Family issues belong on the front page, not relegated to the family page

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home. (Confucius)

One morning in another life a grade twelve student met me at the door of my classroom holding his report card in his hand. As a student whose first language was not English, he had received a grade of 58% in the average of his term work and his examination. He was adamant that such a mark was unacceptable. I listened carefully to his petition; reviewed his work and informed him that the mark would stand.

I later learned that the mark had been “deleted” (back in the non-digital age, ‘white-out’ was the rather obvious choice for deletions) so that his parents could not see the truth. Pride, parental expectations and evidence of personal shame, completely unjustified by the diligence and the persistence the student displayed to learn a new language, were at the root of the situation. Deception was the choice of method to deal with the perceived problem.

There are so many different “reasons” for both children and parents resorting to deception, cover-up, dissembling, and failing to “show up” as we really are.

Basic to the dynamic of deception in the family is the varying reliance on “pride” that accompanies too many situations. If the family is engaged in alcohol dependence, or domestic or child abuse, it is taken as a “given” that family secrets have to be protected, at all costs. Even the closest of friends, neighbours, fellow pew-sitters, co-workers, and classmates must not and do not ever learnt the truth of the tragedy. In fact, too often, even within the family, certain members will not be made aware of the full truth, thereby “protecting” both the abuser and the one kept in the dark from quite literally having a relationship. No relationship is feasible without a full disclosure among close family members. And the refusal to disclose, including the unwillingness, and the incapacity to disclose, as well as the fear of such disclosure (another piece of evidence that is often overlooked in any analysis) lies at the heart of the issue.

While T.S. Eliot reminds us that we cannot stand too much reality, nevertheless, it is the degree of withholding that too often determines the kind of foundation on which family relationships are constructed. For a young twenty-something to drive her car into a snowbank on the way home from a house party, without injuring any of the occupants or damaging the car, without having the courage, and the openness to inform her single mother, as a way of protecting both herself and her mother, is to demonstrate a degree of enmeshment that warrants critical self-examination. For an adolescent male to put long sleeve shirts on every day before leaving for school, to cover up the welts inflicted by his mother, is what many might call a merely incidental incidence, not worthy of consideration as a serious family issue. Those who hold such a view, however, are not, were not, and cannot image being in the “shoes” of the adolescent. For the adolescent, one of the questions is ‘why is this abuse occurring only when my father is not present, and is not being told?’

We do have some examples of public disclosure that, although they are often relegated to the social columns, nevertheless merit a reference. President Obama, for one, stopped smoking cigarettes six years ago, “because he so feared his wife’s response” if he failed to stop. On the other hand, for Trump to have to apologize to his family for having said what he said, and for what he has done, and not said, is loudly displayed as fodder in the current presidential election. So the issue of truth-telling is front and centre in the public discourse in North America, and perhaps around the world.

No child or adolescent can or will tell his or her parents everything about their lives: not the first time a car drives into a ditch, not the first time too much booze renders one intoxicated, not the first time some illicit drug renders him ‘high’…and yet the patterns of disclosure are begun in such situations. For some, it takes a few days, weeks or even months for them to find the confidence to disclose. And, with that time lapse, perhaps they can and do reconcile their fear, and their apprehension about the consequences of full disclosure. And the parents, themselves, are not without responsibility for the kind of family culture they have fostered over the early years. Too much pressure for control, too little relaxation and acceptance of the small “mistakes” and too much rigid discipline, all of these squarely in the purview and the job description of the parent will lead to an inevitable withholding. Parents, too, who operate at such a high performance level, (I was certainly one of these!) will inculcate a fear of not being “good enough” even though their words might be unequivocally supportive of their children.

Fear of not being “good enough,” of not being “up to the perfection” of their parents, of not being willing (or perhaps ever able) to let their parents see their “imperfections” is one of the dynamics, and a very subtle and dangerous dynamic it is) that infiltrates many professional families. How many times have we all heard the story of a young man or woman who spent most of their life trying to life up to the expectations of their parents. And, we all know that those expectations might never have been specifically articulated, but merely inferred from the actions and the attitudes of the parents to their own lives. And these attitudes are extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the child to confront. When, for example, is there time in a busy, fully scheduled, fully engaged, (over-regulated) schedule for children to participate in their various “activities” and then also to have the time and the energy and the composure to say to their parent, “You know, I am getting tired of trying to meet your unrealistic goals for my life! I would like to talk about what I want to do, and what I am willing to do and I would like to get your support for my agenda, not the one that makes you look good in front of your friends!”

Clearly, it is not only the ‘sins’ of the child that need disclosure. So do the attitudes, demands, expectations and even beliefs of the parents also need to be explored, fully and in an unqualified and unrestricted manner, in family circles. And such circles require “strong” parents, open parents, vulnerable parents and the courage to structure time and space for the family to have these conversations. And it is this family culture that I failed to facilitate in my own marriage. I was too busy “performing” on the public stage, drinking in the applause that comes from such performances. I was too dependent on public adulation to be the kind of effective and compassionate and open and vulnerable parent that my children needed and deserved. The temperature inside the home, especially the “heat” of the parental expectations, and also the parental “strength” to take the honest criticism from their children (not the phoney power games, but the real issues of too much pressure that forecloses on open communication) is critical for full disclosure.

And the time and patience required to open to our children, really open, really sit and listen, rather than burying our minds and our bodies in our own “professional agendas” as an unconscious way of medicating the pain of our own unworthiness and our determination to prove our value to “whomever” it is that we believe we have to prove ourselves to, is so ephemeral, like a butterfly, and so fleeting. And like the tennis racket that is poised at a certain angle, needing to be shifted only a fraction of an inch to get the ball over the net, parental attitudes, in too many cases, need to be shifted from achievements of power, money, status and public recognition and acknowledgements to getting to really know their children. I failed in this primary parental responsibility, and for that I have profound regrets and for that I apologize to my three daughters.

