Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One

by Terry Crews

  I really didn’t want to tell her. The whole reason I hadn’t said anything to her for all of those years was because I knew I was going to lose her if I did. But it kept coming to me: You’ve got to tell her. She’s got to know who you really are. Everything.

  By morning, the snow had covered up the windows. I felt awful, oppressed, stuck in this dark, dark place. Rebecca called me again.

  “Terry, you need to tell me, because you’re not telling the truth.”

  This went on and on. I denied and denied. And then, it just flew out.

  “One time, ten years ago in Vancouver, I got a hand job at a massage parlor.”

  She made a sound that was like a whimper. It was just so much pain. I honestly felt like I’d shot her in the chest. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt: It hurt her AND it hurt me. We sat there on the phone, and she just cried and cried.

  “How could you do that? How could you even?”

  “It was ten years ago.”

  “That makes it worse. So you’ve been faking for this long, for ten years?”

  I didn’t have anything to say in my defense. It really was D-day.

  “You can’t live here,” she said. “You’d better find a place to live. I’m done.”

  “I know. I know.”

  I didn’t know what to do. It was so dark.

  “You put me on television, and you did this, and you never told me.”

  I understood everything now. I was like: Oh my God, you’re right. Finally, after another hour on the phone, there was really nothing more to be said, and we hung up. I was lost. I called my current pastor and told him everything.

  “Man, what do I do? I’m going to lose her. I wasn’t truthful.”

  “Look, do the normal routine, at the very least,” he said. “If you were going to go work out, go work out. If you were going to work, go to work. You don’t want to just sit in this. You want to do your normal routine so you don’t disintegrate.”

  So I went, I worked out, I came back. I just tried to hang on. I knew without a doubt I had just lost everything. I was officially done. I was never honest with my wife, or myself. I was broken. For days, I didn’t hear a single word from Rebecca.

  I BEGGED AND BEGGED REBECCA FOR HER FORGIVENESS, but she let me sit with what I’d done for several days. Finally, just as I was headed back up to Stamford to start shooting the show again, she called. My heart was pounding.

  “Terry, listen, I want to work it out,” she said. “I love you, and I forgive you, but I don’t know. I don’t think anything will ever be the same.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “God told me to let you come home,” she said.

  I was so incredibly grateful. I had really believed I was going to lose her forever, but she’d given me a second chance. It was a miracle. I didn’t deserve her. I had hurt her so badly. I couldn’t believe the goodness of God.

  “One of the requirements for you to even get back into the house is that you have to get some help about whatever this is,” she said.

  And then I actually started telling her about the pornography. She didn’t know. Nobody knew, not even my best friends knew. I couldn’t believe I was getting another chance. But I knew, now the work started.

  When I flew home for the first time after D-day, I was nervous as I walked through the front door. All I could think was: I thought I’d never see this place again. I thought I’d lost all of this, and the ability to even come home.

  The kids ran up to me, and I was so glad to see them, but as I hugged them, all I could do was look at Rebecca. She was crying. We sat down right there in the foyer, before we even got all of the way into the house, and we hugged for a long time. Neither of us said much. She was very quiet. The kids could clearly feel something was up, but they weren’t sure what. Again, I thought: I was sure, after what I’d done, I’d be visiting my kids from here on out. It was such a relief to be back in that house. It was like being born again, like waking up out of a coma. I’m still here. I’m not dead.

  Rebecca and I went right up to the bedroom, and we talked, and we talked. She had told me that she had forgiven me, but her anger was still coming out, and it kept flaring up suddenly. She had questions about every little detail of what had happened, and I felt like I had to answer all of them.

  After the kids went to sleep, we stayed up talking all night. There were many nights during that time when there was no sleep. Her emotions seemed to attack her at the end of the day. We lay down to go to bed, but she couldn’t sleep, and she wanted to talk for hours. There were many nights when I went into the bathroom and found her sitting there crying. I didn’t know what else to say. In fact, I knew there was nothing else to say. I usually tried to get in several naps during the day, so I could stay up with her at night while she went through all of this.

  During the day, I found her all over the house, just sitting there, crying, and it reminded me of her breakdown following her second miscarriage. I started to worry that this type of stress might take her back into that kind of depression again. In some ways it did; her behavior was so all over the place. I understood why, and I knew I just had to take it, take the anger, take the emotion, and let her have her say.

  On top of everything else, the Family Crews premiere was nearly upon us, and we were already doing press, trying to act like we were still a big, happy family.

  “You put me on TV when you knew what you’d done,” she said. “And I did it. We filmed it. What were you thinking?”

  I could understand why she felt hurt and betrayed. I just didn’t know how to make it better. I reached a point where I was tired of the secrets, tired of being worried it would all come out, and I just started talking about everything to everyone in our life. One night, Rebecca and I went out to dinner with another celebrity couple that had been having their own problems. We sat there at the restaurant, dodging the real issues, and then something inside of me snapped.

  I’m not hiding anything anymore, I thought.

