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By David B. Wexler
Source: When Good Men Behave Badly; Change your Behavior, Change your Relationship. (2004) By David B. Wexler. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.
Copyrighted and reprinted with permission by New Harbinger Publications.
In Russell Banks’s 1989 novel, Affliction, Wade Whitehouse plans a special Halloween weekend with his eleven-year-old daughter, Jill, who lives with her mother (Wade’s ex-wife, Lillian). Wade tries hard to make sure Jill has a good time, but he fails; Jill feels out of place at a Halloween party and she pleads with her father to take her home.
Wade’s feelings are hurt. What he sees reflected back to him through Jill’s distress is an unbearable reminder of his failure as a father. He is shamed by the fact that Jill is unhappy.
I need a drink, he thought. He had not believed he would tonight, but Jesus H. Christ, did he need a drink. That kid had made him all jumpy tonight. He did not know what the hell had gotten into Jill, but whatever it was, he had let it get into him too. It was only more of the same old stuff her mother had been putting out for years, he thought, and no matter where it came from, Jill or Lillian herself, it always had the same effect on Wade: it made him want to hang his head in shame and run. (25)
Feeling unsuccessful at making a child happy, or at making a partner happy, is hardly a unique experience. For Wade, however (and for many other men), this sense of incompetence elicits an unbearably painful feeling, and he desperately searches for some way to escape from the pain. Shame is at the center of his experience.
What does Wade do? Swimming in his own sense of incompetence, he turns on his daughter. He blames her for reflecting an image of himself that he cannot bear, treating her like the Greek messenger killed for bringing bad news. He becomes sarcastic. He blames her for ruining everything. When he discovers that she has called her mother to pick her up and take her home, Wade tells Jill that she can just sit and wait without him. She says, “Fine.” She tries to explain to him, “Don’t worry, I love you, Daddy, I do. But I want to go home” (29). She is a smart girl, trying to assuage her father’s worst unspoken fear. But it’s not enough.
As the scene unravels, Wade turns against his ex-wife and eventually pushes her husband. Why? What is the trigger? Only that his daughter wasn’t comfortable at the Halloween party. And he could not bear how this made him feel about himself.
What we have here is a case of a good man behaving badly: a man who has good values and meaningful aspirations, but who is too easily derailed by the experience of shame. And when he is shamed, some of the worst behaviors emerge, behaviors that do not fit with his image of himself and which only rarely emerge in the absence of this shame.
One man in a men’s group described it this way.
“I can’t stand it when my wife smokes. I see her smoking and I get sarcastic, tell her in front of our kids that she is a shitty mother. The big fight we had started over smoking. I tried to grab her cigarettes out of her hands and she started screaming at me. She never used to smoke. When we first got together, everything was so perfect. I know probably everybody feels that way, but it was so special to me. Now it’s just not the same. And I think that every time I see her smoking, it reminds me of how she’s changed, and how I don’t have the same feeling any more that I used to have.”
When he saw his wife smoking, it signaled his own failure. He wasn’t able to influence his wife in a positive way. He couldn’t shape her into a better role model for their kids. And what he once envisioned as perfect was no longer so. It was unbearable.
You may view this perspective on men’s behavior as unburdening us from responsibility for our own behavior, as if to say, “Oh, you poor guy, you never learned how to deal with emotions very well and you feel frustrated – what else can people expect from you?” Nothing could be further from the truth. When you learn about your internal triggers, you are in a much better position to truly take charge and take responsibility. You can be powerful – not over others, but over yourself.
Mirrors and Broken Mirrors
Glenn finds it hard to deal with the sense of loss over what once was.”The first four to six months we were together, I thought I was just walking on water. Everything I did was wonderful. Everything about me was cool. I felt great. It was almost like I looked at her and I would always feel great about myself. And then it all came crashing down. She doesn’t look at me the same way anymore. The kids demand a lot of attention. It’s like she doesn’t think I’m that great anymore. So now, I don’t even talk to her about a lot of things because they might upset her and mess up her picture of me even more – even when I know that she’ll get even madder at me later for lying to her. And then I get mad at her, like it’s her fault that I don’t feel like I walk on water anymore!”
