mindfulness

Love III: Not Loved Right

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, love, mindfulness, Personality, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness

This is the third of several blogs on love. Previously, I introduced this series noting that love is so important that it is undefinable, like other undefinable basic elements of life such as “feelings” which is so central to human existence and relationships, as well as time, distance, and mass, which are also undefined but are the basic ingredients of the universe. Having admitted that love is undefinable, we proposed that we learn about love from experience, just as we learn about time and feelings from experience. In fact, the more we experience love, both in the giving and in the receiving, the more we understand it. In the immediately previous blog we studied different approaches to love that people of different temperaments have. In this blog I want to discuss how everyone is love to some degree but that no one is loved perfectly. And there are consequences of “not being loved right.”

Not loved right

No one is loved right, if by “right” we mean perfect. Love is simply too complex, too godly, and too unique to ever be rendered perfect. “Not loved right” doesn’t mean that the person wasn’t loved, nor does it mean there is something intrinsically wrong with the person who attempted to love the person, nor does it mean that the individual who was not loved right was somehow unlovable. So what does this “not loved right” actually mean? It means that there are always elements of the loving process that are missing however much the person was loved. I often tell patients that they were loved right, and I have found that they are able to accept this statement without disparaging their parents or other loved ones. Somehow, people intrinsically know that they were not loved right because they feel it in their souls. I find it important to help people find how they were not loved right and consequently identifiable the results of this phenomenon, to come to terms with this apparent fact, and find ways to adapt and accommodate to having a good life without forever looking for someone to love them perfectly.

There are many ways that people are not loved right. Some folks were, sadly, raised in families where they were not loved at all, while others were loved in families where they were cherished beyond all reason. Let’s look at some of these ways of not having been loved right.

Not loved at all

You may have heard of the tragedy that occurred in Romania 30-odd years ago when the dictator under the Soviet-based regime fostered a program of excessive births in the country. Sadly, many of these children were placed in orphanages, or just “left on the doorstep” of these orphanages that were already overcrowded with children who had been abandoned by parents who simply could not afford to raise them. The tragic result of this overcrowding was that many of these children were simply not loved for at all. They were fed and occasionally diapered, but they often went hours or days without any kind of human comforting touch. The result of this was that many of these children were neurologically impaired, meaning that their brains did not develop adequately. They may have developed some cognitive skills, but many of them did not even do that. The conclusion of researchers of these neglected children was that they simply and profoundly had missed the essential ingredient of physical touch that somehow stimulated the brain to grow normally. While we don’t quite understand the interaction of physical touch, we now know that without it, the infant will not mature normally, and this lack of maturity may be permanent. My daughter, Jenny, volunteered a couple of weeks in an orphanage in Romania simply caring for some of these children, something for what I will be forever grateful as she possibly saved one or more children from a life without much hope.

While few children in America suffer such a tragic fate aside from the occasional situations that we have all heard about where a child was chained in a basement or something for months or years. You might also have heard about the instance of a child having been raised in the wilderness by some animal group and was discovered naked and completely unaware of her (I believe the child was female) humanity, much less any kind of human speech. This poor child matured in human ways after she was captured but never achieved anything like a normal life. Aside from the oddities of terrible parents doing terrible parenting, we do not have many such tragedies although we might consider what it might be like to live in a primitive society or in a society with a primitive religious orientation that does not allow for normal infant care.

While there are a few of these tragedies in America and in the other developed countries, there are many examples of less severe shortage of love that occur. In fact, as I previously stated, none of us have been loved perfectly right despite our parents doing stellar jobs with us. Let’s look at some of the ways we have not been loved right.

Indulged

It is with great concern that I observe a plethora of inadequate loving that many parents afford their children in the form of indulgence. Having been privileged to have grown up somewhat in the 40’s and mostly in the 50’s, I went “out to play” for most of these years perhaps beginning as early as three. I lived in Clearfield, PA at the time on the edge of town not a stone’s throw from an old coal mine as well as a myriad of Pennsylvania hills and streams. My brother, a couple years my senior, and I would often be gone for hours just playing in the words, the hills, and yes, in the coal mine. Such things are unheard of today. I agree that there were dangers in such free play, as it is called, but also much freedom that I think formatted by basic groundwork of self-confidence having had to get myself out of dangerous places and all the rest of free play. I see few kids who “just go out and play today.” This freedom of movement, which was a kind of libertarian parenting, continued into my adolescent years and often led me to understand consequences more than punishment, reward, and restriction. There is great value of freedom in such parenting but also dangers. I had the freedom to debate with my parents, and while rarely arguing with them, I was allowed talk back to my parents as if I were their equal. This indulgence did not prepare me well for the real world where I had to slowly learn to keep my mouth shut. So, I was indulged with freedom.

