Understanding men
I had never before met a woman who understood men so thoroughly until recently, when I sat down for a very enlightening two-hour conversation with Sophie Sim Bate, 42, a psychologist with a degree from UP and an MA in counseling psychology at the Ateneo. Sophie — this engaging, insightful, intelligent, slim-framed woman with a big, fat sense of humor—speaks of men with more understanding and respect than any other woman I’ve ever met. Most women, when they speak of men, prefer simply to whine. Sophie’s eyes sparkle, like she has deciphered the encrypted road map to understanding the male psyche. And she has.
“It is easier to be a woman in the
This was a revelation.
From the onset of their lives, Sophie continued, “Men are told to work and establish their kingdom. In our culture, traditional roles remain very strong. The responsibility of providing for a family is heavily ingrained in every man. That is why men are defined by what they do for a living. They are outward-bound, activity-bound. Men are not about relationships and relationship skills. For them, it is still about providing. Women, on the other hand, are defined by relationships.”
Sophie explained that society doesn’t encourage men to be in touch with their feelings; that’s why women, who were raised to be connected to their feelings and are more used to processing them, become enlightened much faster on issues that concern their options and their relationships.
“Men are caught in a double-bind,” Sophie said sympathetically. “It looks like they have the power while they really don’t because they have boxed themselves in to the ‘provider’ mode. They are more trapped than women because, now, women have a choice of whether to stay home, be housewives, or strike out and have careers. This liberation has actually come about from so much female oppression a century ago, so that rules started breaking as a consequence.
“Women became conscious earlier. They became unstuck to their traditional roles faster. Men, on the other hand, still struggle with this. While we see more and more men opting to leave the workplace and be househusbands, they remain a negligible minority.”
But however stark these basic differences between men and women are, their journey to self-fulfillment, to self-actualization and happiness are essentially the same. It must be noted, however, that they always take different routes. And because the avenues where men and women intersect and become enmeshed are usually relationships, this is what Sophie has focused on.
Through her many years in practice and via the countless couples she has counseled, Sophie has observed that “women are too quick to share everything. And this is because they live through their emotions and their relationships. Often when couples come to me, normally that would mean that the wives succeeded in dragging the husbands over. The men don’t talk; the women cut them off. These strong women put words in their mouths, so they opt not to talk. You see, we women poke too much and most of the time it’s the manner of asking that just throws men off. They fear that what they say will be used against them later on and that they will even have to defend themselves against it. This creates a gap, and that’s putting it lightly.”
“Elbow remarks” is how Sophie describes such “verbal siko,” or the verbal hits that couples throw at each other once this gap is created. “When couples like this are around others, in a group or in some public gathering, everybody feels the hits that they trade. Talking slyly about each other this way becomes wired into them because the anger escalates, resentment builds up and the relationship eventually unravels. Sadly, the more you repress something, the stronger it will come back later on. If you neglect each other, then affairs will happen.”
Sophie and fellow psychologists Dido Gustilo, Bernie Nepomuceno and Rose Marie Yenko have been offering the public the Friends of Jung Society Seminar Series, which are courses providing rich opportunities for exploration, discovery and appreciation of one’s personal journey towards wholeness by using lectures and activities influenced by Jungian psychology. The seminars are open to men and women. But they also offer sessions specially tailored to the needs of men. This series is called “King or Hunter: Exploring the Masculine Self (Men’s Workshop 1),” a basic two-day workshop that provides rich opportunities for the exploration of the masculine self. This aims to address questions such as — to paraphrase Sam Keen — How does it feel to be a man these days? Is manhood celebrated? What are the issues special to men? What is the male psyche? What are its tasks and landmarks?
The second men’s workshop is called “In Search of the Holy Grail.” This one is a two-day workshop in a continuing series of explorations of the masculine self. Using the story of Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail as a starting point, this workshop provides participants with an opportunity to examine the deeper layers of the male psyche. It aims to help participants find out exactly what happens when a man looks deeply within himself. It explores questions such as: What happens to a man when he decides to live according to the demands of his innermost self instead of the demands of his culture (or wife, or mother)? And what happens inside a man when he relates with the different women in his life?
Sophie said that in these workshops she and her colleagues were pleasantly surprised to find men opening up among other men and even commenting at the end of the session that the talk portion was too short. She surmised that this happens because the facilitators are non-threatening and the setting is not inhibiting. “They talk because we are not married to them,” she jested.
She added that when couples come together, they do so bringing their individual experiences and histories into the relationship. “These are two human natures coming together.” After the honeymoon phase is over, where the initial intoxicating emotions are overcome by reality, problems can arise. She was quick to add that relationships are almost never about love; it is what one brings into it. It is about how well one understands oneself. “Each one has a psychic need to understand his essence and actualize that. One has to start owning what is his and if he comes from a dysfunctional background and has not processed this, he will be passing it on to others.”
She says the job of psychologists is to determine where couples come together and where it is that they have developed gaps. “You know, this is something that is common across cultures,” she says. “In any relationship there is always something that works and something that doesn’t. All relationships make you look at you. It is no use running away from it. You have to start looking at yourself and how you love. We all assume that we are good at loving, but maybe we’re not.”
In any relationship, every assumption is challenged sooner or later. Relationships teach us, not about the other person, but about ourselves, as seen through the other person.
“We all have baggage,” Sophie said. “All of us have been hurt and scarred one way or another. Nobody grows up unwounded and one’s template is always his parents, his family of origin. If he is still attached to his mother or father and has not grown up then he will cause wounding to others. We are not only affected by how are parents treated us but also how they treated each other. Real union between couples comes only when there is mending.”
She said each of us must face our own issues and mend them, otherwise we may never succeed at making our relationships work. Many think choosing another partner will give them a happier life, but they soon find the exact same problems recur in their succeeding relationships; the same wounds cause the same problems when dealing with others. What ensues is a succession of partners and broken unions. Until the person stops running away from his own issues and grows up, this pattern will perpetuate.
“To everyone must come an individuation process.” Usually, this is triggered by “an event big enough to make you look inside,” Sophie said. Normally it is a powerful process or challenge that rocks your life and everyone around it. It may be losing a job, retirement, divorce or the death of a close family member. For some, it happens around midlife.
“Midlife crisis is about recapturing yourself,” she explains. “It’s about pushing to be whole. You start to question your life. You look for what you’ve left behind and reassess everything, oftentimes grappling with the fact that your life is half over. You ask yourself what it is you want and what it is you’re looking for. It may be as simple as trying to have as much fun as you did before marriage and parenthood came or as complicated as desiring a career change. More than time-bound, midlife is incident-bound.”
Burdened with traditional, constricting roles; overwhelmed by female intrusion into their private lives and thoughts; bamboozled by partners second-guessing their motives and intentions; subjected to women’s unrelenting analysis and criticism — men struggle constantly just to be. So how can we expect them to be more in touch with their feelings and be sensitive to our own if we don’t give them the chance, the space, the time and the quiet to do exactly that?
So instead of whining about the way men are and making a sport out of it, it’s time we all stopped and listened.
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Those interested in attending a Friends of Jung Society Seminar can contact Sophie Sim Bate at 0917-5276279.
E-mail the author at cecilelilles@yahoo.com.
