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I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression by Terrence Real
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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.
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we also often fail to identify this disorder because men tend to manifest depression differently than women.
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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.
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Too often, 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.
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The curse of Narcissus is immobilization, not out of love for himself, but out of dependency upon his image.
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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 and limitations, as well as those of others. But our basic sense of self as valuable and important neither rises nor falls based on external attributes.
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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.
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Like most covertly depressed men, Thomas had trouble bearing real intimacy with others because he could not afford to be emotionally intimate with himself.
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call depression, in both its overt and in its covert forms, an auto-aggressive disease. Like those rare conditions which causes a person’s own immune system to assault itself, depression is a disorder wherein the self attacks the self. In overt depression, that attack is borne; in covert depression, the man attempts to ward it off. But such attempts are never fully successful. The underlying assault on the self always threatens to break through the defenses.
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The flight from shame into grandiosity lies at the heart of male covert depression. The means one might use to effect such a shift from shame to grandiosity are as varied as human creativity will allow,
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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.
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The covertly depressed man, in contrast, relies on such external stimulants to rectify an inner baseline of shame.
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Addiction experts call Styron’s “mood bath” self-medication. Depressed people who use alcohol to “keep their demons at arm’s length” are abusing the drug in a misguided, often unconscious attempt to dose themselves with a socially accepted, over-the-counter antidepressant—a “cup of cheer.”
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covert depression, the defense or addiction always pulls the man from “less than” to “better than”—rather than to a moderate sense of inherent value.
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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.
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Flooded with depression and feelings of victimization, Jimmy used rage to physiologically pump up his sense of deflation. Research shows that rage simultaneously releases adrenaline, which speeds up the autonomic nervous system, and endorphins, which act as the body’s own opioids. This is a powerful internal cocktail, which tragically, like any other form of intoxication, can offer short-lived relief from the pain of depression.
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The pattern in males of moving from the helpless, depressed, “one down” position to a transfigured, grandiose, “one up” position has become one of the most powerful and ubiquitous narratives in modern times.
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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.
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Between the inordinate shame of depression and the relative shamelessness of grandiosity, there lies appropriate shame, feeling proportionately bad about something one has done wrong. Men who offend must first be brought from shameless behavior into the experience of their forgotten, appropriate shame. They must be thawed out. If not, the addictive defenses pull them toward behaviors that are at best disconnected and at worst irresponsible, the kind of behaviors my father engaged in throughout much of his life.
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Current research on drinking and depression gives credence to this cyclic pattern. Research indicates that depressed people may experience the effects of alcohol and other drugs more strongly than nondepressed people do and have a higher expectation that such substances will help them to feel better. Other research, however, reports that the high incidence of depression in alcoholics stems not from an underlying mood disorder but from the fact that alcohol in general, and prolonged drinking in particular, actually causes depression. The debate has been framed as: Does depression lead to alcohol abuse or does alcohol abuse lead to depression?
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Only after the shame cycle has stopped, after the addictive pattern itself has been broken, and after the person has moved into “sobriety” can the pain of covert depression be addressed.
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Covertly depressed men who self-medicate with substances have the greatest chance of a correct diagnosis and of receiving effective treatment for both aspects of their disorder. Less fortunate are those covertly depressed men who turn for self-medication not to substances but to people, as in a love addiction, or to actions, particularly violence.
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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.
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Childhood injury in boys creates both the wounds and the defenses against the wounds that are the foundation for adult depression.
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Covert depression keeps a core depression at bay. One seldom finds major depression and the defenses of covert depression operating at the same time, for the simple reason that the defenses work, at least partially, to keep the depression looking minor. Once the defenses fail or the person stops self-medicating, the overt depression that emerges can look very much like major depression.
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The relationship between physiology and psychology, body and mind, appears to be a reciprocal one.
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A substantial and growing body of research teaches us that early childhood trauma and loss will have, as one researcher stated it, “lifelong psychobiological consequences.” Primate infants who are separated from their mothers have been shown to have abnormal changes in levels of the brain neurotransmitter serotonin, a chemical whose imbalance has long been associated with depression,
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Monkeys that had been isolated in youth display increased sensitivity to amphetamines and opioids, as well as increased alcohol consumption, when compared to normally raised controls. And these changes accelerate when the monkeys are put under stress.
