Hooked, even after the pleasure goes

(This is the text of my That's Men column published in The Irish Times on Tuesday 14th October 2008):

The term 'porn-zombie' was new to me until I came across it on addiction therapist Jason McClain's website.

McClain was referring to the way in which viewers of porn on the Internet - and I think it's fair to say the vast majority are men - lose track of time as they watch pornography for hours on end.

He takes the view that you have a pornography addiction if your consumption of porn interferes with your relationships or with key aspects of your life away from the screen.

He doesn't see it as an addiction, or necessarily as a problem, if you have a genuinely take it or leave it attitude to pornography. He is not, of course, referring here to child pornography and neither am I.

There are reasons, though, why the journey from 'take it or leave it' to 'porn-zombie' can be a quick one. Anything involving sexual stimulation has a powerful draw and when the stimulation is available free of charge, as it is on the internet, then the draw is all the more powerful.
And remember the collapse of the Internet bubble about eight or nine years ago? Very talented people in Silicon Valley found themselves out of work. Some gravitated towards that area of the web which continued to make money - pornography (the free pornography is, of course, meant to lure people into subscribing to pay sites). The result? Pornography websites became among the slickest and most sophisticated in the world. Link that sophistication with sexual stimulation and you begin to see how easy it is for internet porn, in particular, to draw people in and keep them there.

And the new browsers from Internet Explorer and Google come with what sceptics call a 'porn mode' option that allows people to surf without leaving a trace on their computers.

Add to all this the human tendency to escape into pleasure to avoid the stresses of life. By this I mean that we tend to drink too much, comfort eat, spend too much, do drugs, do pornography and so on and on as a response to emotional pain.

If you can do these things and then put them aside while you get on with sorting out your life, fine. But all too often, they become an end in themselves even after the pleasure has gone out of them.

In relation to pornography addiction, McClain identifies three stages.

The first is anticipation. Here the consumer of pornography is anxious to get people out of the way so he can get to the computer. Next is consumption where the user may well get into that 'porn-zombie' state. The third stage is self-hatred and a sense of time wasted. Then the cycle is repeated, sometimes as a way of escaping from that painful third stage - a bit like taking a drink at lunchtime to help with a hangover.

He suggests measures such as evaluating the effect of porn on your closest relationships, and maintaining an awareness of your behaviour while you are actually consuming porn instead of falling into the 'zombie' state.

He also advocates using software that doesn't allow you to go on to pornography websites. You can always disable the software temporarily but he argues the hassle involved in doing this may give you enough pause for thought to change your mind.

He recommends a free filtering system called OpenDNS, which you can find at www.opendns.com. The only problem is that it involves, according to its website, "taking a few minutes to unbundle your DNS service from your ISP's Internet connection" which would frighten the living daylights out of me.

But there are lots of filtering programs and if you can find porn you can find them too.

Final thought: people who have a dependence on pornography are not bad people. They are just people who are hooked on a very strong drug and who need to make new choices.

They could start off by looking at McClain's website at www.quitpornaddiction.com which promotes his ebook but also has a link to his blog with lots of good, free information. If you are married to somebody with a pornography addiction, you will find much here to interest you as well.

How a German sex education film and Vatican II ruined my taste for Maltesers

(This is the text of my That's Men column published in The Irish Times on Tuesday 7th October 2008):

The Malteser is, I think you will agree, a jewel of the confectioner's art.

But thanks to Pope John XXIII and a movie called Helga, I can't look at a Malteser.

My tale illustrates the dangers of liberal Catholicism and of sex education - for the latter is what Helga purveyed - particularly when both conjoin.

Let me explain. The other day, a friend confided that she cannot face a Fry's Chocolate Cream. This product is another confectioner's jewel, a shining light of sophistication in a coarse world. I know this because one of my grandmothers, a sophisticated lady if ever there was one, used to give Fry's Chocolate Cream bars to myself and my sister when we were children, after she had corrected our grammar.

Anyway my friend, at the age of five, was handed an entire box of Fry's Chocolate Cream. She did what any intelligent five year old might be expected to do - she faded into the background and scoffed the lot.

The results were as you might expect. That's why she can no longer experience the joy of eating Fry's Chocolate Cream.

In psychology this is called the Garcia Effect after an experiment in which...no, let's not go there.

Anyway, her sad tale reminded me of my Maltesers issue.

In the 1960s, a West German health minister called Käte Strobel decided to promote sex education. One of the fruits of her endeavours was a 1967 sex education movie called Helga.

Helga was special in its day because it was a mainstream sex education movie and because it featured a childbirth scene. It was also special because the film censor allowed it to be shown here.

And the Pope? Even before Ms Strobel got going, Pople John XXIII had convened the Second Vatican Council. This had the effect of liberalising the church and making us all think we lived in a new era.

A cohort of liberal priests emerged from Vatican Two and these priests were convinced that it would be a good thing for the young people of Ireland to be exposed to Helga.

Buses were organised to bring young people up to, I think, the Savoy in Dublin to see the film and be educated.

A have a dim memory of an earnest priest flitting about a bus in Naas that had been organised for the young people of the town and environs.

A major attraction of the Helga movie was that people were reputed to get sick during the childbirth scene. So we didn't go to it so much for the sex education - we knew bloody well there'd be no sex left in it by the time the censor was through - as to see if we could get through the childbirth scene without throwing up.

On the way into the movie, you will have guessed, I treated myself to an entire box of Maltesers. I'm talking about 1960s boxes here, big boxes - the sort of boxes you're meant to share.

I remember absolutely nothing about the movie. A Canadian contributer to the Internet Movie Database says that "I remember naked girls in a school shower," but it's a safe bet that the version we saw omitted this key scene.

What I remember is that I ate all the Maltesers myself while wondering if the childbirth scene was going to make me sick. It didn't but the experience created assocations in my mind with Maltesers which have prevented me from ever again eating one of those wonderful (as I recall) taste bombs.

So in the end, Helga was a let down. The church went on to implode and we all became heathens and went to hell in a handcart.

It wasn't worth it, not at the price of putting me off my favourite chocs.

The star of Helga, Ruth Gassmann, went on to make a number of movies including the 1972 Robinson und seine wilden Sklavinnen shown in the UK as Robinson and His Tempestuous Slaves and in France as Trois filles nues dans l'île de Robinson.

Now. why couldn't they have bussed us up to that one? I'd even have chanced another box of Maltesers.

French-style kissing not for the Irish!

Women learn lots from kissing

This is the text of my That's Men column in The Irish Times on Tuesday 13th May, 2008. "That's Men - The best of the 'That's Men' column from The IrishTimes" is published by Veritas.

A year ago this month, president Ahmadinejad of Iran was accused of indecency for kissing a woman in public.

The woman was a retired schoolteacher and he kissed her hand at a ceremony and she was wearing gloves at the time but still.....

As the newspaper Hezbollah poined out, you never know what this sort of thing can lead to.

How, I wonder, would Hezbollah feel about Madonna's latest kissing escapade? Madge got loads of publicity five years ago for kissing Britney Spears in what the Daily Mail called a "steamy stunt" during the MTV awards.

Last week she grabbed a backing singer during a show in Paris and planted a kiss on her but a jaded world failed to pay much attention. That the recipient of Madonna's attentions looked like someone struggling in the grip of a grizzly bear did not help.

