The lack of an internal boundary inevitably leads to control or withdrawal. If there is no membrane between you and whatever external stimulus gets thrown at you, then you attempt to regulate your own level of comfort or discomfort by managing the stimulus.

The answer is complex, but one aspect of it is this: all therapists, under patriarchal mores, are coded as female, and as such they are subject to the same devaluing and intimidation as are traditional wives.

It is this unacknowledged superimposition of grandiosity on shame, this burying of hurt boy inside hurting man, the sweet vulnerable self wrapped in the armor of denial, walled off behind business, work, drink, or rage, the hidden “feminine” inside the bluff “masculine,” that is the truth about men which dare not be uttered. And why must it remain

Women need help establishing a space in which their truth is voiced openly and not met with reprisals. And men need help holding fast, without recourse to the age-old responses of discounting, retaliating, or running away.

We enter life whole and connected, and we operate best when richly attached. Intimacy is our natural state as a species, our birthright.

You cannot speak of women as oppressed without speaking, then, of the consequences. You cannot say that women learn to be indirect without then saying that they learn to manipulate. You cannot say that they stop telling the truth without saying that they lie. Men know very well that women lie to them, manage them, and virtually every man I have

own account, simply could not take it in. Surely, Freud

remember that historically, woman’s participation in domestic life, both logistical and psychological, has been mandatory; men’s has been discretionary. This is not a criticism; it is a simple statement of fact.

We live in an antirelational, vulnerability-despising culture, one that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection but actively fears them.