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Why Men Frighten Women and Women Shame Men and How It Destroys Relationships

Read Jed’s new book, Mr. Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the Irritable Male Syndrome on Scribd at: http://tinyurl.com/MrMeanBook or get a “hard copy” by going to http://www.menalive.com/mrmean.htm

Jed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a marriage and family counselor for the last 44 years. He is the author of 8 books, including Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Male Menopause, and The Irritable Male Syndrome. He offers counseling to men, women, and couples in his office in California or by phone with people throughout the U.S. and around the world. To receive a free E-book on Men’s Health and a free subscription to Jed’s e-newsletter go to www.MenAlive.com. If you are looking for an expert counselor to help with relationship issues, write Jed@MenAlive.com

The primary cause of relationship breakdown is emotional disconnection. We don’t grow apart because love dies. Love dies because we grow apart. I’ve found that the key reason this occurs is that men cause women to become afraid and women cause men to feel ashamed. This usually occurs without either the man or the woman knowing what is going on. Without understanding the Fear/Shame dynamic, too many otherwise wonderful relationships die. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

How Unexpressed Fear and Shame Can Hurt a Relationship

My wife, left a note for me the other day. It said, “Jed, you forgot to lock the door again when you want out the other day. Love, Carlin.” I read the note, had a quick thought about trying to remember when else I forgot to lock the door when I left, and quickly forgot the whole thing.

This morning, Carlin, asked me about the note. “Why didn’t you respond to the note?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t think it needed a response,” I said. I could feel my discomfort rising.

“Well, usually when I leave you a note, you at least acknowledge it. I’m upset about your leaving the door unlocked, but even more upset that you just ignored my note,” she said.

I thought to myself, “Damn, what’s the big deal here? Why’s she getting on my case?” but I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything, though as usual I felt like I was being chastised by the school principal. These exchanges generally lead to

an emotional chill that comes over our relationship and both of us end up feeling hurt and misunderstood.

But Carlin, continued, and said something that broke the ice and lead to a greater connection between us. “It’s really scary for me when I come home to find the door open,” she told me. I could hear the fear in her voice. “I go around the house wondering if there might be an intruder inside. It’s really creepy.”

As soon as Carlin talked about her fear, I was able to feel my shame. “Protecting you and keeping you safe is one of the most important things in my life,” I thought. “When I feel I’ve let you down, I feel ashamed,” I told her. “I realize the way I often handle shame is to block out the incident and erase it from my mind. I really do understand your fear and will be sure to lock the doors before I leave for the day.”

For most of us, there are thousands of little hurts that over time can undermine a relationship. Like me, most men are not aware of the ways in which their behavior can frighten women. And most women are not aware of the things they do that trigger shame in men. It’s also true that women do things to frighten men and men do things to shame women.

What I’ve learned from working with clients for more than 40 years is that it’s useless to try and assign blame. Understanding the fear/shame cycle is the first step towards changing it so that it doesn’t destroy our most precious relationships.

Note: I talk about things “men” and “women” do in this paper. Please remember that I’m not talking about all men or all women. I’m talking about groups of men and women or tendencies that men and women have. We all recognize the truth of the statement “men are taller and stronger than women.” I’m more than aware that at five feet five inches tall, there are many women taller than me and I’m sure more than a few are stronger. So, I’m sure there are many women who will have a greater identification with what I say about “men” and men who will feel more aligned with what I say about “women.”

What is Fear?

Fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat. It is a basic survival mechanism occurring in response to a specific stimulus, such as pain or the threat of danger. Some psychologists such Paul Ekman have suggested that fear is one of a small set of basic or innate emotions.

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This set also includes such emotions as joy, sadness, and anger. Fear should be distinguished from the related emotional state of anxiety, which typically occurs without any external threat. Additionally, fear is related to the specific behaviors of escape and avoidance, whereas anxiety is the result of threats which are perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable. Worth noting is that fear almost always relates to future events, such as worsening of a situation, or continuation of a situation that is unacceptable. What is Shame?

The dictionary defines Shame as follows:

1. The painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous, etc. done by oneself or another.

2. A fact or circumstance bringing disgrace or regret.

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But, unlike fear, shame is much more difficult for people to recognize and acknowledge. “One of the most striking contradictions that I have come across as a therapist is the discrepancy between the centrality of the affect of shame in humans, and the lack of attention shame has received in the study and practice of psychology,” says psychotherapist Marc Miller. “Shame is also avoided in the "real" world as well. In fact, most of us feel shame about feeling shame. As a result shame is rarely acknowledged to others, or even to oneself.” 

