I Don't Want to Talk About It Overcoming the Secret Legacy

of Male Depression

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Praise for I Don’ Want to Talk About It

“This is a sobering, powerful book about male depression both

‘covert’ and ‘overt.’ The book moves on to new ground both in
language and story. I Don’t Want to Talk About It is exhilarating in
its honesty and grief; it moves forward like a hurricane.”

—Robert Bly

“The most provocative in a flood of new books on depression… .

The only volume that speaks exclusively to and about depressed
men.”

—Pamela Warrick, Los Angeles Times

“Even in this era of managed care and Prozac, therapy is still an

art. Mr. Real emerges in this book as an artist who plays his theories
with the passion and skill of Isaac Stern in concert.”

—Dallas Morning News

“A tour-de-force, this landmark book uncovers a hidden epidemic

with devastating effects. In an elegant novelistic style, Terrence Real
traces the shadow of male depression from father to son. And in a
bold, courageous way, he tells his own story of trauma and recovery,
which shines like a golden thread throughout the book.”

—Connie Zweig, Ph.D., author of Romancing the Shadow

“Riveting reading. You pick it up and can’t put it down… . I

Don’t Want to Talk About It could get you started on a conversation
with yourself that would allow you to shed a burden you’ve been
carrying a longtime.”

—Jane Tompkins, The Raleigh News & Observer

 “Terry Real writes with understanding and compassion for his
own father, for himself as a father of young sons, and for the many
men in his practice whose stories he tells. Like a good novel, I Don’t
Want to Talk About It pulls you in and keeps you reading.
Beautifully written; it’s an important book for all of us.”

—Olga Silverstein, author of The Courage to Raise Good Men

“Boys in our culture are taught that real men are stoic. The ability
to not complain, endure pain, and strive in the face of adversity is
admired and celebrated in story and song. The price paid for this
isolation is depression. Terry Real has produced a seminal work that
is likely to be the text of choice for therapists and patients for many
years.”

—Pia Mellody, author of Facing Love Addiction and Facing Co-

Dependence

“Clear, compelling … strongly reasoned… . The book is wise

beyond its stated scope: in setting up a model, nature, and etiology
and treatment of male depression, Real ends up offering—with some
gender variants—an almost universal paradigm.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This is a very beautiful book, one that can help a multitude of

men, women, and children. Written with grace and graced with
humor, I Don’t Want to Talk About It goes down as smoothly as a
sigh, but it carries the power to change your life.”

—Edward Hallowell, M.D., author of When You Worry About the Child You
Love and Driven to Distraction

“An absorbing and informative look at the hidden long-term

depression that constricts or undermines the relationships of many
American men… . An important and rewarding work.”
—Kirkus
SCRIBNER
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1997 by Terry Real

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in

any form.

First Scribner trade paperback edition 2003

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA,

Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
Simon & Schuster Special Sales: 1-800-456-6798 or
[email protected]

DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Manufactured in the United States of America

15 17 19 20 18 16

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Scribner edition as follows:

Real, Terrence.

I don’t want to talk about it : overcoming the secret legacy of male

depression / Terrence Real.—1st Fireside ed.
p. cm.

Includes index.

1. Depression, Mental. 2. Men—Mental health. 3. Masculinity. I. Title.

[RC537.R39 1998]

616.85′27′0081—dc21 97-39236 CIP

ISBN 0-684-83102-3
ISBN 978-0-6848-3539-6
eISBN 978-0-684-86539-3

0-684-83539-8 (Pbk)

“History” copyright Richard Hoffman. Permission to reprint granted by

author.

“Sometimes a Man Stands Up” from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria

Rilke, edited and translated by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1981 by Robert
Bly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
With gratitude this book is dedicated to my wife, BELINDA BERMAN, and our
sons, JUSTIN and ALEXANDER, who remind me that hope is the remembrance
of the future.

The pebble my son

spraypainted gold
rests in my palm, a gift,
and he asks in a clear, high
temporary voice
who taught me my life
is base and needs great pain
to turn itself into gold?
And who taught them?
And for what, and whose, reasons?

—RICHARD HOFFMAN, History

Let the dead pray for their own dead.

