The Most Terrible Feeling of All

One day my father, as a young man, came home from work to find the apartment cleaned out of furniture and swept clean. His wife (not my mother) was gone. Needless to say, reconciliation wasn't an option. I also know of a woman who was so alienated from her husband that, from time to time, he'd come down to breakfast and find a note on the kitchen table saying, "Gone." She'd reappear after a week or so traveling or visiting family. Seldom do you hear of men doing the 'cut and run' routine. As a matter of fact, the more frequent story tells the story of men who who have become obsessed with the object of their affections.

In spite of their bravado, men easily become dependent on women. The same way most women wouldn't leave home and leave her children behind, most men wouldn't leave their wife behind (at least until he had found and hooked up with someone else). Men cling to their wives not out of a sense of responsibility (the way women cling to their children) but out of a sense of need. Talking about his own sex, Dr. Jed Diamond writes, ". . . we give a lot of our power to women. Our sense of self-esteem and value depends totally on their view of us. We become 'nice guys' who are forever trying to please the women in our lives. Or we become controlling and mean as we take out our anger on the women we are so dependent upon."

Although I'm not a trained or licensed psychologists, I've found that I can't spend very long in the midlife arena without having to sort through virtual buckets of emotions — most of them painful, negative ones — that men in the midlife transition experience. As I've been shuffling through this pile of emotional detritus, I've found that people (men in particular) have to manage three different emotional arenas where different emotions may wreak havoc on them simultaneously. The first emotional arena in which men have to play is the arena of felt emotions. This is the most fundamental (and most real) level. These are the emotions that a man is actually feeling. The second emotional arena could be called the arena of recognized emotions. These are the feelings that a man thinks he's feeling (which could be quite different from what he's actually feeling. Finally, there's the arena of the expressed emotions. These are the emotions that he lets out into the world. According to Dr. Diamond and other notable researchers, the typical male emotional vocabulary is limited to two 'words': anger and sex.*

The arena of expressed emotions, where the felt emotions finally emerge, funnels negative emotions (like frustration, hurt, sadness, guild or shame) into the one (negative) expression: anger; and it funnels positive emotions (like sympathy, caring, warmth, connectedness or intimacy) into the other (positive) expression: sex. The deeper that researchers delve past the anger of the expressed emotions, beyond the recognized emotions, to what men are really feeling, the more that they're finding a common source for the Irritable Male Syndrome. Whereas women's self-esteem is tied to their emotional connections (girls want to be liked, women want to nurture), men's self-esteem rises and falls on the respect they receive from others. When men feel disrespected ('dissed'), they feel disvalued and discounted. Men's lives are all about doing, about competency and accomplishment . . . and about being recognized for these things. Norman Mailer once wrote, "Nobody was born a man; you earned manhood provided you were good enough, bold enough."

In the midlife transition, many men are caught in a vicious cycle of negative emotions — often triggered by a feeling of failure or inadequacy — that sends them into a downward spiral. Since all negative emotions (including disappointment get translated into anger (and the man recognizes that his anger is inappropriate), he begins to feel out of control, unable to 'fix' the emotional vacuum that he feels he's being sucked into. Before very long, our emotionally overwrought guy begins to feel the most terrible feeling of all for a man: helplessness. That one feeling, perhaps more than any other, strikes at the root of his manhood and self-esteem leaving him disvalued (and disrespected) in his own eyes. It's unimaginable to feel that you're being devoured by your own emotions, and that your own awareness of that feeling is devouring you. "A man [can easily] prove his manhood every day by standing up to challenges and insults even though he goes to his death 'smiling,'" writes Oscar Lewis. It's far more excruciating for a man to go to his (emotional) death in tears, consumed by his own sense of worthlessness.

Men facing the midlife transition are standing at the very edge of this abyss. Far too many go over the edge, losing their relationships, their families, their careers, their very identities. No wonder men in this situation want to start all over again, create a new persona, and reinvent themselves. Their old selves (defined by their visible signs of success) evidently didn't work. The obvious choice, then, is do something different. We can only hope, when he's through remaking himself, that our guy will get in touch on a deeper level with what's been going on inside him. Otherwise, I fear, there's always the possibility that the 'new' man will only be the old man in disguise, and the cycle will start all over again. We can also hope and pray that our guy doesn't yield to his feelings of helplessness (and hopelessness) and take his own life, as so many do. As they say, that's a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Men can truly change. They can break this cycle and not let it overpower them. All they need to do so is to find a sense of purpose not just in what they do, but also in who they are.

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*I suspect that there's a third emotional expression that we could add here: pride. This is the emotion that he shows when he (or his favorite team) scores or wins a game, when he's succeeded in completing a difficult objective, or when one of his children wins, succeeds or is honored.