September 22, 2002
A while ago, I mentioned reading two books by an author whom Jeneane Sessum had cited in her blog: psychotherapist Dr. Terrence Real.
Here’s another quote that struck a meaningful chord for me (from I Don’t Want to Talk About It – Overcoming the secret legacy of male depression) because it also seems to be true of some females.
Boys learn that the game [of success] requires fierce loyalty to those on the inside of the circle. But the outsiders, those judged weak or lacking, one must be willing to betray. Most boys learn the precise nature and extent of the cruelty leveled against deviants, because they themselves experience both sides. They learn to betray the humanity in others – the fat boys, the effeminate boys… as a way of protecting themselves, and I so doing, they also learn to disconnect from their own humanity, their own compassionate hearts. This is the most fundamental damage of false empowerment.
Real’s other book, How Can I Get Through to You – Reconnecting Men and Women is chock full of stuff I’d like to quote – not because he puts the onus to change on men (which he does) but because his analyses and case studies almost exactly reflect what I have experienced in my personal relationships with men, including sons and lovers. And he also makes it clear that his motivation to write the book has everything to do with his own experiences that Our cultural upbringing has not left us so ill equipped that we are prevented from falling in love. But a great many of us emerge as adults unprepared for the task of staying in love.
Real makes it clear that The first thing to notice about the current crisis is that it is not triggered because of changes in the man, nor even changes in both of them. It is women…..
Using various data sources, he describes the effects on relationships by women changing to expect more from life than they have historically been allowed.
He says:
At the political level, men throughout history have claimed rights for themselves that they have, in most cultures, been loath to grant women – the right to vote, to have access to education, to own property, to not be someone’s property. But at the psychological level, the dynamic of patriarchy stretches beyond the oppression of women by men.
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Psychological patriarchy – the devaluing of the ‘”feminine” in oneself and other coupled with an instinct to protect the “masculine,” even at great cost to oneself and others, has brought incalculable damage to families across generations…..Most men understand, having bumped up against their partner’s complaints at home and against new codes of behavior at work, that the rug has been pulled out beneath them. But rather than take it in, many men, in both their public and private lives, read women’ s chronic dissatisfaction simply as confirmation that they are an irrational and insatiable breed.
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Psychological patriarchy determines the relationship between two sets of human qualities…..On the “masculine” side lie such qualities as strength, logic, aggression, anti-dependence, goal orientation, and insensitivity. On the “feminine” side lie such qualities as weakness, emotion, yielding, dependence, process orientation, and over-sensitivity …..Which one of these two sides is healthy? Neither.
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Psychologically whole human beings, who could be both tender and tough, depending on the circumstances, proved to have the best mental health…… After years of research, it turns out that what makes for highly adaptive people is their capacity to…adapt.
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The latest research on boys and their development tells us that, despite our raised consciousness and good intentions, boys today, no less eager than before, are permeated with an inescapable set of highly constricting rules. Those boy 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 consequence of opposition is psychological and often physical brutality. The consequence of compliance is emotional truncation, numbness, and isolation.
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The essential madness of the patriarchal vision is the delusion of dominance, what pioneer feminist psychologist Jean Baker Miller has called the “power over” model of relationship, as distinct from a model of “being with.” It is the hubris of viewing ourselves as above our surroundings, rather than as a part of them.
I have a female friend (who is in a two-year relationship with a man who seems like a nice guy and he obviously loves her; according to her, he also seems depressed, narrow in his interests etc.) who says she's not going to cut him any more slack and that she's not the one who's going to read any more books on relationships. He's either going to do the work or she's moving on. In other words, he'd better adjust to who she has become. I know a lot of women near my age who feel the same. I think it might be that we just got tired of doing most of the adapting to the needs of all the other people in our lives.
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