Some kids are indulged in other ways, often with material things. I dare say that my daughter, Krissie, indulged both of her kids, particularly her older child, Gavin, who yet struggles to find out how the world is not his mother. He has yet to find a balance of work, play, listening and talking that is essential in the real world. Many parents protect their children, seemingly out of love, that these children do not learn to face the uncertainties, failures, criticism, and other disappointments because they have been too shielded from such things. Aside from the indulgence of freedom and of protection there is the obvious indulgence of toys. I am always surprised that the bulk of items at garage sales are the plastic toys that have been purchased, used briefly, and tossed in a corner before they ended up on the sidewalk. I talked to a young man who said that his mother had given him four drones, each costing more than the previous one, to the point that he was simply not interested in it drones anymore. This indulgence can last into adulthood came in the form of a 23-year old who admitted that he had spent thousands of dollars on sophisticated motorized play cars and trucks before his friends and he lost interest in them.

We don’t normally think of indulgence as “not being loved right,” but it is indeed the case. I admit that I indulged my daughter Krissie, largely because of her “player” nature without knowing I was doing that. I attempted to give her the libertarian freedom that I had, but the world of the 80’s was substantially different from the 50’s, and it didn’t work for her. I think she never recovered from my indulgence, something that may have contributed to her untimely death two years ago. We will discuss the effects of indulgence and ways to correct it at another time, but first we need to attend to some other forms of “not being loved right.”

Neglect

Quite different from indulgence is neglect. While there are (hopefully) few children who are truly not loved at all like the Romanian infants and the poor children who are housed by profoundly disturbed people, there are many children who are neglected. They may have a “roof over the head and necessary food” for survival, they are not loved to a degree that allows them to fully grow up. With few exceptions children who are raised in truly neglectful homes have little success in the world. Theirs is an attitude of surviving, not thriving. As a result of their neglect and the consequences of their seeing the world as a place to survive, they often end up with very damaging intimate relationships, unemployment, and quazi-criminal activities. While we need to find ways to help these people, unfortunately, the culture also needs to protect itself from people who are surviving because they are dangerous. They are dangerous not because they are intrinsically bad, but they are like an animal cornered in some way. Such an animal will be dangerous because the fight instinct dominates when the flight instinct cannot be accessed. People who have been significantly neglected rarely find a way to thrive in the world because of the secondary problems they have created in their lives. We will discuss how to deal with such people at another time because many of these people end up in some kind of incarceration, financial difficulties, or in counseling offices with little hope of finding a meaningful life.

While there are many people who have been neglected to a profound degree, there are many more who have been neglected for a period of time in their lives or have been neglected by otherwise very good parents. Sometimes well-meaning parents restrict their children to such a degree that these children fail to thrive in childhood and hence fail to thrive in adulthood.

Restriction

Restrictions and limitations are absolutely necessary in life. We discussed the danger of indulgence in some homes where children do not have sufficient boundaries to feel safe and to prepare themselves for adulthood. Many more children are restricted from some of the essential ingredients of a home that include the three basic ingredients of life: feeling, thinking, and doing.

The most emotionally damaging restriction is that where the child is not given sufficient time to feel. As we discussed in I Want You to Know How I Feel, “feelings” are more than emotion. We suggest that feelings themselves are never wrong, but when we use the word feelings we are talking about the basic core that everyone has. Feelings are the most basic expression of our inner selves. When feelings erupt, they do so in the sequence of physical, emotional, cognitive, and active. Children can be unduly limited in any of these ways. Some children are restricted physically by their not being able to go outside, listen to radio or TV, go to school, go with friends, or simply run. Parents who restrict the actual movement of children are keeping them from understanding how their bodies work.

