By: Michael Perry
Do not hug a man holding a wrench in his hand.
My brother-in-law Mark carries himself with the wariness common to men who express themselves on the factory floor more than on the dance floor. In the presence of strangers, he will be closemouthed and tentative. You might mistake this for deference, but as any out-of-towner on the losing end of a tavern brawl can tell you, that would be a mistake. Mark's gaze is unalloyed. When he looks at you, he is sizing you up. He eyeballs you the same way he eyeballs a length of channel iron, gauging where he should make the cut. Sometimes when we work together in the shop, he just stands there dangling a ¾-inch Craftsman. I can imagine him bringing it down on my skull. This I keep to myself.
I like to think of myself as a stoic, but compared with Mark, I am Tom Cruise in love. Mark is an eighth-level Zen master of stoicism. His philosophy can be distilled to three words: "Walk it off." He uses it in every context. Hit your head on the hood? "Walk it off." Burned your hand on the exhaust? "Walk it off." Wife left you for the ice-cream man? "Walk it off."
He says it all the time. He says it when his own wife spills a can of paint. He says it when he hears one of his coworkers complaining about overtime. He says it when his 8-month-old son, Sidrock, raps himself on the head with a baby bottle.
He means it.
And it works.
Although, to be fair, Sidrock isn't walking yet.
The Greek philosopher Zeno was the original Stoic. To achieve true enlightenment, Zeno believed, we must control our emotions. As a longtime member of the small-s stoics, I can't vouch for enlightenment, but I believe Zeno would appreciate our guiding precept--specifically, "I don't want to talk about my feelings, and you can't make me." Problem is, for years now, saying you didn't want to talk was thrown right back in your face as evidence that oh yes, you do, and you must. Entire generations have been hectored to gush and weep, Oprah-style. Dare to keep a stiff upper lip and you were just begging for a breakdown. Remain self-contained and you were a Neanderthal crouched on a volcano set to blow. Well, tamp those feelings down, boys. For some of us, letting it all out is not only unnecessary, it may be injurious.
This weekend, my friend George pulled up to my door on a Harley. George looks like a cross between a bulldog and a bulldozer. We have been friends since the day we met as 5-year-olds in the farmyard, at which point he hit me on the head with a rock. There being nowhere to run, I was forced to stop crying and get along. Once, I was helping George with chores when George's father reached for a wooden fencepost and drove a ¼-inch-wide splinter under his fingernail. He didn't make a sound, just clenched his jaw. Then, holding his nail up to our faces so we could see how deep the splinter had driven--all the way to the white half-moon--he smiled maniacally, bellowed HAHAHA!!, yanked the splinter out, and went back to work.
In high school, I found George at the restroom mirror one morning, examining a red knot on his temple. "The old man," he said. This happened a lot. "Knocked me on my ass with a grain shovel," he said. George always gave these reports as a dry-eyed matter of fact and said he and his brother were biding their time. "One of these days," he'd say, "we'll knock the crap out of him, and that will be the end of that." And one day they did. And that was the end of that.
Today George is a successful manager of a heavy-equipment company. He enjoys his nice little house, his nice little family, and the occasional bar fight. After he arrived on his chopper, we shared some old stories and got caught up on the news. Later, when my wife asked me who he was, I said, "That is George, and he is on my list of 10 Friends with Whom to Face the Apocalypse." As he rode away, I wondered how he might have turned out had someone sat him down and talked him through everything. Maybe better, maybe not.
My father never hit me with a shovel, but I once complained about some ache or pain after a high-school football game, and he--having been up since before dawn to milk cows and buck hay bales--handed me a pitchfork and said, "There'd better be a lot of blood and broken bones, or I don't want to hear about it." Win or lose on Friday night, he expected me to be present to shovel out the heifer shed come Saturday morning. I'm sure it rankled a bit, but I came to admire his imperturbable air.
Through the examples of Mark, George, and my father, I remain prejudiced in favor of men who can keep their emotions in check. This form of repression speaks to me not of avoidance but of strength. People who tell me otherwise are asking me to ignore my own experience. Last week our local volunteer fire department practiced interior attacks in a live fire. Inside the burning building, I was reminded that fear is healthy, but that there are times when it does little good to discuss it.
I am not casting myself as some swaggering tough guy. Beneath the cool pose and off the fire hose, I am a nervous Nellie. And I don't always manage to keep a lid on it. If a police cruiser pulls behind me in traffic, or if I encounter certain ex-girlfriends, I get all twitchy and sweaty. My wife will tell you I toss and turn at night over bills and deadlines. Recently, I've developed a tendency to well up on short notice.