They are all professionally successful, and for that they have themselves to thank. They did it! They made their parents and their culture proud. And I can only hope that they did not do it at the cost of missing the emotional and the psychic needs of their children.

Confucius tells an important truth. Can we read the deeper implications to our culture and to our families in his observation. For far too long, family issues have been relegated to the social pages of our newspapers, where the majority of readers are women. Education, parenting and the development of a family culture, including the development of family relationships has for far too long been considered “effeminate” and the responsibility of the mother. It is long past time for editors, political leaders and fathers to learn that they obligations do not stop with the proverbial “bring home the bacon” commandment. All the bacon in the world will not feed the soul, the spirits and the hearts of their children. We need to raise the expectations on ourselves, (and to reap the rewards of our determined and disciplined shift of the “racket angle” of our goals and our agendas) and put more of our energy and our imaginations into the kind of atmosphere and the kind of warmth we bring and foster in our kitchens and our television rooms, and in our backyards, and in our camping trips.

Reflections on personal projections....mining their threads of gold

Psychological projection was defined by Jung as an unconscious transfer of subjective psychic elements onto an outer subject—person or object.

Suppose someone perceived-right or wrong-his father as tyrannical. As an adult he may have the tendency not only to act in a tyrannical way but also to project in people with some authority this feature. He will be convinced-again right or wrong- that the subject of his projection is a tyrant. This is a psychological projection.(Happiness Academy Online)

As a son raised by a tyrannical mother (and an emotionally absent father) I have lately become aware that in my youth, it was my mother’s unconscious projections, both negative and positive, onto her only son that both entrapped and exaggerated the potential of my own life. She was determined to put her signature on her offspring so deeply and in 72-point type, that she quite literally forced her absolute will on the number of hours of piano practicing that were required every day from when I was five until I left for university. And within those hours, she also imposed her military marching orders on each piece, slapping the piano case with some hard instrument as an overpowering human metronome. And then, of course, there were the expected recitals, exams, and public command performances. I was convinced then, and am even more so today, that she was living her failed musical career vicariously through her dependent child. Some would refer to her as a “Hollywood mother”, determined to force her child into progeny expectations, whether or not those expectations were achievable. There were certainly situations, such as her nursing practice, in which she functioned as a diligent, compassionate, exacting professional, lauded and much sought after by suffering patients. So, whether my perceptions were right or wrong, they were indeed my indelible perceptions. As an adult, this early experience has coloured many of my perceptions, and thereby my experiences with people in authority, both male and female, but certainly more frequently among women. Projecting, unconsciously, my perception of my “tyrannical mother” onto any attitude, behaviour, belief, body language, verbal expression that even gave a faint scent of the abuse of power, I have become an over-active radar screen for even potential tyranny, whether or not the intentions of the other warrantaed such a reading.

Along with this aspect of my ‘projection’ dynamic, I have also valued, sometimes too highly, those expressions of support, compassion and appreciation that have been directed to me, once again, particularly from women. Having felt starved for such kindness, I have been like a moth to this often flickering light bulb, without actually acknowledging whether or not such attraction was healthy for me, or for the other. Distinguishing between authentic kindness and ‘political manipulation’, naturally, has been quite tentative, if not misinterpreted. Along the way, of course, an ex-spouse, and later a few ‘significant others’ have suffered from my form of psychic entrapment, as I became increasingly conscious that something about my way of being was ‘not working’ to put it mildly. (These early patterns neither clarify themselves, nor do they have developmental lectures and seminars in which to unpack them, in the normal course of seeking and pursuing both an education and a career! Duh!) Experience, blundering mistakes, bitter interactions, repeated reflections, and even immersion in spiritual direction and counsel might provide some light out of a tunnel and then, perhaps only a faint glimmer. Having been immersed in the white water of cascading projections for most of my first decades, like a salmon swimming to the spawning ground, up-stream, I learned that flayling and deep breathing kinds of hard work were necessary just to stay afloat. And often that hard work, including intense encounters that were at best unproductive and at worst, overwhelming, portrayed my person as the most needy nerd on the block.

Complicating my early naivety, in the realm of masculine-feminine relationships, was the daily, almost hourly presence of a father who, while compassionate and tolerant in the extreme, nevertheless, was either fearful of confronting his spouse, or chose what he considered the ‘high road’, silence, agreement, complicity, and then, when he could no longer hold his feelings in, passive aggression. As an adolescent, I was never sure when the complicity and compromise stopped and the passive aggression began. So I learned both: that men, in order to generate peace and harmony in their marriages, were long suffering, tolerant and always the compromiser, and that, if such accommodations were unreachable or unfeasible, then he resorted to P.A.

Mix into this domestic cocktail a puritan ethic that demanded physical work over mental concentration: “Don’t read, do something!” was the rallying cry of the ethic, uttered whenever I recall picking up a book (infrequently) and settling into its adventures. (You have already intuited that it was not the male parent who uttered such black-and –white commands.) An over-bearing female parent, coupled with a still silent river (or was it a swamp?) of a father, fertilized with a protestant, puritan ethic of hard work, and a maternal ambition to polish her public reputation through piano performances of her son, (and later of her only daughter), will generate complex and unresolved feeling and perceptions that are inordinately loaded, at least in my case, with unconscious projections.

