..........
Chapter 3- The Great Separation
From a psychospiritual perspective, the indigenous initiation experience has a lot to say about the healthy growth of men today. Modern psychology is one key in translating the ancient initiation experience into contemporary terms. Certain mystical spiritual traditions still hold keys to an authentic path to manhood. Both modern and ancient traditions can give answers to the perennial problem regarding the meaning of pain.
Puberty initiation prepared boys for the inevitable human pain of both growth and frustration, the pain of yearning and loss, the pain of both tragedy and transformation. Growth involves going through the pain of change. But there is also pain in resisting change. Elders knew there was no way around this pain of being human. Elders also knew that change always involves the pain of loss, and loss involves separation from something valued but no longer needed. Separation is needed in a man's growth in the same way a booster rocket that has spent its fuel needs to be jettisoned. The separation lesson was the first step toward manhood that elders taught. It is no coincidence that unexpected, abrupt separation is what brings most men into counseling.
Hardwired Trigger
Separation always triggers the initiatory process. But what is initiatory separation in our modern lives? Separation from what? How does a man consciously know which turns to make once he is separated? How do we get in the way of separation? What crises are really opportunities?
Here is an excerpt from Parabola magazine, Fall, 1993, written by an African man, Nouk Bassomb, from his own contemporary initiatory experience:
Soon after a boy has been initiated, that is, soon after he has been allowed into the society of adults, African Bassa people put him to a test. Seven to nine elders materialize one morning, at around five o'clock, outside his father's compound.
"Step outside, boy!" they shout.
The boy comes out. The elders place themselves between him and the door.
"It's time for you to depart, boy. Go! Now!"
The morning this happened to me, I had only a little piece of cloth called sarja around my waist. I turned my back and left.
My mom ran after me, but the elders who were behind me to make sure that I would cross the boundaries of our village kept her from hugging me.
"Go away, woman!" I heard the elders say. "For the next eighteen 'moons' minimum, this boy has nothing, and we mean nothing, to do with the people of this village. That's the law. Let him go."
I did not even have the right to look back. I kept going. I had to show that I was a man, a little man, who one day would be a man, a grown man, an adult. A firm, upright support for the entire village. I was thirteen...
To undergo the transition from being a boy to becoming a man, male children spend ninety days in the deep forest. It is required. They must learn to survive in a dangerous and hostile environment, to find their food, cook it, and share it with their fellow comrades. There are no females around. In my age group, there were twenty-seven of us.
As you can see, these rites continue to go on today as they have been going on for 10,000 years. In this case the separation process goes on for almost two years. The ordeal lasts for 90 days.
In puberty initiation rites from earliest times the first step is the forcible abduction of an adolescent boy by the village elders. These elders decide when individual boys are ready to be taken from the village by discerning when a young boy is strong enough to go through the grueling cultural and spiritual transformation ritual. They hope they are correct in knowing the best time, as boys sometimes do not survive the initiation process.
In these rites the boy is forcefully separated from mother, father, grandparents, village: all that is familiar and nurturing to his boyness. The separation is sudden and intense. It is an experience a boy will never forget. He will never see his mother or father or the village in the same way again.
In this chapter I will talk primarily about the psychological and symbolic meaning of separation from mother. This separation starts the initiatory process for most men, and is the place in our culture it often founders. If a man is able to negotiate this separation from mother he must then learn psychological separation from the father. Both separations must happen if the boy is to become a man. The separation from mother I call the Great Separation for it is the first and most difficult one.
In the excerpt I read, Nouk said, "The elders...kept her from hugging me." This forceful separation sounds rather harsh to our ears. Why not at least a last hug upon leaving? How can a mother's show of love hurt? Don't we all need some encouragement from loved ones to get along in life? Don't we all need human touch, especially from a woman? Where is the wisdom, here, or the manhood?