—JAMES WRIGHT, Inscriptions for the Tank

 Author’s Note

All of the cases described in this book are composites. They have been
deliberately scrambled in order to protect my clients’ rights of
confidentiality and privacy. No client found in this book corresponds to any
actual person, living or dead.
 Acknowledgments

It is fitting that this book, with its emphasis on men’s relationships, should
owe so much to so many. The thoughts presented here would not have been
possible were it not for the genius of two very different women, Olga
Silverstein and Pia Mellody, each a legendary figure in her field. I borrowed
Olga’s daring in abandoning current theories of male development. It was
she who first conceived of this book at all, and I see it as a companion to
her superb treatment of mothers and sons, The Courage to Raise Good Men.
As with Olga, my debt to Pia is obvious throughout the book. Not only has
her work thoroughly informed my practice with clients, it has changed my
own life. Jack Sternbach has taught me most of what I know about running
men’s groups. It was Jack who first made clear to me the revolutionary
perspective of Joe Pleck, and it was Jack who introduced me to the idea of
lovingly holding men accountable, of men as “wounded wounders.” I want
also to thank my colleagues and friends at the Family Institute of
Cambridge, a teaching facility that has been responsible for training three
generations of family therapists throughout New England. In particular, I
wish to pay homage to my own mentors, Charles Verge, Caroline Marvin,
Richard Chasin, Rick Lee, David Treadway, Sally Ann Roth, and Kathy
Weingarten. Any light that passes through my work with men and their
families is principally yours. I am enormously grateful.
My agent, Beth Vesel, one of the initial architects of this endeavor, has been
a powerful guide, protector, and muse throughout the process, as well as a
reader of extraordinary perspicacity. My early collaboration with Elizabeth
Stone deserves grateful acknowledgment, as do the tenacious research
efforts of Rina Amiri. I want to thank Per Gjerde of Stanford University for
his warm support and guidance, Bessel van der Kolk for his wisdom,
openness and clarity, David Lisak and Ron Levant for their many good
thoughts.
Many editors deserve my deepest gratitude. Virginia LaPlante was coach,
critic, and midwife. Gail Winston shaped the project early on with the
stamp of her intelligence. Nan Graham and Gillian Blake of Scribner
brought the work to fruition, giving it final form. Nan Graham’s vision
informs my own, and Gillian Blake brought incisive skill to the text. The
insight and keen energy of these four women flow through each page.
Many kind, loving friends surrounded me and my family during this taxing
period: Jeffrey and Cheryl Katz; Scott Campbell and Richard MacMillan;
Rick Thomson and Judy Wineland; Denise and Kenneth Malament; Margie
Schaffel and Peter Belson; Carter, Susan, and Jessica Umbarger; Jeffrey
Kerr; Mora Rothenberg; Winthrop Burr; Meredith Kantor; Mel Bucholtz;
Gerry Schamess; Kristin Wainwright; Joan Wickersham; Alan and Deborah
Slobodnik—patient, patient friends all.
I want to thank the men, women, boys, and girls I have had the honor of
working with over the years. This book is, more than anything else, a
document of their heroism.
Finally, I pay tribute to my greatest source of inspiration, my soulmate,
Belinda Berman. Along with the hours of hard work and support, I thank
you also for your passion, depth, and unfailing intelligence. Loving you has
been the most exquisite thing I have ever done. To my children, Justin and
Alexander, I am grateful for your tolerance and enthusiasm. Whenever my
mind went numb or my spirits flagged, your shining presence revived me.
In every step of my travels through a dark wood I have benefited from help
and good company. A blessing to all my fellow travelers.
 Contents

Prologue

1. Men’s Hidden Depression

2. Sons of Narcissus: Self-Esteem, Shame, and Depression

3. The Hollow Men: Covert Depression and Addiction

4. A Band Around the Heart: Trauma and Biology

5. Perpetrating Masculinity

6. The Loss of the Relational

7. Collateral Damage

8. Two Inner Children

9. Balance Prevails: Healing the Legacy

10. Crossing the Wasteland: Healing Ourselves

11. Learning Intimacy: Healing Our Relationships

12. Conclusion: Where We Stand

Epilogue

Notes

Index
 Prologue

The son wishes to remember what the father wishes to forget.