More significant restrictions comes in the form of emotions. Many children are not allowed the normal expression of emotions, like joy, sadness, fear and anger. I have many people in my office who report that they were not allowed to cry, sometimes with the addendum, “If you start crying, I’ll give you something to cry about,” meaning some kind of spanking. In some homes there is a danger of indulging children by allowing them to cry excessively, express anger excessively, or express fear excessively, or even express joy excessively however odd that sounds. More often, homes fail to allow their children a relatively free expression of emotions where they learn the value and the dangers of expressing emotions. Such homes are more than stoic. They are repressive, and the repression of emotions can leave a lifelong mark on an individual. I currently see a man who is in his 70’s and cannot think of a single time he has made a mistake despite the fact that he has grossly low self-esteem and is consequently afraid of doing anything that could be determined to be “wrong” by someone else, and for the most part can’t even say something that might seem to someone to be untoward.

The largest damage that is done by restriction comes with people who have not been given many opportunities to express a breadth of emotions, but some children are restricted from thinking in some ways or doing certain things. Many homes are so restrictive of what one says that it seems impossible to even think in a way that might be different from what the parents believe. The more visible restriction, however, is in what children are allowed to do. I was raised in a distinctively evangelical Christian home, but I did not receive the restrictions that other kids at our church had, namely no alcohol, smoking and swearing that might seem reasonable, but also no movies, dancing, playing cards, “mixed” (heterosexual) bathing, and in some cases no TV or radio.

Many of these restrictions are valuable and necessary but many are potentially damaging to people in their formative years. But most people have had at least a modicum of freedom in childhood, and yet everyone has had some experience of “not being loved right” that occurs from the best of people with the best of intentions. This failure of adequate loving comes largely from how different people love.

Limitations in loving due to temperament

A quick review of the way that people of different temperaments love in my previous blog might be in order. Roughly,

  • Lovers love by establishing and maintaining connection
  • Caretakers love by providing safety in their care of property
  • Analysts love by providing understanding and meaning
  • Players love by providing experience

All of these ways of loving are good and godly but none of them is perfect. Furthermore, people who love primarily, or perhaps even singularly in one of these ways of loving may, indeed, fail to love their children “right.” Let me give you some examples:

  • I know of many parents who have a lover temperament that are unable to understand why their player children, analyst children, or caretaker children seem not to want the kind of love that they offer. In fact, of all four of these temperaments I have the hardest time explaining to lovers that not all people want connection, and in some cases they might actively not want it. This comes as patently wrong to people whose primary goal in life is to connect and in so doing offer personal sacrifice to the people they love. In fact, children of lover parents who are, themselves, not lovers, can feel smothered by a lover parent who wants more physical and emotional contact than the child wants. How odd is it to say that many lover parents fail to love their children right.
  • Caretakers, like me are equally at fault for failing to love right. It’s easier for me see how caretaker love can lead to people around him/her not being loved right. We caretakers, remember, have a primary orientation to the care of property. I could even say that we love property the way lovers love people, but this would not be entirely true because our love of people is intrinsic in the taking care of property. Than having been said, it is easy for caretakers to get lost in the care of property and lose sight of the use of property for humankind, which includes family and friends. I made mistakes with both of my girls with my caretaking-based love: for Krissie, the older and the player, I gave her too much freedom and not enough keeping her nose to the grindstone. For Jenny, the younger, introverted and lover by nature often got left because of her extraverted more demanding sister. More importantly, however, I took advantage of her accepting, loving ways but undoubtedly didn’t love her the way lovers need to be loved.
  • Analysts also fail to love people right not out of some pernicious nature but rather due to their tendency to make the world a better place by looking for problems to solve and prevent. Analysts tend to speak much more about what is not right than what is right, not because they are intrinsically mean-spirited and critical, but because they always see how something…or someone…could be better. As I noted in my temperamental loving blog I noted how analysts tend to be the least liked of the four temperaments because of this tendency to comment on what is wrong, not right.
  • Players are so interested in experience and excitement that they can get lost in these two realms. Players are at their best in the matter of loving when they can help people play, experience, and find joy in life. That having been said, they can be the worst, or even dangerous, when they play because they tend to throw caution to the wind. I have seen players drag people into some activity that their friends had no interest in just because the player thought it would be fun. So, while players bring the most joy to people when they are at their best, they are often fail to love people right.

It should be implicit in how temperamental differences can lead people to love in the wrong ways, love to a fault, or even resist loving at all because they have been misunderstood in the past or hurt someone in the past. The key is to “know thyself,” namely to know who you are, how you love, and then add to that knowledge of knowing other people. A failure to love right is not a failure to love.

