Jim Burns always figured he was, in his words, like a rock. Solid, dependable and successful. Admirable qualities, certainly qualities that he had been brought up to believe were admirable.
In his early 30s, he worked 12-hour days in his thriving medical practice. He diagnosed his patients` problems and, if his wife or child had a problem, he`d fix that too: ”I was the fixer, at work and at home.”
His professional life was fine, but his personal life started falling apart. He didn`t know exactly why. ”Frankly, I thought it was my wife`s problem. I thought I was okay, but she was telling me it was my problem.”
Two years ago, at the urging of his wife, he went into therapy to try to figure out what was wrong.
”It was the toughest thing I`ve ever done,” he says now. ”It was so foreign; laying myself open (to a therapist) just did not seem like a male thing to do. But I was desperate.”
A sign of weakness?
No matter how desperate he had been, Burns probably would not have even considered going into therapy 15 or 20 years ago. The occasional movie star or author would talk about ”going to my shrink,” but the word ”therapy”
simply wasn`t in the dictionary for the average man on the street. As Burns expressed it, it wasn`t the male thing to do. Men were expected to take care of their own problems; to ask for professional help was a definite sign of weakness.
But in the `80s, therapy for men is losing its stigma. Maybe their fathers would never have sat down in front of a therapist`s desk, but today`s generation of men is more open to the idea.
Part of the reason is that, unlike their fathers, men today are caught in a confusing crosscurrent of changing roles and expectations at home and at work.
At home, the traditional sex differences are blurring as women continue their advances in the marketplace and demand that their men share feelings as well as paychecks. Men who have traditionally measured happiness and success by career advancement are often being forced to take a second look.
As Burns puts it: ”The behavior that was bringing me great success in my practice wasn`t bringing me success at home. I was trained to achieve, but I really didn`t have any training for having an open relationship with a (mate). I needed help, but I didn`t know it for a long time.”
Changing worlds
And at work, the combination of corporate mergers and changing technologies is leaving many middle-aged men bewildered from early retirement or job loss. Dagwood used to come home and kick Daisy the dog when his boss wouldn`t give him a raise; today`s Dagwood turns introspective and broods about the meaning of it all.
New York psychoanalyst and author Herbert Freudenberger (his latest book, published in 1986, is ”Womens` Burnout,” Penguin paperback, $6.95) talks about ”the deeply troubled men of today. There are many of them, and they are far more prone (than men in the past) to come in and talk about their problems. They need to shift their perceptions about the world; their sense of money as the main measure of success has to change.” Freudenberger has been in practice 32 years, and has seen his practice increase to 50 percent men from 25 percent.
”The old folklore that used to be quoted was that women with problems got help and men with problems drank or blew their brains out,” says clinical psychologist Michael O`Mahoney, director of the psychotherapy program at the Institute of Psychiatry at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
”But that is changing. Just in the last few years, it`s changed a lot. There is much more of a cultural acceptance of psychotherapy. There are many more males sitting across my desk today than when I first started practice. It is becoming all right to get help.”
How it adds up
In 1969, 576 people per 100,000 in the United States sought therapeutic help on an outpatient basis, according to the American Psychological Association. That almost doubled by 1983, to 1,087 per 100,000. Women still maintain a high edge over men when it comes to getting help-an estimate of about 65 percent women to 35 percent men-but the dramatic overall increase means many more men are asking for help.
Experts say there are several key reasons why it is becoming okay for men to seek therapy rather than wrestle with the demons alone, macho style.
For one thing, therapy is no longer automatically linked with pathological disorders; there`s increasing recognition that everyone has peculiarities and problems, and it`s no more a sign of weakness to want to feel better inside than it is to go to the doctor for a physical illness-a man isn`t less of a man if he admits he`s hurting and gets help.
”The stigma used to be, partially, that you didn`t see a shrink unless you were crazy,” says Kenneth Howard, psychotherapy researcher and director of the clinical psychology department at Northwestern University. ”People are becoming better educated as to what it`s all about.”
Also, therapies are changing. Going for counseling doesn`t necessarily mean lying on a psychiatrist`s couch once a week for several years. Instead, it might mean participating in an intensive weekend of group therapy or being counseled by a clinical social worker or psychologist (rather than a medically licensed psychiatrist).
And many corporations and companies today are demanding that employees with problems get help.
”Just in the last five years, there have been so many referrals from businesses . . . alcoholism, cocaine, temper outbursts and depression-those are the four biggies that are putting jobs in jeopardy,” Freudenberger says. ”Bosses are saying, get help or you`re through.”