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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.
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In working with traumatized men, I make a distinction between active versus passive injury. Active trauma is usually a boundary violation of some kind, a clearly toxic interaction. Passive trauma, on the other hand, is a form of physical or emotional neglect. Rather than a violent presence, passive trauma may be defined as a violent lack—the absence of nurture and responsibilities normally expected of a caregiver; the absence of connection.
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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.
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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
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For most boys active trauma is an integral part of life.
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In short, being a man generally means not being a woman. As a result, boys’ acquisition of gender is a negative achievement. Their developing sense of their own masculinity is not, as in most other forms of identity development, a steady movement toward something valued so much as a repulsion from something devalued. Masculine identity development turns out to be not a process of development at all but rather a process of elimination, a successive unfolding of loss.
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what I call the loss of the relational—that wound in boys’ lives that sets up their vulnerability to depression as men. Of the three dislocations—to mother, self, and others—the earliest and prototypical loss, for many boys, is the attenuation of closeness to their mother.
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The typical American father spends on average only eleven minutes a day with his children. And most of that brief amount of time is spent in play.
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A boy’s disavowal of the “feminine” in himself falls into two spheres: rejection of expressivity and rejection of vulnerability.
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Bessel van der Kolk to write about what he calls “addiction to trauma.” Noting the high prevalence of crisis in the lives of people who have histories of trauma, he hypothesizes that some may seek intensity to “self-medicate” internal pain not by reaching for an external stimulant, but by throwing themselves into extreme states of physiological hyperarousal. Trauma survivors may develop dependency on the release of their body’s own “drugs.” Van der Kolk’s research points the way toward an understanding of the physiological basis for those defenses used in covert depression that rely on behaviors rather than substances.
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I work with that recovery requires dragging them back into the relational—often kicking and screaming, initially. 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.
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The construction of manhood turns out to be as social as a sewing circle. Masculinity, unlike femininity, is conferred. And since it is bestowed, it can also be taken away. That is why a mentoring figure like a coach can carry such authority for a boy.
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The paradox of the grandiose position is that it solidifies the very relational disconnections whose pain it seeks to soothe.
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In the same way that grandiosity demands a disconnection from the humanity of “the opponent,” it requires a disconnection from one’s own.
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call such a trade-off “conditional grandiosity.” It lies at the core of the male experience. Boys and men are granted privilege and special status, but only on the condition that they turn their backs on vulnerability and connection to join in the fray. Those who resist, like unconventional men or gay men, are punished for it. Those who lose or who cannot compete, like boys and men with disabilities, or of the wrong class or color, are marginalized, rendered all but invisible.
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conditional, since he must prove himself worthy of love, if a man does not succeed, he risks an abandonment he may feel he deserves. The bind is that in order to succeed, it is often at the cost of neglecting much of who he is and his relationship to those around him.
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Healthy self-esteem is the capacity—rarely taught to either sex in our culture—to hold oneself in warm regard even when colliding with one’s human shortcomings. Our capacity to stay rooted in a compassionate understanding of one another’s flaws keeps us humane. When we lose touch with our own frailties we become judgmental and dangerous to others.
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In fact, sociologists have long noted that men spontaneously seem to become more “androgynous” when they hit middle and retirement age. Circumstances like disability or retirement can relieve some men of the burden of performance, allowing relational capacities and concerns to surface.
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I tell Billy Jodein that I think of depression as an auto-aggressive disease, a disorder in which the self turns against the self.
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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.
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The first clue of his condition is an absence rather than a presence—an absence of feeling for himself.
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In depression, the childhood violence that had been leveled against the boy—whether physical or psychological, active or passive—takes up permanent habitation within him. The depressed man adopts a relationship to himself that mirrors and replicates the dynamics of his own early abuse. This phenomenon, which I call empathic reversal, is the link connecting trauma to depression.
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Trauma expert Judith Herman notes that: “Even more than adults, children who develop in [a] climate of domination develop pathological attachments to those who abuse and neglect them, attachments that they will strive to maintain even at the sacrifice of their own welfare, their own reality, or their lives.” The child’s need to regulate his parent is as fundamental as his own instinct for survival. In fact, it is a direct manifestation of that instinct, for the simple reason that each child relies on his parents’ capacity to function in order to survive.
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In Listening to Prozac, psychiatrist Peter Kramer notes that Prozac and its relatives are equally effective in treating both depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders. He observes that this dual effect challenges traditional views, which saw depression and obsessive disorders as two discrete disease entities.
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Depression is an obsessive disorder.
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This perspective enables us to metaphorically draw a line down the center of a piece of paper creating two columns. On one side, we list the “feminine,” the lost boy, overt depression, shame, and victimization. On the other, we list the “masculine,” the harsh boy, covert depression, grandiosity, and offense. The relationship between these two columns at once describes relations between men and women in our changing, but still sexist, culture and also the internal dynamic of depression.
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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.
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Unresolved depression often passes from father to son, despite the father’s best intentions, like a toxic, unacknowledged patrimony. 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.
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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.
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Men who do not turn to face their own pain are too often prone to inflict it on others.
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Lisak went on to suggest two distinct possible outcomes of that crisis. In one, the victim responds to feelings of unmanliness by “overcompensating,” by clinging ever more strongly to traditional terms. Such men, the research suggests, may be dangerous. The coupling of an abused boy’s unresolved hurt mixed with a grown man’s power produces a volatile compound. In the other outcome of the crisis in masculinity, the men, rather than moving into shamed feelings of inadequacy, question the traditional terms of masculinity itself. Instead of raising the bridge, they divert the river. Having found themselves “unmanned,” these men rewrite the criteria for manhood. My reading of Lisak’s research is that the group of abused and abusing men responded to their trauma with a preponderance of “identification with the aggressor.”
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Since the interplay between shame and grandiosity is the dynamic linking trauma, depression, and gender, a man attempting to resolve either trauma or depression must confront and transform the legacy of masculinity itself. Conversely, a man who refuses to rework that legacy is prone to enact it.
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now look to the one simple formula that runs through virtually all of my work with depressed men: 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. If a man will not accept the demanding challenge of “reengineering himself,” as one patient put it, for his own sake, I ask if he would be willing to do it for the sake of his children.
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Many sons burdened with carried depression need to plunge into the heart of their own pain in order to find and confront not just their own, but their father’s unacknowledged depression.
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Once a man resolves to take up his hero’s journey, real therapy can begin. Our descent occurs in three phases. First, the addictive defenses must stop. Then, the dysfunctional patterns in the man’s relationship to himself must be attended to. Finally, buried early trauma must reemerge and, as much as possible, be released.
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In my work with covertly depressed men, the distinction between abusive and addictive dependency means relatively little. Whenever a man turns to an external prop for self-esteem regulation, he is involved in the defensive structures of covert depression. Narcissus at his well is an addict. For simplicity’s sake, I label dependency on any self-esteem “dialysis machine,” addictive dependency. What I call addiction and what psychoanalytically oriented therapists would call a “self disorder” or a “narcissistic dependency” are synonymous.
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Just about anything can be used as an addictive defense—spending, food, work, achievement, exercise, computer games. When a man with covert depression uses something we normally think of as benign, or even as positive, like work or exercise, it seems almost laughable to insist on questioning the function of that activity in his life. But ordinary activities used as a defense against depression can have wide-ranging consequences.
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Edward Khantzian, the father of the self-medication hypothesis, speaks of addictions as attempts to “correct” for flaws in the user’s ego capacities.
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Khantzian’s research on both alcoholics and drug abusers led him to focus on four cardinal areas of dysregulation: difficulty in maintaining healthy self-esteem; difficulty in regulating one’s feelings; difficulty in exercising self-care; and difficulty in sustaining connection to others.
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The damage to self that Khantzian describes can be summed up as damage in relatedness.
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next step lies in assessing and treating the man’s connection to himself, his “self disorder.” Since I see maturity (“ego functions,” in psychiatric language) as a relationship between the man and himself, that relationship can be worked on directly just like any other relationship. Education and a few basic techniques help increase the man’s capacity to esteem himself, set appropriate boundaries, identify and share his feelings.
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In imaginative work, the client forms a relationship with the immature parts of his personality—the two inner children. He learns to bring the strengthened “functional adult” part of him out to nurture and contain those younger aspects of self. In so doing, the dynamic of internalized violence is ameliorated. But the dramatic personifications of these multiple parts of the depressed man’s psyche is only one aspect of bringing his relationship to self into recovery. 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.
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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.
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Thinking of maturity as a daily practice is a radical departure from traditional psychotherapy in which the man’s difficulties in relating to himself is envisioned as character pathology, ego dysfunction, or structural deficits. His “developmental arrest” is seen as deeply embedded.
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They are activities. Self-esteem, for example, is not something one has; it is something one does. And it is something one can learn to do better. I call this part of recovery work the practice of relational maturity. Treatment involves assessment, instruction, and exercise.
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First the man and I evaluate his strengths and weaknesses. Then I give him a few simple tools to use in work on himself. Finally, he goes off to practice and reports his progress for fine-tuning and for my support. My role is more that of a coach than that of a traditional, transference-based therapist. I tell the families I work with, only half facetiously, to think of me as their maturity and intimacy personal trainer.
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Pia Mellody has devised a five-point grid that I find practical and comprehensive. It consists of five self functions: self-esteem, self-protection, self-knowledge, self-care, and self-moderation.
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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. Healing from depression unpeels these three layers in three phases: sobriety, the practice of relational maturity, and trauma release.
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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.
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And grief, I would come to understand, is depression’s cure.
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Depression is not really a feeling; it is a condition of numbness, of nonfeeling. In my work with depressed men, I differentiate between states and feelings. States are global, diffuse, impersonal. One’s relationship to a state is passive, disembodied. A state of depression just drops over someone, like bad weather as it did with me when I was in college. And, most often, in six to eight months, with or without treatment, for reasons no one really understands, acute depression usually dissipates. The bad weather blows away.
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Feelings, in contrast to states, are specific, anchored in the body of one’s experience. Depression is a state. Sadness and anger are feelings. Anxiety is a state. Fear is a feeling. Intoxication is a state. Happiness is a feeling. One feels about something. Feelings are embedded in relationships; thus, when one feels something about a relationship, one can take relieving action. Emotions are signals that emerge from the context of our interactions.
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The cure for states is feelings. As I discovered that day in the shower, unlike states, which tend to congeal, feelings will run their own course in due time. Despite the often expressed male fear that, if one were to let oneself cry, one would never stop, tears, in fact, eventually taper off if one lets them. Feelings are not endless, but our numbing attempts to avoid them can last a lifetime.
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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.
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Appreciating the nature of trauma memory is key to understanding a depressed man’s recovery process. In a way, trauma memory is not memory at all; it is a form of reliving.
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Bessel van der Kolk summarizes the current literature on trauma memories: Research has shown that under ordinary conditions many traumatized people, including rape victims, battered women, and abused children have fairly good psychosocial adjustment. However, they do not respond to stress in the way that other people do. Under pressure they may feel or act as if they were being traumatized all over again. Thus, high states of arousal seem selectively to promote retrieval of traumatic memories, sensory information, or behaviors associated with previous traumatic experiences. The tendency of traumatized organisms to revert to irrelevant emergency behaviors in response to minor stress has been well documented in animals as well.
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Current research indicates that traumatic experience may be stored in a different part of the brain from the higher cortical systems, which make sense of them. Several researchers have distinguished the two different circuits of memory, calling one the explicit, the other the implicit memory system. The implicit memory system stores habitual responses, physiological responses, and emotional associations. The explicit memory system is responsible for the recall of facts, verbalizations, and the construction of explanatory frames. To put it simply, the implicit memory system experiences, the explicit memory system knows and explains.
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Explicit memory involves the prefrontal cortex, whereas implicit memory involves the limbic system, particularly the amygdala and the hippocampus.