Exploring Literature with high school students, we continually encountered the recurring theme of  the tension between “appearance and reality”. Delving into the back stories of novels and dramas and mining, with the students, evidence that helped to inform a degree of discernment among them, for me always evoked by a silent and private pursuit of my own, pulling apart the evidence of secrecy, distortion, personal neuroses and projections that blew through our little salt-box brick bungalow, churning the gestation and the development of unknown and unacknowledged origins of my own discomfort. Overtly and almost ostentatiously church-going, scrubbed and clean were our bodies and our clothes, while underneath, there was always a raging torrent of anger, discomfort, embarrassment and even despondency that “our truth” was deeply buried and hidden from public disclosure, through both the complicity of each member of our family, and through the normalizing of secrecy that came to be our family rule. We were not living with alcoholics; we were not living with addicted adults, in the conventional definition of the word. We were not living in extreme poverty, nor were we living in squalor. In fact, our physical environment was sanitized into sterility, comparable to the operating rooms in most small town hospitals. And yet, emotionally, psychically, ethically, and most importantly, spiritually, we were living in a desert wasteland. Conflict, in the form of weeks of extended silence, without a single word being exchanged between each parent, was not unusual, or even irregular; it was so frequent that when there was what one could term normal conversation, we actually breathed differently, wondering just how long the pastoral interlude would last.

Conflicts were resolved through the only method available, apparently, maternal edict. Father did not dare to ask,

“Could we re-think this decision and talk about it some more?”

Nor did he consider, as was the case with all of his peers, seeking counsel outside the home, given the masculine requirement to fulfil the maxim: “You made your bed, now lie in it!” without public compliant or even public discussion among close friends. Questions about the length of piano practice were never a matter of discussion; they were ‘settled’ by a unilateral edict, with which I completely complied. I never recall even once uttering a voice of protest that I really wanted to ‘take a break’ and go outside to play with my friends, who would sometimes knock on our door in their attempt to ‘free’ me. Of course, it was inevitable that our public “mask” would crack, and, also apparently it would be inevitable that I would be the agent of the cracking, unknowingly: Taking my father’s half-ton truck out on a Saturday night, without formal permission, I rolled it into a large immoveable boulder, on our return from the local YWCA, where three of us had been visiting counsellors in training. The next morning, Sunday, the whole town could witness the crushed truck, blazing my father’s name, keeled over on the lot of the most prominent car dealership on the main street in town. Whether walking or driving, everyone rounded that corner almost daily, and my embarrassment was extremely difficult to hide. I doubt I was successful.

In school, I was a generally compliant student, as I found the atmosphere collegial, although I could not have described it that way then. I deeply enjoyed learning, reading, answering questions, and especially discussing the various nuances of a situation, whether in history class or in language class. Teachers, too, were collaborative, collegial, and fair disciplinarians, for the most part. ( The incident in which I was strapped, in grade four, and later punished more severely at home, is told elsewhere in this space. However, another angry, controlling female, this time the teacher, was the agent of the unwarranted punishment. I say, unwarranted, but so do all other witnesses of the event).

Later, in college, I ran up against two notable female professors, one in Child Psychology, the other in Zoology. Both had eminent and laudable credentials; both were engaged in honourable research and both were fully committed to their teaching assignments. Neither, however, even seemed to make it to my list of role model educators. And that reality was the result of no action or omission on the part of the two professors. It was, on deep and long reflection, the sole result of my own unconscious projections, about which neither they nor I were ever fully conscious. As proof of my conviction of my responsibility, I failed in my first attempt in Child Psychology as well as in a supplemental examination. The professor’s memorable quote, on appeal was, “I can only conclude that you know absolutely nothing about Child Psychology!” As far as Zoology goes, I also failed that course, and had to enrol in an alternative science course, before graduation. These were in years when I was just entering my twenties at least chronologically. Emotionally and developmentally however, I was still a very young, naive and innocent adolescent, blinded by my own painting another with a brush that neither of them deserved.

Projections are, almost predictably and universally, at root, agents of self-sabotage. People will neither know cognitively, nor acknowledge psychologically at the time of the encounters, that they are attempting to cope with another’s projection. They will, just as I and many others have done, puzzle over why things do not seem compatible. How could they be? When one comes to the table with an unseen and unknown and unacknowledged impediment to healthy compatibility, one tilts the scales in the direction of turbulence, fractiousness and potentially disappointment, if all parties remain connected.

Seeking to fill the gaps in my own development, especially those in the realm of emotional intelligence and maturity, I have fallen into unhealthy relationships with various women who, themselves, were projecting their own unconscious “hero” or “rescuer” onto me, without their, or my knowing I was the target of their projections. Of course, not only do such encounters take inordinate amounts of psychic energy, rise to inconceivable heights of joy and fall almost immediately to deep and dark caves of disappointment.

It is no surprise then, not only that my father was handicapped and restricted from taking healthy and caring initiatives to confront his spouse’s shadow, but that millions of men and women continue to labour under the clouds of competing projections, seeking shelter where none is available, seeking solace from dried-up sources, seeking companionship from another who is also attempting to break out of her own emotional swamp. However, let’s be very clear!

There are helpful resources, reflective retreats, professional psychological and spiritual guides available and open to entering into professional relationships that can and do lead to enhanced clarity, enhanced self-awareness and thereby enhanced potential for healthy reciprocal, dialogic and collaborative, and most importantly mutually supportive relationships. That is especially not only to be sought, but also attained, with another who also acknowledges her own unconscious projections, and the role they play in her life, and relationships.

I can speak with some considerable confidence about that last statement. For the past fifteen years, I have had the good fortune to participate fully in such a relationship. Michelle has both her inner and physical eyes open to the moments when our projections sand-paper each other, and we continue to identify those moments, and seek the ‘threads of gold’ that inevitably emerge from a loving unpacking of the entanglement. Words are inadequate to express my gratitude to Michelle especially, and also to all of those whose lives have intersected with mine, less than happily and less than in complete fulfilment. Nevertheless, there is no final termination to these explorations, except death, and even after death, these projections, and those of our sons and daughters, will  continue to dance in the universe of their generations.