—YIDDISH PROVERB

In high school, my father saw two boys he knew drown. One kid got pulled
out in an undertow off the New Jersey coast and his friend evidently dove
out to save him. This tragedy became one of the central metaphors of his
life. “A drowning person will grip you,” my father told me, “if you get in
too close. They’ll pull you down with them. You should throw them
something, a rope, a life preserver. But don’t touch them, don’t go in after
them.” He used to say this to my brother and me, from time to time, as if
dispensing advice on driving or study habits, as if drowning were an
ordinary occurrence. While I heard the advice, I did not learn the story of
the two boys until much later, because my father never spoke about himself
during my childhood, only about others.
It took me twenty years to get my father to talk about his own life. I
remember the first day he did. I recall the prickly feel of our old yellow
couch as we sat together. I was painfully aware of my father’s great bulk
beside me. He was a big man for his generation, six two and well over two
hundred pounds, with broad arms, a barrel chest, and a great potbelly that
thrust out before him like the bass drum of his booming voice, his laugh.
Most of my father’s gestures, his expressions, were broad, coarse, larger
than life, like his body, like the clay figures he sculpted in our garage—
abstract, looming shapes with massive limbs—or like his rage, which came
as suddenly as a storm, with no particular intent or thought, like some dark
animal, some bear.
My twin brother, Les, had the good sense to keep a low profile and stay
close to the ground, but I was Dad’s gifted child. I was the sensitive one. I
was trouble. “You little brat. I’m going to beat you to within an inch of your
life,” my father used to say. And there were times he seemed bent on
making good on his promise. His violence should have pushed me away
from him, and consciously it did. But in some more primitive way it only
drew me closer. As he raged, out of control, even as he beat me, I never lost
touch with him. It was the vortex of his pathos, his insanity, his hurt that
over-whelmed me, filling me, more than the physical pain, with black
despair, with torpor. I couldn’t wait for the ritual to end so that I could take
to my bed, pull the covers up over me, and sleep.
Later, in adolescence, I began to find that same sweet release in drugs and
in the thrill of risk taking. Things got worse. My life grew more dangerous.
By late adolescence I started to wonder which one of us, my dad or me, was
going to survive.
A skinny twenty-seven-year-old, I pull a thick afghan onto my lap and ask
my father to tell me about his childhood. He begins with the usual
maneuvers: he adopts surliness, then he jokes, evades. But this time I am
armed with the fledgling skills of a young therapist. I have learned a few
lessons in the craft of opening up a closed heart.
“You know, your mother and I deliberately made the decision to keep all
this from you,” he begins.
“I understand,” I say.
“We didn’t want to burden you kids.”
“I appreciate that.”
“But, I suppose you’re certainly old enough now …” he falters.
I am quiet.
He pauses. “You’ll never know what it was like back then,” he tells me,
“the Depression …” He lapses into silence for a while and then he begins.
He wasn’t more than six or seven when his mother died of some lingering
disease whose name he affects not to remember. He had only vague pictures
of her in his head, hardly memories; he recalled her warmth, an infectious
laugh.
After she died, things went downhill for my father’s father, Abe, “a weak,
passive man.” Abe lost his job, bought a little mom-and-pop store; then he
lost the store. Unable to support itself, the family broke up. My dad and his
younger brother went to live with a cousin. “Aunt” Sylvie was mean. She
was bitter before the Depression and taking in my father, Edgar, and his
brother, young Phil, did nothing to slake the venom in her disposition. She
was cruel in a daily, ordinary way.
“Like how, Dad?” I ask him.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he shrugs me off.
“Like how, Dad?” I repeat the question.
I eventually get my father to tell me about the humiliation of ragged hand-
me-downs, about how Sylvie would dish out food to him with a line such
as, “Here is a big piece of chicken for Steven, because he is my son. And
here is a small piece of chicken for you, Edgar. Because you are not.”
When he was eleven or twelve, the rage in my father, the missing of his
mother, his father, filled him to the bursting point. His little brother was still
young and sunny enough to adjust, but my dad began acting out. An
“instigator” at school, a petty thief at home, he lasted through one or two
“incidents” and then Aunt Sylvie summarily got rid of him. He found
himself banished to the home of elderly grandparents in another part of
town.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“What do you mean, what did I do? I went to school. I worked.”
“Did you have friends?”
“I made friends.”
“Did you see Phil and your father?”
Yes, he saw them. All that winter after school he would walk six miles
through the snow to have dinner with them at Sylvie’s house. He would
linger over a cup of cocoa until Sylvie asked him to leave. Then he’d walk
back again alone.
I look out of the window of our little seaside apartment, onto bare
November trees. I picture that twelve-year-old boy walking back in the
snow.
“How was that for you?” I ask. “What did you feel?”