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Chapter 8- Thank God It's Monday

"I've been very busy lately." This was the response of the Governor of a large Southern state to a reporter who asked the name of his recently born granddaughter. He didn't know her name.

If productivity is the highest value of the patriarchy, then busyness, related to business, is a very high virtue. I talked about addictions in a previous chapter. These were addictions related to the young 3-6 year old boy. They included the substance addictions and two process addictions, rage and sexual addictions. These addictions were great obstacles to mother separation, seducing men on a false path of maturity.

There are other addictions that a man can develop along the initiatory path. One is subtler and more insidious because it is a "respectable" addiction. This process addiction is especially insidious because it mimics some healthy qualities of the mature man, such as service and dedication. However, this addiction merely reflects the highest goals of the marketplace culture, promising manhood without the wilderness ordeal. Like other process addictions, this set of habits and behaviors has a spectrum from milder preoccupation with work and career to overwhelming obsession.

Work addiction concerns the boy inside and his relation to his father. This is the boy, starting around age 7 or 8, who needs his father to guide his next steps. It concerns the man stuck in the marketplace, trying to contact father energy and find his manhood. It concerns the patriarchal voice that talks to a man of productivity, advancement, the journey of business, and being a good son.

Work As Initiation

Workaholism is the story of a man trying to deal with his father wound. Work addiction is also the story of a whole culture struggling with a collective father wound. This wound can be anaesthetized by a near total dedication to the patriarchal pseudo-initiation of manhood through marketplace success. Sometimes a man takes up his father's dreams, the scripted plan for his son's life, and follows a similarly addicted father. At other times, in the absence of his own father's script, he takes up directly the patriarchal script of his elderless society.

The patriarchal script speaks of success in the marketplace as the primary test of manhood. In the patriarchal society, the journey of manhood stops at the marketplace. The false ordeal of manhood then takes place in the marketplace, not the wilderness. In this patriarchy there is no other side, no wilderness beyond the village boundaries. Yet the initiatory yearning persists. Entrepreneurial men often talk proudly of the "jungle out there", unconsciously trying to make the marketplace a real wilderness. They talk of survival of the fittest, as if they were actually in a death ordeal.

Thus, by default, the patriarchal voice replaces the good father. The dark father takes the place of the elder. The Vader voice of this marketplace elder pushes a man to be productive and profitable as proof of a successful ordeal. This process takes advantage of a man's hardwired needs for fathering and eldering. The payoff of the addiction is the false sense of manhood the man achieves.

Unfortunately, this false sense of manhood does not fill a man. It can never make a man feel good from the inside out. As Jan Halpern, a psychologist and executive coach, says, "What all the effort comes down to is this: Work is used as the narcotic to run from low self-esteem. It is the temporary fix that makes the workaholic feel good." And Jan should know. She interviewed 4,000 executives as part of the work in writing her book, Quiet Desperation, The Truth About Successful Men.

The work addiction usually reaches crisis proportions at middle age when a man achieves success without the real peace he has been looking for. It is then he starts to feel the reality of his pseudo-initiation. As an elder has said, it is then he has gotten to the top of the ladder of success to find that the ladder is on the wrong wall.

Cal

Cal has been married for 26 years. He and his wife, Carla, have raised four children. Cal is rightfully proud that he has put four children through college even though he has never been to college himself. He has finally reached a level of success that includes a Mercedes, parked in the garage of a showcase house. Cal talks often of how he has "had to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week just to stay ahead". He will also talk of how he didn't enjoy all that work and would have rather "won the lottery a long time ago". His own business involves a lot of standing and physical work, and his limp and slow gait show the results.

Cal's parents divorced when he was 12. He ended up living with his widowed aunt for his 4 years of high school because he couldn't get along with an alcoholic mother. His father moved out of the area after the divorce and had little to do with Cal.

Cal started working in high school and "has been working ever since". Though he sometimes talked of the joys of retirement, he always figured he'd have a short "sprint" of a life and never imagined a life without his work. He measured his worth and his manhood on how much, materially, he could give his wife and family. He would often remind Carla of their hard won survival in the "reality of that unforgiving world out there". He saw himself as a very good father and husband, though he was sorry for how little time he gave his children. He was a good man, using his patriarchal script in the only way he knew how, by providing and protecting. By marketplace standards he could be considered a 'man's man'.

Carla had other ideas. She had expected that once the children were raised they could enjoy life as a couple. Cal would cut back on his work so they would have more time for each other. She didn't want all the fruits of a more affluent lifestyle. She grew up with little and needed little. She wanted more time with her husband and a relationship of warmth and mutual respect. She wanted to share their inner lives as well as their outer ones.

