I Can't Get No . . . Satisfaction

The three emotional characteristics that most clearly define a man in midlife are 'restless', 'irritable' and 'discontent'. No wonder they 'can't get no satisfaction'! There's quite a significant difference between the ways that men and women deal with this bucket of emotional pain: women generally tend to experience it and want to work through it, preferably with people they can trust on an emotional — or even better yet: a spiritual — level. Guys (almost regardless of their professions of spirituality) generally want to avoid facing it. Their approach can be characterized as denial, the place that, as they say, is not the river in Egypt.

In a recent article ("Sounding the Emotional Depths"), I talked about the four levels of emotion that people (both men and women) experience during the midlife transition: they feel — from the outside in — 'glad', 'sad', 'mad' and 'scared'. The guys in denial only want to feel 'glad'. If they were to acknowledge that those other three, much more uncomfortable, emotions were underlying their superficial OK-ness, they'd be afraid that they'd have actually to feel these things. And, of course, they'd be right. As a result, most males tend to behave exactly the opposite from what's natural for most females. I guess we shouldn't be surprised at that, should we?

In my estimation, there exists only four ways of dealing with the midlife transition situation, and, of the four, the only one that actually alleviates the situation is an attitude of active and committed acceptance. That, in effect, is the road that women, by nature and by culture, normally take. The other three approaches are, sadly enough, dysfunctional. As you probably guessed, these are the tools that most men use to deal with their feelings of being uncomfortable in their skin. These three approaches are: denial (or avoidance), blame (or deflection) and isolation.

None of these approaches give you any tools whatever for dealing with the real issues. In fact, they're quite the opposite. They provide convenient excuses and smoke screens to keep the problems covered up so that you can't deal with them. Denial is the most straight-forward of the three dysfunctional approaches. It reminds me of Mad Magazine's famous mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, and his equally-famous motto: "What — Me Worry? Or, from Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, where Igor responds to an offer of corrective surgery on his hump with, "Hump? What hump?" If it's not there, why deal with it?

The major drawback to this sort of denial can be addressed with simple cause and effect: if there's no cause, then why are you experiencing the effects? As a result, denial most often yields to blame. Those nasty emotions may be undeniable enough, but you don't have to do anything about them if they're not yours. And, if they're not yours, then they must belong to someone else: someone else must be causing them, and, therefore, they're someone else's fault (but not yours). Now that you've come to that conclusion, all that's left for you to do is to find out who's the cause of your pain and eliminate him (or her). So begins the blame game, or 'pin the fault on the scape goat' (a very old, but very popular pastime).

Now, even this approach has quite an evident (but hardly obvious to the operator) drawback because, once you've gotten rid of the apparent perpetrator, you'll quickly discover that the restlessness, irritability, and discontent are still there. Many times, the poor blamer just changes targets, but, no matter how many targets he may eliminate (his boss, his wife, his enemies, his friends . . . ), the underlying problem remains untouched.

The last thing that someone in either of these states of dysfunction wants to do is to share his feelings with someone else. If he talks about his feelings to someone else, he first of all has to acknowledge that they're there ("Hump? What hump?"). And, if the campaign to attack and eliminate the supposed perpetrators of injustice hasn't achieved its objectives (as, of course, it never could), then there'd be the added problem with having to talk about the shame of failure and the additional guilt about attacking and eliminating a person who's been basically an innocent character in this fantastic drama. Therefore, there'll be no sharing on these topics!

The more isolated this poor guy in midlife becomes, the more painful his restlessness, irritability, and discontent becomes. And why not? Like an untreated abscess, the deeper layers of his anger and his fears are left untouched, untreated, and, ultimately, unrecognized. What better description could there be of a man in midlife crisis? Before there can be any effective treatment of this painful condition, the patient first has to acknowledge — to accept — that there is a problem and, ultimately, that the problem is his own (and no one else's). Last, and certainly not least, he's going to need to have to accept that he can't handle this alone, accept that he has to share what's going on within him, and, ultimately accept help. Otherwise, that satisfaction that he can't get none of will slip farther, and farther away.