Fragile Masculinity and the culture of sterertypes that sustains it

Men are told all their lives what it takes to be a man. It is a form of psychological abuse. Even as adults, men are still expected to constantly re-apply for eligibility to their gender. “Toxic masculinity” is a term that muddles male behaviour with male identity, and is often simply reduced to “masculinity” as being inherently toxic, a theme that was recently pursued by writer Zach Stafford in an article for The Guardian.
The phrases “man up” and “grow a set of balls” shouldn’t actually mean anything or have any motivating effect. If you gender-flip these terms they become nonsensical. They “work” by poking at a pre-existing trauma.
Masculinity can be a real and significant wound for men. Some are lucky and have not been heavily abused because of how they “perform” masculinity. Others have, and some choose to rebel, but the code of male behavior makes finding allies and giving and receiving support as good as impossible. The rules forbid men from reaching out for help, asking for emotional support, and/or being vulnerable. Which means among other things that there is no one to help them unpack threats to this identity. That’s the trap.
Masculinity is a gender tyranny all of its own. If you live in the city, if you watch television, if you spend time in the public education system, you get a barrage of conflicting messages about masculinity. Boys grow up seeing society reward and punish male behavior in ways that are confusing and contradictory. On one hand, boys and men are told that violence is their problem to solve, and on the other they are punished and ridiculed for showing emotions in a society that throws megabucks at the exhibition of violence that is professional boxing.
When young males are told to police each other for reasons that are found to be misrepresented or distorted, they are likely to adopt behaviors that hold the most favorable reward versus punishment.
Parents are blamed for sending the wrong messages. Boys and men are blamed for sending the wrong messages to each other. Men take society’s messages on to carry shame, guilt, and self-hatred around with them for things they never did. The magnitude of this pain is largely undocumented.
The way men are rewarded (or not) for their behaviors is a big part of what we call male “privilege”. You earn the privilege by demonstrating the behavior. But privilege is situational, and highly dynamic. This is not reflected in the way privilege is often spoken about. This system of privilege is not something that men who have broken its rules can simply re-access at any time. We are talking about life choices, choices about presentation and behavior that make up the difference between authentic and inauthentic, life-affirming and soul-destroying, for those who own the choices. This system of privileges also relies on reputations, that cannot simply be unmade and remade with the wave of a magic wand.
The truth is under everyone’s noses, and yet men can feel hammered away at, as if constant pressure to change will somehow help them. The male can become like an invisible gender, their privileges overstated, their gender struggles ridiculed. Men need your help, not your ridicule.
(By Arthur Dunmore, The Good Men Project, January 7, 2016)
- See more at: http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/whats-up-with-masculinitysofragile-wcz/#sthash.jjrnbgh8.dpuf
And that help will not come from a political culture that takes for granted the stereotype of male dominance, male oppression of women, male irresponsibility and male insouciance, linked to the stereotype of the female victim, the female innocent, the female underclass, the female eunuch, as embedded in each and every conflict between the genders.
And it is men who need to grow up and accept the fact that we are participating, in too many cases, inside the boundaries of these two stereotypes. We want to "do the right thing" especially when we are in places in which the politics of gender equality demands that we change the demographics, the remuneration packages, the status and power ratios and the vocabulary about how the genders relate to each other.
Policy and politics will and do inevitably dismiss the distinctions that accrue to each situation. Policy and politics tend to paint with a very broad brush, not a brush that digs for, uncovers and sheds light on the nuances of each situation.
What we are watching is a cacophony of serious complaints from women drowning out the due process of really seeking out all sides of the "story"...
This not a defense of people like Cosby, who, if the dozens of stories about drugging women for sex are proven true, ought to be punished with the full force of the law.
This is not a defense of the too many male partners who, failing both themselves and their partners, have failed to acquire and to deploy both verbal and physical messaging that depicts the full truth of the full range of their emotions, without endangering the female partner. Those high school literature classes in which the nuances of human relationships were painted in colours and perspectives that shed light on the human psyche, including the male psyche, were not, after all, "just for girls". They were the stuff of the kind of experience that would follow and derail many of our lives for the remaining decades of those lives.
However, when a female cries "foul" against a male, the motives of that female, like the motives of any cry of abuse are an integral part of the resolution of the "conflict. And that process is necessary and too often missing both in the resolution of domestic conflict that has reached the level of public law and enforcement and in the formal legal addressing of such conflicts. When a man is offended, especially by a woman who is deeply engaged in his life, he may sulk, go passive aggressive, seek false solace in another drink, another woman, another compulsive activity. Too infrequently will he either search for or find the patience, even after counting to 10 or 100 or even 100, to ask for a peaceful and quiet and self-disclosing conversation that explains his frustration, his feelings of being demeaned, his feelings even of anger. His fragile masculinity, aspects of which are detailed above, too often relegates him to patterns of behaviour that are so deeply embedded in both his psyche and the culture in which he grew up, patterns that perpetuate the reductionistic stereotypes and deepen the potential for another unresolved gender conflict.
When a female is offended by a male who is deeply engaged in her life, she will often report her offense to her 'sisters' (both biological and social), and if the offense is more serious, to the 'authorities'. And while the protection of the legal system is warranted in some cases of domestic abuse, there are far too many reported cases that keep law enforcement chasing situations that do not warrant their full attention. And the culture, through its usual agents like the media, the entertainment industry, the advertising industry, and the churches, promulgates a kind of " female as victim" archetype as a first mental approach to any reported gender conflict. As a culture, such retreat to the politically correct stereotype, female as victim, male as offender, will never resolve the conflict to the satisfaction of either party.
