by Doug Glanville (appeared in the New York Times online edition, Sunday, June 7, 2009)

I haven’t spent a lot of time watching “MTV Cribs,” but I know the host likes to check the featured homeowner’s DVD collection for a copy of “Scarface.” Apparently, owning this movie is the key to street credibility (by “MTV Cribs” standards), and it is understood that the homeowner will play it for anyone who sets foot inside.

We all have our favorite movies, and I have some staples of my own in my collection — “A Few Good Men,” “Sixth Sense” — but I would never demand that visitors watch those movies as a rite of passage into my “crib.” However, a few months ago, the executive producer of MLB Productions, who is a friend of mine, sent me a housewarming gift of some classic documentaries about baseball. The jewel of the package was a contemporary piece called “We Are Young,” and if you are ever in my home, expect to sit down and take it all in. (Alternative plan: It will air on MLB Network this coming Friday at 3 p.m. EST.)

I have seen a lot of footage on the life of a baseball player, but this story captures the essence of what a lot of players carry with them at all times: the worry about failure, the need to be driven. At times these forces are couched as inspiration and motivation, at times they come from a convergence of fear and a desire for approval — and this documentary shows that dichotomy, unapologetically and realistically.
I happen to know the family, at least the older son, Dmitri Young. I played most of my career against Dmitri and he was a fun-loving opponent. Always laughing, always having time to chat at first base. From the outside, you would think he didn’t have a care in the world, especially since he was also a stone-cold hitter. But this documentary took me inside his life. I learned about the family dynamic that shaped him.

Dmitri was a first-round draft pick, which means he had more opportunity to learn and grow than the average draft pick. The financial investment a team makes on “first-rounders” tends to allow for more latitude with the young player’s growing pains. Yet he was in the shadow of a strong father, a top-gun military man who made it clear that failure was not an option. And for the sake of his little brother Delmon, a rising star 11 years his junior, Dmitri could never show anyone that he struggled with meeting those expectations.

I myself came up chasing my big brother Ken, who was almost eight years my senior. I followed his every move and whatever he pursued, I pursued. He sparked my competitiveness, he gave me a goal. As I got older, I started to understand the pressure he must have been under and the exterior he had to keep to protect me from any disappointment or disillusionment. He had to stay strong, keep smiling, even when his heart may have been breaking.

And although my father was not a stern man with rigid regulations, like Dmitri’s he cast quite a shadow. He began teaching full-time in his native Trinidad by the age of 14. He went on to a teachers college and then became an assistant headmaster. But, unhappy with the way his career was progressing, he vowed to head to the United States and pursue medicine. When none of his school credits translated over to the education system in the United States, he began all over again, a 31-year-old freshman at Howard University, where he eventually got a medical degree and full qualifications for psychiatry. He had two careers before most people even figure out what they are doing for their first one.

I know now that my brother could have translated my father’s drive and success as pressure, but I would have never known it from his unwavering support in my life. He buffered those stresses and I was able to spread my wings; I never feared living up to my father.

But Dmitri internalized everything to free up Delmon, even to his own detriment. It was the ultimate sacrifice.

Play long enough and you become intimately connected to your fellow ballplayers. During my career, I spent considerably more time with my teammates than with my own family. But in crossing over into baseball retirement, I’ve realized that even within all that intimacy there is distance. I didn’t really know my teammates as well as I thought I did. We are often islands unto ourselves in those hallowed locker rooms. This is partly because as ballplayers we spend so much of our shared time focusing on game strategy, life on the field and all the fun elements that spin off from that life, while ignoring what really makes our teammates tick. I suppose it’s something we assume we know — we are all together in the same locker room, and many share similar stories of rising to the top. But beneath the surface, there are a lot of secrets, some that mask a lot of pain, most of them byproducts of the internal struggle to maintain a certain level in a hyper-competitive arena.

For instance, it manifested itself in the dark secrets of steroid use and how no one talked about it, no one could tell for sure who was doing what. It manifested in maybe having a teammate whose locker was right next to yours but having no idea that he was battling depression or anxiety. To acknowledge these challenges is to admit defeat, or anyway take away the edge you need to perform. Where do you go? This can eat people up in ways that often remain unrevealed and suppressed. In the world of professional sports, and baseball in particular, you don’t have time to reflect as much as is healthy, for there is always another game to play.

As players, we are doing what we love to do, and for the most part it’s an enjoyable ride. But trying to figure out why we try to excel can dampen the mood and leave us feeling inadequate. The price you sometimes pay for success is a feeling that you’re not doing enough, that you should be doing more, that you should somehow be “better.” Over time, many players mature and find ways to deal with this dynamic. It may get buried, or become masked in bravado, or re-channeled constructively to wreak havoc on your opponent. But even if we learn to harness our drive, that doesn’t mean peace comes with it.

