Quotes from How Can I Get Through to You? Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women by Terrence Real
“…the most reliable predictor of long-term marital success was a pattern in which the wives, in nonoffensive, clear ways, communicated their needs, and husbands willingly altered their behaviors to meet them.”
“Empathy, sensitivity, knowing what he feels and wants, speaking with a vulnerable heart, even introspection itself – these skills belong to a world Steve left behind a long time ago. They are the very “feminine” qualities that most boys, even in this enlightened times, have had stamped out of them. In our culture, boys and men are not now, nor have they ever been, raised to be intimate. They are raised to be competitive performers.”
“Some husbands, faced with a partner they experience as too angry, or too demanding, or just “too much” in a thousand small ways, will, just as woman worry, simply back out, finding someone younger, prettier, and more compliant. And when husbands do leave, research indicates, their standard of living tends to rise slightly, while that of a woman and children can drop as much as an average of 60 percent. There is a stark political reality to women’s silence.”
“Pioneer researcher Carol Gilligan and a generation of writers following her have shown that in early adolescence, society thrusts upon girls the traditional feminine mores of accommodation. The girls in Gilligan’s study, who had for years shown themselves to be articulate, even astute, about one another’s personalities and relationships suddenly, by ten to thirteen, seemed to render themselves dumb – in both senses of the word. To be a “popular girl,” to be “likeable,” “good,” suddenly takes hold as a preeminent value. And “good” girls don’t make waves. At the edge of adolescence our daughters fall under the “tyranny of the kind and nice.” They learn the ideal, to paraphrase David Habersham, of “pretty, polite, and not too bright.” “Girls,” Gilligan writes, “lose relationship in the service of maintaining relationships.” In her famous phrase, girls lose their “voice.”
“If you ask an eight-year-old girl what she wants on her pizza,” Catherine Steiner-Adair of the Harvard Eating Disorders Center once explained, “chances are she will tell you. ‘I’ll have extra cheese and peppers.’ By the time that same girl reaches eleven or twelve, the answer becomes, ‘I don’t know.’ And when you ask her at thirteen, what do you get? ‘What would you like on the pizza?
There is a word for that transition from “Extra cheese and peppers” through “I don’t know” to “What would you like?” The term is trauma. It is no coincidence that the loss of voice in early adolescence corresponds with the first outbreak of many mental-health problems – eating disorders, depression, significant drops in self-esteem.”
“Here is the problem Will and his lover face in this moment: love hurts. Not just in its absence, but equally in the simplicity of its presence. Love acts like a giant magnet that pulls out of us, like iron filings, every recorded injury, every scar. The prospect of deep connection stimulates a visceral recall of each instance of disconnection we have encountered. Confronted the prospect of intimacy, Will becomes flooded with pain, mistrust, and fear. The technical term for his feeling of unworthiness is shame.”
“While both boys and girls are pushed out of their natural state of intimacy, that forced exile hits boys much earlier in their development. Girls at eleven, twelve, thirteen show a remarkable lucidity about what they will themselves to stop being lucid about, a kid of Orwellian “doublethink.” It is this doubleness that is both the gift and curse of traditional femininity. No such envelope of lucidity surrounds boys’ injuries. Recent research tells us that boys from all walks of life evidence a clear, measurable decrease in expressiveness and connection by the ages of three, four, and five. By the time most boys hit kindergarten they show significant drops in their willingness to express strong emotion, openly demonstrate their dependency. Before our sons learn how to read, they have read the stoic code of masculinity.
Trauma encountered at age three, four or five has very different consequences than trauma met at eleven, twelve, or thirteen. The injuries run deeper and they are more overwhelming. The younger child has not the cognitive skills, the language, nor the social resources of a preteen. If Skylar is scared, at least she knows it. She can put it into language, understand it, reach out for help. Trauma research indicates that the surest indicator in the face of deep psychological hurt consists of precisely these skills – the capacity to “frame” the injury, to comprehend it, along with an ability to move beyond isolation. Will, like most men in our culture, has been raised with impaired access to all of these skills. The same code of stoicism that creates boys’ wounds forbids them to acknowledge or deal with them.”
“By definition, trauma breaks through our capacity to understand, to make sense, and most treatment protocols aim to restore such cognitive capacities.”
“But there is also another reason why Will runs away – he can. For all of men’s vaunted stoicism in the face of physical distress, many of the men I have treated over the years are babies when it comes to bearing emotional discomfort. Men are socialized to mistrust feelings, particularly difficult feelings, to experience them as threatening, overwhelming, and of little value. It takes a lot to teach men to, as they say in AA, “Don’t just do something, stand there!” In stark contrast lies the traditional culture of girls and women, who are taught early that suffering is a requisite skill in the armamentarium of any “good woman.” When confronting pain in close relationshpis, men have an option to withdraw that is not a part of most women’s repertoire.”
