Real Boys

by William Pollack

  At a very young age, a boy may feel emotionally abandoned, without knowing that’s what he feels. Or he may know—as eleven-year-old Jake described this part of his early childhood: “I felt left out in the cold. I was all alone and just had to fend for myself.” Or as seventeen-year-old Jamal explained, “My dad always seemed jealous and would throw these real temper tantrums if my mom let me lean on her. So by the time I was five, neither one of them acted like they really understood what I was going through, even if they really did.”

  This painful separation process by which many very young boys are shamed into withdrawing from their mothers more than they naturally want to, and then are only partially nurtured by their fathers, is a devastating disruption in a boy’s emotional life. It is too often vigorously defended or even celebrated as a natural movement forward for the young boy, an inevitable step away from childlike dependency toward so-called “healthy” masculine identity. Yet many people who advocate this attitude toward boys believe it would be a tragedy if such a schism were to happen so early in a young girl’s life.

  This relational rupture, this trauma, profoundly affects the psychology of most boys—and of most men—forever. To understand what it is like to experience this trauma, we needn’t go any further than the trauma adults experience when their hearts are broken—the trauma of unrequited love. In my clinical practice, I have found that deep in the psyche of older boys and men lies the formative experience of a little boy struggling to maintain an early independent masculine sense of self. That little boy is not fending off too close a tie to mother, but rather is forever longing to return to her, and to the “holding” connection she once provided him, a connection he now feels he can never regain. If a boy had been allowed to separate at his own pace, that longing and sadness would not be there, or would be much less.

  WISHING TO REMAIN IN MOTHER’S REALM IS NORMAL

  Although by kindergarten age many boys are already taking on the persona of their favorite superwarrior, replete with space-age weapons and other high-tech equipment, other boys of that age, and certainly many boys in preschool, are still in the corner playing with dolls and small trucks, and with the girls. For parents who ask me whether this is “normal,” I usually share with them research pioneered by New York psychoanalyst John Ross. In a study in which he explored young boys’ fantasies about pregnancy and birth, Ross found that healthy boys—boys with a clear sense of masculine gender identity—still believed that, like their mothers, they could get pregnant, carry a child in “their tummies,” and give birth. This is not at all surprising when we stop to realize that the lion’s share of child care for both girls and boys is given by mothers and female caregivers, and, naturally, young boys identify with their earliest role models. So it is equally unremarkable to see a younger boy playing with a doll or even dressing up in Mom’s dress. But woe be unto him if this behavior continues beyond the age of five or six.

  By the time boys are ready to enter school they receive numerous messages—in the media, from the toys they are given to play with, from older boys, parents, and teachers—that they must become different from their mothers in order to have a healthy male mentality. Toy manufacturers pour resources into creating “boy toys”—weapons and warriors and games of destruction. Schools still offer gender-specific activities, even when there is no valid reason for doing so. The cultural imperative to achieve this differentiation lies under the push toward separation.

  Nancy Chodorow, a feminist sociologist, did research that looked at how boys and girls connect with their mothers. She showed that because, in our society, women are still largely responsible for child care, boys appear to have a harder time than girls in integrating their identification as males, their initial “gender identity.” Girls can remain comfortably bonded with mother, she explained, but boys are threatened with a danger of remaining too close and not consolidating a safe enough sense of a “different,” more masculine self. Following from her argument, then, being a boy or being masculine is not so much based on the positive identification with father but on the negation of the male child’s tie to mother. Becoming masculine is defined as avoiding the feminine. Being a boy becomes defined in the negative: not being a girl. And this requires a more rigid separation from the close-touch world of mother and all things feminine or maternal—including warm, tender feelings, such as vulnerability, empathy, and compassion.

  Some professionals still believe that this push for separation is good and necessary, that it provides a healthy way station in boys’ growth toward manhood. This kind of separation is called “dis-identification,” since the boy, by separating, is renouncing his earlier identification with mother and replacing it with a supposedly “healthier” male self-image now borrowed from his father. But, in my opinion, this model of dis-identification is not healthy but damaging. If girls were emotionally separated from the caring people in their young lives and thrust into a world hostile to their dependency needs, we’d probably say these girls were in deep trouble, that they would fail unless they were rescued. Yet when it is boys whose development we are contemplating, this ruptured connection is celebrated and is called a manifestation of “health.”

  BOYS ARE ALONE

  Let’s imagine what this experience of ruptured connection must actually feel like for a little boy. Let’s imagine the sense of loss a boy must feel as he is prodded to separate from the most cherished, admired, and loved person in his life, the shame and embarrassment he often encounters whenever he’s asked to “act like a man” but doesn’t yet feel equipped to do so, the destructive feelings—of self-hatred, inadequacy, loneliness—that become deeply embedded within the definition he creates of his own nascent masculine identity.

  A recent poll taken of children as young as nine years old showed that only 40 percent of boys spent almost all weekend with their parents, as opposed to 50 percent of the girls.