Silvan Tomkins describes the experience of shame clearly. “If distress is the affect of suffering, shame is the affect of indignity, transgression and of alienation. Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of man.... shame is felt as inner torment, a sickness of the soul....the humiliated one feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity and worth."

Why Women Are Vulnerable to Fear

Although both men and women can be moved by fear, women are more vulnerable to fear and react more strongly (We’ll see in a moment that men are more vulnerable to shame). Research shows that baby girls, from the day they are born, are more sensitive to isolation and lack of contact.

This sensitivity evolved as an important survival mechanism to protect vulnerable females and keep them in contact with those who could keep them from harm. Think of a female in our evolutionary past who needed the protection of the group in order to keep her alive and well, particularly when she had small children who were dependent upon her.

A female’s primary need is to be cherished. From the moment of birth until the day she dies she needs to feel that “special someone” will protect and care for her and no other. Whenever, this connection is threatened she feels anxiety and fear. “Over the millennia, females developed a kind of internal GPS that keeps them aware of closeness and distance in all their relationships,” say Patricia Love and Steven Stosny, authors of How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It. “When a woman feels close she can relax; when she feels distant, she gets anxious.”

Why Men Are Vulnerable to Shame

Although the human egg is microscopic, it is large enough to house 250,000 sperm. Eggs weigh 85,000 times as much as sperm. Think how you’d feel if you had to merge with someone who was 85,000 times heavier than you? Now, think of the competition involved in mating. There are fifty million to five hundred million sperm per ejaculation. How would you feel competing against those numbers for the prized egg?

Since it is the female that carries the egg, males are the ones who have to compete with each other in order to be chosen by the female. Sexual competition is a replay of fertilization itself. Numerous males, like small, hyperactive sperm, compete among themselves for access to females.

Males often remember, with a great deal of shame, walking across a room and asking the “cute” girl to dance, only to be turned down and having to walk back to his seat feeling that all eyes are on him and imagining people saying to themselves, “loser, loser, loser.” This is the essence of male shame. We are always in competition with other males to be chosen by a female who can trigger our feelings of insufficiency and inadequacy with a casual shake of her head. And our shame deepens as others witness our retreat.

Can you imagine how you would feel if you were forced to compete your whole life and had hundreds and hundreds of small and large rejections, many of them crushing? Women, of course, have their own issues to deal with, but see if you can let yourself feel the shame that haunts men.

Men’s basic need is for respect, just as women’s basic need is to be cherished. He needs to feel like a winner, that he can beat the competition and

be the chosen one. From the time he is born until the day he dies, he is vulnerable to shame and loss of face.

“Shame,” says author Merle Fossum, “is feeling alone in the pit of unworthiness. Shame is not just a low reading on the thermometer of self esteem. Shame is something like cancer—it grows on its own momentum.” Both shame and guilt are ways in which people experience feeling bad. Yet the two are quite different. Guilt involves feeling bad about what we do or fail to do. Shame is feeling bad about who we are, about our very being. The shame that men experience is a kind of soul murder, undermining the foundations of our masculine selves.

The powerful impact of shame on male irritability, anger, and violence is captured by James Gilligan, M.D. who has spent his professional career working with violent men. “I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo this ‘loss of face’—no matter how severe the punishment, even if it includes death.” It’s no wonder men become angry, irritable, even violent, when they feel the impact of shame.

How Men Unknowingly Frighten the Women They Love When a woman tries to talk to her man about the ways he triggers fear in her, he is usually surprised. “I never hit her,” one man told me. “I can’t imagine why she could possibly be afraid of me.” Here are a number of the ways that men can, unknowingly, cause fear:

1. His size and strength

Men tend to be bigger and stronger than women. Many women have grown up around males who could threaten and intimidate them just through their size and strength. A woman may not even be aware of the fear that may be present in her just being around a person who, if he chose to do so, could hurt her.

2. His voice

I often hear from women that when a man raises his voice, she feels fear. He may not even be aware that he is speaking any differently than normal. And he may be right. The male voice is low and can be menacing, without him even being aware of it. Like other male mammals, men are equipped to “roar.” From the time we are little boys we compete with other males and demonstrate our superiority, partially, through the sound of our voices.