One of the most difficult aspect of teaching police ethics is attempting to convince the students aspiring to become police officers to abandon their fixation on their own preconceived "guilt" and "guilty party" prior to entering any situation to which they have been assigned. I know how difficult this process is, having attempted to achieve the stated goal of prior objectivity, not of a perfect nature, but at least of confronting both formally and privately, the raging stereotypes that dominate their world view. A similar paralysis afflicts too many men and women, both those in relationships and those who bear official responsibility for the organizations in which such relationships inevitably arise. And when the organizations, like the church for example, fall victim to the  blanket pleas of the female demographic to whom they "minister", and make every situation that offends their politically correct model of propriety and morality, fit their stereotype, for the purpose of defending their public reputation, those organizations put in danger both the female complainants and the male offenders.
The commencement of a male-female relationship cannot be automatically assumed to have begun solely from the "power" or influence of the male; the continuance of a such a relationship cannot be assumed to have continued because of the "power" or influence of the male; in fact, even a marriage whether healthy or not, cannot be presumed to be dominated by the male, even if that male is or was a "superior" in rank to the female.
And unless and until we can and do park such assumptions and presumptions from our attitudes, our beliefs, our perceptions and our formal and informal processes of considering any and all complaints,  both men and women will continue to be reduced to a mere shadow of their full personhood. They will continue to be mere "players" in a pre-ordained script written by others whose needs do not even approximate the needs and desires of the parties in a gender conflict.
By starting with the premise that all complaints result from male testosterone, male aggression and male obsession with sexuality, and by enforcing a culture that imposes such a perspective on our conventional beliefs, (stemming originally from a religious root of sexuality as evil, that emerged from the Garden of Eden), we shroud the female with a 'protective' force she neither needs nor wants, and we condemn the male to a reputational destruction that may not be deserved.
We will not, because we cannot, achieve either balance or harmony between the genders by adopting a political position and embedding that position in a soil of masculine domination based on physical strength, nor a masculine power  based on rank, nor a masculine offense based on biology.
Having been raised by a domineering woman, my mother, married to a meek and compliant (far too compliant for both his and his childrens' sake) father, I know too much about the  gender inversion of victim/offender that characterized my childhood and adolescence. In fact, as an abused male child, abused brutally and repeatedly by my mother, I am still processing the psychic wounds that are  burned into my memory and my world view. Passive aggressive default by my father, linked to an obsessive pursuit of perfection in parenting by my mother were and are a recipe for a highly distorted picture of the world, especially in the light of the statistics of the sociology of gender relationships.
However, this perspective is nevertheless useful when confronting the dual and competing archetypes of the female victim and the male aggressor.
And the reverse of the current sociological, if not pathological, distortion, to turn women into the aggressor and men into victims is not going to solve the issue either. It is only by pursuing the full disclosure of the panoply of facts, the motives and the attitudes and beliefs of both parties in any gender conflict, that we might be able to more fully realise the complexities and the gifts of both sexes, and the potential for the resolution of many of the domestic conflicts that inhibit the lives of all our children.
Having watched too many women seek and wreak vengeance on too many men, with the formal and informal compliance of too many other men, often out of jealousy, I am appalled that others are not either willing or able to 'see' this dynamic in play, in the theatre of gender politics. If and when a relationship goes south, too often the woman abandoned is fraught with despair, and inflicts her venom on the offending male, the most obvious and most present target of her hate. And if and when such vengeance is dismissed as legitimate, then all the men and women in the circle of information surrounding that drama learn that revenge from a jealous woman will be honoured, over the full disclosure of the truth. Even if a woman is witness to a relationship the details of which she finds offensive (without knowing the full truth) and then coaches the female to cry wolf, that witness is too often seeking revenge for other male offenses with which she has not dealt, for which the male is not responsible.
Even a woman who is neglected in her marriage is a danger to the men of her circle, insofar as her neglect is neither acknowledged nor foreshadowed if and when she pursues a relationship with a male outside of her marriage. That male is in the position of being both the "object" of her affections and the "projection" of her contempt for her male partner. And such insight is not part of the curriculum of men helping men to develop a health masculinity.
It is both complex and highly time consuming to fully investigate the details of all complaints. It is also dangerous because it could and often would disclose the fact that the male "offender" has not offended, did not intend to offend and was behaving in the full conviction of equal and balanced participation. Only after some separating event or announcement, did the woman's "consent" become a matter of debate, question and accusation.
And a policy of protecting women from offending men, as both starting point and rule or law enforcement, dramatically contributes to the reduction of the authentic masculinity and the authentic femininity of both parties to a gender conflict.
The emotional sensitivity of men is also devalued, even discounted, in the politically correct reductionisms of most of the discussion of gender politics, as is the emotional strength of women. Far too often, given both their biological reality and their early acculturation, women and young girls, develop a kind of balance, insight and foresight into the affairs of the heart that far exceeds that of most men. Of course they are not developing in this way to compete with men, at that time, yet their mastery of the inner life continues to plague too many relationships, given the aversion to such matters of the heart of their male partners. And men, for their part, are then left feeling "less than" or even "incompetent" when compared directly with their partner's insight and familiarity with the inner life. How tragic that too many women use this "power" over their male partners, in an obviously and predictably faulty attempt to achieve dominance; and how equally tragic that too many men either walk away or refuse even to enter into conversations about matter of the heart, given their built-in fear of inadequacy.
And the dance of competitive advantage continues to plague the question of relationship-building, negating or at least minimizing the potential for mutual growth and endearment through paths of full disclosure based on courage and not inadequacy or weakness, both of which tend to dominate the actions and attitudes within male-female relationships and more importantly, in the pursuit of public policy to regulate the most dynamic of human energies, the male-female tension.