When I got married 2 years ago, the ceremony was proceeding nicely--smiles and the occasional dewy moment--until I stood to thank our parents and was overcome with weeping. Not the dignified, solitary-tear-down-the-cheek bit, but a full-on, snot-snorting hee-haw. I am grateful that these feelings reside within me, but I wish they'd just sort of ease out now and then, not slosh over like a kicked bucket. Now I'll never be able to sit through the wedding video. And recently, on a goose-hunting trip with a fellow firefighter in a cow pasture, we got to reminiscing and I got teary. I don't know what he thought (later, to relieve the tension, he tricked me into grabbing the electric fence), but the point is, aspiring to the stoic aesthetic doesn't mean you give up on feelings. Stone-faced doesn't necessarily mean stone-hearted.
Still, stoicism is my starting point. That same firefighter and I have handled brains blown across a shower stall and woken up the next morning feeling just fine. We have discovered dead guys smashed beneath trees, found corpses deep in the woods after dark. Sometimes we talk about it afterward, sometimes we don't. It's about knowing yourself, and knowing when you're in trouble.
Five years ago, my brother Jed was the first firefighter to arrive on the scene of a car crash. The damage to the car was such that he didn't recognize it, and then he looked inside and saw his young wife of 7 weeks. Sarah still had a heartbeat, and he did what he could, but she was declared dead at the scene.
Jed walked a black path in the year that followed. Sometimes he and I would work a call, and an hour after the hoses were hung to dry, we would still be leaning against his pickup while he talked against the darkness, holding out against returning to the empty bed. He threw his sleeping bag in his pickup and drove across the country to California and then came back. He tried medication but didn't like how it made him feel. He put a lot of tears on our mother's shoulder.
It became worse in the winter. He just wanted to sleep. My brother John took to prying Jed from bed and force-marching him to the woods. Jed was in no condition to run logging equipment, so John left him to tend the stove in the portable shack at the timber landing. No hugging or gnashing of teeth, just a refusal to let Jed go blind in the cave. One stoic caring for another stoic. This is the kind of strap-steel love overlooked by those who misconstrue stoicism as a failure to engage.
A week after Jed's wife was killed, the entire department met in the fire hall. A team of five volunteers--EMTs and firefighters, led by a minister--took us through a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing. The experts will tell you CISD is "an integrated system of interventions designed to mitigate the adverse psychological reactions that accompany an event with the potential to overwhelm the coping skills of an individual or group." What you basically do is get together and talk the whole thing over, with outside supervision and support.
I have experienced two CISD sessions. Anecdotally speaking, both proved beneficial for some of the participants, but experts in the mental-health field are beginning to reconsider the power of the human spirit to endure, and to endure quietly. The evidence is preliminary and diffuse--a study of heart-attack survivors, investigations conducted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the London bombings, a piece in the New York Times by a psychiatrist who feels that a small percentage of patients are better off not coming to therapy--but it is accumulating.
While we have grown used to the idea of counselors rushing in to talk people through tragedy even as the smoke is still clearing, more and more research indicates that this response is not only questionable, it can sometimes make things worse for those who can least withstand it. When we have a bad call, a few of us will phone the rookie and offer to talk. But if the rookie would rather not, we let it go. We'll work the incident into conversation again later and watch his demeanor, but we will not push or prod. We are learning that, yes, perhaps you may need to talk, but in good time, and not while your ears are still ringing.
In all things psychological, much depends on the emotional makeup of the individual. There are also critical differences between the trauma of one horrific incident and a sustained series of incidents (as in the case of long-term abuse). But from the analyst's couch to the firehouse, I couldn't be happier that we are second-guessing accepted practice when it comes to spilling your guts.
"It's different for everybody," says Jed. "Ya kinda gotta plow through it on your own."
Of course, he didn't do it by himself. He did it with the help of his family and friends and now and then a stranger. But in the end, he was the only one who made the journey. He agreed to do the CISD session 7 days after Sarah's death on the premise that it might help someone else, but he didn't seek it out. "And I'll tell ya, every time someone handed me a book on how to grieve . . . " Jed doesn't finish the sentence, but the implication is the books went straight into the woodstove.
Of course we need to talk. Of course we need friendly ears and caring hearts. The world could do with a few more thoughtful men. But the idea that we all fit some template is absurd. Sometimes it really is best to get tough and walk it off. After years of being told the strong, silent type is headed for a crackup, I'm beginning to suspect he is simply durable.
In the end, the broken circle of Jed's life closed beautifully: Sarah's mother came to Jed one night and said there was a woman he should meet. Her name was Leanne. It worked out, and they were married. He is back among the living.
We had a get-together at the family farm last Sunday. Mark brought Sidrock. He's better on two legs now, although he tends to watch where he was going, which explains the bruise on his forehead. He got the bruise when he tried to walk under the steel hay elevator. My dad says he heard a thunk and turned to see Sidrock on his butt, blinking and rubbing his head. "Grandpa," he said, "you gotta move that."
