Excerpt: Read our 25 quotes on masculinity and learn what can make it “toxic,” how to best raise our boys, and how to break a cycle of harm.
Book Overview: Twenty years of experience treating men and their families has convinced psychotherapist Terrence Real that depression is a silent epidemic in men—that men hide their condition from family, friends, and themselves to avoid the stigma of depression’s “un-manliness.” Problems that we think of as typically male—difficulty with intimacy, workaholism, alcoholism, abusive behavior, and rage—are really attempts to escape depression. And these escape attempts only hurt the people men love and pass their condition on to their children. This groundbreaking book is the “pathway out of darkness” that these men and their families seek. Real reveals how men can unearth their pain, heal themselves, restore relationships, and break the legacy of abuse.
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Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
“Beyond a certain point in a man’s life, if he is to remain truly vital, he needs to be actively engaged in devotion to something other than his own success and happiness. The word discipline derives from the same root as the word disciple. Discipline means ‘to place oneself in the service of.’ Discipline is a form of devotion. A grown man with nothing to devote himself to is a man who is sick at heart. What a great many men in this culture choose to serve is their own reflected value, which they often believe serves the needs of their family, even while their families may be crying out for something different from them.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“Recovery, at its deepest level, evokes the art of valuing, caring for, and sustaining. The relationship one sustains may be toward oneself, toward others, or even toward the world itself.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“I believe that one first changes the behaviors, then, if one is lucky, the feelings follow.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“Those who do not turn to face their pain are prone to impose it.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“Men who do not turn to face their own pain are too often prone to inflict it on others.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“The unresolved pain of previous generations operates in families like an emotional debt. We either face it or we leverage our children with it. When a man stands up to depression, the site of his battle may be inside his own head, but the struggle he wages has repercussions far beyond him. A man who transforms the internalized voice of contempt resists violence lying close to the heart of patriarchy itself. Such a man serves as a breakwall. The waves of pain that may have wreaked havoc across generations spill over him and lose their virulent force—sparing his children. The ‘difficult repentance’ such a man undertakes protects those who follow him. And his healing is a spiritual gift to those who came before. The reclaimed lost boy such a man discovers—the unearthed emotional, creative part of him—may not be merely the child of his own youth, but the lost child of his father’s youth, or even of his father’s father.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“Healthy self-esteem is the capacity—rarely taught to either sex in our culture—to hold oneself in warm regard even when colliding with one’s human shortcomings. Our capacity to stay rooted in a compassionate understanding of one another’s flaws keeps us humane. When we lose touch with our own frailties we become judgmental and dangerous to others.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“Boys don’t hunger for fathers who will model traditional mores of masculinity. They hunger for fathers who will rescue them from it. They need fathers who have themselves emerged from the gauntlet of their own socialization with some degree of emotional intactness. Sons don’t want their father’s ‘balls’; they want their hearts. And, for many, the heart of a father is a difficult item to come by.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“Research teaches us that the capacity to reach out to others for help in dealing with fear and pain is the best single remedy for emotional injury. Whether the person is struggling with the effects of combat, rape, or childhood injury, the best predictor of trauma resolution is good social support.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“The key component of a boy’s healthy relationship to his father is affection, not ‘masculinity.’ The boys who fare poorly in their psychological adjustment are not those without fathers, but those with abusive or neglectful fathers. Contrary to the traditional stereotype, a sweet man in an apron who helps out with the housework may be just the nurturant kind of father a boy most needs.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“As with intelligence, so too with behaviors—malleable kids live up, or down, to our expectations.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“I think not touching a child for decades at a time is a form of injury. I think withholding any expression of love until a young boy is a grown man is a form of emotional violence. And I believe that the violence men level against themselves and others is bred from just such circumstances.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
