No one does a better job at describing where men are coming from... than Ken Druck in his book:
THE SECRETS MEN KEEP
Here are some of the insights that he shares in this book. A collection of best quotes....
INTRODUCTION
The Major Areas in Which Men Keep Secrets
“A majority of men did not receive the love, approval, and direct contact they wanted from their fathers… many are still tied to their fathers for approval, whether those fathers are dead, live far away, or have become estranged.”
“Men hide their desire for friendship and support from other males…. Many men have stopped believing that close companionship is possible, except with women.”
“But few men have one close male friend in whom they can confide.”
“Men use the workplace as a major burial ground for their secrets…. Many men define themselves almost solely on the basis of what they do for a living.”
“Men are much more dependent upon women than they admit.”
“Wives, lovers, and mothers have always known that even the most powerful men are often dependent.”
“Most men were raised by their mothers and are still dependent upon them in ways they never suspected. Until men resolve their feelings toward their mothers, it will be difficult for them to establish and maintain a mature and satisfying relationship with another woman.”
“Men feel powerless and angry toward women.”
“Men deny themselves the right to feel uncertain, fearful, and hurt.”
The Benefits of Acknowledging Our Secrets:
“Disclosure is the least exploited form of power known to men.”
“We fulfill our human need to be known and accepted. By hiding our true selves and projecting false images in order to gain the approval of others, we never test our actual worth.”
What is a Man to Be ?
“Men today no longer know what it means to be a man. We are bombarded on every side by conflicting and contradictory signals…”
Who is the Successful Man of the Eighties? “Man must broaden their definition of success to include both the professional and personal spheres. To be a success in the eighties, men must learn to reach down inside themselves to make contract with what they feel, what they want, and what they believe it means to be a success.”
1. FEELINGS: THE SECRET GARDEN MEN ARE FORBIDDEN TO ENTER
On Being a Man
“To be strong a man must be able to stand utterly alone, able to meet and deal with life relying solely upon his own inner resources.”
“The knowledge explosion affects directly men’s influence as fathers.”
What Price Glory?
“By choosing to go the way of concealment rather than that of openness, we men have too often brought upon ourselves sickness, misunderstanding, and self-alienation. We have had to pay a stiff price for the right to “be a man.”
“In addition, large numbers of contemporary men pick loneliness as one of their chief burdens.”
Men Behind Walls
“There’s no way to reach my husband, to know what is really going on inside him…”
“ ‘Walls’ are defenses we use to put distance between ourselves and others.”
How We Sidestep Our Feelings
“We rationalize a course of inaction by telling ourselves, ‘what good is it going to do to talk about it? That’s not going to change anything!”
“We escape into new roles or hide behind old ones.”
“(we say)… these feelings will pass.”
“we keep busy…”
“We change one feeling into another. (act angry when hurt)”
“We deny the feeling outright”
“We put our feelings on hold - compartmentalize them or put them in a back file.”
“We dull or dilute our feelings… with drugs or alcohol”
“We perform a ‘thinking bypass’ – replacing our feelings with thought or logic…
“We tense our bodies, so that we do not feel anything…”
“We let our women do our feeling for us …”
“We avoid situations”
“Originally meant to inform us, our feelings instead have become a threat to us.”
What’s In It For Us When We Acknowledge Our Feelings?
“Feelings motivate us…. Create a healthy environment for us…. Connect us to other people…. build confidence …. help us make the right decisions.”
Three Steps for Getting in Closer Touch with our Feelings
“Keep in mind that our feelings are usually one or two word adjectives (angry, sad, scared, and happy) … make certain you are expressing feelings and not opinions.
“We must learn to read our body’s emotional signals”
“(you should)… talk out our feelings with trusted friend(s).”
“The reality is that we all need and benefit from support, caring, guidance, and understanding. Women know this. Most of them have friends with whom they can talk about their feelings. Many men do not.”