Some examples of not having been loved right include:

  • The caretaker raised by a lover who wanted his daughter to just sit and cuddle more than just do something
  • The man who never heard that his father loved him because his father had never heard such things from his father
  • The child who was raised in a restrictive environment and never learned how to value and express her feelings
  • The man who was so good at loving his wife that he gave in too much to her and ended up in bankruptcy at their senior years
  • The man who was not loved much at all because his mother was a drug addict
  • The woman who was loved so much that she never learned how to deal with people who didn’t love her
  • The lesbian woman who was raised in a “loving” and evangelical Christian family and couldn’t “come out” until she was 45 only to be rejected by this same family.
  • The man who learned to push all his feelings into alcohol just like his father did
  • The extraverted man who was raised in such a good accepting family that it never occurred to him that someone might actually not lake him
  • The analyst man who was raised by a caretaker father who couldn’t understand why his son would rather read than mow the lawn
  • The brilliant professional introverted analyst man who has never felt loved by his lover wife because neither understood their profound differences
  • The woman who ended up promiscuous because she didn’t have a meaningful relationship with her mother.
  • The child who was loved right by father but not by mother

All of these people, all of their spouses, and all of their parents were good people, not abusive, not indulgent, and not neglectful. All of them are real people although the particulars have been adjusted to protect their identities.

Live right. That is first rule. Love right. That is the second rule. Consider how you were loved but not loved right. We will tackle that next:

Next up: Love IV: I See You (being open to being loved)

 

Love I: Theory

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, love, love, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

This is the first of several blogs regarding this most important concept, most certainly one of the most important concepts, ideas, facts, feelings, and experiences in the human experience. In the following blogs we will be examining the following:

  • You were not loved right (as a child)
  • “Love problems” (the emotions associated with love)
  • Temperamental love (4 different ways of loving)
  • Being lovable (being open to being loved)
  • Love heals (how people can heal each other with love)
  • Getting better at loving
  • Or more, if it comes to me

So what is love, anyway, this ubiquitous part of everyone’s live? Let’s start with something that was the most important thing I learned in Physics.  By the way, it was in Physics (in college) where I got my first and only academic D, something that put me on academic probation (GPA 1.73, this after my stellar 4.0 my first semester in college. Might have had something to do with my joining fraternity, but actually due more to my lack of maturity in discipline.) I learned in Physics, actually my high school Physics that there are three main ingredients in the known universe around everything else is defined. These three things are undefined. They are time, distance, and mass. So, every time we had a Physics test, there would be a question like, “Define distance.” The answer should be “undefined.” So, we can define velocity as distance over time, and we can define weight as gravity times mass, but we don’t define time, distance and mass. We just know what they are.

The same is true of love: we know what it is but we can’t define it. More importantly, the more we observe love, the better we are able to understand it. Likewise, the more a child experiences distance, time, and mass, the more s/he has a grasp of how the universe works. The child learns that there is a “distance” between her and her favorite stuffed animal. She learns that her mass affects her movement. And a bit later she learns that she has to wait (time) for something. She learns about time, distance and time by observing these things. Likewise with love: we learn love by experiencing it, first by being loved and then by loving. And the more we have both of these experiences, the more we understand love.

Various people have attempted to define love, and they are all wrong…and all right. Some people define love as action. Love often is active in some way, but perhaps love is not always active. Others have defined love as physical, but again love might not always be physical. Or, love could be emotional, but not always emotional, or cognitive, or verbal, or relational. You might have your own definition, or more accurately, your own understanding of love, or your own experience of love.

Trying to avoid the danger of defining love, I would like to suggest that love is one of those things in the universe that are so important, like distance, time, and mass, that it cannot be defined. Instead of defining love, I would like to start with suggesting that love is a spiritual quality of human existence like other spiritual qualities that are undefined. Deb and I wrote I Want to Tell You How I Feel for the purpose of helping people understand the equally undefinable word, “feelings” that is also central to human existence. We suggested that feelings are also “spiritual,” but then we have to admit that we have defined the word feelings with another undefinable word, spiritual. We use the term spiritual to include but not be equated with religion. Atheists are now using the term spiritual in their philosophical understanding of psychology and human interaction but they do not believe in a god of any kind, something that I find quite interesting.