Since French women kiss each other - on the cheek - all the time and do it much more elegantly than dear old Madge, she may just have picked the wrong city for her display.

I might add that when you watch a bunch of French people kissing you have to wonder if a simple "Howya" Irish-style wouldn't make life a lot easier. Here in Ireland we're not much good at the kiss on the cheek thing, though. Attempts are more likely to end up as bone-crunching crashes than as exercises in European flair.

Romantic kissing between men and women is usually a more complicated affair.

Researchers on kissing - oh, yes, there are such people - suggest that when a man and woman are engaged in a deep kiss there's a lot more going on than a conjunction of lips and tongues.

Women, they suggest, are noting the taste and smell of the man as part of their assessment of his suitability as a mate. Our brains devote a disproportionately high amount of processing power to what's going on with our mouths and tongues so perhaps the suggestion makes sense.

And if a woman judges you to be a "bad kisser" she is far more likely to refuse to have sex with you.

Research conducted among 1,041 students at the University of Albany - and that's a lot of kissing - found that with men it's all more simple. We're mainly focussed on the chances of getting the female into bed. Most males in the research would be happy to skip the kissing preliminary altogether but most females insist on it.

Which adds credence to the view that with women there is some sort of assessment procedure going on that even they themselves are not consciously aware of.

This in turn suggests that women who refuse to kiss on a first date are depriving themselves of valuable information and should rethink their position.

Men are fonder than women of big, wet kisses. Susan Hughes, the psychologist who led the study, suggests that because our sense of taste and smell is less sharp than that of women, we use the saliva to help us make our assessments. Well, yuk!

And since women's breath changes during their menstrual cycle this may be mother nature's way of telling the male brain that the woman is fertile and to go for it. Not that mother nature would tell the guy upfront - it's all unconscious, otherwise it wouldn't work.

You know what? Hezbollah is right - you never know where this sort of thing leads to. Do yourself a favour and keep yer gob shut.

Men and cosmetics, from eyeliner to guyliner - am I missing something here?

Are more men wearing makeup than meet the eye?

This is the text of my That's Men column in The Irish Times on Tuesday 6th May, 2008. "That's Men - The best of the 'That's Men' column from The IrishTimes" is published by Veritas.

Is there a hidden world out there of guys who wear makeup? Or is it a not-so-hidden world? Am I completely out of touch with trends in the male world?

I have to admit that I am one of those guys who won't be seen wearing makeup this side of the funeral parlour. In fact, I would gladly declare that "I won't be seen dead wearing makeup" except that the decision will be out of my hands.

In all this, I think I'm still a member of the majority - but the world of men and makeup is changing, however slowly.

My eye was caught recently by a blog by journalist Natasha Hughes in the Sydney Morning Herald in which she expressed amazement at seeing the groom at a wedding wearing what she called "slap-full coverage foundation."

What is "slap-full coverage foundation"? I guess it's something you slap on your face and that's awfully obvious to the onlooker, especially to the sharp-eyed female onlooker.

Natasha's amazement at the groom with the foundation mirrored my own surprise at another manifestation of the interest of men in makeup. Last year on my blog I wrote a single paragraph piece under the heading Men, eyeliner and sex appeal. It was just a little link to something I read somewhere else. Since then, that headline has drawn readers to the blog day after day. Never mind my more serious meanderings on the meaning of life. No, it's eyeliner and sex appeal that gets them going.

Why? You don't see that many guys going around wearing eyeliner unless they're Goths and I don't think the Goths are big readers of mine.

Do some of us have a secret habit? Are there lots of guys standing in front of the bathroom mirror wielding the eyeliner and slapping on the "full coverage foundation" and then removing it before the wife comes home?

Well, I guess there are some, but that many?

And anyway are we reaching the stage where fellows won't feel the need to whip off the eye shadow when they hear the key in the front door?

Right now, being caught wearing your wife's make-up might result in several expensive therapy sessions - but it's all a matter of context and maybe context is changing to the point where the makeup thing just wouldn't matter anymore.

Indeed, I read that Boots has a men's makeup line and that the H&M stores stock a line of men's mascara, in London at any rate. I don't know whether they stock it in their stores here. Maybe one of the lads would drop in and check it out?

In the music world, barriers are increasingly being breached when it comes to men's cosmetics. High School Musical star Zac Efron set tongues wagging last year over his fondness for foundation. Other male stars' attachment to eyeliner has given the world the word "guyliner."

And how much money does/did Bertie spend on makeup? Is it €5,000 a day or €5,000 a month? It doesn't really matter, does it? It's the principle that counts. [Note: Bertie Ahern, former Taoiseach - Prime Minister - of Ireland]

And the major question is this: will Bertie keep wearing makeup when he's no longer Taoiseach and he's not before the television cameras every day of the week?

Should a grateful nation not provide him with a small 'makeup' allowance so that he can look his best when, say, he's being filmed entering and leaving the Mahon Tribunal over the next decade or so?

You might think that this is all on the fringes and I suppose it is, but fashions have a habit of working their way from the edge into the centre.

How long is it since a man would be embarrassed to be seen buying a male moisturising cream? Not long at all - but now nobody could care less.

Actually, there is a possible use of male make-up which I hadn't come across before and which just might appeal to Irish boyos. One guy responding to Natasha Hughes' article revealed that he finds "a little concealer" is always useful "to hide those bags under the eyes after a big night."

So there you are. If a night on the tiles has left you unable to face your jumbo breakfast roll, just dab on a little concealer and make those bleary eyes vanish.

Tony - father and career alcoholic in a Manhattan bar

Also, global warming and how to look young

This is the text of my That's Men column in The Irish Times on Tuesday 29th April, 2008. "That's Men - The best of the 'That's Men' column from The IrishTimes" is published by Veritas.

“I am a career alcoholic,“ Tony declared.

I had ducked – alright, walked deliberately – into an Irish bar near the Ground Zero site in Manhattan to escape from the rain and a cold wind and to have a drink while I was at it.

Tony materialised beside me with a bottle of Bud in his hand and a smile on his face. He was dancing lightly to the music and he continued to dance in place as he talked.

He established my name and country of origin, introduced himself – he had what I take to be, in my ignorance, an Italian-American accent – and then made the announcement about his career as an alcoholic.

“It makes me feel good,” he declared. “What else matters?”

I agreed. He was in that state of elation which, in some people, can turn ugly in a second if you express a point of view different to theirs – especially if they have a lot of alcohol on board.

Tony was in good shape for a career alcoholic. He was fifty years old, he told me but I would have put him in his late thirties. His hair was jet black and this, he assured me, was entirely genuine and without benefit of a hair colour. He was only a little overweight and he was light on his feet. Maybe the dancing kept him fit.

It has been a while since I’d been to the barber’s and Tony spotted this. “Lose the hair,” he advised me. “It will take ten years off your age.”

He spoke very fast and with a thick sort of accent so I couldn’t figure out everything he said. For instance, I could not make sense of his explanation as to why he, personally, knows global warming is real (he had moved seamlessly from my need for a haircut to environmental issues). “See this burn mark?” he said, putting his hand to his forehead, as he explained how he knew global warming was for real. There was nothing there but I said I had seen it anyhow.

Then he moved on to his main topic for our encounter, namely his ex-wife, “the evil one”, and how she had unsuccessfully tried to get his kids to say he had molested them.

