn that Mother, and perhaps women in general, need not be taken too seriously. Finally, they learn that not just Mother but the values she manifests in the family—connection, expressivity—are to be devalued and ignored. The subtext message is, “engage in ‘feminine’ values and activities and risk a similar devaluation yourself.” The paradox for the boys is that the only way to connect with their father is to echo his disconnection. Conversely, being too much like Mother threatens further disengagement or perhaps, even active reprisal. In this moment, and thousands of other ordinary moments, these boys are learning to accept psychological neglect, to discount nurture, and to turn the vice of such abandonment into a manly virtue.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“The covertly depressed person cannot merely vault over the avoided pain directly into wholeness, as hard as he may try. 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.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“An addict needs shame like a man dying of thirst needs salt water.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Those who do not turn to face their pain are prone to impose it.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“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 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.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Through the mechanism of carried shame and carried feelings, the unresolved pain of previous generations operates in families like an emotional debt. We either face it or we leverage our children with it.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“If overtly depressed men are paralyzed, men who are covertly depressed, as I was, cannot stand still. They run, desperately trying to outdistance shame by medicating their pain, pumping up their tenuous self-esteem, or, if all else fails, inflicting their torture on others. Overt depression is violence endured. Covert depression is violence deflected. In either case, understanding depression in men means coming to grips with men's violence. How has the door of the psyche been opened to such a dark visitation? By what mechanisms does violence in the boy's environment become internalized as a stable force inside his own mind?”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“And I loathed myself. I loathed myself for the state I was in. I loathed myself as an unlovable person. I felt there was something intrinsically monstrous about me, some rancid stink inside my soul that I had barely managed to cover over with the cheap perfume of my charm. I felt mostly dead and deserving of it. I had become an inanimate object to myself. I had somehow misplaced the knowledge that I was human.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“The flight from shame into grandiosity lies at the heart of male covert depression.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“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. These wholesale excisions are equally damaging to the healthy development of both girls and boys. The price for traditional socialization of girls is oppression, as Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan put it, “the tyranny of the kind and nice.” The price of traditional socialization for boys is disconnection—from themselves, from their mothers, from those around them.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Good parenting requires three elements: nurturing, limit setting, and guidance.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“In 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. Such ecstasy can also be achieved in love addiction, where the love object is felt to be godlike and thus fusion with that person brings rapture. In such cases, one projects omnipotence, or divine abundance, onto another person and then depends on that person to validate one’s own worth. Engaging in such a fantasy is to some degree a universal and celebrated part of falling in love, but the love addict falls in love with the intensity of infatuation itself. Romance is not a prelude to intimacy, but a drug administered to soothe unacknowledged pain.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Instead of the capacity to experience himself from the inside out, he seeks a desperate union with an external source of abundance, which he thinks will complete him. The price of his delusion is death. Unable to eat or sleep, like a severe addict in the final stages of obsession he wastes. With no capacity to speak her own words, Echo records and reiterates Narcissus's every sigh. If he is a reflection, she is the reflection of his reflection, the shadow of his shadow. Narcissus loses sensation, and the result is fatal paralysis. Echo loses her voice, and the result is also paralysis. Neither is capable of authentic relationship.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“In theory an addictive relationship can be established with just about anything, so long as the substance, person, or activity relieves the threat of overt depression”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Recent studies indicate that boys raised by women, including single women and lesbian couples, do not suffer in their adjustment; they are not appreciably less “masculine”; they do not show signs of psychological impairment. What many boys without fathers inarguably do face is a precipitous drop in their socioeconomic status. When families dissolve, the average standard of living for mothers and children can fall as much as 60 percent, while that of the man usually rises. When we focus on the highly speculative psychological effects of fatherlessness we draw away from concrete political concerns, like the role of increased poverty. Again, there are as yet no data suggesting that boys without fathers to model masculinity are necessarily impaired. Those boys who do have fathers are happiest and most well adjusted with warm, loving fathers, fathers who score high in precisely “feminine” qualities.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“many men would rather place themselves at risk than acknowledge distress, either physical or emotional. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien gives a clear example of the force of men’s shame, when he remembers his fellow “grunts” in Vietnam: They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They crawled into tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire. They were too frightened to be cowards.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Roughly six out of ten Americans surveyed in late 2021 allowed that loneliness was a powerful, destructive force in their lives.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“The essence of traditional masculinity is the delusion of invulnerability.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“The turning to any substance, person, or action to regulate one’s self-esteem can be called an addictive process. In this framework, the terms addition, narcissistic disorder, and the defenses in covert depression are all synonyms. When a covertly depressed man’s connection to the object of his addiction is undisturbed, he feels good about himself. But when connection to that object is disrupted—when the cocaine runs out, the credit cards reach their limit, the affair ends—his sense of self-worth plummets, and his hidden depression begins to unfold. Such “withdrawal” drives him back to the drug, the achievements at work, or the next sexual conquest.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“In addition, the person must exhibit at least four of any of the following symptoms: weight loss or gain, too little or too much sleep, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, difficulty making decisions or forgetfulness, and preoccupation with death or suicide.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV) which labels a person as having a clinical depression only if he or she shows, for a duration of at least two weeks, signs either of feeling sad, “down,” and “blue,” or having a decreased interest in pleasurable activities, including sex. In”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“I have often thought about the high school boys my father saw drown and the advice he gave me: "Don't touch them. They'll drag you under." As in so many other instances, his advice on this matter was wrong. I did not go down into that dark vortex with my father. But neither did I let go of his embrace.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Treating covert depression is like peeling back the layers of an onion. Underneath the covertly depressed man's addictive defenses lies the pain of a faulty relationship to himself. And at the core of this self-disorder lies the unresolved pain of childhood trauma.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Depression freezes, but sadness flows. It has an end. The thing I had spent so much time avoiding had just swept through me-- and I was fine.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“I do not blame myself for running from those feelings. No one would deliberately subject himself to the discomfort I carried inside my skin unless he had a very good reason to. As a little boy fleeing into the streets and waiting neighborhood games, as an adolescent fleeing toward drugs that soothed me like a mother, I have taken flight throughout most of my life. Hurt, grandiose, blaming others for not filling me up, I was in search of the next big fix, in search of love without having the skills to love well in return. Like Perceval, I have spent a good portion of my life wandering, searching for the right question.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Red Socks.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Socks.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.” When”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression