How Can I Get Through to You:
Reconnecting
Men and Women
By Terrence Real
© 2002
The relationship between men and women is in
trouble, and it has been for over a generation. The relatively stable
divorce rate over the past few decades indicates that the advent of
couple's therapy in the 1950s has so far yielded nothing potent enough
to affect the fate of the roughly one out of two couples who will see
their marriage dissolve. We have enjoyed a period of unheralded
creativity and prosperity. We marvel at new advances in technology and
science that lengthen and strengthen our lives every day. No
generation in history has taken so seriously issues of health and
well-being -- both for ourselves and our children. And yet,
nonetheless, we have never been lonelier. Our sense of community is
breaking down, our sense of belonging has seldom felt weaker, and,
silhouetted against this backdrop, couples that once loved one another
have never had a more difficult time holding fast.
For over forty years the enormously influential
women's movement has examined the oppression of girls and women in our
society, the corrosive force leveled against our daughters to make
them conform -- and the psychological cost of girls' compliance. We
have just begun to extend similar empathy and support to our sons. And
even now, as I write, it seems easier for us as a culture to empathize
with boys than with grown men. But if we are to heal the enmity
between the sexes -- collectively as a culture or individually in our
own marriages -- we must begin to understand the forces that shape,
and misshape, our husbands. The idea of opening our hearts to men will
strike some women as opening the door to disempowerment. Being "soft"
on men means to many a facile excuse for difficult, even dangerous
behavior. There has been a split in our cultural attitude toward men.
For a generation, feminists have held men responsible for privileged,
insensitive, and at times offensive behaviors. But most feminists have
not spoken to men's subjective experience of pain. Psychologists and
those in the men's movement, by contrast, have begun to look at the
cultural gauntlet through which our sons must pass, and the damage it
does to them. But, in all their empathy, they rarely acknowledge the
power men wield. One camp speaks of the violence men do, the other of
the violence done to them. If men and women are to learn how to
preserve the natural state of love and respect each deserves, both
aspects of masculinity must be addressed -- the wounding and the
wound.
Since the publication of my previous book,
I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male
Depression, I have spent a fair amount of time on the
road, speaking and giving workshops throughout the country to both
health professionals and to the general public about men and what ails
them. Wherever I have gone, I have been struck by a burgeoning desire,
almost a sense of urgency, about "figuring men out" -- how we can help
struggling sons, husbands, fathers, in much the same way that women
collectively began helping daughters, wives, and mothers a generation
ago.
The latest research on boys and their development
tells us that, despite our raised consciousness and good intentions,
boys today, no less than ever before, are permeated with an
inescapable set of highly constricting rules. Those boys who try to
"step out of the box" place themselves in harm's way since, even
today, our culture's tolerance for young men who deviate from what we
deem masculine is limited, and our intolerance expresses itself in
singularly ugly ways. The great bind is that those boys who do not
resist, who choose or who are coerced to comply, do not escape either.
Avoiding attack from without, those who adopt the traditions of male
stoicism and "self-reliance" risk injury to the deepest and most alive
aspects of their own being. The consequence of opposition is
psychological and often physical brutality. The consequence of
compliance is emotional truncation, numbness, and isolation.
"Good-bye, Justin," I say as I drop my
thirteen-year-old off at school in the morning. Unlike his
ten-year-old brother, Alexander, Justin averts his face from my
farewell kiss, concerned that we will be observed. Though Justin is
ebullient and vivacious at home, his expression visibly hardens as the
low-slung school buildings come into view; his voice drops to a near
monotone. I watch my son dampen down, toughen up. I watch him try to
fit in. Despite his best efforts to hide his openness, older boys,
bullies, have picked up the scent of emotional vulnerability in him,
like a pheromone, and episodically over the years they have tortured
him for it. The school protects Justin, and his mother and I arm him,
as best we can. But in the mean game of inclusion/exclusion, ridicule
and praise, in the socialization fields of the playground, Justin
knows better than anyone that it is he alone who must make his way.
