Take It Like a Man
Society says guys who don't gush and weep need help. But this stoic
says they're crying wolf
By: Michael Perry Do not hug a man holding a wrench in his hand.
My brother-in-law Mark carries himself with the wariness common to men
who express themselves on the factory floor more than on the dance
floor. In the presence of strangers, he will be closemouthed and
tentative. You might mistake this for deference, but as any
out-of-towner on the losing end of a tavern brawl can tell you, that
would be a mistake. Mark's gaze is unalloyed. When he looks at you, he
is sizing you up. He eyeballs you the same way he eyeballs a length of
channel iron, gauging where he should make the cut. Sometimes when we
work together in the shop, he just stands there dangling a ¾-inch
Craftsman. I can imagine him bringing it down on my skull. This I keep
to myself.
I like to think of myself as a stoic, but compared with Mark, I am Tom
Cruise in love. Mark is an eighth-level Zen master of stoicism. His
philosophy can be distilled to three words: "Walk it off." He uses it
in every context. Hit your head on the hood? "Walk it off." Burned
your hand on the exhaust? "Walk it off." Wife left you for the
ice-cream man? "Walk it off."
He says it all the time. He says it when his own wife spills a can of
paint. He says it when he hears one of his coworkers complaining about
overtime. He says it when his 8-month-old son, Sidrock, raps himself
on the head with a baby bottle.
He means it.
And it works.
Although, to be fair, Sidrock isn't walking yet.
The Greek philosopher Zeno was the original Stoic. To achieve true
enlightenment, Zeno believed, we must control our emotions. As a
longtime member of the small-s stoics, I can't vouch for
enlightenment, but I believe Zeno would appreciate our guiding
precept--specifically, "I don't want to talk about my feelings, and
you can't make me." Problem is, for years now, saying you didn't want
to talk was thrown right back in your face as evidence that oh yes,
you do, and you must. Entire generations have been hectored to gush
and weep, Oprah-style. Dare to keep a stiff upper lip and you were
just begging for a breakdown. Remain self-contained and you were a
Neanderthal crouched on a volcano set to blow. Well, tamp those
feelings down, boys. For some of us, letting it all out is not only
unnecessary, it may be injurious.
This weekend, my friend George pulled up to my door on a Harley.
George looks like a cross between a bulldog and a bulldozer. We have
been friends since the day we met as 5-year-olds in the farmyard, at
which point he hit me on the head with a rock. There being nowhere to
run, I was forced to stop crying and get along. Once, I was helping
George with chores when George's father reached for a wooden fencepost
and drove a ¼-inch-wide splinter under his fingernail. He didn't make
a sound, just clenched his jaw. Then, holding his nail up to our faces
so we could see how deep the splinter had driven--all the way to the
white half-moon--he smiled maniacally, bellowed HAHAHA!!, yanked the
splinter out, and went back to work.
In high school, I found George at the restroom mirror one morning,
examining a red knot on his temple. "The old man," he said. This
happened a lot. "Knocked me on my ass with a grain shovel," he said.
George always gave these reports as a dry-eyed matter of fact and said
he and his brother were biding their time. "One of these days," he'd
say, "we'll knock the crap out of him, and that will be the end of
that." And one day they did. And that was the end of that.
Today George is a successful manager of a heavy-equipment company. He
enjoys his nice little house, his nice little family, and the
occasional bar fight. After he arrived on his chopper, we shared some
old stories and got caught up on the news. Later, when my wife asked
me who he was, I said, "That is George, and he is on my list of 10
Friends with Whom to Face the Apocalypse." As he rode away, I wondered
how he might have turned out had someone sat him down and talked him
through everything. Maybe better, maybe not.
My father never hit me with a shovel, but I once complained about some
ache or pain after a high-school football game, and he--having been up
since before dawn to milk cows and buck hay bales--handed me a
pitchfork and said, "There'd better be a lot of blood and broken
bones, or I don't want to hear about it." Win or lose on Friday night,
he expected me to be present to shovel out the heifer shed come
Saturday morning. I'm sure it rankled a bit, but I came to admire his
imperturbable air.
Through the examples of Mark, George, and my father, I remain
prejudiced in favor of men who can keep their emotions in check. This
form of repression speaks to me not of avoidance but of strength.
People who tell me otherwise are asking me to ignore my own
experience. Last week our local volunteer fire department practiced
interior attacks in a live fire. Inside the burning building, I was
reminded that fear is healthy, but that there are times when it does
little good to discuss it.
I am not casting myself as some swaggering tough guy. Beneath the cool
pose and off the fire hose, I am a nervous Nellie. And I don't always
manage to keep a lid on it. If a police cruiser pulls behind me in
traffic, or if I encounter certain ex-girlfriends, I get all twitchy
and sweaty. My wife will tell you I toss and turn at night over bills
and deadlines. Recently, I've developed a tendency to well up on short
notice.
