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Terrence Real is an internationally recognized family therapist, speaker, and author. He founded the Relational Life Institute, offering workshops for couples, individuals, and parents along with a professional training program for clinicians to learn his Relational Life Therapy methodology. He is the bestselling author of Us, How Can I Get Through to You?, and The New Rules of Marriage.

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A bestseller for over 20 years, I Don’t Want to Talk About It is a groundbreaking and hopeful guide to understanding and destigmatizing male depression, essential not only for men who may be suffering but for the people who love them.

Twenty years of experience treating men and their families has convinced psychotherapist Terrence Real that depression is a silent epidemic in men—that men hide their condition from family, friends, and themselves to avoid the stigma of depression’s “un-manliness.” Problems that we think of as typically male—difficulty with intimacy, workaholism, alcoholism, abusive behavior, and rage—are really attempts to escape depression. And these escape attempts only hurt the people men love and pass their condition on to their children.

This groundbreaking book is the “pathway out of darkness” that these men and their families seek. Real reveals how men can unearth their pain, heal themselves, restore relationships, and break the legacy of abuse. He mixes penetrating analysis with compelling tales of his patients and even his own experiences with depression as the son of a violent, depressed father and the father of two young sons.

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I Don't Want to Talk About It

Scribner

From Chapter One: Men's Hidden Depression

When I stand beside troubled fathers and sons I am often flooded with a sense

of recognition, All men are sons and, whether they know it or not, most sons are

loyal. To me, my father presented a confusing jumble of brutality and pathos. As

a boy, I drank into my character a dark, jagged, emptiness that haunted me for

close to thirty years. As other fathers have done to their sons, my

father-through the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice, the quality Of his

touch-passed the depression he did not know he had on to me, just as surely as

his father had passed it on to him -- a chain of pain, linking parent to child

across generations, a toxic legacy.

In hindsight, it is clear to me that, among other reasons, I became a

therapist so I could cultivate the skills I needed to heal my own father -- to heal

him at least sufficiently to get him to talk to me. I needed to know about his

life to help understand his brutality and lay my hatred of him to rest. At first

I did this unconsciously, not out of any great love for him, but out of an

instinct to save myself. I wanted the legacy to stop.

One might think that I would have brought to my work a particular sensitivity

to issues of depression in men, but at first I did not. Despite my hard-won

personal knowledge, years passed before I found the courage to invite

my patients to embark upon the same journey I had taken. I was not prepared, by

training or experience, to reach so deep into a man's inner pain -- to hold and

confront him there. Faced with men's hidden fragility, I had been tacitly

schooled, like most therapists-indeed, like most people in our culture -- to protect

them. I had also been taught that depression was predominantly a woman's disease,

that the rate of depression was somewhere between two to four times higher for

women than it was for men. When I first began my clinical practice, I had faith

in the simplicity of such figures, but twenty years of work with men and their

families has lead me to believe that the real story concerning this disorder is

far more complex.

There is a terrible collusion in our society, a cultural cover-up about

depression in men.

One of the ironies about men's depression is that the very forces that help

create it keep us from seeing it. Men are not supposed to be vulnerable. Pain is

something we are to rise above. He who has been brought down by it will most

likely see himself as shameful, and so, too, may his family and friends, even the

mental health profession. Yet I believe it is this secret pain that lies at the

heart of many of the difficulties in men's lives. Hidden depression drives

several of the problems we think of as typically male: physical illness, alcohol

and drug abuse, domestic violence, failures in intimacy, self-sabotage in

careers.

We tend not to recognize depression in men because the disorder itself is seen

as unmanly. Depression carries, to many, a double stain -- the stigma of mental

illness and also the stigma of "feminine" emotionality. Those in a relationship

with a depressed man are themselves often faced with a painful dilemma. They can

either confront his condition -- which may further shame him -- or else collude with

him in minimizing it, a course that offers no hope for relief. Depression in men -- a

condition experienced as both shamefilled and shameful -- goes largely

unacknowledged and unrecognized both by the men who suffer and by those who

surround them. And yet, the Impact of this hidden condition is

enormous.

Copyright © 1997 by Terry Real

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Excerpted from I Don't Want to Talk About Itby Terrence Real Copyright ©1998 by Terrence Real. Excerpted by permission.
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