Who am I to tell my son that he should keep his heart open as he
threads his path to the classroom? And who am I to tell him that he
should not? I don't begrudge Justin the emotional armor he dons each
morning, the mask of feeling less, caring less, than he really does.
It just makes me sad.
In the voices of those I work with in therapy, the
men and women in the workshops I lead throughout the country, I hear a
hunger for a way out of the dilemma of traditional masculinity, a
roadmap toward something brighter, more whole.
If we weren't awake to the violence entwined with
masculinity before, startling eruptions like those in Littleton,
Colorado; Atlanta, Georgia; Santee, California, have made it difficult
to ignore. "The fears of the father are transferred to the son. It was
from my father to me and from me to my son. He already had it...I had
to take him with me." So wrote a seemingly normal Atlanta stockbroker
before he took his son's life, along with the lives of nine innocent
people.
The alarming rise in men's violence and in boys'
violence at first seems incomprehensible. But there is an old saying
in Alcoholics Anonymous: "Hurt people hurt people." The transmutation
of agony into rage, fear into attack, is neither foreign nor new to
manhood. As a teacher and practitioner of family therapy for the past
twenty years, I have seen the wages of what I call "toxic masculinity"
-- the legacies of drinking, womanizing, depression, and fury -- sweep
through whole generations like a fire in the wood, taking down
everyone in its path until one man in one generation is graced with
the courage to turn and face his demons, stemming the tide of injury
passed from father to son. I write this book as one contribution to
that force of courage and grace. I write as an emissary of a
revolution, with the express purpose of engaging as many of you as I
can to join in, to empower yourselves and those around you to shake
off the illusions we have lived within for centuries. For, surprising
as it might seem, what so profoundly alienates men is no different
than what has disenfranchised women -- the system of patriarchy.
When the term patriarchy first entered the
popular vernacular back in the 1960s and '70s, it conjured up images
of male chauvinist pigs and radical, angry, bra-burning women. It was
taken to mean the oppression of women by men. But early feminists like
Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem also understood that the dynamics
they unearthed did harm to both genders. The revolution of which I
consider myself an emissary stands on the ground laid by that
generation of women, and seeks to extend its insights.
In my work with men and women I distinguish between
political patriarchy, which is the sexism that has been the
target of most feminist writing, and what I term psychological
patriarchy. Psychological patriarchy goes beyond the relationship
between actual men and women -- as individuals or as a class.
Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed
"masculine" and "feminine" in which half of our human traits are
exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women
participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is
a "dance of contempt," a perverse form of connection that replaces
true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission,
collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of
relationship that has suffused Western civilization generation after
generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond
between them.
Here is the good news: the latest empirical research on both early
infant relations and on adult optimal health indicates that, as a
species, we are inherently wired for, and operate best in, a state of
active, authentic connectedness. Even the tiniest infants, both male
and female, show themselves eager, active participants in intimacy.
Studies demonstrate that young children are innately
connection-seeking, naturally sensitive readers of others' emotions,
inherently compassionate and honest. In another domain, research on
resilience, both physical and mental, reveals that rich authentic
connection is one of the most salient factors in continued good
health, outweighing such decisive forces as nutrition, exercise, even
the absence of smoking. We enter life whole and connected, and we
operate best when richly attached. Intimacy is our natural state as a
species, our birthright. And yet, while the push away from genuine
closeness occurs at different points in their development, and in
critically different ways, neither boys nor girls are allowed to
maintain healthy relatedness for very long.
As a culture, with no malevolent intent, following
strictures we have all been raised within, we force our children out
of the wholeness and connectedness in which they begin their lives.