Though the ritual seems barbaric by modern standards there is real wisdom in these acts. If a boy stayed in the village near his mother's hut, he could not experience the ordeal in the wilderness. Elders instinctively knew that overstaying in the village, especially by his mother's hut, softened a boy and robbed him of the courage and motivation for ordeal, even though individual mothers knew and respected the importance of initiation. Elders realized that the world of comfort and physical nurturance, the maternal world of village life, could be dangerous and regressive to a boy's spirit as he approached puberty. The possibility of a mother's comfort would always be a temptation for a boy to overstay in the village, to never leave. The elders realized that overstaying would be harmful to both the viability of the community as well as the spiritual maturity of the boy himself.
Good Mothering
Hugging is symbolic of all that is nurturing, that protects a boy from harm, that tells the boy he is loved, that says he is important. In his infancy and early years that kind of nurturing and comforting is essential. A young boy's ability to meet his own needs is minimal. Think of an infant, totally dependent on another human being to protect and nurture its fragile body and ego. The feminine motivation to incorporate the needs of a child as her own, greater than her own, is profound. Good mothering intuits a child's needs because a mother revolves her whole life around that child's well-being.
The result of this good mothering is a deep sense of trust in the boy. The boy trusts that somehow his needs will be met. He learns to trust that the universe is not an impersonal enemy and that he holds an important part in his world. Erik Erikson talks of the first years as the time when a child develops the basic sense of trust, both in other people and in his environment. Nurturing mother energy is probably the ultimate energy that enables a man to keep going in a sometimes painful life with a sense of hope. Mothering energy, symbolized as unconditional love, is the foundation of the initiatory journey.
Especially in the first two or three years of a child's life, mothering energy is vital to protecting the child from being overwhelmed with the pain and frustration of not getting its needs met. Starting at infancy the child is helpless in meeting even primitive biological needs. The mother, or anyone bringing the mother energy, then starts one of the most complex dances in the natural world. At once, she protects the infant from too much deprivation and overwhelming pain while gradually teaching the young child to soothe itself in the midst of pain and learning. This crucial dance requires much balance and finesse. Good mothering results in a boy learning to gradually comfort himself in the same way he was comforted. In effect he will carry good mothering energy inside himself.
The mother who knows that her boy child needs to grow into a man also knows the difference between comforting and nurturing. She knows instinctively that nurturing provides a protected space where a child learns, mostly by experimentation, by trial and error. The gradual letting go of the child to learn of his world is a precursor of the initiatory separation from mother at puberty. Nurturing provides the space for learning, eventually leading to the elder space of ordeal. This mother nurturing is a kind of early and healthy tough love.
Comforting involves wisely creating a space that is not beyond a child's capacity to learn and grow. When a child does get overwhelmed from lack of strength or experience, mother comfort becomes a safety net repairing any trauma so a child does not gradually lose hope and confidence.
Kindlon and Thompson underscore this point in saying that "when a mother reacts reliably and sensitively to her infant's needs, he will form an internal connection to her- what psychologists call a 'secure attachment'- that will provide a strong foundation of trust and love on which he can build other healthy relationships."
Limbo
Most men in our society have had good enough emotional mothering. Their flesh and blood mothers have given them what they need to move on to the next stage of development. The problem for men is that our society does not know how to properly handle this mothering energy. This culture does not understand how separation from the world of the mother is the first step toward initiation while at the same time respecting mothering as a form of feminine energy.
Elders know when a boy is ready for initiation. They are initiated men themselves who have lived their manhood for many years. They know that the movement into the wilderness is a movement into the life of the soul. Though the direction is away from the village, the movement is an interior one. Elders knew that the gateway to initiation is ultimately within the emotional, intuitive, and spiritual life.
The modern patriarchal culture is a culture of biological fathers who have not been initiated. Their training manual is a faulty initiation manual. They have not been taught by initiated elders. Consequently, this culture creates a situation where young boys are both taken too early from their mothers and taken in the wrong direction. So young boys are not only traumatized by premature separation, but are led away from the healthy path of initiation. The movement within, into emotions toward soul life, is seen as feminine or sissy. The inner path to initiation is blocked by the patriarchy.