Simply stated, the more you are around love the more you understand it, just as the infant or toddler begins to understand time, distance, and mass the more he moves around in the world. We will be discussing the presence of love, the absence of love, and the inadequacies of love in later blogs. The fact that there has been a deficiency of love in someone’s life is often the central ingredient in his finding some healing. We will discuss the central ingredient of love in any healing process.

Preparing yourself for the following blogs on love consider:

  • How would you “define” this undefinable word, Love?
  • How have you experienced being love?
  • How do you express love?
  • What might be missing in your having been loved?
  • What might be missing in your love others?
  • Can you think of a time or times when you have been healed by love?

Why Did She Leave Me?

Ron Johnson Development, Discovery, emotional maturity, Feelings, marital, men's issues, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness

My wife left me…again. Yesterday. Bummer? Not exactly. She has a tendency to leave me every now and then. She loves to go to “her canyons” in UT and hike. Sometimes she has dragged me along or allowed me to travel and hike with her. Once she left me and went to Portugal to hike. She called me up and said, “I am so glad you’re not with me.” After a pause she then said, “I miss you terribly. I wish you were here.” I use this as an illustration of the centrality of paradox, and particularly of paradoxical feelings. See? She was certainly glad that I wasn’t with her, mostly so she could go at her own pace, do her own thing, and be alone. As an introvert she really enjoys her time alone. She particularly enjoys the two days of the week that she doesn’t see me except for early AM and late PM when I go to our Madison office. She is usually seeing clients on those days, but also enjoys puttering around in her garden or green house…again without my intrusion.

This time when she has left me, her destination is not so clear. When she left yesterday morning, she said that she “thought” that she would go to St. Croix, WI, about 4 hours away at the beginning of the Ice Age Trail that goes 1000 miles across Wisconsin. I doubt that she will walk/hike 1000 miles, because she would have to walk back another 1000 miles to get her car. I expect that she will walk or hike for a while and then God knows what she might do. Go north? Go west…maybe to the canyons? Decide to come home? I’m sure she’ll be OK with whatever she does because she is a person who trusts her feelings. Note that her “feelings” are not just an emotional experience but a deeper personal experience that we call “spiritual”. When I tell people about our tendency to “trust our feelings” and “just go west” or something, most people are envious, while others are appalled that we don’t have a plan. Planners are people we call “high boundary” people, who like boundaries, rules, and plans. Low boundary people like spontaneity and freedom. Both are good ways of life. The difficulty comes when a high boundary person is trying to plan what s/he might do with a low boundary person, who would really rather “just go.”

Enough about Deb and me. This blog is about several men I have known who have been “left” in one way or another. You might resonate with one or them.

The woman seeking a divorce after a long marriage

Jane left Jim after 34 years of marriage. She struggled with leaving him for at least two years that I know of (she saw Deb for s while she was trying to figure out what to do about being largely unhappy in her marriage. Jane did what many women do (and perhaps some men as well…but that’s another story): she stayed married far longer than she should have stayed married. In Jane’s case there were several factors, all of which amounted to what other people would think if she got a divorce from Jim. There was the “Christian” disapproval of divorce. (Actually, this was evangelical Christian disapproval. Many mainline Christian churches, as well as Christian denominations have a place for divorce, find it valuable and godly, but not so with many evangelicals despite the fact that there are nearly the same number of evangelicals who get divorced as there are non-evangelicals.) Many evangelicals seek to justify a divorce on so-called biblical grounds, namely a singular statement Jesus seemed to have made that divorce is justified in circumstances of adultery. I knew one woman who got a divorce justifying it on these “grounds” because her husband had been using pornography. She asked a “Baptist” (read, conservative, evangelical) pastor if pornography was, indeed “adultery” and was glad to see that she could divorce “justifiably.” In Jane’s case, she did not seek this artificial reason for divorcing Jim. She is quite introverted by nature and introverts have a distinct tendency to keep most or all of their feelings to themselves.

I think the more important thing about the situation with Jane is that she has never really been happy with her marriage to Jim. They shared a house, raised children, both worked professionally, and went to church faithfully. But from what I learned from Jane, albeit with intuition and conjecture, is that she should have married Jim. Or if she married him, she should have been honest with herself and with Jim that she had made a mistake marrying him. It is possible that 34 years ago the marriage could have ended quickly and found way to survive and thrive. But Jane stayed married, and I think she was never happy with him. Indeed, the two of them are quite different in personality but there seem to have been some deeper issues that Jane was not able to see. Sadly, now her perspective is that the marriage was wrong because Jim did this or that, didn’t do this or that. Indeed, Jim has made some significant mistakes in life as well as with Jane, but these divorce-related, attorney-aggravated attacks on Jim are a rouse. I think…and must say that I “think” Jane has never liked Jim and could never bright herself to admit to it. In a nutshell, Jane has not been honest with Jim about this, and probably has not been honest with herself. The theme of some women (and again, possibly many men, I suppose) not knowing how they feel (unhappy), or unable to express it, or unwilling to act on it.

