by Jane Fonda
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets
I must have been about eight years old here.
THE FIRST ACT OF OUR LIVES, AS I SEE IT, BEGINS AT BIRTH AND lasts for twenty-nine years. Originally, I called the First Act “Gathering” because it is the stage when we gather together the ingredients—the tools, the skills, the scars—that make us uniquely us, the elements we will spend Acts II and III recovering from but also building on. In terms of the passage above from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Act I is the “place” we come back to after all our exploring, and, because we are laden with experience and perhaps forgiveness and wisdom, we see it and understand it for the first time. This is why it is important, in a life review, to visualize and reflect on who we were back then and what that can teach us about who we are now and what we want to focus on going forward. Often, by doing so, we can make our present life better.
Unhappy Childhoods Can Fade Away
Interestingly, I discovered research that indicates that whether our childhoods were happy or miserable is not all that important in later life. Dr. George Vaillant, a psychiatrist and researcher, is the director of the thirty-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the most important studies ever done about aging and why people either thrive or fail to. In his book about the study, Aging Well, Dr. Vaillant, talking about the men in the study (although women were also participants), says, “Unhappy childhoods become less important with time. When the lives of the men whose childhoods were most bleak … were contrasted with men whose childhoods were the most sunny … the influence on college adjustment was very important. By early midlife, childhood was still significantly important, but by old age the warmth of childhood was statistically unimportant. A warm childhood, like a rich father, tended to inoculate the men against future pain, but a bleak childhood—such as with a poverty-stricken father—did not condemn either the Harvard or the Inner City men to misery.”1
The Young Brain
One thing scientists know for sure: at birth, babies’ brains have around twenty-five hundred synapses, or points of connection between the neurons that receive and send signals. These continue to multiply during the very early years, and until recently, it was believed that this increase in synapses happened only once—in childhood. Not true! Brain scientists now know that there is a second surge right before adolescence that lasts into the late twenties.
Think about it: Whether you are a boy or a girl, you have all these high-octane hormones flooding through you, but the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that will allow you to avoid risks, determine appropriate behavior, decide on priorities, and understand the consequences of your actions is still under construction!
“The skills you practice as a child and pre-teen become much sharper in the teenage years; and those practiced reluctantly, if at all, will diminish on your brain’s hard-disk drive,” writes Judith Newman, an author and columnist.2 In other words, when it comes to brain neurons, early on we need to use them or lose them!
Education
This aspect of neural development is the likely reason that education is one of the key ingredients of Act I, an ingredient we need to have gathered when our brain circuitry is being established. Early education is particularly critical in determining cognitive function in old age—at least in Western cultures.
Many important studies show that lifelong learning is one element found in happy, healthy older people. It has even been shown that for every added year of education you receive, your life is likely to last more than a year longer! In her book A Long Bright Future, Dr. Laura Carstensen, the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, says, “Although income level and occupational status are influential, when push comes to shove, I think most social scientists would put their money on education as the most important factor in ensuring longer lives.”3 Dr. Carstensen goes on to explain that educated people have better jobs, earn more money, live in safer neighborhoods, lead healthier lives with less stress, and manage their health care better when they do get sick. It may be too late to do much about your education in the developmental sense, but other studies show that learning new things at any age affects one’s brain synapses and has a positive health impact. We can try to keep learning, and we can ensure that younger people—our grandchildren, perhaps—receive a good education. Do you think you might want to go back and study some more? Lots of people of all ages are doing so these days, and schools are making it more convenient for us.
Gender Identity
Another central factor in Act I involves how we have internalized our gender identity—what goes into being a girl or a boy. This is more culturally determined than we realize. As the spiritual leader and philosopher Krishnamurti once said, “You think you are thinking your thoughts, you are not; you are thinking the culture’s thoughts.” When it comes to gender distinctions, early on the culture’s thoughts profoundly determine who we become. Starting in Act I, boys and girls internalize messages about gender and society’s expectations. If we do not become conscious of these unspoken communications and thus do not address them, they continue to determine our thoughts and behaviors throughout our whole lives, in ways that can rob us of our full humanity. One’s gender identity may be a key aspect of Act I, the area where we can sustain the deepest wounds during this stage of gathering.
Me, third in line, at my high school graduation. I designed the dresses we all wore.
GIRLS
When you do a life review, think about your adolescence. What was it like, in gender terms? What scenes do you remember? What were you like? What was your mother like? Your aunts? What role models did you have? How did your father and mother respond to your changes and development during puberty?
Doing my life review, I realized the extent to which I changed when I entered adolescence. For me it began to happen around age twelve, when boys entered the picture and my father began to insinuate that I was fat. Prior to that, I had been a tomboy and what had mattered to me about my body was that I was strong and limber and brave enough to climb high trees and wrestle with my boy friends. Once it was expected that the boy friends would become boyfriends, the emphasis shifted to fitting in, being popular, looking right, staying thin. This is when I became disembodied—I can feel it now, in retrospect. I moved out of myself and took up residence next door. The most authentic parts of me took a backseat to the girl (and then the woman) who tried—at least on the surface—to become whatever I thought the boy (or man) I was with wanted. I was beginning my Third Act before I felt I had recovered from this Act I conditioning. This phenomenon, by the way, is not unique to me … far from it.