When a man comes home to his wife and children, he expects that something will take place between them that will offer him a state of emotional well-being, or what is referred to in self psychology as a state of self-cohesion. The need for self-cohesion is primary. It originates in the interaction between the young child and the most central attachment figure, usually the mother. The child has a compelling need to look into the face of his mother and see reflected back to him eyes that say You are wonderful and a smile that says You make me happy.
The Good Mirror
This is his magic mirror, and the figure in the mirror is known in self psychology theory as the mirroring selfobject. A selfobject is another person (or place, activity, or special object) that functions to keep us feeling cohesive. The self psychology theory of normal child development described by Shapiro (1995) states that all children, at regular points in their development, need validation and acknowledgment from parental figures; these figures serve as the mirroring selfobjects. Over time, if the child experiences these positive interactions, he develops the capacity to feel pride and take pleasure in his accomplishments – to feel competent, valuable, and worthy of appreciation.
When a child looks into the eyes of his parent and sees reflected back to him a loving and approving look, his basic sense of himself is deeply validated. He feels alive and worthy.
When you, as an adult male in a relationship, look into the eyes of your partner and see reflected back to you a look of love and delight and profound respect, you likewise feel alive and worthy.
This process is, of course, not fundamentally any different for women than it is for men. It’s just that men are typically less aware of how powerful these needs are and more likely to withdraw or act out when the needs are not met. And men ascribe a special power to the women in their lives to validate their self-worth.
Broken Mirrors
Children who are deprived of these essential responses, or who are instead subjected to criticism and ridicule for their efforts to achieve, become arrested in their development of an internal sense of confidence and competence. As adults, they are always looking to some outside source of approval or recognition (mirroring). But no mother, no father, no teacher, no coach, and no therapist ever provides the perfect mirror. A child’s mirroring figures, as we all know rather too well, may be quite fragmented themselves and have little capacity to offer the loving and confidence-enhancing reflection that the child desperately requires. Or, in some cases, there is a mismatch between child and mirror-figure such that the child eternally feels a lack of understanding, a dearth of genuine appreciation, and a fundamental gap in attunement. Even in the best of situations, the mirroring can be experienced as incomplete. The child thus develops gaps in his sense of self: he mistrusts and disrespects his own internal signals and states; he doubts his own self-worth and competence. He desperately turns elsewhere for validation and he becomes excessively sensitized to signals that might suggest that he is unappreciated, unneeded, or unsuccessful.
The reflection offered by women as the mirrors in a man’s life are especially powerful. You may find that you crave mirroring and that, as the relationship with your partner moves on, your wife and the life you have together have not sufficiently made up for what you have never quite fully received. Or at least what has never become a solid and reasonably resilient part of your personality. When your partner seems more interested in talking to her sister than to you, or when your sex life wanes, you may become fragmented. The mirroring selfobject – at least in its positive form – has disappeared from your experience. When these responses are not forthcoming, you may be unable to maintain your sense of self-worth, self-esteem, or personal value. Various behaviors reflecting this fragmentation may ensue: gambling, substance abuse, reckless sexual behavior, aggression, impulsive actions, or workaholism; or simply pouting, emotional shutdown, sarcasm, or passive-aggressive behavior. You have to do something to escape emotionally, discharge the tension, or regain a sense of control and importance.
Ernest Becker, in his 1973 book The Denial of Death, describes a broken mirror phenomenon. Here, it is not so much that the mirror reflects back a picture of us that is an injury; instead we see a broken mirror when our loved ones, and anyone else who seems to represent us in some way, turns out to be imperfect. If your wife or your kids (or, for that matter, your employees) are flawed, what does that say about you?