Early on boys are taught not to cry, to take it like a man. Dolls are taken from boys, replaced by cars. Studies have shown that infant and toddler boys are most often held at arm's length while girls are held close to the comforting body. Later boys are lauded for their sports prowess where winning euphoria is the only feeling allowed while boys in the arts are mostly seen as feminine or gay. These are just some examples of boys of boys being culturally cut off from an inner life seen as unmanly.
Modern men are caught in a limbo, barred from the path of initiation, led to a world that promises an initiation but does not deliver true manhood. The result is widespread burnout. The result is a pandemic of under the radar depression that men themselves don't recognize. This is primarily an existential depression that results from men stuck in limbo, neither nurtured by a healthy mother or an initiated father.
Terrence Real, in his book I Don't Want To Talk About It, asserts that depression is much more prevalent in our society than was previously realized because of the "normal" emotional trauma men grow up with in our culture. He believes that men are systematically deprived, too early, of emotional nurturing and understanding, especially from mother figures. As he says, "Studies indicate that from the moment of birth, boys are spoken to less than girls, comforted less, nurtured less." Misguided standards of masculinity and childrearing then cause widespread passive trauma in boys, causing widespread, hidden depression.
William Pollack also makes the strong point that for boys premature mother separation is socially supported in our society. Therefore, mother deprivation is institutionalized as an abusive practice done to young boys. The Boy Code, his term for the faulty training manual, forces a young boy to turn away from mother and those things considered "feminine" or not be considered "a real boy". As he says, "But I have come to understand that this forcing of early separation is so acutely hurtful to boys that it can only be called a trauma- an emotional blow of damaging proportions."
Kindlon and Thompson reinforce this view of the cultural emotional abandonment of boys in their belief "that boys, beginning at a young age, are systematically steered away from their emotional lives toward silence, solitude, and distrust."
These authors see the trauma of premature separation as the primary reason for men's depression. The patriarchy teaches boys to be men on the outside, starting very early. They are taught to act like men even though they don't feel like them. Most men have been told by society to be tough and not a "mama's boy". The lack of nurturing, as well as emotional trauma, at this early an age can have the affect of creating an unconscious sense of hopelessness, a pained withdrawal from natural compassionate emotion.
Most of the men reading this book will have a depression caused by some deprivation of mothering energy in their lives. This depression, often hidden by addictions, has a cultural and psychological basis that men need to understand in order to heal. Most men through neglect of their inner life, taught by the patriarchy, are unconsciously mama's boys while consciously and desperately trying to find patriarchal manhood. The resulting depression is the cause of a man's unconscious yearning to stay in the world of the mother, to get what he feels is his natural right to the comfort and understanding he missed. The emotional truncation causes a man to look for mother love in all the wrong places, causing havoc in his personal life.
Most men are stuck in the psychological world of the mother, even those who seem to go through cultural separation from a flesh and blood mother. Hidden under the cultural separation is the boy's continuing need for an external mother bond. This patriarchal culture, this father culture, teaches that manhood depends on external accomplishment and connection rather than internal growth. This culture, unknowingly supported by men and women, does not know that manhood is an inside job.
The problem for men today is that we are left by society in the village, emotionally needy yet taught to ignore our emotions. We are unconsciously looking to be emotionally taken care of while being taught to act like caretakers. Even though there is a cultural separation from mothering, the patriarchal society doesn't recognize the buried emotional needs of men, alive but underground. So the patriarchal society leaves men out on a limb, culturally separated but emotionally needy, with no guidance toward a healthy initiation. The only avenue it gives for emotional connection is to hearken back to the mother's arms, most often into unhealthy sexual and emotional relationships with women.
The patriarchal path creates men who are a victim of cultural ignorance and unconsciousness. Without separation and psychological initiation boys don't grow into men but stay emotional boys. Men do become "productive" but die early and unhappy. The patriarchy keeps control, but of an emotionally empty kingdom.