Instead of cultivating intimacy, turning nascent aptitudes into mature
skills, we teach boys and girls, in complimentary ways, to bury their
deepest selves, to stop speaking, or attending to, the truth, to hold
in mistrust, or even in disdain, the state of closeness we all, by our
natures, most crave. We live in an antirelational,
vulnerability-despising culture, one that not only fails to nurture
the skills of connection but actively fears them. Few of us
have emerged from healthy, psychologically responsive families because
the patriarchal norms all families live within are profoundly skewed
against emotional sensitivity. While you may have your particular
story and I may have mine, what we most likely share is longing, a
sense of inner emptiness. Part of that emptiness is spiritual,
existential, our "human condition." But a great part of the troubling
sense of dis-ease comes from a profound missing of the abundant
well-being we find in authentic connection. The wound of being torn
from that state represents nothing less than the core environmental
contribution to most psychiatric and behavioral disorders. Some of us
react to this internal deficiency with depression, others with fear.
Some try to fill it with food, or erase it with achievement, or
alcohol, or desperate romance. Some of us feel victimized by our own
misery, projecting onto others the resources we lack and hating them
for it, lashing out in torrents of hurt, helpless, rage. We starve, we
glut, we kill ourselves, we kill others. We don black trenchcoats and
plan media-adoring shooting sprees. All in reaction to the great
deformity, the thing we should have gotten and did not get.
We enter life as children, the poet Wordsworth tells
us, "Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But
trailing clouds of Glory." The men and women whose stories I tell have
not forgotten that. Unwilling heroes, they are in crisis and, as any
family therapist knows, in crisis lies opportunity. Unlike some others
content to live lives of quieter desperation, these fortunate ones
have allowed themselves to be thrown to the wall. They have come to a
choice-point in which they must risk either change or disaster. It is
not uncommon for the men and women who enter my office to present
themselves initially as victims, but I see them as just the opposite.
In the core of their dissatisfaction, their refusal to "adjust," lie
unrecognized seeds of resistance. Angry, lonely, bruised, addicted,
they carry within themselves intimations of passion once possessed,
like clouds of glory, no matter how dimly recalled. And they share
this in common -- they want it back.
It is time to recognize that patriarchy does damage
not just to girls and women but also to boys and men, that the
psychological violence leveled against our children does harm to each
sex and renders sustained, truthful connection between the sexes
virtually impossible. It is time for men to come in from the cold. And
for a generation of women, who have labored so mightily to reclaim
their power, to now bring their full selves back into relationship
with their lovers and husbands. Men and women will not completely love
one another until both recover the state of integrity in which they
began their lives. From there, each must proceed to hone and nurture
qualities and skills that may well have stopped growing from the age
of three, four, or five. The cultivation of our nascent relational
skills is the kind of help all of us as children deserve but few of us
receive. Instead, girls are taught to submerge their own needs in the
service of others, while boys are taught to ignore their own and
anyone else's needs in the service of the great god, achievement.
A generation ago, women across the West united in an
unparalleled collective movement to support one another in reclaiming
the half of their humanity -- assertion, public competence,
independence -- that patriarchy denied them. Now, empowered, they are
insisting on levels of relational skill from their spouses that men
have in no way been prepared to deliver. They are also concerned for
their sons -- desperately wishing for means to help keep them intact,
and yet mistrustful of their own influence.
It is men's turn to recapture that half of our
humanity -- receptivity, emotional expressiveness, dependency -- that
has been denied to us. But the reclamation of wholeness is a process
even more fraught for men than it has been for women, more difficult,
and more profoundly threatening to the culture at large. The work of
relational recovery does not say "Men are intrinsically this, and
women are intrinsically that, so therefore one should learn to accept
or accommodate..." It says, "Most of what you have learned about being
a man, being a woman, being in love, is wrong. Throw it out! Go back
to the beginning! Turn your ear to a deeper, younger, voice that has
never left you...and learn."
Copyright © 2002 by Terrence Real
--From
How Can I Get Through to You : Reconnecting Men and Women, by
Terrence Real. © January 1, 2002 , Scribner used by permission.
Copyright 2001 Glenn
Sacks, all rights reserved