When we look for the “perfect” human object we are looking for someone who allows us to express our will completely, without any frustration or false notes. We want an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. But no human object can do this; humans have wills and counter-wills of their own, in a thousand ways they can move against us, their very appetites offend us…If a woman loses her beauty, or shows that she doesn’t have the strength and dependability that we once thought she did, or loses her intellectual sharpness, or falls short of our own peculiar needs in any of a thousand ways, then all the investment we have made in her is undermined…We get back a reflection from our loved objects that is less than the grandeur and perfection that we need to nourish ourselves. We feel diminished by their human shortcomings…For this reason, too, we often attack loved ones and try to bring them down to size. (166–69)
Since the perfect mirroring inevitably wears off to some degree, even in the best of relationships, the man who especially needs selfobject mirroring is doomed to a cracking of the mirror and a cracking of the self. It is this experience which you must identify and own if you have problems in your relationship with your partner or children. You need to understand the origin of this unrest and resentment so you can position yourself to take responsibility for it. As with most other psychological experiences, once you identify and make sense of your distress, a profound organizing effect takes place which allows you to respond more maturely and appropriately to the genuine problem.
Broken Mirrors and Acting Out
A breakdown in the mirroring experience can be the trigger for desperate and often destructive acts. Try thinking of this emotional injury in terms of the experience of parents who behave badly toward their kids, which is parallel to the experience of the frustrated, verbally abusive husband (White and Weiner 1986). The parent experiences an emotional injury. He experiences his inability to make his child react as if she were part of him and really knew what he wanted as an assault to his sense of self. Here, the mirroring selfobject function is extremely important and quite fragile. So long as a child (or partner) provides the appreciation needed, the father’s self-esteem is maintained. When the applause fails, his internal experience of the self begins to fragment and tremble. The father needs to be respected and obeyed and made to feel worthwhile; when he does not see that positive reflection in the interpersonal mirror, he is left feeling vulnerable, helpless, and outraged.
It happens to the best of us. One time my fifteen-year-old daughter sat through a lecture I gave in San Jose, California, in which I showed the film clip from Affliction where Wade Whitehouse turns against his daughter. Right after this presentation, my family headed off to the Santa Cruz boardwalk. I had been planning this for a long time as a special treat for my kids, and I knew they would really like it. My daughter, however, copped an attitude and complained that this was really kind of boring. I became defensive, and I said to her, “I planned this for you, and it’s like nothing’s going to make you happy!” She looked at me and calmly said, “Dad, you sound just like that dad in Affliction.” I was busted, and she was right.
Listen to what my client Casey says, describing how he blows up and puts his wife down.
“I’ve been married ten years. The first six years were picture-perfect. We had little spats, but that was all. But then this thing called parenthood came along. She was more critical of me, plus the heat from my career got way turned up. And she just got more and more of an attitude. And I’m thinking, “You’re not the only one entitled to have an attitude.” I became the sole breadwinner, and instead of making her an equal partner in our lives, my father came out of me.
I just became my dad! Instead of looking at the fact that she was stressed out, I just blew up. I never hit her or anything. I just put her down, blamed her for everything. Everything that I had said I would never do, I did anyway!”
Here’s an example from my own experience to help expand our understanding of this broken mirror phenomenon from the more extreme to the daily and trivial. Despite the difference in severity, these examples are all fundamentally alike and reflect fundamentally similar psychological process.
On a leisurely Saturday afternoon, I returned home from food shopping, put the groceries on the kitchen counter, and headed off to my daughter’s room to say hello. She was sitting and reading a magazine. She looked up at me with one of her beaming smiles. This is a terrific mirror.
Then I looked around her room. World War III had descended: clothes everywhere, books and papers strewn – all parents know this story. I shook my head and smiled and said, “So when’s the maid coming?” I knew better. My wife and I had made a firm pact to leave the issue of the damn room alone and, like all intelligent parents, keep our battles to the big ones. But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
My daughter’s smile turned to ice. She glazed over and gave me a dismissive wave. I left, feeling stupid. And injured. Her glazed and scornful look was the broken mirror, and it reflected back a picture of myself that I did not like.
So I walked into the kitchen, where my wife was putting away some of the groceries. She said casually, “Oh, I wanted those little yogurts. The ones you bought are too big.” On the scale of nasty and critical comments, with 100 being horribly insulting, this was about an 11. But I exploded nevertheless. “Fine! You don’t like the way I shop, I’ll just do it all over again. Give me those yogurts! Give me the receipt! I’m going right back there and getting them exactly the way you want them!” My wife looked at me and said, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
I stormed out to the store. I came back in a huff, slamming the door, new yogurt in hand. My wife was sitting on the couch. She calmly repeated, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
We talked for a while, and it all fell into place. I was injured by the broken mirror experience with my daughter. And this catapulted me into an emotionally vulnerable state in which another even extremely minor injury was likely to be overinterpreted, overpersonalized, and overreacted to.
