Men start being measured from a very early age. I don’t know when it starts. Certainly by the time we are in high school it is well in place. How fast can you run? How much can you lift? How good are your grades? What awards have you earned?
These external indicators of masculine identity continue as we grow older. How much to you earn? How good is your job? What kind of car do you drive? How big is your house? How pretty is your wife? The list seems endless.
All of the men with whom I work are burdened with being measured. Some of them question the validity of the measures used. A man who has worked hard all of his life, who has earned a lot of money, built a thriving business, and who has been ruthless in doing what needed to be done to “get ahead” now wonders about the point of it all. His relationship with his wife is empty and he finds himself involved in an affair. He barely knows his children.
Another man discovers that he is infertile. He knows how important it is to his wife to have a family. He thinks she would be better of with someone else. He feels that he’s worth nothing to her now. He doesn’t measure up. He wonders if his virility is the true measure of a man.
Other men cannot understand their partner’s unhappiness in their relationship. They work hard, don’t go out with the boys too often, bring home a good paycheck, and do their part around home. What more could she want? The fact that they have never examined their inner life or talked much about their feelings doesn’t occur to them as a possible source of relationship problems. Nobody ever measured that ability before so why should it come up now in an assessment of who they are?
For “New Age” men there is a subtle trap. They know something about feelings and their inner life. They know that sharing these things is important to a woman. They work hard at being the kind of man that a woman wants. The trap is that they are doing this for her. They give her the authority to measure how well they’re doing. Robert Bly calls them “soft men”. They are a kind of “mother’s boy”, doing what has to be done to win her approval. They’ve exchanged being measured by dollars for being measured by feeling output. “See how well I’m doing! Of course you will like me now.”
Another form of this trap is in being sensitive to a woman’s needs and feelings. Responding well to what’s going on in her life is a new measure of male adequacy.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with being financially successful, with being aware of your inner life, or with being sensitive to another’s feelings. The problem arises when any of these becomes the measure of a man. The problem is that someone else does the measuring, even if they don’t do that in an obvious way. Even if we think that we’re being who we want to be the question must be asked: who has set the standards?
I believe that we are beset by ever changing standards. Those of us who are involved in the men’s movement may wonder how we measure up if we haven’t gone on a “vision quest”, if we don’t drum, if we haven’t attended a “warrior’s weekend” or been “initiated” by a group of “elders.”
These questions have a great deal of personal significance. Four years ago I had a serious heart attack. I had always taken pride in my level of activity. I liked to hike, to cycle, to paddle, and to be generally active in the outdoors. Suddenly one of the important measures of my masculinity, my physical health, was called into question. Three years ago I was fired from my job as executive director of a counselling centre. I wasn’t able to find “real” employment. My identity as a successful professional was gone. Two years ago a relationship of five years was ended. I could no longer measure my competence as a man in reference to a woman. Health, position, relationship: all measures of a man. They all were in question.
For my own emotional well-being I had to find something in my self which I could hold on to; something which I knew defined me in spite of the apparent collapse of many external measures. That “something” is a sense of personal integrity.
Integrity is a difficult concept to define. I believe that people have an intuitive sense of what it means. I’ve found in my practice that when I talk to a client about their integrity being “on the line”, they know what I mean. We’re dealing with something “core”, with some kind of centre to their personality, to their sense of themselves.
Movies set in the late 1800’s, whether on the frontiers or in the city, often presented an image of men who were “as good as their word.” What they said and what they did were consistent with each other. This is integrity.
But these were usually simple men, men who didn’t have much psychological complexity. The issues seemed simple. “I’ll save you or I’ll die”—and he would. In a world of moral, psychological, and relationship complexity achieving a sense of integrity is more difficult. It requires more work.
The dictionary definition of integrity deals with “moral soundness”, “wholeness, completeness”, “the quality or state of being unimpaired.” Integrity is an ethical concept. It has to do with one’s values and beliefs, principles which guide action. It also is a unifying concept. It is through integrity that a sense of wholeness or completeness is achieved. And it is an energizing concept. Integrity removes blocks and allows one to act whole-heartedly.
The word “integrity” is related to “integration”, which has to do with the act of co-ordinating personality and environment into a balanced whole. It also has to do with the act of co-ordinating various psychological reactions into a balanced whole. Thus, achieving integrity is not just an inner journey but is also a journey into the world. It involves creating a balanced relationship between the self and the world of relationships and things. Integrity is an ecological concept.