“I am telling you this because you are elder,” he said. I am definitely going to lose the hair, I told myself.

He took out his wallet and showed me photographs of his kids. All were graduation photographs, three boys and a girl, all looking happy and proud of themselves. It hurt him, he said, that their mother had tried to turn them against him.

“You’re a good listener,” he said. Not bad, I suppose, when all you’re trying to do is avoid an argument.

I was wondering how I was going to get out of the conversation and leave with politeness when two young women, maybe in their twenties, came into the bar and sat down at a table. Tony danced over to them and started to chat them up. The young women laughed it off but Tony’s attention had definitely turned in their direction.

I said goodbye and left.

It struck me that Tony seemed to have the ability to create company for himself. He was a man whose whole life was a performance for an immediate audience. Well, whose isn’t – what I mean is that Tony’s one-man show is more direct and up-front than most of us manage. Clearly, from what he told me about his wife, not everybody in his audience is a fan.

Then I remembered last Christmas Day when my wife and I went to a bar on Second Avenue for a drink in the evening. This was an Irish bar too, and their prices certainly lived up to the name. But the other Irish thing about it was the number of men who sat up at the counter, alone, drinking, talking to nobody. It was a somewhat depressing sight for Christmas Day.

They could have done with Tony in there to brighten up their evening. I expect he is still dancing in the bar in Manhattan, chatting women up, explaining global warming and showing pictures of his kids to other customers. Good luck to him. I hope the career works out.

That's Men - printed and ready to roll

The best of the That's Men column from The Irish Times

Veritas has just published That's Men, a collection of my Irish Times columns. In picking the columns to go into the book I threw away the ones which had a lot of preaching in them. To me, preaching is the besetting sin of writing on well-being and I'm as guilty on that score as anyone else but I believe that what ended up in the book is informative, entertaining and occasionally annoying - and that's not a bad mix. Readers of this blog will, I think, enjoy the book. A few of the columns that are in the book are also on this blog under the That's Men or That's Men for You (the old name of the column) labels. The launch is on 15th May so here's hoping for a successful run.

(This is the complete post. Ignore "Continue reading" link below.)
And here is the rest of it.

From lesbian mums to multiple dads - the concept of fatherhood gets more complicated by the week

With traditional families in decline, can fathers meet the new challenges of the role?

This is the text of my That's Men column published in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 22nd April, 2008. "That's Men - The best of the 'That's Men' column from The IrishTimes" is published by Veritas.

The concept of fatherhood grows more complex by the week.

The case of the lesbian couple who were successful in the High Court in fighting off a bid for guardianship and access rights by the child’s biological father provides one example – though not a common one – of this growing complexity.

Recent stories from Britain which featured single mothers with children by several fathers provide another.

In Ireland, the significant number of births outside marriage means that, in many cases, the men the mothers in question eventually marry will not be the biological fathers of at least some of the children in the family.

Divorce, too, means that the role of father becomes blurred when new families form.

Once upon a time, it was all so much simpler. A father was a man who was married to a woman who gave birth to their children and stayed home and minded them while the father supported the family.

When people stepped outside of that basic concept by getting pregnant outside marriage, matters were put to rights either by a hurried wedding or by shipping the mother off to a mother and baby home and the baby to an adoptive family. In this case, the father remained invisible and – to outward appearances at any rate – untouched by the whole thing.

Well, that has all changed and about time too. But are fathers up to the demands of these new roles (I will get back to the issue of same sex couples later)? I haven’t had to do it but it strikes me as a tough job to take on where a man marries, or lives with, a woman who has children from a previous marriage.

Well, that has all changed and about time too. But are fathers up to the demands of these new roles (I will get back to the issue of same sex couples later)? I haven’t had to do it but it strikes me as a tough job to take on where a man marries, or lives with, a woman who has children from a previous marriage.

On the one hand, the man is not the children’s father. On the other hand, he will inevitably find himself taking on some of the “care and control” aspects of a fathering role. If a young teenager who was meant to be home at nine o’clock doesn’t turn up until one in the morning, it would be a poor show indeed if he shrugged his shoulders and declared it was nothing to do with him. Similarly, if a child from the previous marriage was being bullied at school, it would be despicable of the mother’s new partner to wash his hands of the whole thing.

Suppose we are not talking about children from a previous marriage or from one previous relationship. Suppose, as in those British cases that have been in the news, there are several children with several fathers. Is any subsequent partner up to fathering all of these children? I know there are other fathers in the vicinity, so to speak, but the partner is “on site” and the one who faces the most immediate challenges. Frankly, I don’t think any partner is up to facing those challenges in this situation unless he is an extraordinary human being. Most of us are not extraordinary human beings. Most of us would fall down on that particular job.

In same-sex couples with a child born either through sperm donation or through surrogacy (in the case of men) the situation is either more or less difficult, depending on how you look at it. In the UK, as I understand it, if the child was conceived from sperm donated through a licensed clinic, then the biological parent has neither rights nor obligations. If the child was conceived through a private arrangement, the biological parent may have rights and responsibilities – a man could be forced to pay maintenance for the upkeep of the child, for instance.

In the same-sex couple, will one partner take on the role of father in an emotional and psychological sense? I expect that is how it will work out. I hope so – if I was a bold child I wouldn’t want to have two mothers angry with me at the same time (sorry, girls). Oh alright, for the sake of balance, two fathers either.

So, fathering has become as complicated as it could get and we have a lot of work to do to figure out how to handle it. A little courage on the part of policy makers would help. And so would a determination to deal with the world as it is and not as we think if ought to be.

From sex to hot coffee - how the unconscious shapes our choices every day

This is the text of my That's Men column in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 8th April, 2008. A collection of That's Men columns will be published by Veritas this summer.

Oh dear, can it really be true that those sexy images in the ads influence the behaviour of men?

I am afraid it is. But the women need not snigger. They too are prone to being influenced by attractive men in ways they might not expect.

Researchers at Stanford University showed men a series of erotic images and then invited them to gamble some money. The gambling exercise had no overt relationship to what went before. And yet the men who had viewed erotic images took greater risks in gambling than did men who had not seen these images.

But women interviewing men for jobs can find in their decisions influenced, unconsciously, by the attractiveness of the chap in the seat opposite.

Women in a mock job interview situation who were shown photographs of applicants tended to pick the more attractive looking men for the more high status jobs. They were also more generous to attractive men than to attractive women applicants.

Men in this experiment did not seem to discriminate between more and less attractive females. That surprises me given the number of guys in high status jobs who just happen to choose very pretty secretaries.

So I am not saying that these pieces of research are the last word on the influence of sex on men and women. And yet the influence of the unconscious on our everyday behaviour – sometimes in remarkable ways – is well established.

Consider this piece of research reported by Dr Christian Jarrett in the latest Psychologist (access restricted). A number of university students was asked questions, individually, by a researcher. While the questioning were going on, there were asked to hold the researcher’s drink. In some cases this was a hot coffee and in others it was an iced coffee. Later, another researcher came along and had a little chat with each of them.

The students were then asked whether they would recommend the second researcher for a job. The ones who had held the hot coffee cup said they would. The ones who held the cold cup said they wouldn’t.

So if you want someone to give you a job, buying them a hot coffee might work. This is especially so since people who drink coffee are more open to persuasion. For instance, in an Australian study, participants given a drink laced with caffeine were more likely to change their views on controversial topics such as euthanasia than those who were not.