Redefining happiness
Evanston psychologist Robert Mark says his practice is now about one-third men, compared with 10 percent when he started 14 years ago. He and his colleague, Buddy Portugal, run weekend workshops for men called the Men`s Room. The participants are not allowed to identify themselves by occupation, which for many men is their primary source of identification. Instead, they delve into feelings, relationships and needs.
”The common theme I see with men is, even with all their adequacies, they are not happy,” Mark says. ”Men have a craving for closeness but an inability to go about getting it. Our culture in the past has not supported men showing their feelings.
”In past years, it was the man`s job, his big car and the little woman at home that was defined as happiness,” he says. ”Now we`re redefining happiness. Happiness is closeness with the children, closeness with the spouse. A lot of older men get success under their belt, and then look around and think, `What about love?` ”
A need for love
Steve Kranz, a 40ish man with a variety of interests ranging from birdwatching to cooking, talks about years of feeling just plain unhappy and not knowing exactly why. At the urging of the woman he eventually married, he went into therapy several years ago.
”I felt very needy. I really wanted to be loved, but I didn`t know how to go about it,” Kranz says. ”I had a lot of broken relationships; I felt I was always floating on the surface of relationships. When I got angry at someone, I didn`t know how to express that anger, so I would become sullen for a while and then that would force the other person to come to me and ask what was wrong. And I`d deny I was treating them badly. It was inappropriate, ineffective behavior, and it caused me and the other person lots of grief.
”It`s a limited life when you`re like that; you don`t savor much. Our culture expects men to be busy and our busyness is plugged into our jobs . . . but that busyness can mean that we don`t take time to recognize that we have problems in intimacy, in our emotional lives.”
Once Kranz started therapy, he felt what he calls ”emotional results after about six months. I think that a lot of men suffer from emotional stupidity.”
Sense of isolation
Kranz`s feelings that he was unhappily floating on the surface of relationships are the same feelings that propel many men between 25 and 35 into therapy, according to Northwestern`s Howard. ”These younger single men tend to feel isolated,” he says. ”They`re less likely than women to share their fears, their feelings with anyone. And by the time they get in their early 30s and have had 10 relationships that haven`t worked out, there`s some self-doubt.
”Men in their mid-50s have problems similar to the empty-nest problem we saw in housewives. There`s a lot of pressure to early retirement-that`s scary. They`ve missed the opportunity to know their children and now they find themselves married to someone they don`t know very well, feeling very mortal and wondering what the future holds.”
”Out of touch” is the expression used by social worker Jo Lief, who has offices in Chicago and Evanston. ”They may be very feeling men, but they don`t know how to talk about it; they don`t know how to talk about their inner life,” she says. ”Men used to come in with indirect requests-my child is having a problem or I hate my job. Now the problems are much more directly related to intimacy.”
Often the men who end up hurting the most are the ones who are or have been the superachievers in their careers. They know how to be a boss, how to make a lot of money and manage other people-but they have relinquished all control at home. They are passive in their home life, but underneath that passivity is a lot of buried anger. Sometimes they drift through life like that, but sometimes there`s an eruption and they end up in the therapist`s office.
Divorce wasn`t the answer
That`s what happened to Stanley Coleman. He`s 58, has been married to his childhood sweetheart for almost 40 years and was head of a successful Chicago business.
”But I would come home and let my wife do everything,” he says. ”I avoided all issues, all confrontations at home. I wanted to kick any sort of confrontation in the family under the table. About 3 1/2 years ago, our marriage started getting very uncomfortable. (My wife) wanted me to take more responsibility for inter-family relationships . . . I think she was scrutinizing our relationship and wanted it to change. I was angry because I didn`t want to change.
”When I got angry about anything . . . I would go underground for three or four days and be depressed,” Coleman says. ”Then any kind of straw would break my camel`s back, and I would let all that anger out, but it would not be over the real cause.”
He and his wife finally went into therapy together, and had several sessions of individual therapy. ”When a person hurts enough, they`ll go to therapy. It was a case of either going to therapy or start paying a divorce lawyer. I don`t have any reluctance about therapy anymore; I`ve seen it work. I`m going for an A-plus in this marriage and this life.”
Jim Burns doesn`t particularly like to talk about the fact that he went into therapy. It still isn`t quite the thing to do: ”I only talk about it to select people. It`s not really easy for me to talk about. It seemed like a defeat that here was a problem that I couldn`t handle.
”But I know now that (therapy) works. I`ve still got a ways to go. It takes a long time to understand these things. But I`ve become a believer.” –