The woman who “couldn’t do it anymore” and left

Mary and Matt were in a second marriage for both, each have suffered in previous marriages and each having children. They had been married for 15 years when Deb and I began to see them. From what I understand, Mary almost immediately talked about how Mike did this or that, or didn’t do this or that. But Deb is no therapist who allows any client to complain for long, so after the first sessions of complaints, she set the stage for Mary, namely to talk about herself, mature in her self-understanding and emotional awareness, and then to do something. Mike came to see me with the notorious “female hand in the back” syndrome, meaning, “You need to see the therapist.” Indeed, Mike was figuratively pushed into my office but we made a bit of progress, particularly on his tendency towards expressing anger easily, an almost universal phenomenon with the men that I see. I say that men have “A” problems, namely anger, avoidance, addiction, and accommodation. They usually don’t know how to express their deeper feelings, much hear feelings from anyone else. Mike cane for a while, and then Deb insisted that Mary and Mike come to see me together. I did my best, but I couldn’t get Mary beyond doing what so many people do, talk about the other person. I hear something like, “I’ll tell you how I feel. Mike….”
Wait a minute; I thought you were going to tell me how YOU felt, but all you did was talk about Mike and his alleged problems. I didn’t make much progress because it was quite obvious that Mary’s position was that Mike should somehow “change” in some unknown way. It seemed like she was saying, “I married you the way you are; now change.” After a particularly difficult session where Mary came after me with a vengeance because I was attempting to give Mike some hope in the marriage. I talked to Deb about the incident and said to Deb that I was either going to make a direct challenge to Mary or quit marital therapy altogether. Deb pleaded with me to do neither, and then she saw Mary the next day. Deb reminded Mary that therapy was not about the other person but about oneself, and furthermore Deb insisted that Mary “do something.” But Mary said that she didn’t know what to do. Neither did Deb.

That night Mary met Mike at the doorway and said, “I can’t do this anymore” and the proceeded to leave the house and go to their cabin for the night, perhaps permanently. Mary soon called Deb frantically two or three times, sobbing and overwhelmed that she had “fucked up” and didn’t know what to do .A few hours later Mary texted Mike without his response, and then again and again, and then called him. Mike apparently did not think he could talk to Mary expecting that it would be more of the same, namely he was “the problem.” But such was not the case. Somehow, in what we consider to be a “spiritual engagement,” she had found a way to see Mike for who he was, and then saw that she not only loved him, but also liked him. She came home after a sobbing-filled phone call, they talked for hours, and came to see me the next day.

I don’t really know what happened with Mary but her “doing something” turned out to be the right thing, namely doing something. Sometimes you have to move forward so that you can do a 180 and move backward or perhaps to the right or left.

The woman who left the perfect man

I’ve been seeing a 30-something man who has been very successful in business. He is honest, hard—working, expressive although introverted by nature, and generally kind to the people in his life. He has, unfortunately, not been very successful with women including the most recent female relationship, which lasted about nine months. Previously, he has had relationships that lasted a couple of years but never has been able to sustain anything with a woman long enough to establish a real bond and eventually a commitment to a life together. It appears that he has suffered from a phenomenon that I will next discuss, but more importantly, he is a good “catch” for any woman because of the ingredients just noted, like independent success in work, honesty, commitment, and genuine kindness. Guys like this often fail to sustain long-term relationships because they are so attractive to women, often women who are impressed with the guy’s physical appearance, vocational status, or general kindness. Who would leave such a man? This is the question Jack asked me when he came to see me because he was just at the end of this 9-month long relationship with Sidney that she ended, but for reasons that were not clear to him. She spoke of his being great in all areas but then said that “she was not ready to commit” and “needed to find herself.”