Which goes to show that fellows who ask a girl in for a “coffee” at two o’clock in the morning are being a lot more clever than you might think.

Now, suppose you got a job from the manager who had a coffee in his hand at the time and suppose he sends you into a negotiation which you really need to win.

You take the bright new shiny briefcase your mother bought for you and you plonk it on the table, just to show you mean business, right? Wrong. If you ask two people to play cards and you place a briefcase in view, they will play more competitively than otherwise. So no briefcase, please.

Needless to say, you will offer your competitor a nice cup of coffee, though, won’t you? And if you want to be really sneaky, you yourself will just have a glass of cold water, thanks very much.

Here’s another one you can use. Getting people into a state of disgust or sadness will strongly influence their subsequent buying behaviour. In one experiment, students shown a film calculated to make them feel sad (The Champ) were later prepared to pay more for a bottle of water than people shown a film which made them feel disgusted (Trainspotting). So don’t make ’em laugh, make ’em cry and you’re on the road to riches.

And if you can’t make ’em cry, at least you can imitate them. Studies show that if you mimic the body language and mannerisms of a person with whom you are negotiating, you will end up with a better deal than if you do not. And, by the way, persons whose behaviour is mimicked are subsequently more benevolent towards others, a Dutch study shows.

The lesson? Don’t beat yourself up too much over your sillier decisions. It’s nothing to do with you, really.

Now, coffee anyone?

Got an opinion? Comment here.

All the world's a stage

This is the text of my That's Men column published in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 11th March 2008. A collection of That's Men columns will be published by Veritas this summer.

Have you ever spotted a young man and woman walking along of an evening and realised that they were on their first date? Assuming you were right, how could you have known that?

it is because they were playing a role you recognised. They were well scrubbed up. Although they were talking to each other and perhaps even joking there was a slight formality and unease about them. Each was on parade, under scrutiny by the other.

If such a couple goes on to get married, they often begin to play different roles. One may take on the role of being feckless, or domineering for instance. The other may nag or be compliant. One may be playful and the other may be serious. One may drink too much and the other may play the part of caretaker.

Neither necessarily enjoys his or her role and neither necessarily realises what is going on.

Then perhaps something fundamental changes. One goes off on a personal development course, or maybe just off the rails, and begins to play a completely different role. Maybe the compliant person becomes assertive. Maybe the nagging person quits giving out and leaves the other to get on with it. Maybe the drinker gives up the booze and becomes a health freak.

Changes like this can shake up a relationship no end - sometimes terminally.

The roles we play with each other are described by a theory called Transactional Analysis. According to this theory each of us, right now, is probably playing one of three roles: parent, adult or child.

You are behaving like a parent when you give out or lay down the law or act in a nurturing and loving way. You are behaving like an adult when you are logical, and reasonable. And you are behaving like a child when you are mischievous or playful or sulky or whiney.

If you and your partner are sitting there giving out about the bus service or Bertie or the HSE you are having a parent to parent conversation.

If one is talking down to the other, accusing them of being irresponsible, of wasting money, of never keeping the house tidy, then you are having a parent to child conversation.

So given are we to role-playing that if you are being treated like a child, there is a good chance you will behave like one – so you might respond to your bossy partner by storming off or whinging or whining or sulking. Similarly, if one partner actually wants to behave like a child, the other may very well take on the role of parent.

How would you stop this game playing? The advice from the Transactional Analysis people is to drop the complementary role.

So when you are being talked down to by someone in parent mode you could respond, not like a child, but like an adult talking to an adult. "If you have something to say to me I would be grateful if you would address me like an adult,” could be an adult response to someone in full parent mode. And when they say, as they will, “I’ll talk to you like an adult when you start behaving like one,” you could walk very calmly out of the room saying something like, “I’m behaving like an adult right now and when you’re ready to do the same, let me know.” By the way, if you’re in a relationship in which it’s dangerous to act like an adult, you might be in the wrong relationship.

But couples also get locked into parent to parent communications with each other and that can be stultifying, especially if the kids have grown up.

Their main topic of conversation is still the children who may be off on the other side of the planet. Worse, the “children” or one of them may be in the living-room on a permanent basis, having taken out a 99-year lease on the family sofa. The parents may grumble about this but actually the son or daughter who refuses to leave may be helping them, the parents, to continue their parenting role. If they want something better for themselves they need to step out of that role.

In that case, one of the partners might need to start acting like a child by coming up with fun things to do or just by refusing to take life quite as seriously as before.

They might even consider dating each other again. They might consider getting scrubbed up and walking out like they did on that first date. If reviving your winning performances works for ageing rock stars, it can work for you.

Guilt - helping you get what you want

Photo by Ayala Moriel (Flickr)

This is the text of my That's Men column in The Irish Times on Tuesday 4th March 2008:

A couple of days after Christmas a few years ago I was away, along with my family, staying with relatives. I had arranged to return to Dublin on my own a few days before the others. When the day of my departure arrived, I found myself filled with guilt although nobody had raised any issue at all about what I was planning to do.

What was going on? I think I had two contradictory ideas in my mind. The first was that I wanted to get back to Dublin by myself, a wish which possesses many people at that time of year. The other was that proper parents don't abandon their families in the Midlands at Christmas.

One way to resolve this would have been to stay with them. But I came up with a better way, one that allowed me to do what I wanted while preserving my self-image as a good parent. That way was to go back to Dublin as I wanted but to feel guilty about it.

Only a cad would run off to Dublin without a thought for what he was doing. A good parent, on the other hand, would feel guilty about it. So by feeling guilty I could do what I wanted and still be a good guy. Guilt, bless it, oiled the wheels.

William Glasser, who invented Reality Therapy, and who takes as jaundiced an attitude towards guilt as I do myself, has suggested that when a person feels guilt about what they have done they are probably planning to do it again. Recognise that, dear reader?

Now, there's guilt and there's guilt. Sometimes you do a thing that's just plain wrong and guilt, accompanied by what the Catholic Church used to call "a firm purpose of amendment" is very much in order. What that adds up to is remorse which, it seems to me, is a powerful agent for change if you let yourself experience it when it's deserved.

Outside that, though, guilt is a tricky thing. Ever see a parent say to a child, "Alright, go on, do what you like, I give up"? The child protests and the parent says "No, no, do what you like, it's nothing to do with me anymore." What the parent is really saying to the child is "You can do what you like so long as you feel guilty about it."

So you end up with spouses who feel awfully guilty about having affairs and are thereby enabled to have more of them; with overweight people who will, simultaneously, have another slice of chocolate cake and feel a delicious surge of guilt and with sluggards who wrap themselves up in guilt and warmth as they abandon a morning's work in favour of another few hours in bed.

Irish Catholics used to be the world's great connoisseurs of guilt. A trip to the confessional got rid of your guilt and sent you out into the world squeaky clean. And when you sinned again you went back and got cleaned up again. You just had to make sure you didn't unexpectely depart this world before getting back to confession - otherwise you could expect a few thousand years in the flames of purgatory or an eternity in hell.

Now, so far as I can make out, guilt is frowned on in the teaching of religion in our schools, hellfire isn't talked about and purgatory is abolished. Everything is nice and there is no wicked Devil to tempt us into guilty deeds.