Indigenous tribes knew the power of a boy's psychological needs and realized it could be regressive to a man to continue to meet those needs through external mothering energy. This connection would be harmful to the individual as well as the community. For the tribe needed men to carry on its work and its existence. It also needed mature men to carry on its spiritual tradition. Anthropologist David Gilmore, talking from a cultural standpoint, remarks, "...regression is unacceptable not only to the individual but also to his society as a functioning mechanism, because most societies demand renunciation of escapist wishes in favor of a participating, contributing adulthood." Gilmore points out that he believes that regression to "fantasy as a blissful experience of oneness with the mother" is a cultural threat to a society that needs adult men to protect and support it.
Indigenous tribes did not leave a man hanging in emotional limbo. These tribes did not leave a man with a truncated emotional life. They realized the cultural threat of regression. They also realized that mother regression was a threat to their spiritual tradition. Elders plunged a man deeply into his inner world. They gave men a whole new world, the world of mature masculine feeling, to enable a man to separate from the mother's hut. Yet they knew a man had to find and connect with a new form of feminine energy. They introduced men to the other side, a place of connection and emotional fulfillment where their true identity and their spiritual tradition resided.
The Mother Complex
Because modern culture has no healthy initiatory feeling to offer men, most men are stuck in a limbo feeling that is neither nurturing nor genuinely masculine. The result is a place of no feeling, a place of numbness. This numbness is then regularly punctuated by childlike anger whenever a man suffers the discomfort of frustration or loss. This is the reaction of an uninitiated boy stuck in the village because of a lack of elders. Numbness and anger are the signs of men in limbo.
The pandemic of numbness is part of the low level depression that most men are left with in limbo. Any natural feelings will break through the depression as unhappy frustration, the result of not having the emotional tools to handle the ups and downs of life. It is either numbness or emotional discomfort that causes most men to look back to lost mothering for some good feeling. This is the time that the mother complex appears in a man's psyche. She acts and feels like a separate personality inside a man. She is called in by a man's desperate need for relief from frustration and emptiness.
On the archetypal level Robert Johnson talks of this regressive mother need, the need for escapist wishes in every man, as a mother complex. Others call this complex the dark mother. The mother complex is the negative side of the mothering dynamic. The complex causes a man to look for personal mothering as a way to find some comfort in his arid no man's land inside. This complex tempts a man to act like a boy emotionally, like a boy stuck in the village. It is important to realize that this need, and this complex, is in the man. The complex is rarely caused by a human mother.
In his book, Lying With The Heavenly Woman, he describes the mother complex as a man's "wish to regress to infancy again and be taken care of, to crawl into bed and pull the covers over his head, to evade some responsibility that faces him." As such Johnson remarks that this complex "will destroy his life more quickly than any other single element in his psychology."
The mother complex is the dark side of the mother archetype. The mother archetype is positive at the beginning of a man's life and, in a different form, is essential in the midst of initiation and afterward. However, when the boy is ready to move beyond the village the dark side of the mother will always emerge in a man's psyche. The dark mother has a need to keep a boy close, to keep him from initiation. Even a boy sorely wishing for manhood will regress when this dark mothering is the only feel good option for the boy within.
The mother complex emerges as a secret need to be smothered, to be adored, adulated, propped up even if not warranted, to always be "understood." She comes as the desire to be told it wasn't our fault, that the other guy has the problem, that we are a victim of tough breaks, that our mistakes are totally understandable. In a word we all want someone to cover for us and think we're wonderful and manly, even when we're not. Men unconsciously looking for this type of love in the real world are in the grip of the mother complex and unknowingly stuck in the village.
Sam Keen gets this idea of archetypal energy across in his fine book Fire In The Belly. He speaks of WOMAN in a man's life residing in his psyche. WOMAN encompasses the Great Mother and the Dark Mother. He talks of men having a WOMAN need, bigger than life and ready to meet all needs. This is the dark WOMAN, the mother full of comfort but lacking in wise nurturing. We are often attracted to the this WOMAN in our women, the pleasure-giving, comforting, understanding, possessive side. We are frustrated to the point of irrational anger when our woman partner is not this comforting, yet regressive, WOMAN.
