Some Rights Reserved by lepiaf.geo at Flickr

About a year ago, I wrote a series of posts about my experience with the fantasies of a better life that often prompt depressed men to leave their families. You can find the first of those stories here, here and here. Those brief pieces tell only a small part of a long and troubling story. To stay in recovery I have to know more, and so I’m starting a new series of posts specifically about why men want to leave, how we change, where we want to go.

Of course, this story is not mine alone. I’ve been there with many other men, and we’ve all been cold company. Whether depressed men leave by walking out or by emotional withdrawal or aggressive rage and abuse, they go through a baffling transformation and provoke the most devastating crisis for those who love them most. My own experience has been bad enough, but I read the same story and worse online each day. The pain, confusion and desperation are always fresh, even though repeated hundreds of times in forum after forum.

- He won’t look at me anymore. – Whatever I do is wrong. – I can’t understand the anger when he comes home after work – and I haven’t done a single thing. – If I ask him what’s wrong, he goes into a rage. – He gets so abusive and blames me for everything he doesn’t like. – His rages scare me to death. – I don’t know who this man is anymore. – I can’t do anything right. – This is not the life I thought I was getting into. – I feel so small around him. – What have I done to make him so angry? – It’s all driving me crazy. – I can’t take much more of this. – What can I say? – What can I do? – Please help!

It’s one thing for me to blame depression for causing behavior that inflicts such pain. It’s another to get clear about exactly what I did in order to recognize it early and stop myself  from repeating the same thing over and over again. To stay in recovery, I can’t focus only on what’s going on in my head but need to be able to face squarely the effects on those closest to me. Seeing what the reality has been for my wife and children in those dark periods makes it so much more urgent that I get to the bottom of what I have done.

Only in that way can I break the forces of mind and feeling underlying my hurtful words and actions. What was I thinking and feeling when I was isolating myself from my family emotionally, if not actually leaving? Why didn’t I see sooner what I was doing? When I did see part of it, why couldn’t I stop? What was changing deep down? I have to be able to answer these questions and a lot more so that I’ll be quick to recognize the problem if it begins again. If I do see it, I’ll have to know what to start doing to turn that mindset and behavior around. Recovery depends on alertness and action every day.

Here’s a quick overview of what I want to explore in this series. This is the way I’m seeing it through my analytical brain. I’m sure as I tell the stories each evokes, I’ll change and refine the picture I’m looking at now. It’s almost a model of how this state develops, and that means to me it’s far too neat. I’m separating each element from the real experience, but it is never so simple as this line-up might make it seem.

• Control and Denial. Whatever the internal crisis may have been, I had to keep it under a tight lid, hide it from everyone, including myself. Denial is a common word. What isn’t always clear is how much energy it takes both to keep inner turmoil under control and to keep it from getting too close to awareness. That took so much out of me, I was always tense and run down with the effort.
• Refusal. If there was nothing wrong with me, there was no need to talk about it. Every time my wife would try to engage me about what I was feeling, I refused to talk about it. I was genuinely angry at the suggestion that I had a problem. This behavior is frequently described, but what many miss is the sense of power men can get from holding back words. There is a perverse satisfaction in keeping others guessing, and the silence also prevents me from knowing more than I want to know. Strong and silent are paired for good reason.
• Isolation. Isolating from others doesn’t mean physical separation so much as creating distance while you’re with family, friends, everyone who’s close. I could do this by being angry or abusive, or by an emotional and mental disappearance in plain sight. On any given day, I could shift from one unmindful strategy to the other.
• Blame. Naturally, if there’s nothing wrong with me, the explanation for that hurt and turmoil buried within has its cause in someone or something else – family, job, city – probably the combination of it all. The feeling builds that the life I’m living is a trap that’s ruining my chances for happiness.
• The Cure. Since the problem comes from outside, I can also find the cure for it there. Everything will be better there, everything is hopeless here. So the yearning to leave and the fantasies that go with it get stronger all the time. Whether they’re acted on or not, the damage to others is already done.

This is what occurs to me now. How does it sound to you? What’s your experience like?