This is a mistake. We need guilt, for the worst of reasons of course. Guilt allows us to go on pretending that we're better then we really are while continuing to do whatever we want to do anyway. It allows us to get away with things by convincing others that we feel really, really guilty about whatever it is we've done.

Mind you, we have an alternative which is to be honest and open and to quit playing games with ourselves and with others.

Personally, though, I don't see myself going down that path anytime soon.

Now there's something to feel guilty about.

Beware the joy of text

This is the text (!) of my That's Men column in The Irish Times on 26th February 2008:

“God, yes I….” began a text message I got on my way through JFK Airport after Christmas.
The gist of the message was that I was a fantastic lover and that the sender was, er, thinking about me and missing me already.

Clearly the text was not meant for me (my wife agrees). Sneakily, I looked up the number on my computer and nobody came up. Darn.

Naughty text messages sit in phones like unexploded grenades. The explosion comes when a nosey partner spots an unattended phone, reads the messages in the inbox and gets a shock. The result, needless to say, is rarely pleasant for anyone involved.

The text message is a sort of gremlin in the world of relationships. Gremlins are mischief makers which delight in tormenting the afflicted. So it is with the illicit text.

Now, there is nothing wrong with sending loving or even saucy texts to your loved one. It’s when the relationship ends that texting takes on a different complexion.

If one of the partners didn’t want the relationship to end, the texts are likely to keep on coming in a bid to reverse the break-up. If the two parted by mutual consent, the texts may still keep flowing, much to the discomfiture of new parties who, sooner or later, will take a peek into the inbox.

In other words, texting has meant the end of the clean break – splitting up is even harder to do.

There’s another side to texting and it’s linked with control. The day the mobile phone was invented was a red letter day for control freaks everywhere. The mobile provided them with the almost perfect tool for tracking another person’s movements. The control freak will ruin a partner’s evening out with friends by sending text after text demanding to know “where are you now?” “who are you with?” “what are you doing?” “when are you coming home?” and so on. Failure to respond to these texts can lead to a lot of unpleasantness later on.

And when the person who is at the receiving end of this nonsense decides to call a halt to the relationship, the texts and voicemails multiply like rabbits, necessitating an inconvenient change of numbers not once but perhaps a few times. This is because control freaks can be good at finding out your new number, especially if your friends are gobshites who can be plámásed by said control freak.

Needless to say, texting also offers a cowardly means of breaking up with someone. This can add to the pain of the person who has been dumped especially if that person’s texts elicit no response. And when the person who was dumped eventually forms a new relationship, a resumption of texts from the one who did the dumping – and who has now changed his or her mind – can create havoc.

If you’re not used to texting, this may all seem rather laborious. How can people have the patience to do all these things by text? Well, have you ever watched a dedicated texter – a teenager, say – texting? The really good ones do not even need to look at the letters on the keypad. They are like touch typists – their fingers know where to go. A secondary school teacher once lamented to me that she suspects the school’s anti-texting policy is frustrated by girls who are able to text without taking their phones out of their pockets. Needless to say, any attempt by the teacher to remove said phones from pockets could result in a costly trip to the High Court.

There’s something very human about all this carry-on. People stop and coort in cars which were designed to get them from place to place quickly. People use computers for playing games when, really, they could be using them to work out complex mathematical theorems. And people send dirty messages to each other on mobile phones when they could be exchanging uplifting lines of poetry.

We could be perfect. We could be uplifted. But, once again, humanity gets in the way.

And all I can say to that is, “God, yes I….”

A mindfulness approach to chronic pain

This is the text of my That's Men for You column published in The Irish Times on 19th February 2008:

I am always reluctant to write about chronic pain and about psychological approaches to coping with it. This is because it is so easy to patronise people who are in pain when you are not in pain yourself.

Chronic pain is pain that can only be managed – it isn’t going to go away completely. As a person who is a coward when it comes to pain, I cannot imagine what it is like to have to cope with this torment day in and day out.

There is some research into psychological approaches to pain which offer the possibility of improving one’s way of coping with pain and that may be of help to readers in this situation. These involve acceptance and meditative practices.

Why in Heaven’s name should you accept pain? You shouldn’t, in my opinion, if the doctor, the physiotherapist or the chemist can help you to get rid of it. But if the pain cannot be made to go completely, the methods described here may help.

People who are in pain can be said to suffer from two types of pain. The first is the pain which arises from their injury or illness. That pain is largely, perhaps completely, outside their control. The second is the emotional distress which they feel because of the physical pain. It is this second type of pain that acceptance and some meditative practices can help to reduce.

Last year, researchers from NUI Maynooth, NUI Galway and the University of Almeria, Spain, published research showing that people subjected (willingly) to electric shocks had a greater level of endurance if they accepted the shocks instead of trying to distract themselves from them. This, though a small scale study, seems to confirm what many have believed for a long time about the importance of acceptance in dealing with pain and, indeed, with much else in life. The report on their research appeared in the journal, Behaviour Research and Therapy.

Mindfulness meditation has been used for years now at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre to help people live with chronic pain and stress while experiencing a higher quality of life than before. Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn, who runs the pain clinic, has published an account of his work in the widely-available paperback Full Catastrophe Living.

Mindfulness involves continually bringing your awareness back to what is going on right now whenever it strays off into the past, the future or into fantasy. It sounds easy but it takes more practice than you might think.

In mindfulness you accept the pain that is inevitably there while expanding your awareness of those parts of your body that are not in pain, of the room around you, of other people and so on. This is not a substitute for medical treatment – it is something you do alongside medical treatment.

Blue Sky based in Dublin and run by people with a Buddhist and medical background offers a low-cost course based on Kabat-Zinn’s work.

Here is a simple, four-part mindfulness exercise to give you an idea of what the use of a mindful approach might involve:

1.
Notice your breathing. Notice your posture. Notice the points of contact between your body and the chair, floor, ground. Notice your clothes touching your body.
Every time you drift into thinking, just return to noticing your breathing.

2.
If you feel pain, notice the pain without getting involved in thoughts about it. Notice how the intensity of pain rises and falls but rarely stays the same.

3.
Notice the area of your body that surrounds the area of pain. Notice how that area is tensed up. Imagine that you are breathing into that area and allowing it to relax.

4.
Now, as well as your body, notice the room you are in. Notice how your pain is part of your experience. It is not your total experience. Now notice your breathing again.

Exercises like this do not, of course, get rid of the pain. Instead they are meant to help you to cope differently and to reclaim parts of your life and experience that the pain has overshadowed.

The common experience of feeling like an impostor

Photo by autoreverse tiramisu (Flickr)

Do you see an impostor when you look in the mirror?

You’d be surprised how many people do.

Most of us adopt or are thrust into roles in life that we think we are not up to. Other people might say you’re great at your job or you’re a great parent or a great partner.

But they are looking at you from the outside. You are looking at yourself from the inside and you “know” you are none of these things. What’s more, you think, if other people knew you as well as you know yourself, they would agree with your unspoken opinion.
This is the text of my That's Men for You column published in The Irish Times on Tuesdsay, 12th February 2008:

The so-called impostor phenomenon was first described in the late 1970s. Then, it referred to young women who were doing well in managerial and executive jobs in the workplace but could not give themselves credit for their own ability.