Mother To Mother Object
Most men will unconsciously turn a wife or a lover (including another man in a gay relationship) into a mother through a psychological process called transference. In this situation transference allows us to find mother substitutes in other people, or even other things. In counseling I have to make mother transference clear to most men because they believe they have separated from their mother when they left home. They believe that cultural separation is psychological separation. They don't realize how they have taken their mother with them, in the form of their needs and dreams, only to later transfer her to another beloved woman. That is how WOMAN migrates around our environment.
As we become adults we don't realize that we are often connected through the mother complex to the woman we love. When a man says he is looking for "unconditional love" from his wife he is really saying he wants his wife to be his emotional mother. When a man says he is looking for the "right" woman to make him happy he is usually fantasizing about a mother he never fully had. When a man spends most of his time fantasizing about women he is emotionally stuck in the village, close to his mother's hut, even though he hasn't seen his actual mother for months or even years.
When we project our mother complex needs onto another woman we turn her into a mother. Most every relationship a man has with a woman in our society is contaminated by this dynamic. Even though our society tells a man not to be a wimp or a mama's boy, it also teaches him that ultimate happiness for a man resides in a woman. Unfortunately, this is the woman of the mother complex. This double message regarding mother shows how unwise our culture is, how lacking in understanding of the inner life.
The beloved woman then becomes a mother object. Mother object is another psychological term that I will use often in this book. The word 'object' conveys the reality that the man is reacting to an impersonal archetype, like a mother machine, and not to a whole person. Object also conveys the meaning that the woman is not literally the man's mother. Through transference a woman loses her own personality and becomes a mother to the boy inside. A woman referred to as a 'sex object' comes from this same psychological situation of impersonal attraction.
Unfortunately, women are taught an unconscious part in this drama, too. In this drama women are just as oppressed psychologically as men. In our traditional society the woman is taught that she must "take care" of her man. The woman is taught to identify closely with the mother archetype and goes about trying to please and pleasure her man as a sign of her womanhood. So a man is taught to find a mother object and a woman is taught to act as a mother archetype. Both treat the other as an object and lose intimacy in the process. The man stays a boy emotionally. The woman unknowingly keeps her man a boy while yearning for a man. Traditional industrial and agricultural societies have worked like this for hundreds of years.
A man who can't find mother in another person is forced to look elsewhere or face the pain of his depression. He then often chooses to find his mother comfort in an addiction. In this case a substance becomes a mother object, giving him instant, on-demand pleasure. The substance can be alcohol, hard drugs such as cocaine, or soft drugs such as nicotine. He gets hooked on the mother object because it consistently takes away the pain while giving him some feeling to relieve his depression. Temporarily, the inner regressive yearning is satisfied.
Addiction is winked at in the village. It is even seen as manly. Getting roaring drunk for the first time is an example of an empty initiation ritual for young adolescents that is accepted, even encouraged. Addictive highs are seen as a pleasurable rewards for hard work or as a manly way to drown sorrows. As we shall see in a following chapter, addictions are a normal part of village life in our society and a primary way that men get stuck by the mother. Addictions are one of the strongest tools of the mother complex.
Separation
Just as there is a mother complex in every man pulling him back to the village, there is the initiatory archetype in him pushing him toward the wilderness. This initiation archetype will surface first in a separation experience. A contemporary man will most often experience the start of initiatory separation as an abandonment and betrayal brought on by the withdrawal of a loved one. This loved one will most often be a wife or lover who is a mother object. And the uninitiated man will be devastated by the experience of abandonment.
Separation often comes suddenly, like elders in the middle of the night. A man's wife may tell him she has had enough and wants him out of the home. A man's lover, whom he has dated for years, says she has found someone else. A spouse is no longer interested sexually and is becoming distant.
The man will be surprised, not necessarily by the physical separation, but by the strength of feeling he didn't know he had. He will be shocked by the depth of his pain at feeling alone, abandoned, and helpless. He will not have realized how much he counted on his loved one, a loved one he had taken for granted. He will be shocked at the depth of his emotional yearning.