“The angry male voice gets deeper, louder, and more menacing,” say psychologists Patricia Love and Steven Stosny, “because it is designed to invoke

fear of physical harm, whether he wants it to or not. Angry women can sound shrill or unpleasant, but rarely will their voices invoke fear of physical harm in a grown man.”

It may not take much increase of volume or intensity for the male voice to frighten a woman.

3. His eyes

When my wife and I would get into a fight, even a slight one, she would tell me I would get “beady eyed.” She said it frightened her more than anything I would say. For the longest time I had no idea what she was talking about. I would insist that my eyes didn’t change. I was just looking at her, not doing something to frighten her with my eyes.

However, when I saw two boxers at the weigh-in getting ready for a fight, I understood what she was talking about. I realized that each boxer was glaring at the other, clearly trying to demonstrate his superiority and intimidate his opponent.

Throughout our evolutionary history men have had to compete with other men for resources, for women, for power and glory. We don’t realize that when we turn that “beady-eyed” gaze on a woman, it will frighten her.

4. His anger

For most guys, anger is an emotion we know quite well. Many of us grew up around angry men. We played at anger when we were kids, roughhousing with our buddies. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a woman tell me, “I can’t talk to him without him getting angry.” While the man responds, “I wasn’t angry-- I was just talking.” Clearly, men often don’t realize the extent of their anger or how it impacts the woman in their lives.

“Most men have no idea how frightening, threatening, and terrorizing their anger is to women,” say Drs. Love and Stosny. “Even when the anger is not directed at the woman, it still has a frightening effect. And if he has a habit of overreacting and getting angry on a regular basis, she lives in a constant state of fear and alertness.”

5. His Jekyll & Hype changeability

One of the things that caused major problems with my wife and I was my rapid mood changes. “You’re angry, accusing, argumentative and blaming one moment,” she would tell me. “The next minute you’re buying me flowers, cards, leaving loving notes with smiles and enthusiasm. I never know what to expect with you.” I was aware that I was easily triggered into anger, but I wasn’t aware

of how extreme it was. I was also aware that I tried to “make things up” to Carlin after I’d blasted her with my rage, but wasn’t aware of how “crazy-making” that was for her.

She’d tell me my anger would make her close up like a clam to protect herself. But even my gestures of love were difficult for her. “I never know what to trust with you. Just when I let my guard down and trust your love and kindness, you erupt again and I feel hurt even more.”

I hear from many women who have had the same experience. “He’s like a Jekyll & Hyde personality,” one woman told me. “One minute he’s loving and kind. The next minute he acts like he hates me. I walk on egg-shells all the time with him. I never know which man I’ll have to deal with.”

Men’s reactivity may, in fact, be inborn. “A male’s hair-trigger propensity for hyper-arousal has a distinct survival advantage,” say Love and Stosny. “Due to his greater strength and muscle mass, the male is better equipped than the female to fight off predators. Since the primary predators of early humans stalked and attacked stealthily, males needed to respond with fight-or-flight behavior in a fraction of a second.”

Unfortunately, too many men mistake their wives for a charging tiger. By the time they calm down and realize they are not being attacked, they have yelled at the woman they love the most.

6. His emotional withdrawal

We all thrive when we feel emotionally connected to our partner, but women have a special need for this connection. Most women have a terror of being abandoned. This probably comes from her evolutionary past where a woman was easy pray on the savannas of Africa without a man to protect her. His emotional presence reassured her that she was important to him and she could count on him for his protection and support.

No one leaves a long-term relationship without trying to fix the disconnection that is causing the unhappiness and pain. Although more women now leave their marriages than do men, when women leave, they most often tell me that he left the relationship before she did. He may have been there physically, but emotionally he had checked out long ago.

What makes marriage miserable for a woman is the isolation she feels when her husband seems to leave the marriage emotionally. What neither realizes is that his withdrawal is a response to his increasing feelings of shame. The only way he may know to protect himself from shame is to close down emotionally. Once again, his shame triggers her fear and the downward cycle can bring down even the most secure marriage.

How Women Unknowingly Shame the Men They Love

1. Her “Size” and “Power”

When told about the things that shame men, women are incredulous. As with male strength and size, women have an inherent power that is so obvious no one is aware of it. Think about this. All of us are born from the body of a woman, but only men (in heterosexual relationships) have an intimate relationship with a person who is the same sex as the mother.

