Larry Pesavento is a member of the TMC Advisory Council, a therapist, an author and the Founder of CHRISTOS - A Center for Men located in Cincinnati, Ohio.

"In 1993 Larry Pesavento started CHRISTOS men's center to help initiate a dialogue about how a man in this confusing, elderless world can find a sense of identity, place and pride. He had been counseling men for close to 25 years and learned from their struggles as well as his own. He then decided to write a book about the internal journey that a man must take in order to find a sense of peace and generativity. He felt called to write this book to share what he had learned as part of his own journey and struggle with manhood.

For more info about Larry Pesavento, visit his web-site, http://www
.christoscenter
.com/
E-mail: Larpes@aol.com

MENSIGHT will publish a chapter each month and we would like for you to submit suggestions and discuss your opinions on our Men's Issues Forum.

Chapter 13 - Part 1
Death

"Your time has come to die!" Tomme's father, as chief and elder, has just yelled that at Tomme. The other elders are also present and in agreement. The suddenness is ominous, as are the prospects. This happens in The Emerald Forest.

This will not be a very happy topic. The paradox of the initiatory journey becomes most acute at this time. The young man is not yet a man, though his body is manly. The adolescent, though needing friends, finds deep aloneness. The middle boy, who has needed a father, now is faced with other older men, strange elders. The youngest boy, who at times still feels he needs a protective mother, finds nobody to protect him.

I will talk now about pain, loss, and death. I will talk about entering the bull ring. I will talk of entering the ordeal.

According to the world, and the consensus reality that we live in, this topic will be absurd. The message is crazy. There is profound paradox here. Carl Jung exemplified this paradox in his therapeutic insight. When a friend would tell him good news, about a promotion or a financial windfall, he would usually reply, "I'm sorry to hear that. If we stick together we can get through it." However, if a friend would talk of supposedly bad news, like being laid off from a job, he would say," Let's open a bottle of wine. This is wonderful news; something good will happen now."

From the view of the marketplace, pain is something to be avoided, loss is tragedy, and death is a defeat. If manhood is based on the assumption that a true man is always on top and feeling good, then this journey to maturity starts to feel like a farce. So here we come to a very mysterious place. Here we come to the great divide between boyhood and manhood. Here we come to the place where pain cannot be avoided, if manhood is to be attained. Here we come to the place where death is part of the transition to a changed life, where the pain of loss is the gateway to transformation.

The stakes were so high here that indigenous peoples around the world incorporated their most serious rites to represent the change that was about to happen. It was vital to leave the boy behind. Any remnants of boyhood were considered too dangerous to the new man and to the tribe. Men were needed as fathers and elders, guaranteeing the physical and spiritual survival of the tribe. Boys had neither the strength, wisdom, or courage for this responsibility.

To these people, the harshest, most total symbol of change was death. In death, the old disintegrated. The spirit fled. Old relationships no longer had meaning. Old desires felt corrupted. Old rules no longer held. Nothing was as absolutely finished as something that died. Death was also the symbolic entry to the other side. That is why the boy had to die. His manhood could be found only on the other side.

Loss

In pre-modern times, the boy, who would become a man, was forced to experience death in its many guises. His first death was separation from the community: from his family, village, boyhood pleasures, marketplace goals and successes. He was separated from the whole way of life which was dependent on his family relations. Gone were his old routines and schedules. Gone were the familiar sights and sounds of everyday life, the familiar sounds of his mother's food preparations, the sights of commerce in the marketplace, the chatter of his friends. Gone was the familiar anchor, his bedding place, that he could return to every night for a sense of stability.

The initiate experienced the loss of his very boyhood, for he would not be treated like a boy again. The immediate boyhood loss he experienced was the loss of nurturance. He had no mother around to take away his pain or even sympathize. Nobody was there to give him a hug. He had no father around to share his pain or teach him how to handle it. He experienced for the first time the pain of his aloneness. This emotional pain far outweighed the physical pain of facing the elements or evading dangerous predators.

This aloneness, in symbolic death, was often characterized by being painted white, the indigenous people's color of death. If any villager did happen to spy an initiate, or come upon him, they were to treat him as dead and invisible. He was considered a ghost or disembodied spirit. He did not exist in the eyes of the community. Villagers ran from him or ignored him.