  I told them exactly what I had done and what we were going through. Well, they both looked at me as if a lizard had just come out of my mouth. They could not understand why I was telling them this. That was not the celeb way to do things.

  Oh, boy, I guess that was a mistake, I thought.

  But it wasn’t long after that they were divorced. So much for the celebrity way.

  The next time I saw the husband, he brought it up right away.

  “What are you doing, man?” he said. “Why did you tell your wife?”

  “Dude, I had to be honest. I had to be real.”

  “Man, never,” he said. “What is your problem? That’s man code, brother. You don’t tell.”

  “Well, if that’s man code, I’m not a man, then, because I’m not living that way anymore,” I said. “I can’t do it. How could I be a man if I lived that way?”

  As much as I had clung to my fear of telling Rebecca the truth and tried to pretend it was the best thing for both of us, I’d always known, deep down inside, that it was either tell her the truth, or we would just break up later anyhow. You can’t build a relationship on secrets and lies. It’s not a real, firm foundation. And somewhere inside, she always knew I was keeping something from her. She always suspected something was up. So she would have just kept asking me again, and again, and again, until her questions were finally, really answered.

  Rebecca had not forgotten her requirement that I get professional help, and on March 14, 2010, I entered a one-week program that dealt with sex addiction at a place called Psychological Counseling Services in Phoenix, Arizona.

  I was willing to do whatever it took to save my marriage, but I was clear on one thing as I checked in and got settled on my first night: This is crazy. I’m not like them. Maybe I went too far, and it got me here, but that’s it. Come on, who doesn’t look at pornography? What kind of a man doesn’t look at pornography?

  And then, as I talked to my counselors and went to the group sessions, I began to se
e that there are many people who don’t have compulsive behaviors around pornography. There are many people who don’t have this problem. From there, it was just one epiphany after another for an entire week.

  Early on, I was in therapy, talking with my doctor about my acting career.

  “With my job, people ask me to do certain things, and I have to do them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s my job.”

  “But you don’t have to do it.”

  “Yes, I do, because it’s my job.”

  “Get another job.”

  “But I can’t get another job,” I said. “This is what I want to do.”

  “So you want to do it?”

  “No, I have to do it.”

  “No, no, no, you don’t have to do anything,” she said.

  That’s a Jedi mind trick, I thought. Stop it. You’re freaking me out.

  “Terry, you always have a choice,” she said, smiling at me warmly. “The only reason you feel trapped is because you thoroughly believe you have no choice, but you always have a choice.”

  In my head, I had no choice about anything. This went back to when I was little, and I really didn’t have a choice. But now I was an adult, and maybe she was right. It seeped in slowly, like water through a rock: We always have a choice, every minute of our lives. Oh my God, I do have a choice, I thought. I can say no.

  Up until then, I had really felt like I couldn’t say no, to certain opportunities, or to certain requests from directors or fans. Even as I started to believe her, I couldn’t imagine a producer telling me to do something, and then me saying NO.

  “I feel like I would lose my job,” I said.

  “First of all, if you lose your job then that’s not the job you wanted anyway,” she said. “There’s always another way to do something. If you feel uncomfortable, you should be able to tell them you feel uncomfortable.”

  “But how?”

  And then it hit me: Almost all actors are like this. We don’t ever say no.

  “All of these actors need to be in therapy,” I said.

  She watched this new idea dawn on me, and she laughed, not unkindly.

  “You’re right,” she said. “And half of them are.”

  I laughed, too. It was a funny moment. But it was also a whole new world. Okay, I have to start saying no. I can say no now.

  I knew what I had to do, but let’s just say I had a bit of a learning curve. When I first got home from Phoenix, I stopped at a gas station, and a male fan approached.

  “Can I get a picture?” he said.

  I immediately went into default mode: I don’t really feel like it, but I don’t want to make him mad, or make him not like me, so I guess I should just … NO.

  “No,” I said.

  I had found the word, but my voice was quiet and squeaky. I had to practice.

  “No,” I said, louder this time. “I’m getting gas.”

  “Come on, man,” he said. “Come on.”

  “NO,” I practically shouted, getting into it now. “NO. NO.”

  Once I started saying no, after all of those years of being the pleaser and going against my own wishes just to make everyone else happy, it felt so good to say no that I couldn’t stop. That poor guy, he got the brunt of all of my therapy, and he didn’t even know what he was walking into. He had no clue.

  “No, I’m just pumping my gas,” I said. “I don’t have to give you a picture. I don’t owe you anything.”

  “Dude, get you, man,” he said. “I never wanted it anyway.”

  When he finally walked away, I was still pumping my gas, and as I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed what had just happened, I realized I was shaking. I had never told anyone NO before. And then, suddenly, I felt so light, full of possibility. I didn’t have to do things I didn’t want to do. It was a whole new world.