This is the process that most good men behaving badly go through. If you see yourself behaving badly in relationship, try to go the source: Which mirror has broken? Where is the emotional injury that set the stage for this? Again, this does not absolve you of responsibility. Instead, it is a way for you to become even more emotionally intelligent and ultimately more responsible.
Disappointment and Dysphoria
Some disappointment like this is inevitable, given the limits of human relationships. The problem with the man who behaves badly with his partner or children is that he has mistaken the flood of good feelings that comes from a close relationship with a promise that the good mirror will always shine. So if, in your eyes, the mirror breaks, then your sense of self shatters, and you blame the mirror. Because she promised.
Wade Whitehouse reflects: “There was nothing wrong back then, nothing, or so it seemed then…Those were wonderful times, he thought, truly wonderful times. After that, things all of a sudden started going wrong. They were only kids, he and Lillian, and they did not know how to repair anything, so when something in the marriage broke, they just went out and got divorced” (26).
Dysphoria is a depressed mood state, the opposite of euphoria. Some men, like Wade Whitehouse and my client Casey, plagued with the dysphoria of the broken mirror, turn overtly against the people closest to them. Others simply turn to whatever they can find to help them cope with the gnawing emptiness.
Eduardo, married with three young children, engaged in compulsive sexual behavior. He was drawn to secret, anonymous, and depressing encounters with gay men in porn store booths. Eduardo, a wonderful family man and great provider, was a very good man acting badly – toward his wife, his family, and himself. But it was essential for him to make sense of the fundamental needs that he was seeking to fulfill with his compulsive sexuality. “The guys there feed my ego. They are very complimentary – I don’t get too much of that at home. And the ones I am drawn to are the guys who are married, like me. We’re exactly alike, looking for the same thing in the same place.”
Eduardo sounds like an addict. He hates what he is doing, but he feels compelled. It is the only way he has discovered to temporarily repair the effects of the broken mirror.
Exercise: Facing the Broken Mirror The next time you notice yourself doing whatever it is you do that gets in the way of your relationship (pouting, becoming sarcastic, acting like a martyr, yelling, getting critical, withdrawing), try to figure out what kind of broken mirror experience preceded this.
Perception and Reaction
If you behave badly in a relationship, it is typically the case that you have experienced a fundamental emotional injury or mirroring breakdown preceding this outbreak. Something has gone wrong. Your feelings have been hurt. Your self-esteem has been diminished. You feel unimportant, or devalued, or disregarded, or rejected, or powerless, or helpless. These emotional states challenge your sense of masculinity. You enter a mood which, unchecked, leads you unconsciously down a slippery slope of toxic self-talk, dysphoric emotions, and dysfunctional behaviors.
Misattributions
The research of Holtzworth-Munroe and Hutchinson (1993) is particularly illuminating here. They examined the misattributions (flawed descriptions of why behavior is occurring) of men who abuse their wives compared to nonabusive men. They found that violent husbands were much more likely to attribute the most negative intentions to their wives’ behavior. When presented vignettes of situations like a wife talking to another man at a party or a wife who was not interested in sex on a particular night, these men were much more likely to be convinced that she was trying to make the man angry, hurt his feelings, put him down, get something for herself, or pick a fight. The researchers also found that when the men perceived a situation of abandonment or rejection, they were particularly likely to respond with bad behavior. These are emotional injuries to these men, and like all emotional injuries, they are strictly governed by the cognitive interpretation of the event. A nonabusive husband might interpret the same situation in a different, more benign way. If his wife were spending a lot of time talking to another man at a party, he might be a little irritated at her, or he might make nothing of it, or he might actually feel pleased that she was attractive and popular and having a good time.