The initiate was often sent naked into the wilderness, his physical protection taken away. Sometimes, as happened to Nouk, he had just a loincloth. Even more harshly, his social face, his persona, his way of showing any connection to the community, was destroyed. He did not wear typical, common clothing that would identify him as a member of the tribe. He was a nobody, a nowhere man. It is interesting to note, here, that in sleeping dreams where one is naked the symbolism of nakedness is the loss of persona, the deprivation of role.

The initiate also experienced the death of his boyhood goals. He no longer had his father's goals to shoot for. No longer would he have his father there to give him direction and motivation, to structure his life by rules and expectations. He could no longer draw strength from his father's presence. He no longer had a father around to cover his mistakes in the hunt, or in the marketplace. He could no longer depend on his father's resources for survival.

To enter the ordeal he was often taken to the bush where he was taught that he would be killed or devoured by the gods or their animal spirits. The gods were depicted as terrible, mysterious creatures. The gods lived on the mysterious other side, close to death, and close to manhood. The gods were revealed to show the process was sacred. They were introduced to show that the journey of manhood ran through the community of the gods. The gods were the gatekeepers of manhood, and death was the gate.

Death was in his aloneness, in the absence of protection, in his deprivation of nurturance, in his confusion about how to survive, in his facing the terrifying gods. For the first time death and manhood became intertwined. Death marked the village boundaries, leaving his boyhood behind. Death mysteriously held the secret to his manhood.

Modern Wilderness

It is understandable why a boy decided to face the death experience in an elder culture. There was the social pressure of family and friends, but also the meaning that initiation held for a boy's future life. There were fathers and elders to prepare him and explain to him. There was a clear and satisfying sense of manhood on the other side. The boy saw men walking around him who were proof of the efficacy of the process.

But what about today? Why would any man willingly leave the modern village to take this terrifying psychological and spiritual journey? Leaving boyhood doesn't make any sense by today's village standards. Our society has no guidelines that consciously bring a man to inner manhood, painful or not. There is no definite demarcation symbolized by death. Our culture, except through the witness of our religious traditions, recognizes no reality beyond the village, no power beyond the marketplace. If somehow a man finds himself at the village boundary, feeling unsatisfied and alienated and confused, he can spend the rest of his life stuck there. He will stay an emotional adolescent at the crossroads, or he will regress back to the boy's world of his mother's dreams or his father's rules.

As I said, the elder points the way to another reality. Even though there is death, there is also the promise of a whole different life. The elder declares there is another reality that is actually more real than what is in the village. This other reality is represented by the wilderness, the other side. Yet the other reality today, as in the aboriginal mentality, involves giving up most of what a man formerly knew to be real. In modern times it means giving up what a man thought manhood to be.

An important modern elder, Thomas Moore, author of the book Care of the Soul, has written, "Care of the soul requires acceptance of all this dying. The temptation is to champion our familiar ideas about life right up to the last second, but it may be necessary in the end to give them up, to enter into the movement of death."

From a more secular viewpoint, yet showing archetypal dimensions, Ken Burns, the famous documentary guru, has said that "regardless of the progress of things, the essential human experience is of loss." He goes on to say that "there can't be any human equation, any truthfulness, without the awareness of loss."

The modern wilderness is in the geography of the inner life, which some people, such as Thomas Moore, call the soul. The modern ordeal brings one face to face with the wilderness of one's own soul. This wilderness is the other side of the reality we see outside, in the physical world. The father's voice speaks of the outer life of the village and marketplace. The time comes when we need to listen, instead, to the elder's voice, and give up the voice of the father. The elder speaks of the reality of the soul.

Up to this point in a modern man's journey there is nothing that has alerted a man to his inner life. He has not been introduced to his own wilderness within. When men are forced to look within, thrown into the inner wilderness by a separation experience, most see very little topography, and feel only emptiness. This is why the inner wilderness is often first depicted as a desert.

Men are little prepared for the ordeal of exploring their inner life. So most men have little idea of what they really want and need, outside of what is expected of them. They do not know what would satisfy their souls or their inner longings. Instead they often recite the routine formula for happiness: a 'good job' and 'taking care of my family'. Or a younger man will talk of finding the 'right woman' to love him. These goals are not bad. They are good goals in themselves. However they have no imprint of the wilderness journey. A modern man will often recite his goals with little enthusiasm or inner conviction because they don't come from his soul. They don't ignite his passion.