“…social psychologist Sandra Lipsitz Bem, and a generation that followed, began proving that the best predictor of good mental health in both children and adults was not confinement to rigidly defined characteristics but rather access to the whole palette of traits and appetites afforded us by nature. Psychologically whole human beings, who could be both tender and tough, depending on the circumstances, proved to have the best mental health.”
“The great paradox for girls is that their ticket into relationships is silence, over-accommodation, indirect expression. How can one maintain genuine relationships while not being genuine in them? The paradox for boys is that in order to be worthy of connection, they must prove themselves invulnerable – buttoned-down warriors in the world’s emotional marketplace. In the world of boys and men, you are either a winner or a loser, one up or one down, in control or controlled, man enough or a girl.
Where in this setup is the capacity to love? Sustaining relationships with others requires a good relationship with ourselves. Healthy self-esteem is an internal sense of worth that pulls one neither into “better than” grandiosity nor “less than” shame. But the essence of psychological patriarchy is the nonexistence of such middle ground.”
“For the past twenty years, in a thousand incarnations, I have treated my father. Though I was not aware of it, looking back I can only assume that somewhere along the way, I also made a deal. I would rather devote my life to saving my father than being him.”
“Since Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking research, the idea that girls approaching adolescence “lose their voice,” that they learn to back away from conflict and swallow the truth, has become virtually a cultural axiom. But it takes factoring male development back into the analysis, understanding the patriarchal cultural influences on both sexes, before it occurs to us to ask the next critical question: When girls are inducted into womanhood, what is it exactly that they have to say that must be silenced? What is the truth women carry that cannot be spoken? The answer is simple and chilling. Girls, women – and also young boys – all share this in common: None may speak the truth about men.”
“Pia observed that there wasn’t one form of childhood abuse, but rather two. What Pia has called “disempowering abuse” is the one we can all readily identify. It is made up of transactions that shame a child, hurt him, physically or psychologically, make him feel unwanted, helpless, unworthy. What Pia has called “false empowerment,” by contrast, is comprised of transactions that pump up a child’s grandiosity, or at the least, that do not actively hold it in check. Pia’s genius was in understanding that falsely empowering a child is also a form of abuse.
…Disempowering abuse leads to issues of shame, riding in the “one-down” position, feeling worthless. Disempowerment sets up a bad relationship to one-self, and it tends to pull one into the victim position. False empowerment leads to issues of grandiosity, riding in the “one-up” position, feeling superior and contemptuous. It sets people up to have difficulty, not with themselves, but with others. And it tends to result in offensive, or at the least, irresponsible, behaviors.”
“Now, girls in our culture are subject primarily to what form of abuse? Disempowerment. And boys in our culture are subject primarily to what form of abuse? It is a trick question. One is tempted to say, false empowerment, but that is only partially correct. In fact, boys are routinely subjected to alternations between the two – exaltation and degradation; shame and grandiosity; being on the “masculine” side, or relegated to the “feminine” side, based upon their performance…While it is true that girls and women struggle predominantly with shame, boys are subject to a two-step process of first, feeling shame, and then, fleeing from it into grandiosity. Repudiating the inner vulnerability that is made up of equal parts humanity and trauma, boys learn to punish in others what they dare not risk showing themselves.
It is this unacknowledged superimposition of grandiosity on shame, this burying of hurt boy inside hurt man, the sweet vulnerable self wrapped in the armor of denial, walled off behind business, work, drink, or rage, the hidden “feminine” inside the bluff “masculine,” that is the truth about men which dare not be uttered. And why must it remain unspoken? Because women and children fear triggering either extreme grandiosity or shame in the men they have depended upon. They fear that the very act of naming these states, of unmasking their effects, will escalate them. And their fears are far from groundless.”
“Skylar’s offer of love triggers in Will a tremendous vulnerability. ‘What if I love her and she hurts or abandons me as all others have?’ is the obvious question that rises up in him. Or as Skylar puts it with characteristic bluntness, ‘You’re afraid you’ll love me and I won’t love you back.’ But Will avoids such feelings of vulnerability. He disowns the wounded boy inside, wrapping that small self in a large cloak of coldness and rage. Encountering such reactions, most women freeze.