When will men be "good enough"?...in an extrinsic world, never!!

I just read a piece by Gint Aras, in The Good Men Project, April 16, 2014, entitled, "When's a guy good enough?" An English professor in a community college that serves a relatively poor neighbourhood in Chicago, Aras recounts in eloquent detail the narrative he heard from a Latino cab driver punctuated with the rhetorical question, "When's a guy good enough?"
The cab driver had enrolled in college, received an initial liberal arts associate degree and then, after enrolling in a four-year college, encountered many hurdles that blocked the completion of his program. Returning to Mexico to an ailing mother, where he was ostracized as the "rich" American, the subject of too many requests to proceed with his education, only to learn that his wife back in Chicago had left him for a tire salesman, the cabbie had also, after his mother's death made another attempt to finish a teaching degree only to be blocked by an arrogant "gate-keeper" of a professor whose course he seemed unable to pass. Here is how Aras describes the instructor:
the instructor with a strong sense of (completely arbitrary) ethics, values that must be present in the student before he is “released into the world”. -
See more at: http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/when-is-a-guy-good-enough-gint-aras/?utm_source=Thursday+April+17%2C+2014&utm_campaign=Constant+Contact+Apr+17+2014&utm_medium=email#sthash.F5ldGkWn.dpuf
 It was, as the story was told, almost inevitable that, on one level the cabbie would consider his "incompleteness" a disadvantage compared with the tire salesman's "career" and the capture of his estranged wife. Here is another quote from the Aras retelling of Juan's (the Cabbie's) story:
He wished someone would respect him, but he knew no one would until he was truly wealthy and stable. “That’s what a guy’s good for. A man is a source, but he’s never good enough, and he’s never got enough, or whatever he has is the wrong thing.” A guy who sells tires today, Juan said, is more stable and wealthier than a guy who might be a teacher in the future. “That’s the danger of education for a guy,” said Juan. “People need you to give them something right now. They don’t care if you say, ‘I’ll get it to you when I’m done with my degree.’ That degree might never come. You’re stupid if you think it takes four years. They plug the thing up with hoops, or they steal classes from you, make you take the same thing twice.”
And then the blockbuster:
“How about this one?”
We were now approaching the college.
“If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete. You know who that is, right?” “I don’t.” “Ha! It’s Charles Bukowski.* You don’t know Charles Bukowski?”
“Not by heart, no.”
“Well, he writes a lot of truth.”
Juan pulled up to the front of the college, right before the entrance to the theater. He said, “You can’t wish for it to go both ways. If you want everything your way, you end up lonely. And if you don’t want to be lonely, you must give up your way. No matter what, something’s got to suck. That’s just the way it is, I guess.”
Juan's attitude might sound like a "pity-party" to some, and perhaps it is. However, the question has hung over the foreheads of millions of men for centuries, without being addressed in nearly as articulate and compelling a manner as Juan, through Gint Aras, puts it.
Every time I left my home, as a young boy, I heard the words, "Be a good boy!" as if somehow my plan was to be something else. Most times when my mother talked about her husband, my father, the words "your father's no good" were included in the diatribe, although they stayed together in an uncomfortable truce for sixty-two years.
I have a theory, based on some seven decades of watching men "attempt to prove themselves" as if their identity had been replaced by their capacity to earn, or to provide, or to perform a skill, or to win friends, or to essentially turn themselves into a function, as if bring a human doing had replaced a human being, in their consciousness.
And despite his perception of himself as an incomplete man, "never good enough," Juan hits the nail on the head about my theory.
Most of the activities in which men are engaged start out as attempts to prove that these men are "acceptable" to someone...first their parents, then their teachers, then their employers, and then and most importantly their female partners, and then their children and grandchildren. Men (perhaps women too, but here we are talking about men) are "other-directed" to the point that the notion of "self-direction" seems almost meaningless. I once asked a high school principal what he would do if he could do whatever he wanted. He shrugged and replied, "I have no idea!" He was engaged, by his own words, in managing widgets on a board, providing coverage for absent teachers, scheduling meetings and the agendas for those meetings, writing reports for head office, listening to complaints from parents and teachers, and attempting to keep the lid on the school, so his reputation would pave the path toward a superintendent's job, with more of the same, including both more salary and more pension.
And the culture supports this concept of "proving oneself"...and if and when one decides, really decides, that one is more than or different from "a function for others" then one is, from my experience, completely ostracised as evil, dangerous, irresponsible, uncontrollable, deviant, and the target of slurs that say more about the person firing the verbal assault's own poverty of self than they do about the target of the slur. For men, existence is highly competitive, with siblings, with classmates, with co-workers, with supervisors, and with 'friends' or perhaps 'associates' who rarely get behind the mask of "good guy" or "funny guy" or "combative guy" or "wise guy" or "serious guy"....rarely is a man, (and this includes how other men see him as well as how he sees himself) a human being, somewhat full of gaps, and somewhat competent and seriously complex yet also extremely simple, and most important "comfortable in his own skin"....as the cliché has it.
We fight to win and depending on the prize of that winning, we will do almost anything to achieve it, including sacrificing our too often unknown identity in the process. And in the process of reducing both ourselves and the prize to some form of objectification, we inflict violence on ourselves, and on many others, including our partners, our children our co-workers, our bosses and our futures.
Wars have been and will continue to be fought because "some man or men were not good enough."
Divorces have been filed because someone, either the woman or the man believed, "the man was not good enough."
Heart attacks have occurred because someone pursued a goal at the expense of balancing health and wellness, a word that really did not exist even a couple of decades ago. Firings and dismissals have occurred too often because someone was found "not good enough" for the post.
And, to turn this around, first we have to tell our stories about how this "meme" has impacted our lives, who those people were who projected their own inadequacy onto us unconsciously and then remind both ourselves and others when appropriate, that projections are just that, projections and not reality. Just because my mother was neurotic and projected her need for perfection onto both my father and me (as well as onto my sister) does not, and need not define my identity. And just because the Christian church takes the position that we have all sinned and are all sinners falling short of the glory of God (I think the quote is from Paul's letter to the Philippians) does not mean that we are "no good" as creatures, although the imago dei portion of that Christian faith seems to have got lost in too many pulpits and pews on Sundays, and then carried home for the "leavening" of the home culture for the rest of the week.
Whenever and wherever one finds abuse, one can immediately look for the abuser who is invariably acting out of "scarcity" of some essential ingredient in his life. "Being no good" is at the heart of the worst crimes in human history, including the brutal murder of 6 million Jews in the Second World War. The pursuit of superiority, as a substitute for  inadequacy, inflicts so much brokenness, pain,  misery and death, not to mention the angst infesting the spirit of our cabbie Juan. And, of course, on the other side of this canvas are the "winners" who callously and contemptuously patronize  those of us who are "not good enough" in their eyes, and we let that perception dominate our culture.
And feminism, at least in its most virulent form, simply adopts the 'meme' of masculine competitiveness, proving, once again, that women are as competent, if not more so, than men, (as if there were any question about that in the first place!). And the cycle grows even more insidious, and encircling of both genders.
On Good Friday, 2014, one of the questions poking its head above the frozen ground remains, as always, "Will Death imprison us all, in one of its many forms, or will we be able to find our own path to a new and fully alive and fully authentic existence?
So long as the "extrinsic" dominates and obliterates the "intrinsic" in our culture, and in our faith, then we will all forever be "never good enough"....and there is no deity supporting that reduction.
*A quote from the writer Charles Bukowski:
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