Even among men who are not violent, these misattributions can dominate. Devin, a man in one of my groups, described an argument he had with his wife. On Monday night (the night of the week especially significant because it was football season), he came home from work to find his wife exhausted and depressed. She told him she was really feeling down and just didn’t have the energy to put dinner together. So, being a good guy, he told her not to worry and proceeded to fry up some chicken and bake a couple of potatoes. He cooked while trying to watch the football game, which was a sacrifice for him.
When he proudly presented her with dinner and sat down to watch the game, she sat and ate just a few bites. Then she pushed the food aside and said that she wasn’t really all that hungry.
Devin did not blow up (a significant step forward for him), even though he was telling himself this story: What the hell? I bust my ass to take care of her and then it turns out she wasn’t really hungry in the first place! That woman is just yanking my chain!
Independent Center of Initiative
In Devin’s eyes, at that moment, his wife was allowed no independent center of initiative, the term used in self psychology to recognize that the other person has his or her own independent reasons for making a decision – reasons that have nothing to do with you! Although Devin couldn’t see it at the time, his wife was making a decision based on other factors besides how her decision would affect him.
After his wife stopped eating, Devin just got very quiet and withdrawn. His wife knew he was upset. Later that night she tried to talk about it with him, and she explained (again!) that she was trying out some new birth control pills which were really messing up her appetite. She had cravings, then lost her appetite unpredictably.
Since this relationship had a fundamentally positive foundation, and since Devin fundamentally wished the best for his wife, and since he fundamentally believed that she was not someone whose primary motivation was to mess with his head, this new information was a relief to him. He no longer had to interpret her behavior as an act of disrespect or manipulation. His wife had her own independent reasons for behaving the way that she did.
We hear the same theme when listening to Paul. “My wife wanted to take this job where it takes her on the road for weeks at a time, sometimes a few months. This is not what she promised me when we got married! This is breaking her vows! And why would she do this when she knows how much this means to me and how much it affects me? What it means is that she just doesn’t care!”
Paul was making a couple of mistakes in his thinking. He could not recognize Karla’s independent center of initiative. All he could see was the way her decision was affecting him – and since it was affecting him, she must be intending for it to affect him. He was interpreting Karla’s personal decision as a sign that she didn’t care about him or respect him. And he was unable to recognize that he was getting what he had always said he wanted: for Karla to be more expressive and assertive about what she wanted and needed.
“The night after I blew up at her and we had this big fight, I decided that I really wanted to try and make things better. I came home and I said to her, “C’mon, honey, let’s both go for a walk. Let’s spend some time together.” She said, “Okay, I’ll go for a walk, but I don’t want to talk about our relationship. You get too upset when we try to do that and I don’t want to go there.” So I’m thinking that I don’t need this shit, these restrictions on what I can talk about and what I can’t. I just said “fuck it” and we never even went for the walk.”
So what happened when Karla put this restriction on the walk? She simply made it clear what her needs and boundaries were, based on what she had just experienced from Paul the day before. And all he could recognize was that he was being “victimized” by her: another misattribution.
Men’s Powerlessness
Researchers like John Gottman (1994) have described the experience of powerlessness that men have in difficult interpersonal relationships. Many men – especially those who withdraw, escape, become critical, or become abusive – have very low tolerance for difficult or aversive feelings. When they experience some emotional injury or discomfort, they feel overwhelmed. A mistake may lead to shame, frustration to helplessness, emotional distance to loneliness. In this model, men do whatever it takes to defend against these extremely dysphoric states. They may behave with passivity, placating or apologizing excessively just to keep the peace. Or they may take a more active approach, as men in our culture tend to do: lashing out at the person who seems to be causing this pain, engaging in controlling behavior to eliminate the sources of discomfort, abusing substances as an escape from the feelings, acting out recklessly through sexual escapades or dangerous driving, or taking bold but impulsive action to provide some relief. The problem behaviors run the gamut from sarcasm, emotional withdrawal, and passive-aggressive behavior all the way to substance abuse and domestic violence.
In another novel by Russell Banks, Continental Drift (1994), Bob Dubois’s story reflects this kind of male experience. At a time when his family’s financial life is unraveling, Bob heads off to get some shrimp nets to catch shrimp for family meals. In the tackle store, he runs into the legendary baseball star Ted Williams. Since Bob grew up in Boston, this is equivalent to meeting the pope.