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Recovery means bringing these two systems together. Van der Kolk writes: The goal of treating post traumatic stress disorder is to help people live in the present, without feeling or behaving according to irrelevant demands belonging to the past. Psychologically, this means that traumatic experiences need to be located in time and place and differentiated from current reality.
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As for recovery, the Prozac family seems to approximate chemically some of what healing work accomplishes emotionally and cognitively. It helps quiet the implicit memory system and strengthen the explicit memory system, or, said differently, it helps decrease the intensity of the wounded internal children and bolster the skills of the functional adult.
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a depressed man must first learn to cherish and take care of himself.
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The same gender bifurcation that deprives men of their hearts deprives women of their voices, setting up a culturally sanctioned pas de deux in which the man’s covert depression, his dependency on self-esteem props, is matched by his spouse’s protectiveness, her often resentful dependency on him.
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There is some indication, for example, that human males are, if anything, more emotional than human females.
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Gottman found that his male sample showed on the whole a greater physiological response to emotional arousal than his female sample, and the men took longer to return to their physiological baseline once aroused. The aversion of many men to strong emotion, Gottman speculates, may not be the result of a diminished capacity to feel, as has been commonly believed, but just the reverse.
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In twenty years of work with men and their families, I have come to see men’s struggles with redeveloping neglected emotional and relational skills as about on a par with women’s struggles to redevelop assertive, instrumental skills. Generally, it seems about as difficult for the sons of Narcissus to open up and listen as it is for the daughters of Echo to speak.
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Both forms of depression in men, overt and covert, frequently evoke in mates an urge to protect their husbands. If overtly depressed men often implicitly demand care, covertly depressed men often implicitly demand dysfunctionality. The spouse of a covertly depressed man may offer herself up as a scapegoat, expressing his projected vulnerabilities for him. This is a phenomenon called adult-to-adult carried feelings.
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Hafner’s research supplies empirical evidence for one of the axioms of family therapy: a force exists that allows one person to stabilize the psychological equilibrium of another—if she is willing to contort herself into the shape required to accomplish the task.
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Some women seem willing to keep their covertly depressed men strong by becoming less functional than their partners. Such self-sacrifice does not belong simply to a lunatic fringe. Married women are consistently reported on a number of sociological measures as less happy, less well adjusted, more anxious, more overtly depressed, and generally more neurotic than either married men or single women, while single men are the most at-risk population in the nation for both physical and psychological health problems.
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When I am faced with a family in which there is a depressed woman, my first move is to empower the woman. When I am faced with a family in which there is a depressed man, before beginning work with the man, my first move is to empower the woman. To help a depressed woman means facilitating her rise against the forces of oppression that surround her. To help a depressed man, one needs to invite him to step up to increased relational responsibility, a move he may not be inclined to make if his partner allows him to avoid it.
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In overt depression, the man may express “feminine” vulnerabilities but, like Joe and his father, couple them with a “masculine” entitlement to behave irresponsibly. 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.
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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. Men’s fear of entrapment, of female engulfment, is not really about women at all. It is a transposition of a male model of interaction to the living room and the bedroom. When men fear that their women will “engulf” them, they fear that their women will act like men.
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Recovery, at its deepest level, evokes the art of valuing, caring for, and sustaining. The relationship one sustains may be toward oneself, toward others, or even toward the world itself.
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When a depressed man steps up to the task of practicing full relational responsibility, he not only transforms the dynamics of his disorder, he also shifts to a more mature stage in his own development.
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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.
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Those who fear subjugation have limited repertoires of service. But service is the appropriate central organizing force of mature manhood.
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Beyond a certain point in a man’s life, if he is to remain truly vital, he needs to be actively engaged in devotion to something other than his own success and happiness. The word discipline derives from the same root as the word disciple. Discipline means “to place oneself in the service of.” Discipline is a form of devotion. A grown man with nothing to devote himself to is a man who is sick at heart.
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Yet it is the placing of oneself at the service of a larger context that drives a man deep into his own growth and fullest potential.
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Gore’s prescription is similar to my own. First, the addictive defenses must be confronted and stopped, then the pain beneath them must be allowed to surface. Finally, the skills and responsibilities of true intimacy—“stewardship” as Gore, among others, calls it—must be reestablished. The
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