All men have a body memory of being small, vulnerable, and totally dependent on a woman who is big, strong, and imposing. He may appear big and strong as an adult, but inside he still feels small and vulnerable. He never forgets that it was a woman who held his life in her hands, whose displeasure might cause her to abandon him to his death. This creates an inherent sense of shame that men feel when they are around women, but it’s a shame that neither the man nor the woman is conscious of him having.

2. Her siren call to return to the womb

Women also trigger men’s desire to return to the safety, comfort, and warmth he remembered as a child—even back to the memory of being in the womb. I remember many times in my life feeling crushed by my battles in the world and wanting nothing more to return to the comfort and warmth of the womb. But the thought was so frightening and shameful, I immediately blocked in out.

If I could have allowed the thought to surface it might have been something like this: “It’s so damn hard being a man in the world, always competing, always fighting my way to the top, always struggling to make a living and supporting a family. I just want to rest. I want to crawl up in my wife’s arms and let her hold me. But if I ever let myself do that I know I’d never want to leave. I’d forfeit my manhood, she would hate me, cast me out, and that would be the end of me. I’ve got to erase that thought and never let it return.”

Anthropologist David Gilmore has studied male/female relationships in cultures throughout the world. He recognizes this male ambivalence as being at the core of male/female conflict. In his book Misogyny: The Male Malady, he tells as that male anger towards women comes from his tremendous need for her and his shame at being needy.

There are, he tells us, “unconscious wishes to return to infancy, longings to suckle at the breast, to return to the womb, the powerful temptation to surrender one’s masculine autonomy to the omnipotent mother of childhood fantasy.” Men long for the connection they had, or wished for, as children but are deeply ashamed of that need.

3. Her power to choose or reject

Men never forget that they must be chosen by a woman. They must compete with other men and constantly be trying to “get the woman he wants to want him.” We all remember the terror of walking across the dance floor and asking the woman we want to dance. She could light up our life with a “yes” or crush us with rejection. If we won the prized woman, our battle wasn’t over. We had to please her and continue to please her or we might lose her to another.

Social psychologist Sam Keen captures the male longing for, and terror of, women in his book Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man. “If the text of my life was ‘successful, independent man,’ the subtext was ‘engulfed by WOMAN.”

Keen goes on to describe the ways in which the archetypal WOMAN (and hence all real-life women to a significant degree) rule our lives. “The secret men seldom tell, and often do not know (consciously) is the extent to which our lives circle around our relationships to WOMAN…She is the audience before whom the dramas of our lives are played out. She is the judge who pronounces us guilty or innocent. She is the Garden of Eden from which we are exiled and the paradise for which our bodies long. She is the goddess who can grant us salvation and the frigid mother who denies us.”

4. Her cutting words

Often women assume that men are “tough” and her words won’t hurt him. In part this is a result of our inaccurate gender assumptions. Many believe that women are more delicate and easily hurt and men are stronger and can take more punishment. The truth is that men are very vulnerable to women’s words. He is likely to cover his pain because he feels ashamed to admit that what she said may have cut him to the core.

Patricia Love and Steven Stosny remind us that “Words hurt. Words destroy. Words can kill a relationship.” In their book, How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It, they detail some of the most common things that women say that trigger shame in a man including:

Correcting what he says, “It was last Wednesday, not Thursday.” Giving unsolicited advice: “If you would just make the call you’ll feel

better.” Implying inadequacy: “I wish you had been at that workshop with me ( not

because he would have enjoyed it but because it would have “corrected some of his flaws”).

Focusing on what I didn’t get, not what I did: “It would have been better if you’d said ‘I’m sorry’ to begin with.”

Using a harsh tone: “I’m so tired of this!”

Condescending: “You did an okay job picking out your shirt.” Belittling his work: “Just what is it you do all day?” Making “you” statements: “You make me so mad I can’t think straight.” Expecting him to make me happy: “If we just did more fun things

together…”

As with fear triggers in men, women often aren’t aware of the things they say that trigger shame in a man. Women are generally much more facile with words than men and are more used to verbal jousting. They often wound without meaning to because they aren’t aware of the power of their words.

5. Her emotional demands

Women often tell me that they want their man to talk more. By that they usually mean to talk more on a feeling level. But for most men emotional expression is like a foreign language to them. When you ask a man to tell you how he feels, he usually has a shame attack and freezes up. Often he isn’t in touch with his emotions and even when he is, he is unlikely to have the words to express what is going on inside. Many women conclude that her man just doesn’t feel much.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Men are actually very emotional. In fact, studies show that men are often overwhelmed by their emotions. John Gottman, Ph.D. is one of the most heralded relationship researchers in the world. He found that men close down and refuse to respond emotionally, a reaction he calls “stonewalling,” because they are flooded by their reactions to a woman’s emotional expression.