When he comes home, he is in a daze from this experience and he has completely forgotten about the shrimp nets. He tries to explain to his wife, Elaine, about how magical this experience has been. Bob’s speech is very moving, reminiscing about days spent with his father as a youth. Elaine is politely uninterested and is more concerned about dinner, the kids, and her impending announcement that she has taken on a part-time job to help out with the finances.
“Bob,” Elaine says, interrupting him. “We have to talk.”
“Yeah?” He whips out his cigarettes and lights one, and his hands are trembling. “Everybody seems to want to have a fucking talk with me these days…I can’t even come in here and get a little excited about seeing my goddamned childhood hero, a man who’s a fucking god to me, without you bringing me down for it!”
“All I said was…”
“All you said was, ‘I want to have a talk with you,’ in that damned accusing way of yours, as if I was a fucking little kid, like you’re going to tell me what’s what and how it’s all my fault! I know already what you got to say to me! …You want to tell me what I already know. You want to tell me what shit this all is. Shit. This…whole damned life.” (269–70)
Bob hears nothing but potential shame in what Elaine apparently wants to talk about. Elaine is a broken mirror to him, despite whatever it is she is trying to do or really wants to talk about. She is stunned by his description of their life together.
“Is it? You feel that way about it?”
He remains silent for a second. “Yeah. It’s shit. All of it, shit, shit, shit. And now you want to tell me how it’s all my fault,” he says in a low, cold voice. “You like doing that, telling me how it’s all my fault…. Well, you didn’t want me to go on shrimping anyhow. All you do is bring me down about things I get excited about. You, you never get excited about anything anymore. All you do is mope around here with a long face.” He crosses to the television set and snaps it off. “I hate that fucking thing!” (270–71)
Although it may not appear so from this scene, Bob is a man with strong family values, emotional sensitivity, and a vision of a good life that he desperately wants to provide for himself and his family. But, as this scene illustrates, he is very vulnerable to careening off course when he feels dismayed about his own self-worth. This is a classic broken mirror story. Bob sees reflected back an image of himself that is not appealing: his bank account is nonexistent, his wife is forced to take a job, the TV set is blaring, his daughter sucks her thumb, and his wife doesn’t show enough damned interest in an experience that was so precious to him. She is not mirroring the positive, worthy-of-appreciation self that she once did.
And thus, in Bob’s mind, it becomes her fault.
In this state, under these circumstances, Bob perceives his wife only as a potential mirror figure, with zero independent center of initiative. This means that, at that moment, all that matters to him is what she can offer him to make him feel better. Elaine’s behavior, feelings, and independent center of initiative are peripheral to his need for self-cohesion: he will do anything it takes to avoid the dysphoria and regain some measure of well-being. For some men, this means gaining control over someone else. And, for some men, this means emotional, verbal, or even physical abuse.
Searching for Twinship
The twinship selfobject is parallel to the mirroring selfobject, referring to the need we all have to be members of the same club or clan, to feel that we are all in this together. Like the experience of mirroring, the twinship experience can be deeply emotionally fulfilling. In moderate doses – like moderate doses of mirroring – this is one of the most human and enriching experiences of all. It helps provide self-cohesion. But the longing for this, if you’re feeling deprived of it, can catapult you into destructive behavior patterns. Consider Eduardo, whose inner emptiness led him to a desperate and shameful search for twinship. It is especially interesting to pay attention to his description of one of the key positive ingredients of this experience: “We’re exactly alike, looking for the same thing in the same place.”
The healthy awareness of the need for twinship would allow you to say to your wife or partner, You know, I feel really lost sometimes without all the special times we used to have together. It just seems like having kids and getting used to each other and money problems have really taken their toll. I guess you must feel the same way. Here you, as a man, shift from needing your partner to be a mirror reflecting you to recognizing the ways in which the two of you are profoundly alike. She is no longer the enemy, but rather a comrade along the difficult road of life. A comrade who is inevitably flawed, but no more fundamentally flawed than you.