Cal, who was known as a bear with a heart of gold, told Carla she was "crazy" to think he could cut back. She had to "start looking at reality". When Carla asked for more time than money Cal took this as a criticism of his manhood. He was being a man to her, and it wasn't enough. He saw her as living a good life without the worries he had. To him, she was either naive or ungrateful. He was really more hurt than angry at the slap to his manhood. However he exhibited the only defense most men have learned, a show of righteous anger.

In fact his anger had gotten out of control in the last few years. This was why Carla had insisted on marriage counseling. This good man had started throwing things in the direction of his wife while yelling profanities at her. He would then minimize his short bouts of anger, often blaming Carla for her unreasonable demands.

Cal didn't know how to handle any criticism of his manhood, especially by the damsel whom he thought he saved. He hadn't been taught by a father how to handle his pain or an intimate relationship. He couldn't understand what sharing his inner life meant. He was becoming proof that uninitiated, though good, men can be dangerous men.

Cal was stuck. He was being a man to his family in the only way he knew how. In his mind he had survived the ordeal of years of hard work. He had suffered his initiatory wounds. He had followed the voice of his patriarchal elders. He had found the values of his materialistic culture and made them his own. He was a Man and deserved a Man's respect.

I felt truly sorry for Cal, as I feel sorry for so many men who have been betrayed by a pseudo-initiation and a dark father. His wife, though uninitiated herself, did provide an alternative for Cal to stop his dead end journey before it was too late. He couldn't understand that alternative. Since he was unaware if his inner life he had no other place to go, except to work.

Cal could only minimize his wife's complaints, including charges of abuse, and go on working as a way of satisfying his craving for initiation. Unconsciously, by working he was also satisfying his archetypal craving for the fathering and eldering he never had. No matter how many men complain that they work only for others, they are really working to fill a deep, gnawing craving in themselves. Wives cannot understand this need, though they instinctively, like Carla, see the addiction as self-serving. They fail to see the misguided activity as a search for manhood. They also fail to see how much their criticism tears at an already open wound.

The Religion of Business

Many men who are work addicted, like Cal, are seen as pillars of the community. And they often are. They are the ones who volunteer for the high profile boards and governing bodies. They are the ones elected to local posts of responsibility. They are often quite skilled in their work and try to broaden their impact. Often, these are men genuinely interested in the community as they see it.

These men then become the marketplace elders for other men. Marketplace work is their deepest value, and productivity is their mantra. Business becomes their religion. They are usually the ones who talk about the need to protect the marketplace as hallowed ground. Since men have a hardwired need for the sacred place of initiation, the marketplace replaces the wilderness as their sanctuary.

These men then support any politician who places the marketplace first. They speak of the market system as inevitably producing social good. Any work that produces income becomes a sacred calling, so they support all activities that "get people back to work". Sin not participating in the market. So they are righteously indignant if anybody is able-bodied and not productive. Their religion says that what is good for business is good for mankind.

And there is a truth to what these men are saying. Material survival, and the leisure time that comes from a surplus in the marketplace, does come from market efficiency. Involuntary poverty is not a good thing. Not being able to work and support a family is a tragedy. The problem is that this truth stops short of where human values lie. Leisure does not bring manhood or meaning in itself. Neither does uninitiated work. Material security is a jumping off place, not a destination.

In 1947 Simon de Beauvoir, a French woman and pioneer feminist, talked of men in this country. It is an interesting observation across time, gender and geography: "In the United States one is always concerned to find out what an individual does, and not what he is; one takes for granted that he is nothing but what he has done or may do; his purely inner reality is regarded with indifference, if, indeed, any note is taken of it."

Men treat work as religion because the stakes are so high. Just as the alcoholic will try to find the spirit through drink, the workaholic tries to find his sacred destiny through work. The irony is that a mature man does often live out his destiny through his work. But it is not any income producing work. It is a sacred work that can be found only beyond the marketplace.

Cal didn't understand his wife's needs for companionship and relationship. It wasn't that he didn't love his wife or care about her happiness. He just didn't get it. One of the symptoms of a workaholic is his obsession with the marketplace as a way of feeling good about himself and feeling like he has a place. Start talking to him about any topic and the conversation will quickly get around to his job or his field. Other than that he is often silent. The alcoholic needs his alcohol to feel confidence. The workaholic needs his work to feel like he is fulfilling all his manly roles: father, husband, productive citizen, civic leader, philanthropist. Work as pseudo-initiation gives a man an identity. It is also the place he feels most comfortable and most respected as a man.