Taken at my high school graduation.
Because of my work with adolescents, I have studied the ways in which this stage of gender-identity development in Act I is different for girls than it is for boys. For many girls, especially Caucasian girls, adolescence is when they try to hide what they know and feel; the code says, “Don’t be too strong, too outspoken, too sexual, too aggressive.”
A perfect example of this was related to me by Catherine Steiner-Adair, an instructor at Harvard’s Department of Psychiatry and the former director of Eating Disorders Education and Prevention at the Klarman Eating Disorders Center. “I was doing research in a middle school,” she said. “Sometimes I’d invite the students out for pizza. When I would ask the girls what they wanted on their pizzas, the ten-year-olds would want double cheese with pepperoni, the thirteen-year-olds would say, ‘I don’t know,’ and the fifteen-year-olds would answer, ‘Whatever you want.’ ” In other words, girls lose their relationship with themselves and what they want in order to fit in and to be in a relationship, especially with a boy. Asking for double cheese and pepperoni might make them look like they’re pigging out or not “feminine” enough.
Like many girls, I first began to experience anxiety and depression during adolescence. That is also when my twenty-year-long battle with anorexia and b
ulimia began. As I know all too personally, this doesn’t end with adolescence but is a pattern of disembodiment that, unless consciously broken, can make intimate relationships nigh impossible; we are not bringing our whole selves to the table—literally and figuratively! If we manage to break the pattern of anxiety, disembodiment, and addiction, then, in our Third Acts, we will be able, as the psychologist Carol Gilligan says, to find our way back to the spirited ten- and eleven-year-old girls we once were, before our voices went underground—only better, wiser.
If you are a woman, think about your own adolescence. Did you feel you had to conform to culturally imposed stereotypes of femininity, or did you have an authentic relationship to your sexuality and to your gender? Did you own it? Were you able to embody your sexuality because someone made sure you understood that sexuality isn’t just about the act of sex, it’s also about sensuality and feelings? Were you made to feel you had to look and behave a certain way if you were to earn love? Were you supposed to be seen and not heard? Did you have someone who made you understand that your feelings and ideas were as valuable as a boy’s? That you could be strong and brave as well as caring and giving? What kind of role model was your mother? Did she express her own opinions? Take some time for herself? Did your father rule the roost and your mother always acquiesce? How did your father respond to your adolescence? Did you feel you weren’t pretty enough or good enough or thin enough?
This is all so subjective, isn’t it? Some of the most beautiful women I know think they are unattractive because of early messages, and some not traditionally attractive women exude confidence and beauty because that’s how they were made to feel growing up. Did one or both of your parents act as a buffer to the misogynist media? Did they talk to you about how ridiculous it is that so often advertisements use ultrathin, stereotypically sexy girls and women or macho, super-buff men to sell things? Ads can make women and men feel anxious about how they are (real life) in order to persuade them to buy things that, the implication is, will make them more acceptable—like the models.
Me, age 22.
BOYS
From my friend Carol Gilligan, a psychologist, a writer, and the mother of three sons, I learned that one of the big differences between girls and boys is that girls’ voices go underground at adolescence, whereas boys’ hearts go underground when they are around five or six years old, the age when they begin formal schooling, leave home, and are exposed to the broader culture. If you are a man, did your parents or your teachers make you feel like a sissy if you cried, or a momma’s boy if you walked away from a fight? Were you taught that a “real man” would never let anyone get away with shaming him and that shaming had to be met with violence? Did your template for manhood mean having to choose between a nonthinking, nonfeeling macho man and a New Age wimp? Did you have an adult who helped you understand your uniqueness, that you weren’t better than girls but wonderfully different? Did they instill in you an admiration for attributes like being present, brave, trustworthy, focused, goal-oriented, or a good team player? These are positive masculine qualities (good for women, too!). As a boy, did you feel it was okay to be wrong? Did you find it hard to ask for support? Did you believe that asking for help showed weakness and vulnerability? Did you feel pressure to prove your manhood and, if so, did you ever wonder why it needed to be proven as opposed to its being assumed as a part of your innate, authentic self? Were you helped to believe that a real man or woman is one who refuses to be casual about sex, who respects his or her own body enough to not be nonchalant about giving it away?
At around age four with Peter, my brother—two years younger—playing in the sandbox.