More research into young males' depression seems promising

Warning sign for depression in teen boys found By Kounteya Sinha, TNN The Times of India, February 19, 2014
LONDON: The world's first biological marker to single out teenagers suffering from acute depression has been found - a discovery scientists hope will enable better diagnosis and treatment. Teenage boys who show a combination of depressive symptoms and elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol have been found to be 14 times more likely to develop major depression than those who show neither trait. This has helped scientists from the University of Cambridge identify the first biomarker - a biological signpost - for major, or clinical, depression. They argue this could help identify those boys in particular at greatest risk of developing the illness and provide treatment at an earlier stage.

Until now there have been no biomarkers for major depression. ; this is believed to be, in part, because both the causes and the symptoms can be so varied.

The researchers now hope that having an easily measurable biomarker - in this case, elevated cortisol plus depressive symptoms - will enable primary care services to identify boys at high risk and consider new public mental health strategies for them in the community. Cambridge University professor Ian Goodyer, who led the study, said depression is a terrible illness that will affect as many as 10 million people in the UK at some point in their lives. "Through our research, we now have a very real way of identifying those teenage boys most likely to develop clinical depression," said Goodyer. "This will help us strategically target preventions and interventions at these individuals and hopefully help reduce their risk of serious episodes of depression and their consequences in adult life."The researchers measured levels of cortisol in saliva from two separate large cohorts of teenagers. The first cohort consisted of 660 teens, who provided four early-morning samples on schooldays within a week and then again twelve months later. The researchers were able to show within this cohort that cortisol levels were stable over one year in the population at large in both boys and girls in this group.

A second cohort, consisting of 1,198 teenagers, provided early-morning samples over three school days. Using self-reports about depression current symptoms collected longitudinally over the 12 months and combining these with the cortisol findings, the researchers were able to divide the teens in the first cohort into four distinct sub-groups, ranging from those with normal levels of morning cortisol and low symptoms of depression over time (Group 1) through to those teenagers with elevated levels of morning cortisol and high symptoms of depression over time (Group 4) - this latter group made up one in six (17%) of all subjects.

The subjects in Group 4 were on average seven times more likely than those in Group 1, and two to three times more likely than in the other two groups, to develop clinical depression.

The Good Men Project: The Disposability of Boys by Cameron Conaway

The Disposability of boys
By Cameron Conaway, The Good Men Project, February 17, 2014

The UN’s recent reports on the treatment of children in Syria and in the Roman Catholic Church revealed some of the despicable acts committed against boys that are part of a disturbing and hidden global trend.

They are the forgotten many. The afterthought. The tacked-on obligatory mention at the end of a sentence, if that. Some university classes on human trafficking fail to mention them alongside “girls and women” in their syllabi. But there they are being used as soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and as slaves in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan, the shipbreaking yards of Bangladesh, the farmlands of Florida and the fishing villages of Ghana. And there they are, as detailed in recent reports from the UN, being used as human shields in Syria and as sex slaves in the Roman Catholic Church. Can we talk about this now? Is it okay to talk about this?

Preface: Addressing the disposability of boys is not ignoring or in any way minimizing the appalling situations many of our world’s girls and women are enduring right now. Addressing the disposability of boys is addressing the disposability of boys. There is often hostility when this topic is brought up because there’s the assumption that the speaker is choosing sides. This isn’t a game and there are no sides.

***

On February 4, 2014 the UN released its first detailed findings on the treatment of children in Syria. The “Report of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic” contained text perhaps even more damning due to its comprehensive details than the alleged torture photographs that were released weeks ago and that a team of war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts deemed “direct evidence” of the “systematic torture and killing” by the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime. One excerpt on page 4 stated:

“Boys aged 12 to 17 years were trained, armed and used as combatants or to man checkpoints.”