As I watched “Young Larry” (as he calls himself), the father in the Youngs’ story, I was impressed by his ability, ultimately, to reflect on the pressure he had put his sons under. He was a caring father who wanted the best for his children and understood how to provide support through channeling his experience as a top gun. Dmitri and Delmon Young have just gone through another challenge with the loss of their mother, Bonnie, to pancreatic cancer last month. Yet they carry on, having learned to stay close to their nuclear family, no matter what. Dmitri is now fighting to come back from a stint on the disabled list with the Washington Nationals, still taking it one day at a time. Delmon is an established player with the talented Minnesota Twins.

I connected to Dmitri’s story because it showed how the rollercoaster of emotions inside so many players can often be traced back to the people who cared about them the most. And if you have the time and want to understand what I’m trying to express in this column at the most core level, take a look at “We Are Young.” Or come by my “crib” and I’ll play it for you. And you will understand, like never before, what an amazing ride a life in baseball can be.

I like to identify universal themes in the work that I do with men in counseling, so this blog post is no different. I find that guys tend to operate in relationships the same way that they do on the job – with linear, solution-focused mentalities. Although it’s these very tools that make them so successful at what they do professionally, often times inappropriately utilized when creating relationship success.

When shopping for a car or house, when crunching baseball statistics or weighing the pros and cons of a decision to be made, the there are certain left-brain skills that are employed. Reasoning and critical thinking skills are necessary. Weighing costs-benefits is surely a solid solution to use. But, when it comes to relationships, men often fumble because they don’t realize that they’re trying to solve a situation that can’t often be solved with those left-brain skills. The matters of the heart require more attention to the powers of emotional intelligence.

Employing emotional intelligence (simply, to identify, assess, and manage the emotions of one’s self or of others) is a skillset that is often deperately needed in men, yet deficient. Being able to “solve” relationship problems (interpersonal, relationship or self) with one’s emotions is something really hard for men to do.

A couple of factors come into play here. Historically, men will mimic the lessons of emotional intelligence (or lack thereof) from their fathers. If there is a lack of emotional intelligence from father to son, and, more likely, that learning has been supplanted with criticism, shame, and education in avoidance, then men will continue to carry on in their adult lives and relationships stunted and emotionally unaware. They will bring those deficiencies to their intimate relationships.

Cuturally, it is reinforced that men invest a lot of their energy in building up their identities from their professional lives. Men get so used to using these left-brain heavy skill sets in careers that predominate their time and attention, they forget to turn them off when they leave work and have a hard time navigating in their intimate relationships and their marriages.

So, it’s not that men aren’t capable of developing emotional intelligence, because they can. I don’t belive in the “old dog, new tricks” cliche, which is tired and antiquated to me. Men have the ability to develop emotionally. Whether they want to or not is another matter.

I’ve polled a number of women friends of mine (both professional therapists and not) to find out the answers to three important questions about the differences between men and women in relationship. Here is the first question and the answers I got to it. A big thanks to my friends who were willing to participate in my unofficial survey. Parts 2 and 3 are coming soon.

1. What do you see as the three biggest problems men have in intimate relationships? What about the top three that women have?

My goal was to try to get better marketing information, but also to understand the issues that I work with from another perspective. I want to help men to understand what they are up against from the women they love, and how to better understand them and reach them.

For the first question, women answered communication several times as being one of the biggest problems that men have in relationships. They also reported that being vulnerable, being too analytical/thinking, honesty, letting go, and being afraid to show emotions for fear that their women will think that they are weak. Men, according to my friends, also want to fix everything instead of just validating.

As for the women themselves, women reported that the biggest problems women have in relationship include: nagging or repeating things to their man (which makes them not heard anymore), overly emotional, and impulsive reactions. Women also reported that their problems include being open and not afraid that they may scare their man away, creating an equal partnership and feeling misunderstood. Also, women reported that they try to force their partners into communicating instead of easing in to it. One of my friends talked about the idea of a “mythical mate,” a fantasy partner that women think will automatically read their minds without them needing to tell their man what they want and need.

Overall, some very interesting answers, both as a therapist and as a man in a relationship. I hope you can find some valuable ideas here, and maybe you see yourself in some of these answers.

We’ll look at questions 2 and 3 in future posts, so stay tuned.

Jason

A lot of the time, we lose valuable experiences that take place in the present moment because we are busy “living” our lives in our heads, either lost in the memories of the past, or fantasizing about the future, where life will be better. It’s difficult to stay planted in the present moment, because that is where our minds don’t want to stay.

Men tend to avoid the experience of their emotions and feelings by living in the past or the future, and have a difficult time dealing with the present moment. Some men avoid their present moment experience by staying in their heads all of the time, and “thinking too much.” Some just avoid the present moment by not having their experience of anger, of pain, of sadness, or of grief. The failure to attend to these crucial experiences means that we have to find surrogate places to be. 