Some Rights Reserved by nyki_m at Flickr

As I’ve noted before, Real Depressed Men Don’t Cry – well, hardly ever. I’ve had Bob Dylan on my mind lately, he’s about the last person you’d think would trigger those droplet-things that have a wet way of blurring your vision. Have you seen I’m Not There
– the completely original film about dimensions of Dylan’s life captured by six different actors? The first of these is an 11-year old runaway, escaped from a youth correction facility (remember “reformatory?”), or something like that. He’s an African American kid with a guitar, and his name is Woody Guthrie. We first see him running beside a freight train and pulling himself into an open car. There are two tramps there, and he sings them a song I hadn’t heard in forever. It’s the rousing ballad of the triumph of good over evil, called When the Ship Comes In.

Now the time will come up

When the winds will stop

And the breeze will cease to be breathin’

Like the stillness in the wind

Fore the hurricane begins

The hour when the ship comes in.

As soon as I heard that fast guitar rhythm and those first words, I knew I was in trouble.

Throat choking, eye-storm threatening, wave of feeling breaking lid-tight composure, I chomped the right side of my lower lip as I do when I just won’t let that stuff rise to the surface. So I listened as that ship split the seas, shook the shoreline and ignored the “words that are used/ for to get the ship confused.” Then those sands rolled out a carpet of gold as the ship hit land:

And the ship’s wise men

Will remind you once again

That the whole wide world is watchin’

And those bad guys, the “foes,” roused from sleep, can’t believe what’s happening – but soon they see it’s real:

Then they’ll raise their hands,

Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands,

But we’ll shout from the deck your days are numbered.

Those merciless masters of war will drown like Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea “And like Goliath, will be conquered.”

Just so simple and pure as that, a beautiful power will drive the evil right out of life. Then that exploding emotion threatened my face and I fled the room, as if driven by urgent need of pit-stop time. Closing the nearest door behind me not a minute too soon, a sob lurched my throat, then another, then three – oh, man, I was in trouble! But I soon shut it down, as real depressed men do, and went out to watch more-but then got blasted with another song – and on and on. It was a tough night to be tough.

And the next day, I got out my big book of Dylan lyrics, hunted down those songs and tried (in absolute privacy, of course) to sing them through. But each time I got to something like the whole wide world is watchin’ or the first will be last and the last will be first or the chimes of freedom flashing, my tuneless voice broke, I got wet eyed and worse, and I tried to understand what the hell was going on.

Sure, it was heartbreaking to feel again the idealism and hope of the early sixties, smashed like Kennedy’s skull, then lost in the miasma of Vietnam, race riots, police riots, escapes into hallucinations and rockin’ peace and love, then more assassination, Russian tanks crushing Czechoslovakia, Nixon, Watergate and everywhere drugs, murder and laundered money. Who wouldn’t shed a tear for lost innocence and hope from a time when the revolution of the young was all but certain, when we knew it would surely sweep all injustice before it? Perhaps I was crying for that, but I could tell there was more, much more.

We’ve lived to feel a resurgence of hope right now, and who could keep eyes dry watching so stalwart a figure as Jesse Jackson listening to Obama’s victory speech with tears streaming down his face. That was triumph to be sure, all the way from chattel without status as humans under the Constitution, lynching, police beatings, voting that got a black man shot dead, the murder of one great leader after another, all the way to President of the USA. Who wouldn’t shout and sob for joy at once – even knowing how fragile the hope in great leaders is? So that was mixed up in my breaking voice, but there was more, much more.

I could cry for my own sense of loss so deep, for a grief that rolls to the surface when I least expect it – a grief I don’t fully understand. There are shadows of family, past and gone forever, broken apart, cracking the earth open right under my feet. And that happened despite – or as I believed, because of – my imagined and failed ability to hold it all together – losing the grip that secured a family, as I thought, as I hoped and hoped, when a kid of 8 or 10. The syndrome of the too young adult took hold so early, and I impressed the hell out of all the grownups. But I’ve been dealing with such loss and later disappointments and hopes that fill any life for a long, long time. A grief survives that a song can trigger, but there is still something more, so clearly much more.