Elaine has an intuitive sense about the power of twinship experiences. She tries to defuse Bob and engage him from this point of view. “Bob, you can’t hear yourself, or you’d shut up. Can you listen to me for a minute?…Now, you listen to me for a few minutes. I know you’re working hard, as hard as anyone can. And I know you’re worried and scared. Like I am. And you’re right, it’s true, this life is shit,” she says (271–72).
She proceeds to tell Bob about some of the plans she has developed to help them get out of this bad situation: her job and counseling for one of their daughters. Unfortunately, Elaine is too late. Her attempts to get them involved in solving these problems together, as “twins,” fails because of Bob’s emotional disarray. He hears and sees only failure and self-blame, and he unravels even more.
Exercise: We’re in This Together
Here are some examples of blaming statements converted into twinship statements. As you review these, think of situations when you have made blaming statements to your wife or partner and consider how you might have been able to convert them into twinship statements instead.
Blaming Statements
Twinship Statements
When you think about your relationship as a twinship experience, you are less likely to feel resentful and victimized. Remember that our universal longing for twinship also means that twinship statements are much less likely to lead to defensive responses from your partner.
Shame, Shame, Shame
According to psychologist Donald Dutton (1995), male shame comes from public exposure of one’s vulnerability. The whole self feels bad. If you were a boy whose father engaged in a pattern of shaming you, you can probably figure that your father was desperately attempting to bolster or reassure his own shaky sense of self. Or maybe it was just force of habit, based on what was modeled for him. Regardless, for the boy, who needs to feel loved by this main source of his male identity, it is a series of crushing blows.
Shame-o-phobia
Men who have been exposed to shame will do anything to avoid it in the future. If you were shamed as a boy, your radar is probably hypersensitive to the possibility of humiliation, and you may be almost phobic in your reactions. You may tend to project blame and perceive the worst in others. Tragically, you are especially desperate for affection and approval, but you cannot ask for it. Sometimes the smallest signs of withdrawal of affection will activate your old wounds, and you lash out at the perceived source of this new wound. You can describe none of these feelings; you don’t even know where they have come from.
A number of different researchers, clinicians, and writers have developed paradigms to understand this pattern in male psychology. Terrence Real (1997) describes the “silent epidemic” of male depression, in which men who have been repeatedly shamed about their emotional states and genuine needs turn to various forms of “addictive” behavioral patterns to escape the intolerable negative emotions. He identifies the source of this condition as “the loss of the relational…that wound in boys’ lives that sets up their vulnerability to depression as men” (137). This relational impoverishment creates the base for the feelings of shame, worthlessness, and emptiness that haunt many men.
Shame and Acting Out
In the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, Will (played by Matt Damon) is a young man deeply shamed by the abuse in his past. He struggles to form a relationship with an intelligent, emotionally mature young woman, Skylar (played by Minnie Driver), who falls deeply in love with him. But his shame keeps him hidden and holds him back. When she suggests to him that he move out to California with her, he withdraws and refuses. She challenges him to tell her why and to let her know more about himself. What could have been, and should have been, a very positive mirroring experience (It feels so good to have this great woman confirm her love for me and her belief in me!) instead becomes a trigger for shame.
Will tells her he can’t go. Why? Because he has a job here. Because he lives here. When Skylar, hurt and confused, asks him to tell her what he is so scared of, Will starts to unravel. He wildly, defensively, recklessly accuses her of using him for a “fling” before she marries “some rich prick your parents’ll approve of!” Skylar dishes it back, demanding he be truthful with her. Will opens the faucet and it all comes gushing out: He doesn’t really have twelve brothers. He’s an orphan. He had cigarettes put out on him when he was a kid. His scar was not from surgery – the “motherfuckers” stabbed him!
And Will, in his shame and his fear of dealing with traumatic memories and his terror that nobody like Skylar could possibly love him with all that he has been through and all that he has done, loses it. He pushes her against the door, slams his hand against the wall, screams in her face. He yells at her that he doesn’t need her help and demands that she never “bullshit” him.