Growing up, many of us learned to stuff our emotions or feelings, and started creating a life that avoided the pain of the present moment. It was too hard then, and it’s too hard now. We build lives on top of these individual experiences of pain, fear and sadness, and then lament when our problems are getting the best of us. We forget that we are the ones that created a lot of the problems that we experience, because it’s been too long and our problems have been embedded in our lives for as long as we can remember.

Learning to be in the present moment is truly living our lives, and not living in the false realities of the past and future. It is difficult for people to do this type of living, especially when there are many places inside of us that are too scary to revisit.

Meditation, yoga, therapy, and other vehicles of mindfulness are all ways to get back into the beauty of the present moment. Deep breathing is also a practice into accessing the present moment. 

Learning to have our feelings and experiences, and then communicating them to the ones we love is a form of acceptance of the present moment. We are truly living our lives when we do this.

A friend recently gave me a great idea. He thought I should post on the idea that men sometimes don’t know what to do or say when women get upset. He thought that men who do not consider themselves emotional have a hard time empathizing or dealing with women who are upset emotionally, especially if they are in a relationship with those women.

I can say two things about this phenomenon: practice deep listening, and don’t try to fix anything yet. Try to not be logical for once.

Men are notorious in their desire to fix a situation, and when this happens, deep listening cannot happen. We are fixers by nature, and this trait is good, when it comes to hunting big game, fixing a car engine, or making everyday decisions. It is a hinderance when it comes to connecting with the women in our life.

We run from, try to fix, avoid, lack empathy or do a thousand others things when the women in our lives get “emotional” because we are not in touch with those similar places within ourselves. The more we, as men, can get in touch with those emotional places (no, you won’t be crying or overly sensitive from now on), the quicker we will be able to connect and empathize with what women are experiencing emotionally.

Issues that come up for women in the context of a relationship will require the skill of both deep listening and suspending trying to fix anything. What is ideal is to listen and reflect back what you are hearing from the women as she is having her emotional experience. If she is crying, or upset, it might help to just be silent and be aware of your tendency to fix anything. When she starts to talk, simply reflect back what you are hearing, without fixing her problem, diagnosing it or getting defensive. This is hard stuff that requires practice, so don’t give up the first time you stumble. Use statements like, “You must be feeling…” or “It sounds like that really upset you when I….” You are just mirroring and stating back what you see and hear – that’s it. Maintaining that position will help. If you don’t know what to say or do, then say that. At least it’s being honest, and present, instead of trying the myriad other ways to deal with the situation.

If you disagree with her upset state, or what it is that she is upset about, that’s fine, but I would encourage you to keep those disagreements to yourself for the time being. Her upset-ness doesn’t need you to disagree with it, or else it’ll just become worse. She may be an overly emotional person in general, but when we try to figure it out, stamp out her experience or generally try to exert ourselves on it, the outcome is worse. We don’t give our women the experience that they are trying to have in the moment.

These steps will help you to become a better friend, family member, or relationship partner. These are the first few basic steps in a series of ways to engage with her in a healthy way. Most guys don’t do this. Really. You’ll be serving both of you really well if you can learn how to deal with a situation like this in the future.

The things that make us the men that we are are largely attributable to the relationships that we have with our fathers. Our intimate relationships, in some ways, are also results of the things that we learn from how to be in the world from our fathers, too. 

Too many men simply cannot be the fathers that they should to their sons, because they never got the right role modeling. Men go on to have imperfect relationships, and don’t know how to be effective intimate partners to their wives and girlfriends. Often times, it’s a combination of two problems.

First, men learn how to be emotionally withdrawn from their women. They learn, over time from the environment they grew up in, to shut down, stay in their heads and generally not be present to their feelings. This is the nucleus of the problem.

Second, as children we model behavioral patterns from our parents. As boys, we model the ways of being in a relationship from our fathers (and mothers). Many times, our fathers never got it right, so we simply take from them what we see, because unconsciously, if we do what they did, we just might get our needs met after all. This is child’s logic, and somewhere down the road, we fail to drop those tools when they don’t work for us anymore. As kids, they might have had some basic effectiveness. But as adults, we continue to use outdated tools to create similarly neurotic and ineffective relationships today.

The key is to understand these behavioral patterns, and the emotions that we avoid buried underneath. In seeing these, often for the first time, and experiencing them in the present moment unconditionally, they begin to transform themselves and set us free from the patterns that keep us stuck in conflict and unsatisfying relationships. We can work towards freedom from these blocks if we can first see them. Our fathers might not have been able to do it for themselves, but we can for ourselves.

I spoke today at Paradise Valley Community College about the effects of culture on men, and, specifically, how as men, we are driven my the messages that culture brands into us. 