Invariably a man first calls me for counseling in the deep pain and hopelessness of separation from a mother object. This separation is triggering his initiation but he doesn't realize it. Instead, the man sees himself in a crisis of deep pain. He doesn't realize that he is being separated unwillingly from the village, represented by his wife or family. All he knows is that his world is turned upside down and he is terrified. His first words are usually, "how can I get her back?" Like the young, startled boy he would give anything just for a hug from her.
The deep pain in the man comes from the uninitiated boy inside who suddenly realizes that he is disconnected from what he perceives as the source of his pleasure and security. Suddenly the man feels very empty and uncomfortable. Often, in the privacy of my office, he cries for the first time since childhood. Sitting before him I sometimes image a desperate 3 or 4 year old child who realizes that he can't find his mother to comfort him. This helps me see the genuine pain the man is in. The boy in the man's body has taken over all feelings. The boy's only goal is to reunite with the bearer of his maternal solace or to keep her from leaving. I understand the boy's pain because my boy inside has suffered the same pain.
I know that a man hasn't had initiatory separation when he talks in counseling of being afraid to be alone. He will usually describe a history where he felt he could count on his wife or lover to be at home when he called or returned. When he pictures his home without a woman's presence he becomes extremely agitated. He will not be able to be at his house alone. If he is home after separation he will be continually on the phone talking to friends about the woman who left. He will either continue to try for a reconciliation or he will very soon try to find another mother object to take her place. He will talk of being unable to imagine even a short period of time without a relationship with someone.
At this point it is not helpful for me to show my understanding and tell the desperate and hurting man that he is experiencing a great and crucial opportunity, that he is experiencing the Great Separation as an initiatory event. What I do make clear, though, from the beginning is that I am not the person to come to if he wants just to feel better. If that is his goal I can't help. I would be doing a disservice to the man if I, too, identified with the mother archetype and protected him from his initiatory pain just to make him feel better.
I do tell him that his pain is nothing to be ashamed of. I tell him that his pain is not a sign of weakness or lack of courage but is actually a sign that he is ready to do the work of manhood. I also tell him that I will be there with him through the process of facing the pain, because men need other men to go through these crises. I appeal to the warrior in him to summon the energy of separation and look toward the possibility of continuing consciously his crucial journey.
Engulfment
Numbing happens because a man has not lived his own life, he has not gone the inner way of his initiation. He is living someone else's life and doesn't know it. In this case his lack of separation keeps him connected to the life of the WOMAN rather than his own life. The uninitiated man, left without direction from his interior life, turns to his mother object for direction. To a great extent he looks to a mother object to initiate him. He needs WOMAN to look up to him, to praise him, to convince him of his manliness. He needs a woman to recognize his sexual prowess or his patriarchal power. He may need a trophy wife, or a woman to praise him for his trophies. Or he may need a woman to excuse him for an empty trophy case.
Much of the power of infatuation comes from this pseudo initiation by a mother object. Suddenly a man feels manly. WOMAN has given him importance by her attention alone. If she treats him like a man he must be one. This is quick and easy manliness, shake and bake initiation.
But then an unfortunate thing happens. Feelings of manliness inevitably fade. Since there is no initiation in the village, no initiation by mothers, the man starts to feel like a boy again. The mother complex exerts control and turns on him. For the dark mother ultimately wants control. A man starts to feel controlled by the very woman who supposedly freed him. This man feels engulfed. His life feels circumscribed by a controlling mother. He feels cramped, claustrophobic. She becomes the "ball and chain". He starts wanting "space". He doesn't realize that he is the one whose connection keeps him a frightened boy. He puts the blame on this mother object when it is his own mother need that is to blame. Eventually he expands the habit to blaming everyone but himself for his unhappiness.
At this point a man becomes paralyzed between his fear of being engulfed and controlled and his fear of abandonment and separation. He lives out the unfortunate saying, "you can't live with them and you can't live without them". He doesn't realize that he is imprisoned by his own dependence. He doesn't realize how much he counts on the very person he feels controlled by. Neither does he realize that his fears of engulfment arise out of a healthy need for initiation. He doesn't realize how much he needs an elder.