When I speak to a man who talks of his 'duty', or his 'responsibility', or about doing what is 'right', I find I am in the presence of an uninitiated man. He will be a good man, a sincere man. Yet he will parrot the patriarchs, not separating enough to be his own man.

To Carl Jung, the wilderness was the unconscious, including the collective unconscious. His message was clearly that we had to descend into the wilderness within if we were to find real life. A book title of his describes this journey, Modern Man In Search Of A Soul.

The modern ordeal of initiation involves moving voluntarily into the wilderness within. Today, the pain of modern man's ordeal involves the pain of the inner journey. To most men this inward journey means facing feelings and thoughts that reside inside, at the very edges of awareness. To most men this journey means exploring very alien territory.

It is interesting that both ancient elders and modern depth psychologists, as well as those in the mythopoetic men's movement, talk of going down as the way of going in to the wilderness. We need to go down into our feelings and intuitions to find our manhood. We have to go down into our emotional pain. We have to go down into the confusion and terror of first facing the feelings we were taught to ignore. This is invariably a terrible, frightening place when we first descend into it.

I am struck by the dreams of men in the middle of this struggle. Men at this time often dream of going down into caves or basements or sinkholes or over cliffs. It is often a frightening experience. Sometimes, when they see these images in their dreams, their dream self is afraid to go on. At other times they find themselves in the underworld against their will. Luke Skywalker had this going down experience when Yoda sent him into the cave filled with snakes, insects, darkness and his shadow self, Darth Vader.

This down place is especially frightening to men who were prematurely thrown into the ordeal as children. Premature separation is terribly traumatic. I talked of mothers who couldn't consistently nurture because of their own depression or physical illness. These are traumatic childhood separations. To these men the ordeal holds little hope, the inner life symbolizing tragedy. It is especially difficult to talk to a man about going down to his inner life when he associates this inner life with so much trauma. Men is this state need a great deal of preparation before they are ready for this ordeal so that they are not retraumatized.

For most men this going down is unnerving and terribly uncomfortable, but not traumatic. Forcing oneself into the presence of feelings and ideas that are foreign and unforeseen is not fun. Facing the loss of one's manly persona is very daunting. Looking at the possibility of ongoing dependence on a mother object is a shaming and dreadful thought. Starting to realize the losses of the past that have been stored away, unfelt, bodes a great deal of pain. Looking at the possibility of future separations brings no consolation. Looking at life without former structures seems overwhelming.

Depression

Most men experience the start of the emotional ordeal as a decline. They react to this initial part of the ordeal with depression. They are depressed because they have just consciously suffered a loss, a death. They feel victimized. They feel cut off, out of touch with their normal life and the life of the community. They are also depressed because they are at a loss to know how to handle this tangle of feelings they have fallen into.

Kindlon and Thompson talk of this depressive reaction occurring in many teen-age boys, without fathers or elders around to help them with this ordeal reaction. They explain that "Often a boy's depression is clearly based in loss. It may be the loss of a parent or friendship. Or it may be the loss of a role by which the boy defined himself, as in sports or academic activity, or even the loss of aspects of childhood that accompany growing up, such as the delirious excitement of opening holiday presents."

Though depression is endemic in younger and older men, men rarely recognize depression in themselves. Rarely will a man say he is sad, never that he is depressed. One reason is that the word depression for men represents some kind of weakness or defeat. As one man I worked with said, "I'm a wuss if I'm sad." To admit to sadness or depression is considered unmanly. It does not fit into the manly persona.

Also, depression is painful. It is the first pain of the ordeal. Men are not taught how to handle pain. The uninitiated boy inside will always feel that pain is unnecessary or shaming. The boy, who is unprepared for the ordeal by good fathering, will always instinctively run from the wilderness and the ordeal. He will run blindly without thinking. He will run from his depression and anyone who reminds him of it. Later, there will be many rationalizations for the fleeing. Some men will say that their pain is caused by someone else, possibly a wife or boss, and it's someone else's problem to fix. Others will talk of a long series of misfortunes and their need to find some relief rather than more pain. Others will say they just can't take the pain any more.

A man who is depressed is very confused and often angry at his own confusion. Men aren't supposed to be confused. A real man is supposed to be in control. He has his 'shit together', his 'ducks in a row'. He's 'on top of things'. He 'pulls his own strings'. He doesn't realize that confusion is part of his necessary depression. He doesn't realize that confusion is a natural reaction to the ordeal, and being at a loss is where he's supposed to be.