“Men,” says Gottman, “tend to be more physiologically overwhelmed than women by marital tension. For example, during confrontations a man’s pulse rate is more likely to rise, along with his blood pressure. Therefore, men may feel a greater, perhaps instinctive, need to flee from intense conflict with their spouse in order to protect their health.”

When a woman is feeling that there is disconnect with her man, talking emotionally is her way to regain connection. For him, her unhappiness triggers his shame. The more she tries to get through to him, the more overwhelmed he becomes and the more he shuts down. His shutdown is interpreted by her as “coldness” and an indication that he doesn’t care about her. Her attempts to get him to talk about his feelings are interpreted by him as attempts by her force him to do something that causes him great pain. No wonder her emotional reactions are so difficult for him to handle.

6. Her withholding praise for his accomplishments

When we first meet and fall in love, we usually lavish each other with praise. Every little thing he did pleased her and she told him so. He was her knight in shining armor. When he opened a can for her, she praised him for his strength. When he accompanied her drop to off a book for a friend, she told him how kind and considerate he was to take time to run errands with her. But over time, as we become more disconnected from our partner, she praises him less and less (and he praises her less and less). For him, the lack of praise translates into shame. “She doesn’t value me or think what I’m doing is worthwhile,” he may think to himself and go on to put himself down. “And she’s probably right. I haven’t really accomplished anything significant in my life.”

The deepest wound to a man’s sense of self is when he doesn’t feel that he can please the woman he loves. “It’s like nothing I do pleases her anymore,” a client told me with real sadness in his voice. “She points out all the things I do that she doesn’t like, but she seems to ignore the things I do to try and please her. She’s the most important person in my life, but I’ve all but given up trying to get through to her.”

For the woman’s part, she is caught in her own fears and is more likely to see what he isn’t doing to please her than the things that he does do. The man often closes down his efforts to protect himself from the shame of inadequacy he feels. The woman is sure he just doesn’t care about pleasing her. When I tell women how important her safety and pleasure is to a man, she is surprised.

“Most women do not understand how much it pleases a man to please a woman, specifically how important it is to the man in her life to please her,” say psychologists Patricia Love and Steven Stosny. “Furthermore, a man does not simply want to please her—he lives to please her.”

Breaking the Cycle of Fear and Shame

I remember an experience I had with Carlin that gave me a better understanding of the difference way women experience fear vs. the way men experience shame. Early in our relationship we were both working long hours to advance our careers. We had both decided we needed to take some time off work to be by ourselves.

After one of my “alone days” Carlin happened to ask how I had spent my time. I told her I had done into San Francisco, walked around, and spent most of the time sitting in a restaurant reflecting on my life and what where I was going. To my surprise Carlin reacted to my story with anger. “I thought we were taking time to be alone,” she told me. “What are you doing socializing in San Francisco?”

It took us awhile to calm down and talk about our experiences. She told me that she could never walk around alone in San Francisco or sit in a restaurant without having men come on to her (yes, she is very attractive). She shared her pain about always feeling somewhat afraid, always having to be aware of who might be following her or watching her.

My story was the opposite. I told her that I often felt the shame of being invisible in the world, like an outcast from the tribe. I could wander for hours on end and never feel anyone paying the least bit of attention to me. I would sit in restaurants just to feel the “vibes” of human interaction. I began to tear up when I told her that I often felt that I could be sitting somewhere and die and no one would notice that I was gone.

Carlin and I are learning to talk about our experiences of fear and shame. It isn’t always easy, but it always brings us closer when we’re able to reveal our most vulnerable places. We’re learning that when there is a “disconnect” between us, it often is caused by me not understanding her fear or her not understanding my shame.

It’s never easy to put ourselves in the shoes of the other. Too often the unexpressed fear and shame eats away at a relationship like acid. But the more we are able to tune into our own feelings of fear and shame and share them with our partner without judgment or blame, the deeper and more intimate our relationships become.

I look forward to your feedback.

To receive a Free E-book on Men’s Health and a free subscription to Jed’s e-newsletter go to www.MenAlive.com. If you are looking for an expert counselor to help with relationship issues, write Jed@MenAlive.com