Posted on 09/28/2003 5:30:04 PM PDT by wallcrawlr
When a mighty force overstuffs a container, it shatters.
Scott Trobec shattered, in 1996, after a lifetime of never saying an angry word to anyone.
Sound impossible? Not to mental health experts who counsel men suffering from what could be called anger over-management. These men don't know how to get mad.
They are not just gentle or easy-going types, the experts stress. They are the opposite extreme of the common view of men and anger -- violent, out-of-control guys who stab their wives or beat their children or shoot up the office where they got fired -- and they leave a different, more private path of destruction.
Many fall into depressions, failed marriages or lonely, solitary lives. Some have even been linked to legacies of family violence, almost like "carriers" passing along illnesses that they themselves don't catch.
There's no count of these men. Indeed, there is no "over-passive condition" recognized in the standard guide to psychiatric illnesses, the DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) of the American Psychiatric Association.
But specialists in men's mental health issues say it's time for science and society to catch on. They attribute the lag to gender stereotypes -- people also have trouble seeing men as victims of domestic violence, they say -- and to the fact that these men aren't disturbing the peace.
St. Paul psychologist David Decker likens these men to the Jack Nicholson character in "About Schmidt," an insurance actuary whose bland life was controlled by his job and his wife.
"Schmidt is the kind of guy I'm talking about," Decker said. "He lives out the standard expectations of men -- the breadwinner, the solid citizen -- but he feels no human connection, in part because he doesn't deal with emotions, including anger.
"To be honest, I don't know that a lot of people would see that as a problem," Decker said. "In terms of society, he was very productive. But in terms of meaning in his life, there was little, if any."
Trobec, now 42, grew up in Cottage Grove. He graduated from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., in 1983, got married and started to build a CPA practice in St. Paul.
His No. 1 adjective for himself was "normal."
He thrived in a career of digits and details, until night terrors overtook him in 1996. He screamed in his sleep, terrifying his wife, Sarah. Days, he found himself distracted by an obstinate sadness.
To his own astonishment, memories of physical and sexual abuse by a relative gathered in his mind. Another family member could confirm enough about those times to convince Trobec and his therapists that the memories of assaults -- from ages 6 to 13 -- were true.
St. Paul psychologist Mic Hunter said childhood abuse is often the reason men shut anger out of their lives. As boys, it wasn't safe to get mad at the person who beat them; the abuser would just get madder, Hunter said. And young boys blame themselves when they're sexually assaulted.
As Trobec now says, "I was being assaulted by someone I loved and who loved me. So I thought I deserved it, that there must be something terribly wrong with me."
Hunter said the unspoken pledge among some of these boys becomes: "If this horrible thing is what it means to be angry, I will never be angry." They can grow into men who feel that no demand from a spouse or employer or friend is too much. They also can become fathers incapable of disciplining their own children who then -- never having been required to control themselves -- turn into abusive parents themselves.
"That's how you get these things skipping a generation," Hunter said.
It's often wives who refer these men to the anger management program at the Men's Center in Minneapolis, said program director Herb Jaehne.
"They'll say, 'I can't get any reaction out of him,' or, 'He just says whatever he thinks I want to hear,' " Jaehne said.
Trobec understands the dynamic. "This wasn't something going on consciously," he said, "but I had learned that I didn't matter, that I survived by taking care of other people."
He remembers getting angry about a handful of things, but only at a safe distance -- emotionally and physically -- from his life: a referee who made a bad call in New York, or a terrorist on the other side of the world.
"And the places where I could feel anger, it seemed all out of proportion," he said.
Trobec said his wife talks not so much about his lack of anger through the years, but his lack of joy. By shutting down his anger, he said, he stifled all emotion.
Reality check
Hunter said part of these men's distorted view of anger is its all-or-nothing state. They see nothing between rage and capitulation: "I'll say, 'What about discipline?' and they don't even know what that is."
He gives them assertiveness assignments. In one, the client has to go into a coffee shop and order coffee. When the clerk asks, "Do you want cream?" he is to say no. Then, when the cup comes, he is to say, "I changed my mind, I do want cream."
"Some men can hardly do this," Hunter said.
On a deeper level, therapy tries to help men remember the source of their timidity, so they can understand and then overcome its influence.
It worked this way for Trobec one recent day: A dissatisfied client became menacing on the phone. "Are you threatening me?" Trobec asked him. The caller's rant got worse. Trobec hung up on him, after silently talking his way through a practiced message.
"I know that as a child I learned that I 'just had to take it,' his message to himself goes. "But I'm an adult. I'm safe. I don't have to take this. Now I can put a different ending on this story."
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
I don't get it. What'd he do in 1996? Man, I hate these cliffhangers...
Anyway, glad to see that he's getting some help.
Taking a pill is not going to make it go away.
Great, so now the feminist bitches can vilify every man for abuse, even men who have never laid a finger on their wives. These people are impossible to please and should be ignored.
--ccm
Ummm...I don't know about everything is fictitious...but the "recovered memories" thing, particularly given that the abuse is supposed to have continued past his thirteenth year makes me supicious.
'Course maybe it was a coven of Satanists...one of the tens of millions that plague our fair land. (snort)
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