Most men, instead of accepting their confusion and loss, will rage against it. I talked about rage when I talked of addictions and rageaholics. Rage is the uninitiated reaction to pain. Rage medicates the pain while blaming it on somebody else. Rage is a retreat to the masculine persona, instead of feeling the powerlessness of the ordeal. Rage is a last resort.

In terms of the ordeal, rage effectively keeps a man a boy by blocking his path to the wilderness. Rage silences the elder voice and effectively stops any process of being with feelings. Consequently, many men end up alternating between the rage of fighting off their ordeal and the numbness of being cut off from their inner life. However, below every man's rage lurks his depression and confusion. Just at the other side of his rage stands the boundaries of the wilderness. Within the rage is a frightened boy yearning for a wise masculine guide to explain his pain. If he found this guide he wouldn't rage. He would cry. He might then use his anger to voluntarily set boundaries, separate, and explore the world beyond the village.

It would be easy to just pity the young, helpless, mother's boy if he weren't in a man's body. Unfortunately, a rage reaction to separation is dangerous. This man/boy can do a great deal of damage in his rages. Since an uninitiated man won't own his inner pain and accept his separation, he will ignorantly believe that others are causing his pain. This produces a kind of paranoia. A man will then try to eliminate, in a childish way, anything that he feels causes the pain of the moment. Unfortunately this includes loved ones and other innocent people.

If a man has some fathering, enough to dutifully hold his rage inside, his rage will often go into his body. Rage turned inward fuels a deeper depression. Most men will experience this deep depression as fatigue, physical powerlessness, and lack of any motivation. This is a sign the depression is going deeply into the body. The pain can then turn to illness. This may explain why men live on average 6-8 years less than women. Paradoxically, the men who live a shorter time are often the ones who are more responsible about their anger. I have talked to many sensitive men whose responsible, unguided frustration is slowly killing them.

Men are taught to ignore feelings of depression, while it is acceptable for a woman to admit sadness. Women can cry. Men can't. In the case of chronic depression, fighting or ignoring the threshold of initiation can lead ultimately to physical death.

I mentioned that women can admit to depression much more easily in our culture. Because of this, for a long time women were seen by the dark patriarchy as the only emotional weaklings who were depressed. As a result, the definition of depression and its symptoms have been feminized. Even in psychological circles, the definition of depression describes feminine depression. Therefore, another reason a man does not realize he is depressed, is because he is observing the wrong symptoms. Where a woman strongly feels melancholy, a man will feel only emptiness. Where a woman may react to depression with silence, a man will often react with irritability and anger. Where a woman can have an illness that keeps her from working, a man feels only a deep fatigue while he is working. While both may feel a lessening of sexual drive, to a man this is a sign of loss of manhood or loss of love, unrelated to depression. It is easier for a man to lose his depression in addiction, and more accepted. And for a man, his lack of motivation and direction may have been coming on for most of his adult life, making his depressive situation feel normal.

This last condition, a chronic, low level depression, is endemic in our society. This is the depression that Terrence Real, in his book I Don't Want To Talk About It, talks about when he estimates that 50-80% of men have a hidden depression. This 'normal' depression goes unnoticed, something like the water is unnoticed by the fish. Real talks of men's depression being covered over by addiction or rage or numbness, therefore unnoticed and untreated. He calls this omnipresent condition 'covert depression'. The clinical name is disthymia.

I believe this depression is caused primarily, not by traumatic, early separation from mother, but from the lack of any guidance in the psychological initiation process. Depression is separation with no next steps. It is loss without a leader. Initiation with no elder. The need for guidance only becomes apparent when there is sudden separation. Then a man is totally unprepared for a feeling of devastating loss. He is totally in the dark about what is happening to him.

Most men who come in to my office are often extremely depressed. This desperate depression will be the only motivation to cause him to take such a countercultural risk. These men have been prematurely thrown into the ordeal with little or no preparation from fathers and elders. Their rage has been spent with no results. They are confused, alone, and terribly sad. They experience a great deal of fatigue. They have little motivation for anything. They have a hard time concentrating on work. They paradoxically have sleep problems, most often insomnia. They have often lost their appetite and many pounds. These are the classic signs of a clinical depression for men.

These men have been separated from the familiar with no warning. They never realized this could happen to them. They never realized this should happen to them. They are going through a death experience. They feel dead. Their pain is the only sign they are alive.

Larry Pesavento ©2005