I Don't Want to Talk About It

Reread this in 2022, three years after my first read. At that time it was an eye-opening introduction to the concept of covert male depression, something I had encountered in family members, colleagues, and even been seeing in action on the world stage without understanding what I was experiencing. The book is extremely helpful in identifying the dysfunction that plagues so many men and in articulating a path toward healing.

This path can only begin when an individual man himself decides to stop the cycle begun by relational trauma, and go a different way, a way of facing his condition rather than running from it and covering it up with addictive defenses. We can't legislate or force such a decision. But only if enough men make it – as the inspiring stories in the book show that many men are capable of doing – can our world survive, in my opinion. Among all the crises clamoring for our attention, this is THE central crisis. The others all stem from this one, especially from the addictive defenses with which men combat their depression.

During this reread I really longed for some discussion of how covert depression also affects and presents in women. Women may be more prone to overt depression, which is a more obviously disturbing, but ironically probably less dangerous form of the disease – because it has come out into the open and there is at least a chance of seeking help. However, women are also highly prone to covert depression as well, and I suffered from it for many years.

Real describes depression as a disease of “carried emotions,” emotions generally carried over from a dysfunctional parenting relationship, and I started to wonder about this in relation to the gender gap. Far from being a “women's disease,” as it's often considered, depression may be in fact a men's disease that women frequently end up carrying for the men in their lives, covertly or overtly. Men have trouble naming, cognizing, and processing emotional experience, but they are not less emotionally needy than women – if anything, they are more needy than women. Maybe their depression infects the women around them, who have more innate tools for dealing with emotional issues. And their presentation of overt depression may at least sometimes be a cry for help on the behalf of those who are too emotionally shut-down and repressed to do it themselves.

Unfortunately this often does not lead to the healing of the real, root problem, which is fundamentally one of failure to protect and nurture the fragile human core. Without awareness of what is going on, this failure gets transmitted unconsciously down the generations, and continues to compound and be strengthened. Those who present overt symptoms can end up scapegoated by others who don't want to fully confront the issues, while others with more covert symptoms are discouraged from revealing and releasing their pain. I feel as though that is what has happened in my family, with my own covert depression, and other family members who have exposed more overt symptoms and ended up as the “symptom-bearers” for those who don't want to acknowledge the hidden connection between all of us.

But I don't want to be one of the deniers any more. I really want to wake up now, and break the cycle of depression in my own family, and I appreciate books like this that are helping me. It is not about blaming anyone, but about uncovering unconscious patterns that have been controlling our behavior and harming everyone they touch. There is so much work to be done, but it is a source of hope to have a new orientation towards the problem.