They saw themselves as succeeding either because they were lucky or because they worked harder than anybody else – but not because they were intrinsically good at what they did.

Subsequent research has shown that the term can be applied equally to men.

The odd thing about the impostor phenomenon is that it seems to affect people who are genuinely successful rather than people who fail. The “impostor” may gain promotions, may be praised by colleagues, may be in demand among customers yet her or she feels like a fake.

Instead of basking in this praise and approval, the affected person lives in fear of being found out.

Another curious thing about people who feel like impostors is that they are less likely than others to behave like real impostors. For example, a study of college students found that those who felt like impostors were less likely than other students to cheat.

“Impostors” seem to dread the arrival of the day when their work will be judged, so they have developed ways to put off the evil hour.

One is to put off starting tasks for as long as possible, always completing them just before the deadline.

The other is to start work on a project long before everyone else, perhaps dragging out the preparations interminably and continuing to work beyond the point at which others are finished.

What’s the payoff for these strategies? The first – putting the work off until the deadline is nigh, as I have done with this article – allows the “impostor” to say the work was so rushed it was pure luck that it was any good. This neatly avoids the question of whether the person is inherently good at the job.

The strategy of working interminably on the project allows the “impostor” to assert that anybody who put in this amount of work would be bound to succeed – again, the “impostor” avoids the issue of his or her personal qualities.

The research on the impostor phenomenon has mainly concerned itself with the workplace and with college studies.

However, I have no doubt that it implies also to relationships. The person who cannot take a compliment may be an example of someone who feels like an impostor.

My own phrase for this is “the ah shure syndrome.”

“Aren’t you really marvellous to have rescued your aunt from that burning building?”
“Ah shure, I was heading in the direction of the door anyway and she just kind of clung on to me.”

If you feel like an impostor and someone expresses love and admiration for you, you will conclude instantly that they don’t know what they are talking about. And you will make sure they don’t get close enough to find out what you are really like.

You believe that if they find out what you are really like, they will no longer admire or love you. To avoid this fate you may have rows with people when they get too close. Indeed, you may even walk away from them altogether.

It’s a painful phenomenon and one that may be more prevalent at home and at work than we realise. I think it is also very difficult to get rid of but awareness is the first step to reducing its influence on our lives.

Ambivalence towards violence keeps it thriving

Photo by Pro-Zak (Flickr)

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday 5th February 2008:

The state pathologist, Professor Marie Cassidy, referred on a recent TV programme to a chilling aspect of violence today.

This is the tendency, when a group of young people attack a victim, to intensify the attack after the victim is on the ground, stunned and unable to protect himself in any way.

It is when the victim is in that defenceless condition that the attack really starts. By the time it is over he can count himself fortunate if he gets back to normal functioning.

I say ‘he’ because the victims are almost always male, as are the perpetrators. Indeed, we now live in a society in which parents worry far more about the safety of teenage boys than of teenage girls when they go out at the night.

Back in what I call the John Wayne days, there were certain taboos. You didn’t shoot a man in the back. You didn’t kick a man on the ground. Silly stuff? Maybe. But it beats getting some young fellow down on the ground, rendering him unconscious and then kicking him into rehab.

Of course, terrible things happened in those days, the abuse of children in institutions and in their own homes being a prime example. But the practice of going out on a weekend night to hunt down some poor sod who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and to kill or disable him did not exist then.

The taste for violence is not confined to those who carry out these vicious attacks on the street.

Some years ago, I escaped into a cinema out of a wet afternoon in Paris to watch the then newly-released movie Casino. The violence in the movie really shocked me – but when the lights came on again I was intrigued to see that the afternoon audience of respectable pensioners appeared quite unmoved by the whole thing.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. “It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay, Decline of the English Murder. “The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World…..what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.”

There it is, then. A vicarious enjoyment of violence has become so commonplace we barely notice it. We hardly even register how extreme it has become – the violence on The Sopranos is just an example.

When it comes to real life, the terrible behaviour we see on our streets owes much to the influence of groups. When you are in a group you are capable of doing things which you would never do if you were on your own.

Research suggests that murders which follow disagreements and an exchange of insults are often carried out in the presence of an audience made up of friends and acquaintances of the killer. The need to play up to an audience can make murderers of us all.

But we are caught in a double bind about violence. On the one hand none of us wants our son and daughter to be the target of a vicious attack; and most of us would not want our son or daughter to be the perpetrator of such an attack.

On the other hand, society wants its members to be capable of and willing to go to war where necessary. Even in this neutral country of ours many of us demand that countries such as the US, Britain or multinational entities such as the UN or the EU should intervene in Darfur or other places where terrible events are happening. We know that such intervention may involve the use of violence – but we are all for it.

So we are ambivalent about violence – we want it and we don’t want it.

And that’s a major part of the reason why we may never come to grips with the violence that kills and maims our sons on the streets today.

The pain of shyness and the mistakes shy people make

Photo by Sukanto Debnath (Flickr)

This is the text of my That's Men for You column which appeared in The Irish Times on Tuesday 29th January 2008:

I was much shyer when I was in my late teens than I am today and one of the great discoveries of my life was that other people didn’t know what I was going through. I found this out when a colleague casually remarked that I was “as cool as a cucumber.” In reality, I was experiencing agonies of shyness but the discovery that other people interpreted this as confidence helped me to take the risk of social involvement.

And shyness is, indeed, an agony when at its most intense. I suspect that the agony is greater for men than for women. This is because even in the 21st century it is the men who are expected to approach the women for dates and dances.

Indeed, you don’t have to be shy to have experienced the “will she, won’t she, will I make a fool of myself?” drama that can go on in the head of a man trying to pluck up the courage to ask a woman for a date.

If anything, the business of asking for a dance is worse – that walk across the floor can seem as long and as daunting as a journey to the Antarctic.

There are certain errors that shy people make and which worsen this wretched condition.

First, they assume that other people can see how shy they are. That is why it can be liberating to realise that this is not so, as I mentioned at the start of this article.

The second error is to assume that other people are thinking about you to the exclusion of almost anything else. A shy person will walk past a bus queue and assume that he or she is being scrutinised by everybody standing there. In reality, the others are almost certainly preoccupied with themselves and some of them wouldn’t notice if you stood on your head. Similarly, shy people at a party assume that everybody in the room is looking at them and judging them – a horrible feeling – when nothing of the sort is going on.

Shy people tend to compare themselves to the most outgoing person in the room. They could make life easier for themselves by aiming to be average – instead they curl up in a ball because they know they can’t measure up to the biggest party animal in the place.

This tendency to demand more of themselves than is reasonable is a major source of pain to shy people. Worse, they tend to assume that other people expect perfection from them when in fact other people, with the exception of a few bullies, are more tolerant and easy-going than the shy person can imagine.

Paradoxically, the shy person is the star in his or her own drama. That can be said of any of us but the shy person takes it to an extreme. To the shy person, nobody on the street, in the nightclub or at the party has eyes for anyone else. The shy person, therefore, imagines himself or herself to be under intense examination at all times.

This can begin to change if the shy person somehow manages to get involved with other people or allows other people to drag him or her along with them. Of course, it will still all be agony at first but gradually the shy person’s comfort zone will expand. Maybe the shy ones won’t ever be the life and soul of the party – though some people hide their shyness behind a façade of confidence – but at least they can be at the party and can function socially with a few people at a time.