Most men are stuck in the limbo between regressive connection and separation wanting both security and adventure. A man in this situation ends up feeling neither good about himself or good about his partner. He is depressed about the possibility of feeling deprived of a mother object yet he is depressed about not feeling the aliveness of the initiatory journey. Numbness is a two-edged sword. It cuts off pain. It also cuts off the way to a man's soul.
Men Need Men
The man experiencing separation needs balancing masculine energy to move on developmentally. He first needs the masculine energy of the healthy, not patriarchal, father archetype and then the masculine energy of the elder archetype. Masculine energy fuels the way for a man to move on. It is also the way for a man to satisfy his deepest yearnings, while bringing his regressive mother yearnings to closure.
As we will talk about in a following chapter masculine energy is separating energy. It is a hard energy, but it is the next step for the boy. Masculine energy stands between the boy and the door of his hut, not allowing him to go back. Masculine energy, first in the form of a good father, tells the mother very forcefully to "leave the boy to me". This energy gives a boy the courage and strength to face his pain. Masculine energy, in the form of the elder, then leads a boy to the wilderness of his soul. It is only an elder society that can teach a man how to be in right relationship to the mother archetype throughout his lifetime.
Some psychologists feel that the answer at this crisis time is for a man to get more feminine energy, that boys need more mothering not less. The theory is that men need more relatedness and woman teach relatedness better than men. The assumption is that men enter the inner life best through the world of the feminine. This is feminist theory that some psychologists, writing about men, have also espoused.
It is true that boys from a very early age are told to go it alone, while not being encouraged to explore their inner life of feeling. This is part of the flawed training manual that men labor under. However, my clinical experience has shown that most men already see the world through women's eyes, either in trying to win a woman as the ultimate happiness or in believing only women's rules of relationship and intimacy. Men don't really go it alone. They have an unseen mother object with them at all times. They have the feminine around constantly, causing them to be unconscious psychologically and emotionally passive. The feminist answer unknowingly tends to mire a man in the world of the mother. Archetypally and psychologically, this approach can be very regressive for men.
Men need to relate more to men, or the masculine experience, for healing. Wiser men are best equipped to lead a man away from the mother's hut and his own mother complex. Men are hardwired to respond at a certain time in their growth to fathers and elders. Men are stuck because there are no men to lead them into the wilderness.
This is not to put the feminist answer down. Feminism has done a great deal to transform our culture into a more human place, especially through emphasizing relatedness. It has also saved many women from the oppressive patriarchal training manual. But I insist that the way to the inner life for men is not by more and better mothering. Men have been let down by other men, not women. And older men need to right that wrong by presenting a more authentic masculine experience. The latter part of a man's healing then involves fully understanding the feminist answer. As we will see, later on in his development a man will reunite with the feminine archetype in a healthy way.
Most men come into counseling in great pain in the middle of an involuntary separation. They are desperate, understandably so. Their mother dependence comes out as the need to please or appease in order to avert a separation. They have come upon overwhelming painful feelings they never knew existed. They are like a wild animal suddenly caught in a vice-like trap. They look desperately to me to take away the pain.
Then a strange thing often happens in my office. In the midst of terrible pain and confusion a man will hear my words of necessary separation and additional pain. After getting angry at my message something will happen. He will hesitate. Even in the middle of his negative whirlpool of feeling he will know that what I am saying is true. That hardwired knowledge seems to show up in the crisis. And he will often, very courageously, tell me to keep talking and tell him the next steps.
We then start talking about boundaries. Boundaries are conscious emotional separations for a higher purpose. They are the psychological equivalents of completing separation from mother objects. Here is where positive warrior energy is needed. Here is where men's innate courage shows up. Men have little training in psychological boundary setting since they are taught they have already separated. It is their most important work at the beginning of therapy. Boundaries is what I always work on first when a man gives me the signal to go on.
..........