  While not quite one tenth of the girls sampled said they spent few or no hours with their families on the weekends, almost 25 percent of the young boys polled reported that they were already out on their own! Given the young age of many of the boys involved in this study, these statistics are staggering. They suggest that the schism between boys and their parents most often thought of as taking place at adolescence actually begins at a much earlier age. And the younger boys are when this separation is first thrust upon them, I believe, the more traumatic they may find the experience.

  CHRISTOPHER: LONELINESS AND SADNESS BEHIND A YOUNG BOY’S MASK

  Sometimes a boy must undergo an unexpected and painful separation from his caregivers that is not related to a first day of school or time away at camp.

  Christopher Benson is a ten-year-old who came to see a colleague of mine. His parents were baffled as to how he could have become so depressed. An energetic, upbeat, extremely well-liked boy for most of his childhood, Christopher had undergone, a year earlier, a series of operations after a major bicycle accident had seriously injured his right foot. After the accident, Christopher had had to undergo months of medical treatments and physical therapy. He had missed weeks of school, and his whole family had rallied behind him to help him through the process.

  His parents couldn’t figure out why only now, a year later, after Christopher had almost completely healed, he had suddenly become so depressed. According to his parents, Christopher had dealt with the accident and its aftermath with a positive attitude. He had rarely complained about the acute pain, never put up a fight when he had to undergo medical treatments, and had always joked about his condition with doctors, nurses, and family members. Everybody had loved Christopher. During his year of recovery, his parents had taken off a lot of time from work to be with him. For the months that Christopher was hospitalized, one of Christopher’s parents had visited him in the afternoon every day, and many times one of them had spent the night with him at the hospital.

  About eleven months after the accident, Christopher had recovered almost a hundred percent of the use of
his right leg and was otherwise in top health. His doctors told him he could return to school on a full-time basis. His parents resumed their full-time work schedules and Christopher went back to school. But instead of rejoicing in his recovery and slipping back cheerfully into his life at school and with his friends, Christopher became deeply depressed. He virtually stopped eating, became extremely quiet, and refused to cooperate with his parents or his teachers. He lost most of his energy, didn’t respond when spoken to, and protested each morning when his parents tried to wake him up to send him off to school.

  For weeks Christopher refused to say much of anything in his psychotherapy sessions. When asked how things were going for him, he either ignored my colleague or simply said that things were “fine.” But about six weeks into his therapy, Christopher finally opened up. When asked how his foot was doing, he stood up, kicked over his chair with his once-injured foot, and shouted, “I wish it were broken again. I wish it were broken! I hate this!”

  “Tell me about what you hate. Do you hate having everything seem like it’s OK when it really isn’t?” my colleague asked him.

  “Everything was OK when I was at the hospital,” he explained, his words cut off by tears. “But now, everything sucks. I hate school. . . . I hate everything.”

  “Have you spoken to your parents about this?”

  “They wouldn’t care. They only cared about me when I was in the hospital. Now that I’m all better, they spend all their time with my little sister, Jessica. They hardly even talk to me.”

  “Then you miss having special times with your parents?”

  Christopher responded by sobbing.

  In future sessions with Christopher, his parents were invited to come along. What emerged through these discussions was that once he returned from the hospital, Christopher still sought the extra attention his parents had given him when he was undergoing medical treatment. Christopher wanted to keep receiving the extra love, affection, and support they had given him when he was in the hospital. Although they loved him very much and wanted to see him happy, his parents were concerned about Christopher’s apparent need for this kind of special attention. So instead of talking to him about it, instead of reassuring him about how much they loved and cared for him, they both nudged him away. They were, in effect, doing exactly as Johnny’s mother and Roger’s mother had done with their boys—forcing him to make “a clean break” and “tough it out” without adequate preparation or support. They both felt certain that if they continued to “baby” him, he would become overly dependent on them. “I didn’t want to treat him like we treat his younger sister anymore,” his father, Chip, explained, “because I felt that he should begin to learn how to handle things on his own. It was one thing when he was at the hospital. But once he had come home, I just didn’t think he needed me or his mother to treat him like a little boy anymore.”

  “I really wanted to continue to take time off from work and spend it with Chris in the afternoons,” his mother added, “but Chip convinced me that this would just make it harder for him to adjust to going back to school. I don’t know. Maybe we were wrong not to stick in there longer for him.”

  Christopher’s parents were gentle, thoughtful people. They wanted what was best for Christopher. But what they were unable to do was feel comfortable staying emotionally connected to their son once an emergency had passed. Something made them feel that it was time to nudge this boy toward independence. This impulse, I believe, is “normal” in that many parents feel and act upon it. But as common as it may be, I believe that pushing boys to separate, to be on their own, when they signal they need something else, is a mistake with serious emotional consequences. It is so traumatic that it can lead, as it did in the case of Christopher, to depression.