When I got married 2 years ago, the ceremony was proceeding
nicely--smiles and the occasional dewy moment--until I stood to thank
our parents and was overcome with weeping. Not the dignified,
solitary-tear-down-the-cheek bit, but a full-on, snot-snorting
hee-haw. I am grateful that these feelings reside within me, but I
wish they'd just sort of ease out now and then, not slosh over like a
kicked bucket. Now I'll never be able to sit through the wedding
video. And recently, on a goose-hunting trip with a fellow firefighter
in a cow pasture, we got to reminiscing and I got teary. I don't know
what he thought (later, to relieve the tension, he tricked me into
grabbing the electric fence), but the point is, aspiring to the stoic
aesthetic doesn't mean you give up on feelings. Stone-faced doesn't
necessarily mean stone-hearted.
Still, stoicism is my starting point. That same firefighter and I have
handled brains blown across a shower stall and woken up the next
morning feeling just fine. We have discovered dead guys smashed
beneath trees, found corpses deep in the woods after dark. Sometimes
we talk about it afterward, sometimes we don't. It's about knowing
yourself, and knowing when you're in trouble.
Five years ago, my brother Jed was the first firefighter to arrive on
the scene of a car crash. The damage to the car was such that he
didn't recognize it, and then he looked inside and saw his young wife
of 7 weeks. Sarah still had a heartbeat, and he did what he could, but
she was declared dead at the scene.
Jed walked a black path in the year that followed. Sometimes he and I
would work a call, and an hour after the hoses were hung to dry, we
would still be leaning against his pickup while he talked against the
darkness, holding out against returning to the empty bed. He threw his
sleeping bag in his pickup and drove across the country to California
and then came back. He tried medication but didn't like how it made
him feel. He put a lot of tears on our mother's shoulder.
It became worse in the winter. He just wanted to sleep. My brother
John took to prying Jed from bed and force-marching him to the woods.
Jed was in no condition to run logging equipment, so John left him to
tend the stove in the portable shack at the timber landing. No hugging
or gnashing of teeth, just a refusal to let Jed go blind in the cave.
One stoic caring for another stoic. This is the kind of strap-steel
love overlooked by those who misconstrue stoicism as a failure to
engage.
A week after Jed's wife was killed, the entire department met in the
fire hall. A team of five volunteers--EMTs and firefighters, led by a
minister--took us through a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing. The
experts will tell you CISD is "an integrated system of interventions
designed to mitigate the adverse psychological reactions that
accompany an event with the potential to overwhelm the coping skills
of an individual or group." What you basically do is get together and
talk the whole thing over, with outside supervision and support.
I have experienced two CISD sessions. Anecdotally speaking, both
proved beneficial for some of the participants, but experts in the
mental-health field are beginning to reconsider the power of the human
spirit to endure, and to endure quietly. The evidence is preliminary
and diffuse--a study of heart-attack survivors, investigations
conducted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the London bombings, a
piece in the New York Times by a psychiatrist who feels that a small
percentage of patients are better off not coming to therapy--but it is
accumulating.
While we have grown used to the idea of counselors rushing in to talk
people through tragedy even as the smoke is still clearing, more and
more research indicates that this response is not only questionable,
it can sometimes make things worse for those who can least withstand
it. When we have a bad call, a few of us will phone the rookie and
offer to talk. But if the rookie would rather not, we let it go. We'll
work the incident into conversation again later and watch his
demeanor, but we will not push or prod. We are learning that, yes,
perhaps you may need to talk, but in good time, and not while your
ears are still ringing.
In all things psychological, much depends on the emotional makeup of
the individual. There are also critical differences between the trauma
of one horrific incident and a sustained series of incidents (as in
the case of long-term abuse). But from the analyst's couch to the
firehouse, I couldn't be happier that we are second-guessing accepted
practice when it comes to spilling your guts.
"It's different for everybody," says Jed. "Ya kinda gotta plow through
it on your own."
Of course, he didn't do it by himself. He did it with the help of his
family and friends and now and then a stranger. But in the end, he was
the only one who made the journey. He agreed to do the CISD session 7
days after Sarah's death on the premise that it might help someone
else, but he didn't seek it out. "And I'll tell ya, every time someone
handed me a book on how to grieve . . . " Jed doesn't finish the
sentence, but the implication is the books went straight into the
woodstove.
Of course we need to talk. Of course we need friendly ears and caring
hearts. The world could do with a few more thoughtful men. But the
idea that we all fit some template is absurd. Sometimes it really is
best to get tough and walk it off. After years of being told the
strong, silent type is headed for a crackup, I'm beginning to suspect
he is simply durable.
In the end, the broken circle of Jed's life closed beautifully:
Sarah's mother came to Jed one night and said there was a woman he
should meet. Her name was Leanne. It worked out, and they were
married. He is back among the living.
We had a get-together at the family farm last Sunday. Mark brought
Sidrock. He's better on two legs now, although he tends to watch where
he was going, which explains the bruise on his forehead. He got the
bruise when he tried to walk under the steel hay elevator. My dad says
he heard a thunk and turned to see Sidrock on his butt, blinking and
rubbing his head. "Grandpa," he said, "you gotta move that."
And then he got up and resumed walking.
The boy is learning.
Adapted from Truck: A Love Story, by Michael Perry, ©2006 by
Harpercollins
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