Terrence Real - I Dont Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

Terrence Real

SCRIBNER
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Praise for I Don Want to Talk About It

This is a sobering, powerful book about male depression both covert and overt. The book moves on to new ground both in language and story. I Dont Want to Talk About It is exhilarating in its honesty and grief; it moves forward like a hurricane.

Robert Bly

The most provocative in a flood of new books on depression . The only volume that speaks exclusively to and about depressed men.

Pamela Warrick, Los Angeles Times

Even in this era of managed care and Prozac, therapy is still an art. Mr. Real emerges in this book as an artist who plays his theories with the passion and skill of Isaac Stern in concert.

Dallas Morning News

A tour-de-force, this landmark book uncovers a hidden epidemic with devastating effects. In an elegant novelistic style, Terrence Real traces the shadow of male depression from father to son. And in a bold, courageous way, he tells his own story of trauma and recovery, which shines like a golden thread throughout the book.

Connie Zweig, Ph.D., author of Romancing the Shadow

Riveting reading. You pick it up and cant put it down . I Dont Want to Talk About It could get you started on a conversation with yourself that would allow you to shed a burden youve been carrying a longtime.

Jane Tompkins, The Raleigh News & Observer

Terry Real writes with understanding and compassion for his own father, for himself as a father of young sons, and for the many men in his practice whose stories he tells. Like a good novel, I Dont Want to Talk About It pulls you in and keeps you reading. Beautifully written; its an important book for all of us.

Olga Silverstein, author of The Courage to Raise Good Men

Boys in our culture are taught that real men are stoic. The ability to not complain, endure pain, and strive in the face of adversity is admired and celebrated in story and song. The price paid for this isolation is depression. Terry Real has produced a seminal work that is likely to be the text of choice for therapists and patients for many years.

Pia Mellody, author of Facing Love Addiction and Facing Co-Dependence

Clear, compelling strongly reasoned . The book is wise beyond its stated scope: in setting up a model, nature, and etiology and treatment of male depression, Real ends up offeringwith some gender variantsan almost universal paradigm.

Publishers Weekly

This is a very beautiful book, one that can help a multitude of men, women, and children. Written with grace and graced with humor, I Dont Want to Talk About It goes down as smoothly as a sigh, but it carries the power to change your life.

Edward Hallowell, M.D., author of When You Worry About the Child You Love and Driven to Distraction

An absorbing and informative look at the hidden long-term depression that constricts or undermines the relationships of many American men . An important and rewarding work.

Kirkus

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Copyright 1997 by Terry Real

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Scribner trade paperback edition 2003

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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Manufactured in the United States of America

15 17 19 20 18 16

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Scribner edition as follows:

Real, Terrence.

I dont want to talk about it : overcoming the secret legacy of male depression / Terrence Real.1st Fireside ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

1. Depression, Mental. 2. MenMental health. 3. Masculinity. I. Title.

[RC537.R39 1998]

616.85270081dc21 97-39236 CIP

ISBN 0-684-83102-3
ISBN 978-0-6848-3539-6
eISBN 978-0-684-86539-3

0-684-83539-8 (Pbk)

History copyright Richard Hoffman. Permission to reprint granted by author.

Sometimes a Man Stands Up from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Robert Bly. Copyright 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

With gratitude this book is dedicated to my wife, B ELINDA B ERMAN , and our sons, J USTIN and A LEXANDER , who remind me that hope is the remembrance of the future.

The pebble my son
spraypainted gold
rests in my palm, a gift,
and he asks in a clear, high
temporary voice
who taught me my life
is base and needs great pain
to turn itself into gold?
And who taught them?
And for what, and whose, reasons?

RICHARD HOFFMAN, History

Let the dead pray for their own dead.

JAMES WRIGHT, Inscriptions for the Tank

Authors Note

All of the cases described in this book are composites. They have been deliberately scrambled in order to protect my clients rights of confidentiality and privacy. No client found in this book corresponds to any actual person, living or dead.

Acknowledgments

It is fitting that this book, with its emphasis on mens relationships, should owe so much to so many. The thoughts presented here would not have been possible were it not for the genius of two very different women, Olga Silverstein and Pia Mellody, each a legendary figure in her field. I borrowed Olgas daring in abandoning current theories of male development. It was she who first conceived of this book at all, and I see it as a companion to her superb treatment of mothers and sons, The Courage to Raise Good Men. As with Olga, my debt to Pia is obvious throughout the book. Not only has her work thoroughly informed my practice with clients, it has changed my own life. Jack Sternbach has taught me most of what I know about running mens groups. It was Jack who first made clear to me the revolutionary perspective of Joe Pleck, and it was Jack who introduced me to the idea of lovingly holding men accountable, of men as wounded wounders. I want also to thank my colleagues and friends at the Family Institute of Cambridge, a teaching facility that has been responsible for training three generations of family therapists throughout New England. In particular, I wish to pay homage to my own mentors, Charles Verge, Caroline Marvin, Richard Chasin, Rick Lee, David Treadway, Sally Ann Roth, and Kathy Weingarten. Any light that passes through my work with men and their families is principally yours. I am enormously grateful.

My agent, Beth Vesel, one of the initial architects of this endeavor, has been a powerful guide, protector, and muse throughout the process, as well as a reader of extraordinary perspicacity. My early collaboration with Elizabeth Stone deserves grateful acknowledgment, as do the tenacious research efforts of Rina Amiri. I want to thank Per Gjerde of Stanford University for his warm support and guidance, Bessel van der Kolk for his wisdom, openness and clarity, David Lisak and Ron Levant for their many good thoughts.