And that comes back to me here and now, cautiously hopeful about a life turning onto a recovery road instead of staying fearful in a dark wood, the straight way lost. I cry in hope and fear at once. Will that Goliath who has crushed and weighted me down for so long finally be cut down to size? A depressive mind has overpowered me for far too long, and I’m on the offensive now, at last.

Will I conquer? Will I survive?

Some Rights Reserved by Memotions at Flickr

A breakthrough to healing can come at the most unexpected time. The other night I was trying to divert myself by watching a mystery episode from an old British series. Instead of taking my mind off things, this story pushed me into a past history I had long kept at a safe distance.

The film built its story around a soldier haunted by his experience of violent death in Bosnia, especially the sight of a basement floor piled deep with the corpses of women and children. Much later, after his return to civilian life, the shock of another act of violence brings back the Bosnian memories and plunges him into such an intense guilt that he loses his power of speech. A minister, he somehow internalizes guilt for such horrors that have nothing to do with his own actions and is even driven to seek atonement for them. And so he tries to find punishment by confessing to a killing he did not commit. It’s based in part on Pat Barker’s fine novel, Regeneration, about a World War I combat veteran slowly brought back to health through the efforts of a gifted psychiatrist. These stories bring to life the hard work of recovery.

Certain dramatic scenes often have powerful resonance for me, often triggering grief and tears, but I have never been able to understand what was going on. Why should such powerful feelings fill me in response to fiction? I could see reasons for such reactions when brought on by the real-life stories of veterans suffering complete collapse from the traumas of combat. However, I thought of that more as empathy for their suffering rather than as response to my own far less violent family disturbances. The other night, though, things began to get clearer.

I could finally feel that a gradually unfolding childhood in a family full of anger, blocked love, passive abuse, the refusal to show affection, all of it was a prolonged losing battle, a slow-motion shock. Over and over again, it seemed I didn’t measure up, couldn’t do things in quite the right way, didn’t take sides as expected to in the bitter arguments, the fist fights, the threats, sometimes with guns. But as a kid, unable to find acceptance from parents too wrapped up in their own sharp-edged disappointments, I could do the natural thing – take all the destructiveness on myself, find myself guilty of failing to set everything right, of being a coward, running from battle, a soldier trying to hide from confrontation. Instead of jumping into the combat, I watched it passively as it played out in front of me. It seemed to go by like an endless movie in which I had no role. Of course I was guilty, deserving scorn for emotionally stepping outside the raging feelings around me. There were times when I played the part and did small things I could really feel ashamed of – petty vandalism, lies, cheating. If everything else had failed, perhaps being bad would meet my parents expectations and win me a perverse place in their lives.

Repression is an unconscious thing, a costly mercy. A great trauma hits, especially when you’re young, and something clicks. Mind and feelings hide the whole thing away. In this case, I managed to get through the violent, angry scenes by losing awareness of all the intense feelings, the fear, the hurt, the rage that must have been there. All the feeling that I knew was the guilt. And so in time that part of my past receded more and more. I left it so far behind emotionally that I could joke about it with college friends after I had moved away and no longer had to deal with that life. Emotionally, the past became a non-event. It was taken care of without need for a thought, for a feeling, certainly not for the persistent guilt of childhood. Problem gone.

Many years later, something finally began to break open, and I could feel with the intensity I had pushed below memory. Mostly, though, the feelings rising to the surface come out only in the form of a deep grief. At first that baffled me – where was this coming from? I well remembered all the events of growing up but emotionally could not make the connection. I would just be moved to tears by stories about the losses and triumphs of others, their guilt, their regeneration into life, but not mine. For a long time, I didn’t know what it was I’d lost. There were only the grief and the tears that surged out unexpectedly.

Then I read Peter Kramer’s line in Against Depression that grief is not a common thing for severely depressed people since their feelings are so blunted and inaccessible. Grief is linked to resilience, to whatever life force is left to fight off suicide, to refuse, ultimately, to let your life be lost to this illness. It is a sign that life is flickering back up, that something good is finally coming from all that shutting down.