Being a “real” man in our culture means to “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” and take care of things on your own. You “shouldn’t need to seek out help,” even when you’re depressed.

Could you see how this could create more suffering? By not asking for help, men will spiral deeper into the problems that they should be asking for help for.

Our culture doesn’t permit men to be depressed, sad, or even non-productive. It doesn’t allow for men to be emotional, and yet the same culture that tells us that also says that men should be emotional beings, especially within the context of an intimate relationship. It’s cultural schizophrenia.

6 million men a year are diagnosed with depression, and who’s to say how many are undiagnosed. Depression can only get worse without the right help, which would include counseling and psychiatry.

To “be a man” means a lot of things in our culture, and leaves little room for experiences that are not consistent with its definition of being a man. Weakness, sadness, fear – all are emotions and experienced that are sidelined when it comes to being a man in our culture, and that’s unfortunate. To integrate the whole experience of being a human being – both the feminine and masculine – is to be whole. To integrate the feminine is to be be female; rather, feminine feature, such as emotional expression, empathy, kindness, are things that are lacking in today’s modern man.

So, to lop off one side of our humanity and to accept the culturally-driven messages about what it means to be a man is missing a lot. It’s missing exactly one-half of the story.

- Jason

I think one of the reasons that we avoid our feelings, and, consequently, avoid our lives, is because what our minds think they will find when they get to the “darkness” of our emotions is much worse that the actual experience of having our emotional experience – as it comes up in the present moment.

The present moment is an enemy of the mind. The mind continues to elude and avoid the present moment (read any of Eckhart Tolle’s books for more clarification on this). The mind’s fuel for all this is provided early on, when, as children, we learn the tools that we never let go of to navigate issues and problems. We are trying to solve adult problems with children’s tools. They just don’t work.

Tools like trying to out-think a problem, avoiding the issue or one’s feelings, laughing to avoid the problem, and a thousand other distractions keep us from the essence of our suffering, the energy behind all of the elaborate problems that we encounter, and, disappointingly, create for ourselves.

So, because I work in the present moment, I help men get in touch with those places that they are scared to go. Most of the time, they are too busy using their outdated childrens’ tools, and don’t know that they need to tackle the problem with something else (more modernized versions). That something else has to do with working with the problem through the present moment. A lot of the work is do is observing, pointing out, exaggerating things I see, giving feedback about what I see being done in this very moment. I just have to pay very close attention to what I see unfolding before me, and try to not get in the way.

My mentor and I were talking about the major themes that men struggle with, and I wanted to share with you some of them. They are not ranked in any particular order.

1. Anger

2. Helplessness

3. Control issues

4. Need for validation, love and praise

5. Emotionality and its expression

Kat (my mentor) and I agreed that control and power underlie so many issues for men. We traced back many issues that men deal with to those issues above, but, more specifically, to issues related to control, power and the lack/loss of those forces. Relationship issues can manifest a plethora of issues that seem to come back to control. So, in your own experience, do you deal with issues of control? If you did, would you admit it, if you even know that you’re dealing with them? Has she told you that you are controlling, and it simply did not register for you? I’d like to hear what you think about that.

Leave a comment about your personal experiences with the issue of control within your relationship.

For the guys, I want to help communicate for you those things that are creating fighting and problems in your relationship. For the girls, I want to help you understand your guy, and what he is needing, as to give you an insider’s edge. Here goes.

1. Wants to be loved: You’re not too different from her, I know. This idea doesn’t run rampant in our culture, which says that we need sex, beer and football, which is crazy. I know that you need to know that you are loved, special and important to her, and that she communicates this to you.

2. To be admired: I know you want her to think highly of you. Remember why you tried out for your high school baseball team in the first place? Yes, it was to impress the girls. As adults, we still have that same need to impress our women. We want to know that she is admiring and swooning at us and our achievements and accomplishments, whether that’s being a good dad, employee or husband. So important.

3. Sex with you: Ladies, yes, he does want to have sex with you, and why should this even be on the list. A no-brainer. But, he also needs intimacy and affection from you, in the same way that you do, too. Guys are emotional beings, and don’t let any article form MSN or the like tell you that that is not the case.

4. Validation: A little different from admiration, validation is needed by guys to know that they are doing right by you. That’s it. I think that guys fear angering their partners, so a little verbal validation will help keep your relationship on track and show him when he’s doing a good job. Plus, it’s a great behavioral modification tool, so he’ll know when he does good and when he doesn’t do so good.

So, these are some things that guys do want, whether or not they are said. We’re not just limited to strictly what the media has to say about us. Believe it or not, we’re quite dynamic and emotional beings. And, no, this conversation doesn’t go past this blog post. I promise.

Check out this related post on why men cheat:

http://phoenixmenscounseling.com/blog/2008/09/30/why-men-cheat/

Jason