Work And Father

Psychologically, many work obsessed men have received some positive fathering energy from fathers who gave them all they had. Their wound is not as deep as the neglectful father, such as Cal had. Their father had in some way started the separation from the mother and shown them the lesson of pain for a higher purpose. Many fathers of workaholics have given them a sense of guidance and competence. These fathers are not ruthless insider traders and capitalist pigs, the robber barons of the modern age. These are more often good men who passed on the only manhood they knew. Their sons are also men who have a real sense of marketplace justice and fair play, given them by their fathers.

Many workaholics are the product of a hardworking father and an emotionally distant mother. They do not understand the need for an intimate relationship because they did not have a mother who was able to bond emotionally with her husband and her son. I talked in an earlier chapter about the reasons this might be true, including a mother who was depressed or seriously ill early in the child's life. These men need the maternal object of wife only in the home, raising the children, providing the secure homestead. They are unable to understand the need for an emotional partner, even though they may have a supportive wife. They are most comfortable and secure at work. They live their whole active life behind the wall, unaware of their inner life.

Cal's mother was a depressive who actually left the family when Cal was a teen-ager. She was overwhelmed by her own life and understandably had little emotional energy left for her children. When a maternal object, his wife, asked for love, Cal didn't know what that meant in any relational way. Love meant meeting his wife's needs, her marketplace needs. Love, in return, meant being needed and respected for his protection. For men like Cal respect is much more important than love.

Cal had not taken the next step because he didn't know there were next steps. He already knew the lesson of pain for a higher purpose. He didn't realize that the pain he needed to face was in the wilderness within, rather than in the external marketplace. He also didn't realize that his higher purpose involved a much more complex journey. And he didn't realize that there was a life that had a sense of deep satisfaction and meaning different from the ultimately empty feeling gotten from a large bank account and multiple plaques on the wall. Finally he didn't realize he had a wife who loved him but for far different reasons than he thought.

Cal had been betrayed by a patriarchy that promised a satisfaction it could not deliver. One of the signal betrayals of the workaholic is that he gives his lifeblood for a work he is not called to. That is his greatest sadness. Many a man may be very skilled at his chosen profession, yet not find the work that gives him deep satisfaction and sense of purpose. He may never realize he has followed a father's dream rather than his own. He has taken any job instead of his sacred work. He has stayed a son in the patriarchy.

Many men stay a son because of their love for their father and all their forefathers before them. We are all hardwired to look to fathers for our manhood. Most of us have been the recipients of an unselfish father love. We have been recipients of the care of a man who has gone out of his way for us even though he didn't know the right way. We are alive today because we have been cared for.

Tom Daly in an issue of Wingspan talked of his workaholic father, "Ultimately I realized that I was unconsciously keeping Dad's pattern going in me as a way of honoring him. As crazy as it sounds, that was my way of loving him." Many good sons of good fathers do the same.

The Good News, The Bad News

The good news is that workaholics in many ways are much closer to their manhood than those with other addictions. They have absorbed much that masculine energy has to offer, often from their fathers. They have developed many skills that would allow them to survive in the wilderness. They have shown they can endure pain. They have also showed courage and focus. They often have an abundance of warrior energy. They only lack an elder to explain their next step and expel them from the marketplace.

The bad news is that most workaholics need the sudden, unwilling separation from the father, and the patriarchy, to get their initiatory energy again. Some job tragedy is, paradoxically, their main hope. Men will often experience this tragedy as a betrayal, only later realizing it was a necessary one.

Many men experience the tragedy, or betrayal, in modern times as a job loss. "Downsizing" is a common betrayal today. When the patriarchal father has no more use for the son he lets him go. As I have said, the corpoarchy is ultimately narcissistic. Let the sons beware, even the most skilled ones. The dark father has his own needs to meet. He is ultimately competitive. Like Cronus, he sometimes eats his young.

Job tragedy could also be from illness or injury. In this case the separation can be more sudden and complete. The depression is also more profound. This type of circumstance is very insidious because the betrayal can most often only be attributed to the higher power. A man will then treat his God as the demonic father. His anger will keep him from seeing the injury as an initiatory wound and a major step in his ordeal. If a man succumbs to the tragedy and his own anger he will lose the opportunity of his lifetime. His loss of faith will be the real tragedy.

