"I Don't Want to Talk About It" by Terrence Real

Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

Curious Quotes from the Book

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

“The covertly depressed person cannot merely vault over the avoided pain directly into wholeness, as hard as he may try. The only real cure for covert depression is overt depression. Not until the man has stopped running, as David did for a moment that day in my office, or Thomas did when he let himself cry, can he grapple with the pain that has driven his behavior. This is why the “fix” of the compulsive defense never quite works. First, the covertly depressed man must walk through the fire from which he has run. He must allow the pain to surface. Then, he may resolve his hidden depression by learning about self-care and healthy esteem.”

“Men's willingness to downplay weakness and pain is so great that it has been named as a factor in their shorter life span. The ten years of difference in longevity between men and women turns out to have little to do with genes. Men wait longer to acknowledge that they are sick, take longer to get help, and once they get treatment do not comply with it as well as women do.”

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“An addict needs shame like a man dying of thirst needs salt water.”

“Through the mechanism of carried shame and carried feelings, the unresolved pain of previous generations operates in families like an emotional debt. We either face it or we leverage our children with it.”

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

“Those who do not turn to face their pain are prone to impose it.”

“And I loathed myself. I loathed myself for the state I was in. I loathed myself as an unlovable person. I felt there was something intrinsically monstrous about me, some rancid stink inside my soul that I had barely managed to cover over with the cheap perfume of my charm. I felt mostly dead and deserving of it. I had become an inanimate object to myself. I had somehow misplaced the knowledge that I was human.”

“The flight from shame into grandiosity lies at the heart of male covert depression.”

Cognition of the Book’s Main Idea

After treating men and their families for twenty years, psychotherapist Terrence Real has come to the conclusion that depression is a silent epidemic in males, and that men conceal their illness from friends, family, and even themselves in order to avoid the shame associated with melancholy's "un-manliness." Intimacy issues, workaholism, drinking, abusive conduct, and anger—problems that we tend to associate with men—are actually attempts to get out of despair. Additionally, these attempts at escape only harm the people that men care about and cause their disease to be passed on to their offspring.

The "pathway out of darkness" that these guys and their families are looking for is this groundbreaking book. Real shows how guys may uncover their suffering, get better, mend relationships, and end the cycle of abuse. As the father of two young sons and the son of a violent, depressive father, he blends insightful analysis with gripping anecdotes of his patients and even his own experiences with depression.

Until Tomorrow,

Jason Ziebarth (Founder Club255)

JZ#423