2. LIFE WITH FATHER: OR, “WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?”
The Father Within Us “When my Uncle Nathan was 70, he visited his father’s grave tucked away in a corner of a cemetery in the Bronx. He stood there facing the headstone, the November wind ruffling his silver hair. Suddenly, his body started shaking. Tears streaked his face. “Dad, you never even put your arms around me,” he sobbed, spilling out a secret grief that he had carried around with him all these years. “You never touched me. You never hugged me. Where were you when I needed you?”
“It may surprise us to know that the most powerful common denominator influencing men’s lives today is the relationship we had with our fathers. The events ad circumstances may have taken place years, even decades, ago. They may appear irrelevant to our lives in the present. But if we look beyond the surface, we will discover, as my Uncle Nathan did, that Dad is still very much with us today. Much of our behavior and many of our attitudes toward living can be traced to our fathers. Whether our dad was physically or psychologically absent, whether he died when we were young or is still alive at a ripe old age, whether we consider him a good father or a poor one, our fathers are in us. Every man hears the silent voice of his father inside his own head.”
“And some, like my Uncle Nathan, will journey to their own graves with that secret longing unsatisfied…” “More often, our stories uncover a deep yearning for Father’s love and acceptance. ‘Our fathers wanted to raise us; but they didn’t want to know us,’ was the way one man stated his disappointment.”
Who was that Masked Man?
“Rather, my father, like the Lone Ranger, was always riding in and out of town.”
“I did not know. My father was a stranger to me in so many ways. The world of his workplace was a mystery to me. He was a very private man. I knew little about his dreams, his fears, his feelings toward me. These were his secrets.”
“For many years he had masked his true identity behind a relentless commitment to his business and his exhaustion at the end of the workday.”
“I secretly resented the fact that my dad put his business ahead of his family and gave so little of himself directly to me. I wanted far more fathering that he was able to give me.”
“ ‘Don’t upset your father,’ my mother always cautioned us.”
“And so I grew up with the feeling that my father was unapproachable. My resentment built up over the years as I saw the kind of fathering some of my buddies enjoyed in their homes.”
“… by making my father the ‘bad guy’ and judging his lifestyle as ‘wrong,’ I had made some important decisions about my own life. And in the process I had also denied a rich and vital part of my male heritage. I had denied the industrious, strong willed, and confident part of my father that was in me. Most important, I had denied the love and gratitude I did have for my dad.”
3. REACHING OUT TO FATHER
Eight Benefits of a Reconciliation with Father
“It will allow us to be our own man, not our father’s man… allows us to achieve a communication with him…”
“The ‘fringe benefits’ of a love relationship with our living father are unlimited. We have opened the doors to each other’s lives and the richness that comes in sharing special moments, supporting one another’s goals, assisting one another in times of need, and generating newfound affection for one another.”
“Face to face, man to man, you are your father’s equal. You no longer need to ‘prove’ yourself by doing ‘manly’ deeds. Your father accepts and loves you for the person you are.”
“The confidence born of a loving, healthy father-son relationship sets a precedent for other relationships in the lives of both the father and the son.”
“We can learn from the unique textures each seaon brings as we partake of each other’s lives. Autumn remembers spring, as spring looks on autumn’s rich colors.”
The Hostage Game
“The Hostage Game is another ploy we often use when we refuse to accept our own responsibility for a fractured father-son relationship… we make our fathers the ‘Bad Guy’… we make what our father did unforgivable… we foul up our own lives and blame our father…”
“We blame his failure on his job, health, personality, wife, or upbringing. In this hostage drama we cast our father as the victim of circumstances beyond his control. We perpetually let him off the hook, telling ourselves that he is not responsible for his behavior.”
“We hold Dad hostage to Mother’s bitterness. We see him through her eyes. And this can provide a dangerous distortion, especially if there has been a divorce. We can easiliy end up with what the poet Robert Bly has called ‘a wounded image of our father,” caused less by his actions than by our mother’s perception of those actions.
“Broad-based indictments of our father also fail to consider two other essential factors: our father’s identity as a unique individual and the family roles men had during the earlier part of this century.”