The most subtle tragedy is, paradoxically, the man who has been successful. The marketplace has many rewards suited to a man's uninitiated desires, suited to his addictions. These rewards are like a drug, numbing him to his own deeper desires and his own inner pain. Often they numb him to his interior boredom, boredom from doing work he is not innately interested in. One of the biggest false rewards of the successful man is a woman who gives him the respect and pleasures that the pseudo-man needs. Often, in mid-life, when he starts to feel his boredom and emptiness he will blame wife or friends. He will miss the tragedy inside while he looks for another challenge outside. If he is able to see his boredom as the pain of an internal wound he has a chance.

The subtle tragedy of workaholism is that the man looks initiated. He even starts to believe it himself. Yet he has not gone through the pain of finding the underlying values that direct his talents and lifestyle. The man is still a boy and a son. He has lost the opportunity to feel a man from the inside out. The uninitiated man, because of his deficit, uses his "responsible" work to dodge healthy relationships with wife, children, friends. Like the alcoholic he uses his addiction to numb the pain of the work of relationship. He has no idea how to relate to anyone outside of a work context. This man has many acquaintances but few friends, especially other male friends. His marriages often become financial partnerships rather than love relationships. Jan Halpern writes that of all the executives she interviewed only 10 percent claimed to have married for love. Divorce then becomes a poor financial decision. Many successful workaholics can't bear the thought of divorce simply because they can't bear the thought of losing half their estate.

Workaholics have no idea how they would act if they wanted to have a healthier relationship. So work becomes a refuge from uncomfortable family and social situations. Work also becomes an obstacle to connecting with other men who could motivate them to another level of initiation. Many men cannot realize their tragedy and live out their lives not knowing what could have been. Many more are starting to realize their tragedy and looking for answers.

Cal was pressured by his wife to come to counseling. He did start talking about slowing down and "retiring at 55" as the first rumblings of another movement. He was starting to realize he didn't know how to enjoy himself. He saw Carla as the one who enjoyed life for both of them. He was willing to start questioning his need for work and the disappointment his life had given him.

Work vs. Job

I believe that most men who near maturity must leave behind the patriarchal workplace, where they are treated as perpetual adolescents. A man separating from the dark father needs to consider three alternatives in the marketplace.

One alternative. He needs to work for himself, start his own business. Many men, especially middle managers, have been spurred on by job betrayal to find more life-giving work, often as an independent businessman. Downsizing has triggered their initiatory ordeal. As we will see, their loss has brought them to their work calling. As Mark Gerzon points out, "Those who are self-employed or who can run their own shop outlive those who are trapped between superior and subordinate."

There is a new term that may catch on. It's called 'selling in' as opposed to selling out. And some younger people, especially professionals, are leading the way. Some yuppies, Young Unhappy Professionals, are leaving high paying jobs to risk following their personal vision. They don't aim to drop out, as in the 60Ís, but to find a work that has both meaning and financial opportunity. As a Newsweek article says, "They don't necessarily believe that money and happiness are mutually exclusive." The article goes on to report the results of a recent poll that found that half of all American workers would choose a different line of work if they had it to do all over again.

A second alternative. He can work in a business or corporation but be given the freedom to freelance, to create and innovate as he sees fit. He must be given the freedom to follow his own vision even though the overall vision of the institution is not what he can wholly agree with. This involves a man setting strong, healthy boundaries with his company and risking separation if the company does not respond. A man who has gone through ordeal, and separated from both the good and dark father, is able to take those risks because he knows there is significant life beyond the corporation.

A third alternative is to find a job with significant responsibility in a corporation, profit or nonprofit, that mirrors closely one's own values and goals, even though the pay is less. So many men are highly talented and greatly unappreciated. If a man has faced ordeal and separated from the patriarchy he is no longer hung up on status or financial success. He is value driven. He can often find real meaning in taking a lower status yet highly fulfilling job because he is finding the satisfaction of the inner life. He is also serving his community in a most effective way.

These alternatives are dependent on a man finishing the initiatory process. These alternatives depend on a man being able to see the difference between a work and a job. As we will see, the initiation ritual is the key to a man finding a work that has intrinsic value to him, as well as needed value to his community. The process is painful because of the many character traits that are forged in the initiatory experience. Values and character are then the guarantee that a man does not use his work and power for his own narcissistic ends. Initiation guarantees that a man will not collude with a dark patriarchy or identify with his negative father voice. Like Luke, he will not join the dark father for supposedly good ends.

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Past chapters of Toward Manhood are archived.