It is at this early age that so many boys are encouraged to bifurcate head and heart so that they will be “real men.” They become emotionally illiterate to the point where they often don’t even know what they are feeling and they lose their capacity for empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling. And it happens so early that for men it is just the way things are. They can’t remember a time when they felt differently. The psychologist Terrence Real, in his wonderful book about men and depression, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, writes, “Recent research indicates that in this society most males have difficulty not just in expressing but even in identifying their feelings. The psychiatric term for this impairment is alexithymia and psychologist Bon Levant estimates that close to eighty percent of men in our society have a mild to severe form of it.”4 For boys, this can manifest in signs of depression, learning disorders, speech impediments, and out-of-touch and out-of-control behavior.
Brother Peter as a young teenager.
Obviously, not all boys experience the early trauma of manhood. It seems that a warm, loving, structured home and school environment can act as a vaccine, helping boys stay whole. Were you lucky enough to be surrounded by adults who showed you explicitly or by example that being a man means being a whole human being—strong and emotional, brave and compassionate?
In today’s Western culture, most men are still very vulnerable to shaming, to being seen as not manly enough, and this affects every part of men’s lives—and women’s, as well.
Consider the economy. In her book Backlash, Susan Faludi writes about an opinion poll that asked men and women around the world how they defined “masculinity.” Overwhelmingly, the response was “Masculinity is the ability to bring home the bacon, to support their family.” So, if this is the main criterion for masculinity everywhere in the world, what happens when the economy goes south, jobs become scarce, and it is women who are bringing home the bacon (albeit for lower wages and benefits)? Violence against women goes up because men feel ashamed.
Or consider issues of war and peace. In his book War and Gender, Joshua Goldstein, a professor of international relations at American University, wrote, “As war is gendered masculine, so peace is gendered feminine. Thus the manhood of men who oppose war becomes vulnerable to shaming.”
The Pentagon Papers showed us that in the 1960s and ’70s, the advisers of four different administrations—Republican and Democrat—told their presidents that the Vietnam War could not be won short of annihilating the entire country, and yet our leaders kept sending more young men to fight. I wondered about this, and then I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of President Lyndon Johnson. He told her that he feared being called “an unmanly man” if he pulled out of Vietnam. This seems to be an ongoing pattern in the United States—a fear on the part of our male leaders of premature evacuation!
In the 2004 presidential campaign, when Democratic candidate John Kerry spoke in favor of upholding international law and supporting the United Nations, he was called “effete” by Vice President Dick Cheney. There’s that masculinity thing again, as though advocating for peace and diplomacy is effeminate.
I cite these examples because gender is such a core issue affecting every one of us—not because all boys and men are potentially violent and hawkish, but because the root of what surfaces in some of our boys and men as violence and hawkishness exists in too many of them as lack of empathy, emotional illiteracy, inability to be authentic, and vulnerability to shame. When adults help boys and girls shape their identities without resorting to gender stereotypes, they prepare them to have an optimal chance at future relatedness and intimacy in the stages of life to come.
A noteworthy shift has taken place over the past thirty years. Psychologists have come to believe that the highest form of human development lies not at the extremes of the gender-role spectrum—men as autonomous and dominant, women as dependent and malleable—but in the middle, where true, authentic relationships take place. From Jung forward, most psychologists have recognized that only when partners are able to let go of rigid, hierarchical sex roles can there be intimacy and authenticity.
In a later chapter, I explain the good news that as we enter our Third Acts, a great many of us, women and men, tend to move away from damaging sexual stereotypes and, as a result, find deeper intimacy and more gender parity in ou
r relationships.
As I have learned from Carol Gilligan, gendered adolescent behaviors are not simply a matter of biology—“boys will be boys” and “girls are just experiencing hormonal surges.” Psychological and cultural factors also play a role. In addition, the success of programs that encourage girls’ interest and performance in math, science, and sports and the proven benefits of interventions that help young men get in touch with their emotional lives argue against a simple biological determinism.
That’s not to say that boys and girls are the same. Today’s brain science has revealed beyond a doubt that there are many innate and universal differences in how we think, how we see, and how we react to various circumstances. We need to respect those differences, while also not letting them become exaggerated, overly self-conscious expressions of what “masculine” and “feminine” mean.
For the health of our boys, we need to define the positive qualities of being male. It is hard for a boy to learn to be both tough and tender—and then to learn to integrate the two into appropriate behavior so they can become holistic men who can move toward intimacy and communion and not feel that empathy and emotions mean weakness.
How Much Can We Change?
Like many people, I went through my First Act pretty much on my own in terms of figuring things out. My dad was a naval officer in the Pacific during most of World War II, but when he was home, I learned important things from him, mostly by osmosis (and from the roles he chose to portray in theater and movies)—about fairness, sticking up for underdogs, and the wrongness of racism and anti-Semitism. No one taught me about sex, however—how to know if a relationship was real, that it was okay to say no and to honor my body. Maybe this is why understanding these things (and writing about them) and trying to teach them to young people became important to me toward the end of my Act II. Part of this has to do with understanding in what ways people do and don’t change. If in your First Act you did not receive much guidance of the sort I have just written about, how can you get over it? What might be some ways? Frankly, I wouldn’t be writing this book if I didn’t think change was a real possibility.