A further escalation of either state in the man bodes no good. If the man’s grandiosity intensifies, so, too, will his irresponsible behaviors; in Will’s case, his aggression. If the shame escalates, women fear that the man will “fall apart,” that a lifetime’s worth of suppressed pain will flood him, overwhelming him. Grandiosity pushed to extremes ends in homicide, shame in suicide. Both states are potentially lethal. This double-edged threat stops the truth in a woman’s mouth. Afraid of being hurt, afraid of hurting someone she loves, she backs down. Caretaking is, after all, her mandate, her primary training since birth.“
“The problem for women (or anyone inhabiting the caretaking side of the dynamic) is that while their empathic connection to the disowned “feminine,” the vulnerable, in the other is exaggerated, the connection to their own vulnerability, to self-care, is attenuated. In this way, many women, caring more deeply about the little boy in the man than the man does himself, find themselves bathed in sympathy for that hidden boy even while being psychologically, and sometimes, physically, harmed by the man.“
“Freud is correct in saying that the son’s love for his mother is, in many ways, his prototypic romance. And he is also right in observing that this great love affair most often ends badly. But Freud’s explanation for the grief the boy carries is wrong. It is not, as Freud suggests, the tragedy of the son’s inability to possess his mother. It is his broken-heartedness that they may no longer possess one another, as they once had. And, more sadly still, it is the burden that comes with the realization that his beloved mother does not stand in full possession of herself.”
“Conventional therapy has failed most couples. After thirty years of marital counseling, the divorce rate as decreased by not 1 percent. In a recent national survey, researcher John Gottman tested out one of therapy’s most cherished assumptions – that teaching couples to listen to one another empathically, that improving their “communication skills,” lead to longer-lived, happier unions. Gottman reports that he was as surprised as any other clinician to find that his data did not support this view.”
“When I am faced with a woman in trouble, my first move is to empower the woman. And when I am faced with a man in trouble, my first move is also most often to empower the woman.”
“No matter the therapist’s sex, and no matter their style, the asymmetries between men and women’s relationship skills must be put on the table. Men must be brought in from the cold, and often brought down from a perch of bewildered grandiosity. If intimacy is the conjunction of truth and love, then for couples to reclaim passion, connection, they must first reinhabit full honesty and then warm the starkness of truth’s landscape with their hearts.
But the play of shame and grandiosity blunts many men’s sensitivity to the impact of their behavior on others, while women withhold the missing information – and for good reason. As any woman knows, a man may have achieved great things in the world, may be acclaimed, enjoy the wealth of a king, but the one thing most men do not possess is a stable sense of self-worth. Like naked emperors, many men parade their disowned vulnerability even as they cloak themselves in the vestments of grandiosity. Damaged as boys, men often combine a boy’s vulnerability toward being wounded with a man’s entitlement to withdraw or lash out.”
“While women appear to be overly dependent, and men appear anti-dependent, actually both genders are taught to renounce their wants and needs. Traditionally, a good woman’s defining characteristic is her willingness to subordinate her wishes to those she loves. And for the heroic man, one who “serves and protects,” who “does his job,” his own wants and needs are supposed to hold such little importance that he is barely to take note of them. Women learn service and men, stoicism. The transition from childhood into these adult roles is a journey toward what psychiatry called “anhedonia,” the relinquishment of pleasure.”
“In American Beauty, Carolyn’s bedazzled worship of Ron looks suspiciously like a preadolescent’s adoration of her horse, her teacher, or a soap-opera doctor. They are a young girl’s dreams of a tamed brute animal, Beauty’s “Beast” filled with wild masculine power dampened down and made mild. Many common female fantasies align with the inchoate yearnings of a ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old girl.
While anorexic waifs may grace fashion runways, well-endowed heroines swoon in the arms of pectorally spectacular heroes on covers of the eternally popular romance novel. When women speak frankly about their sexual fantasies, they are often shockingly “incorrect.” To be swept away by Prince Charming, Clara’s handsome Nutcracker, someone both soft enough to be unthreatening and yet at the same time omniscient and omnipotent, this is a longing for the perfect father, youthful, powerful, and benevolent.”
“Men’s fantasies tend to be even younger and, consequently, more troubling. If romance is the great seller among women, the insatiable market for men is porn. What many women find offensive in the male sexual marketplace is not erotic explicitness per se but pornography’s characteristic lack of mutuality, or even real personhood. Even when not overtly aggressive, pornography posits women as existing for men’s use.
But as the pioneer sex therapist David Snarch once observed, people tend to do in the bedroom what they do in every other room. To be of use is the essence of women’s traditional, in increasingly archaic, job description, so why would we expect it to be different sexually?
…The essence of porn is a fantasy in which everything the man does is perfect, and the woman’s sexual pleasure lies in the giving of pleasure.”