  After my initial breakthrough, I had a hunger for therapy, and to learn everything I could about human nature in order to understand myself better. I read everything I could put my hands on, books about addiction, psychology, neuroscience, how the brain works, anything to try to figure out what was happening with me, and how I had come to end up in the circumstances I had. Now that I’d experienced such a profound breakthrough, I was embarrassed by my previous ignorance. I could see how arrogant and self-centered I had been, how unconscious I’d been of the forces that drove my thinking and behavior, all the while assuming I knew better than everyone else did. The most horrible moment for me was finally getting that I hadn’t known anything before, and I’d even been ignorant of my own ignorance. I didn’t ever want to be in that position again, where I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I vowed I never would be.

  I had another breakthrough during this time. I had started down this path to save my marriage, and I wanted more than ever to be a good husband and father, but I wasn’t doing this for Rebecca anymore. I was doing it for myself. And it was perhaps the first unselfish thing I’d ever done in my life. I was taking care of myself so I could be there for my family. And I wanted Rebecca to take care of herself first, too, no matter what it meant for her marriage to me. It was a profound shift, and it wasn’t always a smooth process. There were moments when I was still desperately afraid that I was about to lose everything.

  I had seen so many other couples fall apart, even ones who’d gone through all of the same kind of therapy as Rebecca and me. And there were times when all I could do was pray. There were moments when it wasn’t about how much I was learning or growing, or what technique I was using to be a better person. All it was about was how I didn’t want my wife to leave me, and all I could do was fall down on my knees and pray. Sometimes that was all that was left, and it comforted me.

  Once Rebecca and I had stabilized things in our relationship to the point where we could live in the same house together, we knew we had to talk to the kids about what was happening. Obviously they’d noticed the tears and tension, and I knew the worst outcome would have been for them to blame themselves in any way. Having grown up in a family where there were many dark truths that were never discussed, and having seen how my own personality was shaped by this environment, I’ve always felt like we’re so backward in choosing to remain silent because we think our kids are too young to understand adult problems, rather than just letting them know that what’s happening is not their fault.

  Our older two kids could understand a little more, and so I told them a quick version of what had happened without too many details. I sat the younger three kids down together, and I chose my words very carefully.

  “Daddy did something that hurt Mommy a lot,” I said. “It was outside of our marriage, and it should have never been done, and Daddy didn’t say it for a long time. But now Daddy is sorry, and I want to make it better.”

  They didn’t seem all that surprised. What I had learned in therapy, and through my reading, was that the kids already knew something was wrong, and if I hadn’t told them, they would have thought it was them. So they seemed relieved, especially after I made sure they knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

  I continued to be on a quest to understand myself better, and I expanded the range of the material I was reading and listening to as audiobooks. I took in all of the stuff I could absorb about how to be a better husband, how to be a better father. As I did, I was struck by something. As men, we will study how to be the best architect, the best football player, the best actor. We’ll spend all the time we can find on our careers. But we need to be spending more time studying how to be a great husband, how to be a great father, how to be a great man.

  The more I learned, the deeper my realizations went. I began to understand why I had always messed up financially. And I don’t mean I was learning about financial planning, although I definitely came to understand money better, too. I finally grasped the psychological underpinnings for my behavior. Every time I was sad, I needed to get happy, so I spent money. Or I made ridiculous, impulsive decisions, just because I was
trying to improve my state of mind, when not spending—and actually saving my money—would give me all I needed in the long run, and forever. I even made risky moves because it was exciting, and I got energized from the risk, which distracted me from feeling bad.

  No matter what, I couldn’t let myself be sad. Once I realized I needed to experience happiness and sadness, I started to wake up. I realized I also needed to understand empathy. I needed to let myself stop and feel bad for other people, and really listen, and really feel what they were talking about. This started with my family, and my friends, and it expanded to everyone I worked with, and then everyone I encountered every day. It changed the way I thought about everything. EVERYTHING. I even started to understand the people who cut me off while driving.

  Mostly, I came to understand myself. I was forced to see who I really was. I finally realized I’d been so driven over these many years, mostly because of my dark secret, first about the drinking and abuse in my house, and then about my own pornography addiction. Because I always felt dirty, I was basically trying to clean myself by achieving perfection. I made up for my dark secrets by working harder, working longer, working more, getting more fit, perfecting my artistic ability. I had to be that perfect person. I had to be what everybody wanted me to be.

  That’s how, all of my life, I came to be the primo yes man. If anybody wanted me to do something, I did it. When the coaches asked who was going to do something, I always raised my hand. As an adult child of an alcoholic, I was a pleaser, and as a perfectionist, I was the main pleaser. All my life, I just wanted peace. And so if I felt like I could bring peace to a situation by saying yes to something, I did it. I never really shared what I wanted. And then, when I became a parent, I put this on my kids. I wanted my kids to be that way, too. It had always been my job to do what other people said. And now it was their job to do what I said. Let me tell you, there’s discipline, and then there’s being a tyrant. I was a tyrant. And when I could finally see all of this, I understood why I’d had tension with my children for years.