The story on film unlocked grief about the past, not guilt. Grief for what? Perhaps for everything lost, every bit of rage and hurt I might have let loose at the time, the loss of love, the hurt in the whole family – I still can’t get it quite clear in mind – though it’s clear enough in feeling. Such intense moments come back to me when listening to John Hiatt, who knows this experience so well:

Well, I’ve cried me a river, I’ve cried me a lake

I’ve cried till the past nearly drowned me

Tears for sad consequences

Tears for mistakes

But never these tears that surround me

Alone in this place with a lifetime to trace

And a heartbeat that tells me it’s so

I’ve got these tears from a long time ago

These are tears from a long time ago

And I need to cry 30 years or so

These are tears from a long time ago

Are there breakthrough moments that you can share?

Jelena Popic – Fotolia.com

Some years back I took part in a series of group sessions that focused on helping people confront and deal with inner shame that had haunted them since childhood. It was the first group in my experience that got me to interact with other people not just through talk but through dramatic reenactments of past painful encounters. This experience was one of the first to wake me up to the ways other people might see me, free of the projection of shame I usually cast over the judgments of others. By working with the members of this group in recreating traumatic dramas and talking through each one afterward, I could finally begin to see the inner shame I carried as a depressed belief, not an objective reality. The people I knew only in this setting were tremendously supportive and gave me hard evidence to fight back against a heritage of shame built up in my boyhood.

There was one moment of frustration with that group, though, that opened before me all the emotional violence of my boyhood and teenage years. I had a choice to face it openly or keep clamping down and forcing the powerful emotions to break under the pressure of my refusal to let them out. There was no clear ending to that crisis.

The incident in the group that set me off isn’t even all that clear to me now. I just remember that I felt overlooked. I must have been bypassed as others were telling their stories and I was preparing to tell my own. Suddenly the focus of the group shifted, and I never got my turn. Since I had been getting ready to pour out hidden grief about a major event of the past, I felt betrayed by everyone. I was angry, hurt, even fighting back tears, and I found myself determined not to let any of that show. I spent the rest of the time shutting down and burning all the energy I had not to reveal what was storming around inside me. And then it happened that my past opened up, and I found myself holding tight to my feelings in the midst of a raging family fight of years ago.

My brother and father were locked in a furious fight, hurling punches, then stumbling over each other wrestling, knocking aside a table, hitting the floor, my mother screaming herself hoarse at my dad to leave him alone, my brother at some point breaking free and running upstairs to lock himself in the bathroom. But my father pursued him on a wave of rage that lifted him up those stairs to start beating on that bathroom door, then shoulder-smashing it open. My mom shoved him aside to grab my sobbing brother in her arms while hoarsely bellowing at my father to get out, get out forever. And there I was standing by, following the scene as it unfolded, silent, holding in all feeling, convinced that if I were to rage with the rest of them there would be nothing left standing of family, home, safety.

For this was no typical scene of domestic violence unleashed by an alcoholic parent on a battered family. It was an ongoing battle between my mother and father, mostly fought with quiet verbal knives but often breaking into shadow fights of shouted abuse. My mom looked to my older brother as her champion in this bitter contest, and he took my dad on physically. I was alert each night as I tried to study in my room to the sounds of my father entering the house, and I would wait to hear how violently my brother would greet him. Would this be a night of combat or merely a night of quiet tension and anger? If I heard the hard challenge in my brother’s voice, I’d move to get into that room with them, somehow hoping my presence would help avoid the worst. When I held back from the fighting, refusing to see my dad only as a monster to be hated and attacked, my mother called me a traitor and a coward. Yet I held my ground of not taking sides because a greater fear than her contempt was fear of the complete breakdown of this fractured household, the only home I knew. And in my heart I loved them all – my mother, my father, my brother – wanted them together, wanted a family, though love in that house was such a tortured and punishing thing.

There was only one way to express anger, aggression, violence in safety, and that was by directing those feelings inwardly at myself. I had little awareness of what was happening, but depression took hold quite early in my life. And the belief grew over time that the monster I refused to see in my father or my mother or my brother had taken up residence in me. It was a long and costly struggle to keep him well hidden.