If you know somebody who is shy, there is no point in berating them for failing to fight this socially crippling illness. Such criticism will simply drive them further into isolation.

It is far better to involve them in things and to accept that they will be the quiet ones in the crowd. This will help them to begin to accept themselves and acceptance of how they are is perhaps the most important first step on the road out of isolation.

Bringing up teens - a tough call for separated Dads

Photo by .Tatiana. (Flickr)

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 22nd January, 2008:

Adolescence, to put it mildly, is a time when teenagers separate out from their parents.

Consider, then, the difficulties which non-resident fathers have in maintaining relationships with their teenage children.

Not only have the teens reached the stage where Dad is no longer perfect but Dad isn't there to give them the attention they want.

It is, of course, very easy to criticise fathers in this situation for not spending enough time with their teens.

But Dad probably has a job to do, complete with commuting and may have another household to go home to as well.

On top of this the teenagers themselves have to fit in study, drama, football, dancing and time out with their friends.

So co-ordinating the contact is not easy and takes an effort. It is especially difficult to do if the teens' mother and father are not on speaking terms.

A study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family gives some idea of how the sense of closeness between teenagers and a divorced father suffers in this situation.

I am assuming here that it is the mother who has custody of the children.

The research was derived from a national, long-term study of adolescents in the United States.

Young people were interviewed at the beginning and end of a five year period. Their parents were together at the start of the five years but, by the end, some had divorced.

At the start, 57 per cent of the young people said they were very close to their fathers.

By the end, this had fallen to 48 per cent where the parents were still together and to 25 per cent where they were divorced. Closeness to the mother was unaffected by the divorce.

Three things strike me as important about these figures.

The first is that closeness between father and teenagers suffered whether the parents were divorced or together - though to a greater extent, of course, where there had been a divorce. This, I expect, is part of the usual war of independence that goes on between adolescents and the old folks.

The second striking point is that, given the way the study was done, all the divorces had occurred relatively recently when the teenagers were interviewed the second time. At this stage emotions would still be very raw and the father's 'rating' could, perhaps, be expected to suffer as he is the absent parent.

The third point is that we do not know how long this absence of closeness might last. The storms of adolescence die down and are generally followed by a greater closeness between parents and 'children'.

There is no reason why this should not also occur where the parents are divorced.

Nevertheless, the findings underline the fact that separated fathers have to make a special effort to keep involved with teenage children.

For this they need to be able to cooperate with the mother. That is easier said than done. Parents who are still together often fight over how to handle their teenagers. Such fights, I suspect, are just as likely to occur when the parents are apart.

But unless they are able and willing to cooperate, the scene is set for major conflict.

Other research suggests that once teenagers become fairly independent, they may shuttle between parent and parent to get what they want.

If Mammy is being a pain in the neck, then a few days with Daddy seems like a good idea. If one parent won't shell out for tickets for Oxegen, then maybe the other one - alright, Daddy again - will.

This again points up the necessity for separated parents to talk to one another about these issues and to try to reach some sort of accommodation about them.

Parents living apart, whether married or unmarried, can get help with with reaching such an accommodation from the Family Mediation Service which is part of the Family Support Agency and has centres around the country.

Its website is at www.fsa.ie and the telephone number is (01) 611 4100. They're worth a call if you're living apart and fighting over the teens.

See also: Staying close to teens is harder for separated Dads.

"Running away money" - when couples marry should their money stay apart?

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Women in certain parts of Dublin used to have - and maybe still have - what was known as "running away money." This was a little stash of cash that the husband knew nothing about. It was meant to fund the wife's escape if life with himself should become intolerable.

In practice, I suppose, it got dipped into for various expenses and treats. If "running away money" exists today it probably vanishes on shopping trips to New York.

I thought about "running away money" when I read that couples in the UK have become a more secretive with each other about how much money they really have. One symptom of this is that fewer couples have joint bank accounts.

In the first flush of romance, the joint bank account may be seen as an expression of undying love. But in the divorce era, when love is far from undying, it appears that couples getting married now doubt if it is wise for their bank accounts to marry as well.


The issue of joint control over money also raised its head last week when the Liveline on RTE Radio 1 addressed the question of child benefit or the children’s allowance as it used to be called. Listeners heard stories of bad behaviour by both genders. On one side, there was the man who kept his wife and children on a subsistence allowance because money had to be prioritised for his drinking. On the other, there was the woman who left her husband and children and went to live in England a couple of decades ago. The husband was told he could not get the children's allowance; so whenever the wife came home to Ireland from England she popped into the post office, collected her children's allowance and used the money to help to fund her new lifestyle.

Even in the absence of such extremes, it is not all that unusual for each partner in a long-term relationship to have a different attitude to money. Perhaps one is cautious and the other is of the Spend! Spend! Spend! mentality, for instance. If they could talk about money matters in a rational way, they could avoid a great many problems. But how many of us are capable of talking to our partner in a rational way about money? Suppose you divide a page into two columns and note on one side the times you have had a rational, logical conversation about money with your nearest and dearest and on the other side the times you fought over money. Which column would be the longest? Unless you’re living with Eddie Hobbs, I suspect it would be the second one.

The emotions and, sometimes, bad behaviour that accompany money are, needless to say, carried into relationship breakdown. Separating partners have an interest in hiding from each other their true financial status. Money may be removed from bank accounts, for instance. If one partner gets a pay rise it may be kept very quiet. In mediation between separating couples, the point at which the mediator puts up on a flipchart the expense of running two households can be an early breaking point.

In a discussion on the topic on BBC Radio 4’s Woman's Hour last week, Jonathan Self (author of The Teenager's Guide to Money) suggested that attitudes to money should be discussed with anybody you are thinking of having a relationship with. He even suggested that the topic is sufficiently important for a first date.

That’s fine if your first date happens to be an accountant, a revenue official or a banker. For the rest of us, though, it strikes me as a bridge too far, too soon – the sound of first dates running very fast in the opposite direction could become a familiar one. Best confine yourself to trying for a kiss and park the money issue until the next time.

And if the relationship flourishes and you end up together until death or irreconcilable differences do you part, I hope each of you will be wise enough to have your own little stash of "running away money" hidden in the post office.

Love and maintenance

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday 8th January 2008:

A poem by the late Detroit poet Robert Hayden brings home the importance of recognising a sort of love that that has little to do with romance but which deserves to be acknowledged and praised nevertheless. Called Those Winter Sundays it begins:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labour in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

The image of the father who gets up in bitter cold to light the fires for the family before they, too, arise is probably somewhat dated in the central heating era but the principle remains: that such acts can be, in their own way, acts of love.

They are also, very often, unacknowledged. Hayden talks of getting up in the now warm house and

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Note: Click here for the full poem.

A few weeks ago, on Sarah Carey's GUBU blog, I came across a poem by the British poet UA Fanthorpe which expresses the same idea. It begins:

"There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget the milkman, which remembers to plant bulbs;"

Note: Click here for the full poem.

(WD40, if you don't know, is a type of oil good for rust prevention and other purposes.)

And it's not all sweetness and light. Hayden was raised by foster parents who had a very troubled marriage and the effects stayed with him throughout his life. Indeed, in the poem mentioned above he talks about "the chronic angers of that house." Nevertheless, he recognised in later life the value of the practical things done for him by the foster father whom he often had reason to fear.