4. MAN TO MAN: WHY A GOOD FRIEND IS HARD TO FIND
Male Friendships as second-class Relationships
“… a major problem of contemporary men – their failure to establish close friendships with other men, friendships in which they feel secure enough to confide their deepest fears and feelings. The sorry fac is that men today often have no close male friends. This is so common that it is taken for granted and rarely commented upon. Many of the men I counsel admit they do not have one intimate male friend in whom they can place complete trust and confidence.”
“The sad fact is that most men simply do not trust one another.”
“When we marry, we cease spending much time or energy nurturning and developing close friendships with other men. We focus our attention instead on our wives, our families, and the ‘contacts’ we make at work.”
The Friendship Rut
“Many men have come to view the need for a friend as a bit of an embarrassment, a throwback to adolescence”
“Six Don’ts of Male Friendship: Don’t let your guard down; don’t show too much emotion; don’t become too involved, friendly or frivolous; don’t let on how much you really care; don’t touch one another; don’t act like a sissy or appear feminine in any way.”
“Usually, when I ask men to list their male friends, they give me the names of friends from their past – buddies from their youth, fraternity brothers in college, or guys they know when they were in the armed forces.”
The Walls We Hide Behind
“But just the opposite happens when we are with other men. Most men would be hard put to define precisely what they like and do not like in other men.”
“We are reluctant to pay other men compliments.”
The wall of competition: “Two men meet and introduce themselves. Almost immediately each one asks himself, ‘How much better or less a man am I than he?”
The wall of Women: “Some men use the women in their lives, including their wives, girlfriends, mothers, and secretaries, as buffers between themselves and other men. It is their way of avoiding any sort of direct contact with other men. For some men, this is a throwback to their childhood when Mom was always there to act as an intermediary between them and their fathers.”
The wall of fear: “Men’s fear of rejection and judgment at the hands of other men constitutes another major wall. We are more sensitive to what other men think than many of us let on. The Wall of Fear is well guarded. We keep our insecurities at work a secret from our male colleagues for fear they may use that information against us.”
“Many men fear that if they get too close to another man physically or emotionally, others will perceive them as ‘gay.’ It is an unfortunate aspect of our ture that the American man’s preoccupation with losing his ‘maleness’ can often preclude the kind of healthy close male camaraderie that exists in other cultures.”
The Wall of Ignorance: “The Wall of ignorance is perhaps the saddest of them all. Because we never allow ourselves an opportunity to get to know other men in ways that permit a mutual exchange of feelings, we never understand the way in which men are truly different from as well as similar to us.”
The Benefits of Man-to-Man Friendships
“Most men feel more comfortable drawing their closest friends from women rather than other men. We fall back on our wives, lovers, mothers, sisters, and daughters. We decide early on that women make better friends.”
“Men feel safer talking to a woman about their fears and uncertainties than to another man. We perceive women as more loving and trustworthy than other men.”
“We validate our experiences as a man… once we open our world to another man, we learn that we are not alone in our fears, insecurities, uncertainties, and desires.”
“Frank and honest exchanges of experiences allow us to gain a fresh and clear perspective on ourselves.”
“We lessen our dependencies on women… Friendships with other men put a balance back into our lives and strengthen our marriages because there is less emotional clinging to the women in our lives.”
“We develop our skills at intimacy… Men who achieve intimacy with other men enjoy a sense of acceptance by their peers. We become more certain of who we are. We develop more self-esteem.”
“Male friends help us in times of crises with women.”
“Friends protect us against life’s stresses … a buffer against such crises as the loss of a wife or job, a chronic illness, and th psychological stresses of aging.”
“Friends minimize loneliness… become valuable resources… reaffirm our sense of being alive.”
Man to Man
“Men are adept at talking about things rather than what they feel about those things. Our willingness to be emotionally honest and vulnerable can make the difference between an acquaintanceship and a friendship.”
“I learned more about him and he about me in those two days than in twenty years of friendship. What forced it was that we didn’t have anything to lose and everything to gain.”
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