And then, the unkindest cut of all. After she challenges him to tell her that she doesn’t love him, he does just that. His face, enraged a moment ago, goes cold. He tells Skylar, “I don’t love you,” leaving Skylar collapsed in tears.
Will cannot bear to do what seems like such an obvious solution to his pain and alienation: Talk to her. Tell her about his inner world and what he has experienced. Trust that she will be brought closer to him rather than pushed further away. He cannot bring himself to do it. The immediate pain is too great, and it drives him to acting badly. The greatest injury he inflicts is not the defensiveness or the yelling or even slamming his hand right next to her face. It is the emotional shutdown and the emotional cruelty of I don’t love you. Will is a good man acting badly.
Will and other men like him – men who are terrified of taking emotional risks – can and often do find a way to take a chance and rise above their troubled past. Even when faced with the possibility of experiencing shame, you can choose to relate rather than withdraw, to offer your heart rather than shut it down.
Michael, a man who felt profoundly injured when his wife turned him down for sex, yelled at his wife and became mercilessly sarcastic with her. He told me about his propensity for shame. “I never knew my father. He left when I was one, then occasionally reappeared but never followed through on anything. My mother remarried a jerk. My older brother, a half-brother, he always made me feel worthless. He was a put-down artist. Now it’s so easy for me to feel put down by my wife. And now I feel even more shamed for what I have done to her. I can’t look her in the eye sometimes. I go to church and can’t walk in the building because I have done so many things so wrong.”
Like victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, men like Will Hunting and Michael experience waves of shame when a current situation even remotely resembles the shame-producing experiences of the past. But that was then, and this is now, and it is your job to learn the difference.
Men’s Patterns, Men’s Futures
All of these themes coalesce into a complex yet clear description of the ways that so many of us malfunction in relationships: The intolerable “nonmasculine” emotions put such unbearable psychological pressure on us that we feel compelled to do something immediate and powerful to escape from the pain. We drink, we criticize, we seek ungratifying sex, we gamble, we fight, we emotionally withdraw, we avoid. And we often turn our negativity on the perceived source of the bad feelings: the women and children in our lives.
This book is designed to help you identify and respect the emotional states that trigger your relationship problems and then to lead you into new ways of responding. This approach employs a self psychological perspective in helping you recognize the fundamental – and valid – emotional needs that you were experiencing when you made the behavioral decision which turned out to have destructive or self-destructive consequences. You can become less defensive by recognizing and validating your tender spots and by celebrating what is good and strong and heroic about being male.
The implications of this are profound. Your ability to genuinely understand your own unmet needs for mirroring and affirmation is potentially of tremendous value. The selfobject needs of good men behaving badly are valid. By recognizing that your choices about behavior are guided by your need for self-cohesion and control over your sense of self (not necessarily over another person), you can gain a new, deeply respectful perspective and learn to express your needs in more acceptable and effective ways.
As you read through this book, you will learn about the particular power that men ascribe to women, and the ways in which the modeling of masculinity generates a powerful legacy from father to son and again from father to son – and ways to break the cycle. We’ll take a look at the corollary issue of the male peer culture influence. You will learn to appreciate the soft underbellies of even the most emotionally guarded men. You’ll learn about the male brain and male neuropsychological functioning, which in some ways is not well adapted to the demands of modern relationships. You will also learn the latest research about issues particular to midlife which affect men and often lead us into emotional disarray and to acting badly.
Perhaps most significantly, this book will offer example after example of men’s success stories. The story of Odysseus will show the paths with heart which men are capable of choosing. A series of structured exercises will help you transfer the concepts from this book into your everyday life and the everyday lives of the men around you.
Those of you who are not men (otherwise known as women) will learn to recognize men who are dangerous and not likely to have a tender heart within. You will also learn ways to help bring out the good man and even tips on how to raise boys to be the best possible good men they can be.
Your job as a man, or as someone affected by men, or as someone trying to help men, is to understand the patterns of response to emotional pain and to develop a new narrative of yourself and a new set of tools for coping with these very human experiences. The perspective from clinicians like Terrence Real, from novelists like Russell Banks, and from the self psychology perspective – all of which emphasize the breakdowns in self-cohesion leading to damaging behavior – offers us a map.