  SHAME: THE CONSEQUENCE OF EMOTIONAL DISCONNECTION

  As boys reach adolescence the traumas of early childhood can persist in forms that do not look like normal sadness or loss. So masked are boys’ feelings by the teen years that many of the inexplicable bouts of anger or wild mood swings parents see may be produced in part by earlier, unrequited longings for connection and a fear of the shame such longings produce.

  Shame, it turns out, is with most of us throughout our lives. It begins to be experienced very early on, and is perhaps one of our most primitive feelings. Infants show the precursors to shame—physical responses such as painful blushing and “heat”—when their vocalizations for parental response or gestures for recognition go largely unacknowledged. In some psychological research, shame is associated primarily with these types of early physical sensations. But I have come to believe—following Judy Jordan, my colleague at Harvard Medical School—that shame can also be described as the feeling state that accompanies an emotional disconnection.

  We all experience such emotional disconnection. Two common examples come to mind. The first one, suggested by a patient some years ago, involves what happens when we see somebody we know across a crowded street and wave to them—this is a simple reaching out for connection. But, instead of returning the greeting, the other person stares in our direction, looks away, and keeps walking, as if to say, “Who the hell are you?” We realize he may not have seen us. But still, we give a furtive glance to those around us. Do they see us looking foolish with our hand waving in the air? We blush and try to melt into the sidewalk. We don’t want anybody to see us because we feel too embarrassed. The isolation and humiliation we feel—and the feelings of emotional disconnection that result—are what psychologists call “shame.”

  A second example involves the feelings of shame experienced in the workplace. You’ve created an important presentation for your manager. The key points of the presentation are rejected, however, and the boss derides them in front of your colleagues. You feel stupid, foolish; you want to disappear. You don’t want anybody to exacerbate your feelings of vulnerability, so you shun any help. Instead you turn inward and become emotionally disconnected from others.

  These examples are mild in comparison to what a boy experiences when he does not measure up to the Boy Code, but they help demonstrate what shame is all about. It is about feeling such a fear of humiliation and embarrassment that we prefer to be alone with our pain.

  GIRLS ARE SENSITIVE TO SHAME, BUT BOYS FEAR IT

  Because shame is such an undesirable experience, I have found that most boys (and men) will do anything to avoid the possibility of experiencing it. I recall attending a Little League game where my friend’s son, Peter, was participating in one of his first baseball games. Before the second inning, Peter was hit in the head by his first hardball. Small for his age and only in the first grade, he looked absolutely mortified. The helmet drooping over his brow gave him the look of a miniature punch-drunk fighter about to go down for the count.

  His mother rushed out to the field to comfort her son. “Not here, Mom,” she later told me he had whispered to her, stifling his tears, “Big guys don’t cry on the field.”

  For many years, traditional psychologists thought that exquisite sensitivity to shame was mostly characteristic of girls, especially at somewhat older ages. But what I have found after years of working with boys and their families is that the same kind of shame that silences girls from expressing their true voice as adolescents takes its inhibiting and self-suppressing toll on their brothers at a much earlier age. And while girls may be shame-sensitive, boys are shame-phobic: they are exquisitely yet unconsciously attuned to any signal of “loss of face” and will do just about whatever it takes to avoid shame.

  Rather than expose themselves to this kind of potent embarrassment, boys, in the face of suffering shame, engage in a variety of behaviors that range from avoidance of dependency to impulsive action, from bravado and rage-filled outbursts to intense violence.

  GABE: TRYING TO BE THE STURDY OAK IN A FRIGHTENING FOREST

  Boys can feel separation and disconnection—and a resulting shame—from an isolated experience, as well as from a more prolonged separation, such as going
off to kindergarten.

  Gabe, sixteen, was usually a thoughtful boy, bright and cheerful. But this morning he was fidgeting in his chair like a much younger child, reminding me of a little kindergarten boy sitting still with difficulty in the classroom. Gabe’s parents had brought him in to see me this time because of a sudden outburst of irritable and tearful behavior. All they had done was mention the idea of a tennis camp in a distant city. Gabe had good friendships and excellent grades, no prior history of emotional or behavioral problems, and he had mentioned getting serious about his tennis. So why such a radical response, a change from his usual cool composure?

  Gabe was as puzzled as everyone else. I thought about some indirect ways to find out what was on his mind, and remembered we had previously discussed dreams, but he had said he usually couldn’t remember them. Today, however, Gabe could remember one from the previous night.

  “It was very scary—a nightmare, I think,” he said. “A strange place all dark and quiet, maybe in the woods. I felt all alone, but there were others there—my parents, I think. We were camping. All of us were in sleeping bags, but mine was missing. All of a sudden there was a noise at the edge of the tent—a wild animal maybe? I freaked, then I screamed—and that’s when I woke up.”

  The vividness with which he told the dream, the liveliness of his feelings in comparison to his day-to-day cool attitude, gave me a hunch that perhaps this dream was more than a complex piece of fantasy from Gabe’s unconscious. Here, instead, was a memory emerging from repression. “Gabe,” I asked, “Does the dream remind you of anything similar that ever happened to you, perhaps not recently, but long ago?”