I have a fair number of male softies on my client list. This is not merely a matter of the success of women’s liberation’s evolution, nor is it just a matter of men’s depression. It appears to be a problem generated when either (a) men are attracted to overpowering women or (b) men have a kind of personality that brings out the dormant abusive and narcissistic power of their wives.
Examples are two men in their thirties who are the sole breadwinners and hard workers in their families. One husband referred to the “negative cycle I get into with my wife. I’ll identify an inequality and get worked up, but I’ll sulk because I’m conflict-averse. It festers. I analyze it. I don’t want to confront an issue if I can think of what she might say.” The other husband was cowed by his wife regarding the household chores, which he alone did. He vacuumed the carpet but missed some corners where pet fur had collected. His wife was over-the-top abusively angry at him over this.
The point here is that these men feel in advance that their wives’ arguments or criticisms are superior de facto and de jure and would by that fact defeat anything they might say. So they remain mute. This intrinsic defeatist “knowledge” – “what she might say” – is probably related to Dr. Thomas Gordon’s concept of “psychological size.” Gordon, Nobel Peace Prize nominee (thrice) author of Parent Effectiveness Training (1970) observed that to a child, the parent always has greater “psychological size.” The parent looms large – powerful, omniscient, awesome – before the child’s diminutive self-possession. These men turned to awed, intimidated mush in the presence of their wives’ negativity which was, I’d wager, C-PTSD or personality-disordered.
To them, I suggested a lite theory (made up on the spot) and its intervention. The theory is called “emotionally winning versus logically winning an argument.” Both men could see they mentally equated their wives’ angry arguments with factual soundness. This mentality is a feature of the inner child, which Pessimistic Depth Therapy conceives unconventionally: “We don’t have an inner child. We are our inner child. The adult is just the window dressing.” My clients were asked to see that their wives’ emotionality was not right: It was their feeling felt as fact. This was named “emotionally winning.” The clients were asked to see that their own feeling-fact – now called “logically winning” to accentuate their right not to be vanquished by injurious disrespect – had every reason to be in the ascendancy. It would be perfectly valid for the man to vacuum the house, after a grueling workday, and bypass carpet corners that would require the placement of a cumbersome attachment and unnecessary time spent. He was asked to consider responding to his wife’s emotional attempt at winning: “You’re not right. I’m not giving in this time.” With possibly this supplement: "You can pick up the corners which are important to you."
We all know that self-esteem and an emotional backbone can’t be conjured by rightness or willpower. But sometimes noble anger can be summoned from the deeps to support right and to inhabit willpower. Inner child work can wait for another day.