The psychologist Eric Erikson has stated that achieving integrity is a developmental task which is to be accomplished during the later stages of life. It is a task of old age. He believes that in later life a person attempts to discover the principles for living which can be gleaned from changing experience but which, in themselves, prove to be unchangeable in essence. This is the wisdom of elders.
I don’t believe that we can wait until old age to be concerned with integrity. I think that it comes into play as soon as the ability to think and to reflect on experience is developed. As one gets older there is more complexity of information regarding self, other and world to be integrated.
There are many ways to avoid achieving integrity. I think that the chief of these is an unwillingness to face anxiety and confusion. Within anxiety and confusion hides the complexity of personal and relationship issues which need to be understood in order to be integrated into a meaningful whole.
Clients often use cliche’ concepts, stereotypes, or stock phrases to avoid their anxiety and confusion. This is the appeal of all forms of fundamentalism: it frees you from the necessity of doing your own work–and it deprives you of the opportunity to achieve integrity. A client who tells me that “men don’t talk about themselves” is drawing upon images of men which he learned in his family and which have received a great deal of cultural support. He uses these images to avoid the anxiety of looking inside himself and putting what he sees out into the relationship world.
Another way to avoid anxiety and confusion is to “act out”. Rather than containing the feeling so that it can be examined and understood the temptation is to “do something.” This is an especially male temptation. Getting busy, getting violent, having an affair, finding distraction in work or sports or addictions, are all ways to avoid (temporarily) anxiety and confusion.
A third way, also popular with men, is to simply be unconscious. We try to not look at the sources of anxiety and confusion and hope that they will go away. Men with whom I work have often never taken the time to think about themselves, their reactions, feelings, desires and inner conflicts. They have been too busy following the cultural script which gets them out in the world accomplishing things.
There’s no simple formula for achieving integrity. I know that doing so involves the courage to honestly examine one’s self. This may come about through regularly writing in a journal, through meditation, through talking to friends or a therapist. It also involves finding ways to get feedback about who we are so that we can avoid self-deception. This may come about through a careful listening to what our significant others say about us. It may come through working with dreams. It may come from the feedback of friends or a therapist.
I also believe that achieving integrity involves a conscious examination of cultural beliefs and images. Acting on these beliefs and images, letting them be the organizing principles of our lives, causes us to be undifferentiated from the mass. That path skews the balance between personality and environment in favour of environment. Achieving integrity means taking our own experience seriously and determining how it squares up with cultural beliefs and images. Where it doesn’t fit calls for a challenge to those cultural beliefs and images. Achieving integrity is, to some degree, a counter-cultural activity.
For me the measure of a man is the degree of his integrity. It isn’t something which can be measured from the outside. It can only be known from the inside. I can know about another’s integrity only insofar as he is willing to be intimate with me.
One of the great paradoxes of relationships is that the more intimate I am with another person the more significant they become to me. And the more significant they become, the more they mean to me, the more difficult it becomes to be intimate. The reason for this is that when another person means a lot to us we want to please them. We tend to modify what we say about ourselves in order to keep the relationship secure. That is why relationships often reach a state of boredom: the risk of greater intimacy is too great.
But the failure to take that risk costs in a loss of integrity. Taking those risks exposes deeper and deeper layers of our selves to the other. Having the courage to take those risks requires the ability to stand on your own feet. As soon as your self-esteem depends on the response of another to your self-disclosure you’ve put your self in a position of emotional blackmail. You have given the other person the control over your own life. Thus, the very act of self-disclosure to a significant other involves integrity. You may not be comfortable with what you’ve discovered about your self but it is part of who you are at the moment. To hide that from another involves a loss of integrity.
I often hear clients say “I can’t tell her that because she might leave me if she knew—-and I couldn’t live without her.” At the same time they know that if they continue to hide from her they will be living a lie. There will be a part of who they are which will never be known. There will be a part of themselves of which they are ashamed. Shame is the fear of the other’s response. It is based on the double illusion that our happiness depends on the other’s response and the illusion that we can control what that response will be.
Disclosing ourselves to a significant other gives us the opportunity to receive feedback at deeper levels. When the feedback isn’t contaminated by the other person’s issues it is an important source of information to be used to achieve greater integrity. The feedback can help us see blind spots and patterns in our behaviour/feelings of which we are unaware. We can then begin the task of understanding these and integrating them into the greater whole of our identity. Ultimately, the task of achieving personal integrity is a task which is best carried out within an intimate community.