What happened to Jack has happened to many men who are good in many ways and “look good” to women. Women are initially attracted to the stability that such men offer, but eventually find the man “not good enough,” probably not exciting enough. Men like Jack are self-made, confident, and usually pretty successful in work but may not be all that some women want. They tend to attract women who they try to “fix”. This “fixing” comes after a few months in the relationship with the woman starts to be true to herself and displays the “deep hole” that I will describe next. I think that Jack couldn’t fix Sidney. More importantly, because of many women’s tendency to overly emotionalize, Jack was less emotional himself. More importantly, Jack is not emotionally mature himself, which means knowing what you feel, valuing what you feel, communicating what you feel, and governing what you feel. This, of course, leads to the man being able to hear and adjust to a woman’s feelings. Jack was good at listening but his tendency to fix Sidney didn’t work. It never does.

The women caused the man to leave

Many men become involved with women who have a “deep hole” in their soul. My previous blog was about deep hole people, whether male or female. Such people tend to be very attractive, often very sexually active, often outgoing, fun-loving, and very engaging. They are, in a nutshell, the bombshell woman that many men are attracted to…unfortunately. I don’t know how they develop this bombshell manner, but I suspect they have learned to “be attractive” to men, whether consciously or unconsciously. So they “get” men, but then they began to display the deep hole phenomenon that starts to deteriorate the relationship with the man. Like Jack, men usually try to “fix” these women, but there can be no successful fixing of the deep hole. It needs to be healed. Deep hole people, whether male or female, tend to be in relationships quickly but not successfully, sometimes going from person to person, often being promiscuous, and usually having some kind of addiction, whether behavioral or chemical. I’ve recently seen two such men and one gay man who was “left” by the deep hole man he was with for a few months.

In one case, the man was somewhat sophisticated in psychological matters and concluded that the proper diagnosis for his former partner was a “personality disorder.” That was probably right, but I don’t like the diagnosis as it speaks of what is wrong with someone rather than what is right, much what can be done about it. The other “left” man simply gave up on his deep hole woman after trying to fix her for years. Both of these men were exhausted, one still exhausted from the end of his relationship a year after it ended. What happened is that these men got so drained by the deep hole women in their lives, that they finally got a grip and ended the relationship. In both cases the woman protested loudly that she loved the guy in her life and promised to be “better,” but it was too late. They had drained the life out of the guy who was trying to fill the empty hole. The gay guy had a similarly deep hole person whom he left because he couldn’t tolerate his lover’s promiscuity anymore. He was driven to leave his lover just as the deep hole women had driven the guys to leave them.

The woman who left because the man couldn’t

Now I get personal. This is me. I am not alone in this category partly because many men really want to leave the women in their lives but can’t seem to do it. I was married for the wrong reason: I wanted to have sex, and at that stage of my life, I couldn’t have sex while unmarried. Perhaps, more importantly, I couldn’t deal with the sadness and hurt my wife displayed when I suggested that we break up…even “for a while.” I caved. My wife was a lovely woman, but I was the one who propped her up in many ways, encouraged her, and helped her make a life. Eventually, I got tired of all the work and began to drift away. I drifted into another woman’s arms, also a good woman, but perhaps also a woman with needs that I couldn’t manage. However wrong it was for me to have an affair, it was the only way I could see of getting out of a marriage to a “good woman,” but someone who was not good for me. You understand, hopefully, that I delete much of the rest of the story for reasons of propriety and privacy of all concerned. So my wife left me because I didn’t leave her. I most certainly shouldn’t have married her, and most certainly should have trusted my feelings in the very first year of our 14-year marriage when I suspected that I shouldn’t have married her. I didn’t trust those feelings and paid an enormous price, the price exacted by the scorned woman. I won’t give the details, but this is now 40 years in the past and no longer are important to me. There are many men who somehow get into a relationship or marriage on shaky grounds, stay in it too long, and end up being left by the women that they don’t really want to be with in the first place. You can’t blame the woman here.

 

My encouragement to men is always to trust their feelings, however murky these feelings are. This is the core of the work I do with men and it is the core of work Deb does with women. It is hard work, but it is valuable work. Many marriages wouldn’t happen, would end quickly, or would be healed with good therapy if the man could be honest with his feelings. We can’t blame the women for our lack of courage, wisdom, and emotional maturity. It’s not up to the woman to do something. And when it happens, it is up to the man to see what he has not seen, not been willing to see, or otherwise ignores. The men that I see in the “left man” syndrome need to look at themselves, not the woman. It’s not her fault.