It seems to me that for people who have had a harsh upbringing there can sometimes be a kind of healing in this realisation. A parent might be unexpressive about love but might nevertheless build his or her life around the needs of the child or the other parent.

This realisation is also part of the Japanese Naikan meditation which I have mentioned before in this column. To do Naikan, you call to mind someone who was or is important to you even if - perhaps especially if - you have a big resentment against that person. You then ask yourself three questions and reflect on each in turn: What has this person given me, what have I given this person and what troubles have I caused this person?

You are encouraged to be very specific in your answers. Maybe all you can think of is that this person put food on the table, ironed your clothes and saw to it that you went to school. You may be full of justifiable anger towards them but there are, nevertheless, these things that they did for you. And there are, after all, parents who don't do even these things for their children.

All of this is a million miles removed from romantic love which involves doing things for the other person simply because they are romantic and without much regard to whether they are useful. A bouquet of roses hasn't got a lot of utility to it but it can get a guy out of trouble because it appeals to the romantic side of love. So if you want a flourishing relationship with your significant other, don't rely on the "love called maintenance" but throw a little romance into the mix as well.

But never underestimate the importance of the "love called maintenance" either. In some people it can simply be a sour expression of a resented duty. But in others, it can be as true an expression of love as the roses and the box of chocolates and the diamond ring, or maybe even truer. That it so often goes unappreciated and unacknowledged -as by Robert Hayden as a child - does nothing to alter this fact.

Link between depression and heart disease needs our attention

Photo by Adoodi (Flickr)

Poorer outcome for depressed patients

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 18th December:

The link between depression and heart disease is not often written about, perhaps out of fear of causing distress to people with one or the other of these conditions or with both. But to remain silent about the link is to deprive people of information that could save their lives.

The latest research, from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, confirms earlier findings that people who are depressed following a heart attack are significantly more likely to die during a follow-up period than heart patients who are not depressed. This outcome has been found in follow-up periods ranging from six months to more than six years in different studies.

Other research suggests that people who are depressed are more likely to suffer heart illness in the fist place than those who are not depressed.

Quite how it works is not clear. One theory is that in depression the brain’s regulation of the production of sticky platelets in the blood is impaired, that this brings about an increase in the production of the platelets and that this in turn can lead to an event such as a heart attack.


Effect on behaviour
However, It is also possible that the poorer outcome for depressed people following a heart attack is related to the way depression affects their behaviour. For instance, people who are depressed can find it difficult to motivate themselves to exercise, to take their medication or to modify their diet. If they are smokers, then giving up smoking will be far more difficult when they are depressed. All of these things, let’s face it, are hard enough to do when you’re not depressed.

In these instances, one can see how easily depression can leave a person more vulnerable to future heart problems.

What matters in all of this is to understand that depression is a real issue that needs to be taken very seriously after a person has a heart attack or develops another heart condition.

Depression not surprising
We need to remember that when you have a heart attack your whole view of yourself, your health and your life changes. So it’s not surprising that for some people this leads to depression.

One can also see how a person who led a very stressful life before a heart attack could become depressed afterwards at not being able to give the same energy to the issues about which he or she was stressed. If they have had to give up the work they used to do, then the emotional impact can be very, very strong.

It is important, if somebody close to you has heart disease, to recognise that depression may cause them to fail to exercise or to fail to comply with their medication or dietary requirements.

In such a case the issue of depression should be raised with the GP who may refer the person to a counsellor. If you prefer to contact a counsellor directly you can get the name and telephone number of an accredited counsellor from the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy at 01-2723427.

Exercise and mood
It is also helpful to encourage the person to carry out faithfully the exercise regime prescribed by the hospital or by the GP. Aside from the physical health benefits, exercise is known to improve the mood and is an important ally in the fight against depression.

I have directed this advice to people close to the person with depression because it can be hard for the person who is depressed to motivate himself or herself to do these things.

But if you have had a cardiac problem and you are not depressed, follow that exercise regime that the doctor advised: it will keep you in good shape psychologically as well as physically.

I’ve used the word ‘link’ in talking about depression and heart disease throughout this article because what we seem to know is that there is a very definite link between the two but what we don’t know is exactly how that link works.

There is, nevertheless, a link which is all the more reason for doing something about depression instead of letting it drag on and on - especially the wake of heart disease.

Happy Christmas but only if you want to - there's no law about it

Photo by krisdecurtis (Flickr)

Avoiding an unhappy Christmas creates problems

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 11th December:

There is no law written down anywhere that obliges you to have a Happy Christmas.

I think that is important to say at this time of year. The marketing industry would have us believe that everybody else is going to have a wonderful Christmas because they’re buying the right drinks, driving the right cars, wearing the right clothes, eating in the right places and, well, generally doing everything right.

Every man, this myth would have it, has a glamorous girlfriend or wife on whom the snowflakes fall gently under the stars as Santa appears around the corner in his sleigh. There is a blazing log fire inside. The children are all cute and would never dream of calling you, their father, a dork.

Of course, it’s not true. Moreover, we know it’s not true but somehow we contrive to feel aggrieved or even guilty if we are not happy enough at this time of year.

The problem with insisting on being happy at Christmas is that we can inflict extra pain on ourselves and on others when we fail to achieve this ideal. Drinking too much, taking drugs, fighting with people and brooding and moping are all things we do to try to get rid of negative feelings. Very often, though, we would do better to allow ourselves simply to experience the negativity which, if it is allowed to, will pass. Allowing it to pass means not talking endlessly to yourself about what’s going wrong but getting on with whatever it is you need to do today.

Other people
Consider the matter of involvement with other people. This is the time of year when most of us have closer contact with colleagues, friends and relatives than at any other.

That’s fine. We need involvement – it’s good for our mental and physical health. But we need to be able to accept that not all of this involvement will be unalloyed fun.

For instance, some people simply do not enjoy office parties at which you get to spend ages listening to some very drunk person explaining to you how he would reorganise the purchasing department if only the management had the good sense to put him in charge.

Similarly, visits to relatives are not always an unalloyed pleasure around Christmas. Some visits will be boring, others irritating . But despite the irritations, we know involvement with other people can be life-saving. We are less likely to be depressed and less likely to take our own lives if we have good relationships with others.

But to be with people we have to have the capacity to put up with feeling negative some of the time. We humans are contrary. We can be a bit spiky with other humans. We tend to be motivated more by what we want than by what the other guy wants. So we’re not as easy to be with as we would like to imagine.

Develop tolerance
Therefore in order to be with people we need to develop a tolerance of discomfort and annoyance because these are all part of the package.

I think this is especially so around Christmas Day and St Stephens Day. What seems to happen is that people who can usually tolerate each other good humouredly for an hour at a time are put into a sort of social pressure cooker and made to stay there for hour after hour. The pressure rises as alcohol is applied. And yet if people can get through the day without the lid blowing off, they are likely to feel a glow of well-being for having been there.

But what will blow the lid off is the person who cannot tolerate being irritated or discomfited and who makes sure everybody else gets to know about it.

Now, I would like you, me and everybody else to have a happy Christmas. But if you are going to be unhappy or irritated, at least don’t worsen the experience by feeling angry, guilty or aggrieved about the fact.

In short, if you want to be unhappy or fed up go right ahead and be my guest. Bah. Humbug.