This falls perfectly in line with why boys are often selected around the world for use as slave laborers. Comparatively, boys tend to be more physical, stronger, and more physically aggressive than girls and are therefore more preferred when it comes to the often backbreaking work of slave labor. While some communities have tried to eradicate this notion that boys are more physical and physically aggressive than girls, Dr. Michael Thompson, co-author of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, believes the difference is clear but admitted to PBS Parents that he isn’t precisely sure why:

“Why are some young boys more aggressive than girls? We don’t know for sure. We think that boys are predisposed to higher activity levels as a result of androgens (male hormones) inutero. However, it is not, as many people believe, a result of testosterone in the blood, because before puberty, boys and girls have the same level. What we know is that boys in all cultures around the world wrestle more, mock fight more, and are drawn to themes of power and domination, but that’s not the same as hurting someone, so it’s not necessarily a cause for worry.”

Dr. Thompson’s statement about “boys in all cultures of the world” aligns with what I learned about human trafficking during my two and a half years living in and traveling throughout Asia. Whether it was Nepal or the Philippines, Sri Lanka or Myanmar, it was simply more acceptable for boys to perform the most grueling forms of physical labor, especially when it was the kind of labor that may lead to disease or permanent disfigurement.
Some posit that this acceptance is a direct result of how cultures have been socially conditioned to see gender roles due to the way religious attitudes and/or patriarchal cultures have demarcated them. While this influence certainly can carry over into secular societies, it seems there’s a more pervasive form of social conditioning at work; one that views boys, regardless of age, as young men; one that views their more physical behavior as the seed of manhood—a time when, at least conceptually, they’ll no longer be seen as vulnerable and will instead be capable of preying on those who are truly vulnerable. The result? Boys who will be men are judged as though they are men. This is harmful both for boys and for the men who then live under the socially conditioned false narrative that believes they are invulnerable.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the shipbreaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh. Security guards dressed in blue leaf camouflage pointed their semi-automatic machine guns directly at me (after making sure I didn’t have a camera, notebook or phone), and I watched in horror as one tiny boy after another dragged their feet through toxic shoreline sludge in order to lift with their bare hands the rusted anchor chains. The black plumed skies lit up red as other boys took turns using the blowtorch. I have no idea if there’s hell in the afterlife but that scene showed me for damn sure that there’s hell in this life.

From the UK....1/3 more girls seek university admission than boys this year!

Boys being left behind as university gender gap widens

The number of girls seeking a university place this year is more than a third larger than that of boys, who university chiefs say are becoming “a disadvantaged group”

By James Kirkup, The Telegraph, January 31, 2014
Young men are becoming “a disadvantaged group” as far more young women go to university, higher education chiefs have warned.

The number of girls seeking a university place this year is more than a third larger than that of boys.

The growing divide is becoming a more pressing issue than the number of applicants from poorer homes, said the chief executive of Ucas, the universities admissions service. “There remains a stubborn gap between male and female applicants which, on current trends, could eclipse the gap between rich and poor within a decade,” Mary Curnock Cook said.

“Young men are becoming a disadvantaged group in terms of going to university and this underperformance needs urgent focus across the education sector.”

Ucas said that 580,000 people have applied for places at British institutions this year. Around 333,700 of them were women, almost 58 per cent. Only 246,300 men applied, a difference of 87,000, which was up 7,000 on last year. In the 2010-11 academic year, women made up 55 per cent of applicants.

Politicians seem to be happy with policy approaches that focus on economics, poverty, some kind of numbers that have currency in the public discourse. We have, indeed, become collectively fixated on the money barometer as our window on political issues. And then, it seems too often we think that throwing money at the problem absolves the political class of responsibility.
This issue of female university applications outstripping male applications in Great Britain by one third trumps the issue of the numbers of applications from poorer homes. Perhaps, finally, some of the more complex reasons for this gap will finally merit some serious public, political and academic attention.
We have needed research on the question of what is happening to boys in most of the countries in the west for some time. It is not sexism to point out these trend lines and there is or must be no aspersions cast in the direction of female applicants. In fact, any public discussion of these numbers and their meaning must focus instead on the reasons behind the drop in male applications and not on blaming the female segment of the university-applicant population for the rise in their numbers.
And, while it is not a competition between males and females in a direct sense, the culture needs to sustain a healthy proportion of male university graduates  in order to sustain healthy employment rates, and all that accompanies that gradient for families, and for social services and for balance and good health culturally.
Men must be present with articulate voices at all the "tables" where decisions are taken in all fields including education, economics, technology, science, health and in private corporations. And in order to accomplish that legitimate and long-term objective, we need to pay attention when deficits, like the one being reported in the Telegraph today, appear.
It is, of course, much more glib and simplistic to focus on some benchmarks like a country's GDP, for too long the measure of  the economic success of a nation. The value of good produced is both easily calculated and easily translated into a simple version of "good government" in order to provide fodder for politicians seeking re-election. It is the public, in the widest meaning of that word, who needs to be more focused on the many issues that comprise any legitimate yard stick for how healthy a society is, and will be in the foreseeable future.
And one of those benchmarks has to become the ratio of male to female university applications.
Men must not be either  encouraged or permitted to withdraw simply because women are "appearing" to outstrip them in some kind of faux competition. And men must not be encouraged or permitted to perceive these numbers as a competition. In fact, removing competition from the equation may be one of the best ways to address the issue.
Schools, from a very early age, need to become sensitized to the issues facing male learners and to address those issues, as legitimate, and not as "deviant" simply because they are different from the issues facing female learners. And that begins in the faculties of education where the archetype of the good student profiles all the natural attributes of female students: compliant, disciplined, polite, enthusiastic, responsible and coachable.
Male students, on the other hand, fail to measure up to the female "standards" on all of these attributes, in many cases, and the approaches to their learning needs have to take those needs into consideration. Perhaps it is time to segregate male and female students in the classroom, in order to achieve a learning environment that generates a better balance of interested, talented and ambitious male and female applications to universities, so that we do not face a society and culture in which men revert to a secondary role, while women dominate. We need both genders playing their full part for the sake of their children and grandchildren and we will not see that balance if these trends continue without being both formally and informally addressed.