It is unusual for me to feel depressed but for much of yesterday that was my experience. Symptoms included irritability, tiredness and a feeling of a kind of nothingness. When a friend asked me how I felt I said, “I feel hormonal.” I realise that this experience is part of the process that I am going through for a man of my age. It is called the andropause of male menopause. Jed Diamond writing in “Surviving Male Menopause – A guide for Women and Men,” writes,
In many ways, the male menopause passage is a “dark night of the soul.” It is a time to do down and feel our emotions, to feel the pain from the past, and to deal with unfinished business so it can be healed. It can also be a time of rebirth, a time of letting go of old dramas so that we can feel the love that awaits us into he second half of life.
I feel withdrawn and I project my feeling of being withdrawn unto my partner. I do what depressed men do. They project their depression outward and seek to find someone to blame. In many ways I am not the man I was and it frightens me. I used to be affectionate but now I am not. Many who read this blog will know how I pay attention to lines from songs. The song lines I hear and pay attention too are frightening me as well. I hear them and I know they are talking to me and I hope that they will go away but they don’t The song that I hear now is one I haven’t heard in decades. I hear it in cafes and I hear it in shops. It is a song written by Neill Diamond. This song has the following lines in it.
You don’t bring me flowers You don’t sing me love songs You hardly talk to me anymore When you come through the door At the end of the day
This is what it feels like on some days and I want to run away from it all. All of this is a kind of internal combustion that in many men becomes a silent killer. They turn to some form of addiction or to another relationship in order to avoid feeling the pain and thus avoid crossing the threshold into the second half of life.
Yet I know the process. It usually, if not inevitably, involves the experience getting more intense instead of lessening. One does go into a dark night or into a dark forest. In relation to male menopause there isn’t much light available. It is for this reason I share this kind of non-event through this writing. If I can assist men, and thereby assist their partners, to recognise the process then in some way I am shedding some light into the darkness. I have no idea what such sharing will mean. I fear ridicule. I fear that no one will ever return to reading what I write because of what they will think of me. Yet I will continue to write about this personal dark night of the soul because I can and because it is what I want to bring light and healing too. This healing is not only for myself but for others who are not as able to share their experience.
I lived in a family where the word depression was taboo. I live in a culture where the word depression is taboo. My mother lived much of her life feeling depressed and feeling guilty about feeling depressed. She had every reason to feel that way but would not share it. It made getting close to her almost impossible. I learned to get close to her by becoming sick and manipulating her in some way. As a child I had what where thought to be heart problems. I never did have physical heart problems but the symptoms all pointed that way.
It is my intention to make the experience of depression and its association with the male cycle called andropause not the taboo subject it is. I have huge resistance against doing this but this is no reason not to do it. Even when writing about this subject I want not too. I want to write about all the beauty, the power and the grace available beyond the experience of duality. Yet I see so many spiritual seekers who talk about, and aspire too, the attainment of personal salvation and transcendence who are emotionally depressed to a large extent. What they want to do as many spiritual seekers wish to do is avoid painful feelings.
Male menopause can drive a huge wedge between a couple who have been happily married for many years. The man is literally taken into the dark and changed by a process that he will resist and that in many instances can destroy him. Women who witness this process say they want the man back who they once knew. They don’t want the monster that he has become. If it does not destroy him it will in many instances destroy the relationship. At this point I can see how easily that could happen in my own life. I am to some extent more fortunate. I have not let the issue drag on and drag on although it has dragged on. I have asked for help from someone outside the relationship trained in such matters.
It has got worse since that time I began talking to the councillor. Yet I know from experience that you very often take two steps forward and one step back. People sometimes feel that they are taking more steps backward because the process opens up more painful experiences. This is not necessarily a step backward although it feels that way. Sometimes you go deeper into the darkness before you get insight into the coming dawn. I have of yesterday taken one step back.
In the past I would have had another drink and then another couple of drinks which would have lead to some more drinking. This way of avoidance is in the past. Today I will take an extended walk to a holy well and circumnavigate it. Exercise is one key way of alleviating the symptoms experienced with male menopause and the experience of depression. I will try, as best as I am able, not to be rejecting. This isolates me and makes my partner defensive. Simple expressions of kindness help. Patience helps tremendously for both parties but is not an excuse for continued denial or avoidance of the real issue.
I will look at what is positive. While I might be in a dark wood my dream life is more than alive. It seems to be a preview of coming attractions. I had for a long time stopped remembering my dreams. I think that this was a response to the denial that I was going through at the time. Now I am through (I hope) this phase of denial the dreams have returned. This is polarity. What is avoided in the conscious mind plays havoc in the unconscious. Now that denial has opened up other options the unconscious has again become alive. I am able to do this because the length of time I have spent in honouring my dreams as a spiritual practice.
The 10th September, 2011 was World Depression Awareness Day. It was a day in which we where invited to try and make depression an experience we refuse to deny. It is in our interest not to continue to deny it because it is one of the highest growing medical issues in the Western world. One day won’t do it. Awareness of the symptoms and how they differ in women and men and the process involved will help. It is in educating an awareness of how the process begins and how it can develop is a beginning to the end, not of depression, but of the cycle what can become chronic depression.
The first step, and I think it is a big first step, is to be courageous enough to admit the feeling of shame that hides the underlying depression and which allows it to begin to become chronic and more difficult to shift. In sharing this experience of depression that is a symptom of male menopause it is my hope that many men and their partners do not have to experience deeper suffering and deeper dark nights where it appears there is little or no light at the end of the dark forest. It is my hope that they can avoid the experience at the end of the song “You don’t bring me Flowers Anymore,”
And baby, I remember All the things you taught me I learned how to laugh And I learned how to cry Well I learned how to love Even learned how to lie You’d think I could learn How to tell you goodbye ‘Cause you don’t bring me flowers anymore.