And then he got up and resumed walking.
The boy is learning.
Do not hug a man holding a wrench in his hand.
My brother-in-law Mark carries himself with the wariness common to men who express themselves on the factory floor more than on the dance floor. In the presence of strangers, he will be closemouthed and tentative. You might mistake this for deference, but as any out-of-towner on the losing end of a tavern brawl can tell you, that would be a mistake. Mark's gaze is unalloyed. When he looks at you, he is sizing you up. He eyeballs you the same way he eyeballs a length of channel iron, gauging where he should make the cut. Sometimes when we work together in the shop, he just stands there dangling a ¾-inch Craftsman. I can imagine him bringing it down on my skull. This I keep to myself.
I like to think of myself as a stoic, but compared with Mark, I am Tom Cruise in love. Mark is an eighth-level Zen master of stoicism. His philosophy can be distilled to three words: "Walk it off." He uses it in every context. Hit your head on the hood? "Walk it off." Burned your hand on the exhaust? "Walk it off." Wife left you for the ice-cream man? "Walk it off."
He says it all the time. He says it when his own wife spills a can of paint. He says it when he hears one of his coworkers complaining about overtime. He says it when his 8-month-old son, Sidrock, raps himself on the head with a baby bottle.
He means it.
And it works.
Although, to be fair, Sidrock isn't walking yet.
The Greek philosopher Zeno was the original Stoic. To achieve true enlightenment, Zeno believed, we must control our emotions. As a longtime member of the small-s stoics, I can't vouch for enlightenment, but I believe Zeno would appreciate our guiding precept--specifically, "I don't want to talk about my feelings, and you can't make me." Problem is, for years now, saying you didn't want to talk was thrown right back in your face as evidence that oh yes, you do, and you must. Entire generations have been hectored to gush and weep, Oprah-style. Dare to keep a stiff upper lip and you were just begging for a breakdown. Remain self-contained and you were a Neanderthal crouched on a volcano set to blow. Well, tamp those feelings down, boys. For some of us, letting it all out is not only unnecessary, it may be injurious.
This weekend, my friend George pulled up to my door on a Harley. George looks like a cross between a bulldog and a bulldozer. We have been friends since the day we met as 5-year-olds in the farmyard, at which point he hit me on the head with a rock. There being nowhere to run, I was forced to stop crying and get along. Once, I was helping George with chores when George's father reached for a wooden fencepost and drove a ¼-inch-wide splinter under his fingernail. He didn't make a sound, just clenched his jaw. Then, holding his nail up to our faces so we could see how deep the splinter had driven--all the way to the white half-moon--he smiled maniacally, bellowed HAHAHA!!, yanked the splinter out, and went back to work.
In high school, I found George at the restroom mirror one morning, examining a red knot on his temple. "The old man," he said. This happened a lot. "Knocked me on my ass with a grain shovel," he said. George always gave these reports as a dry-eyed matter of fact and said he and his brother were biding their time. "One of these days," he'd say, "we'll knock the crap out of him, and that will be the end of that." And one day they did. And that was the end of that.
Today George is a successful manager of a heavy-equipment company. He enjoys his nice little house, his nice little family, and the occasional bar fight. After he arrived on his chopper, we shared some old stories and got caught up on the news. Later, when my wife asked me who he was, I said, "That is George, and he is on my list of 10 Friends with Whom to Face the Apocalypse." As he rode away, I wondered how he might have turned out had someone sat him down and talked him through everything. Maybe better, maybe not.
My father never hit me with a shovel, but I once complained about some ache or pain after a high-school football game, and he--having been up since before dawn to milk cows and buck hay bales--handed me a pitchfork and said, "There'd better be a lot of blood and broken bones, or I don't want to hear about it." Win or lose on Friday night, he expected me to be present to shovel out the heifer shed come Saturday morning. I'm sure it rankled a bit, but I came to admire his imperturbable air.
Through the examples of Mark, George, and my father, I remain prejudiced in favor of men who can keep their emotions in check. This form of repression speaks to me not of avoidance but of strength. People who tell me otherwise are asking me to ignore my own experience. Last week our local volunteer fire department practiced interior attacks in a live fire. Inside the burning building, I was reminded that fear is healthy, but that there are times when it does little good to discuss it.
I am not casting myself as some swaggering tough guy. Beneath the cool pose and off the fire hose, I am a nervous Nellie. And I don't always manage to keep a lid on it. If a police cruiser pulls behind me in traffic, or if I encounter certain ex-girlfriends, I get all twitchy and sweaty. My wife will tell you I toss and turn at night over bills and deadlines. Recently, I've developed a tendency to well up on short notice.
When I got married 2 years ago, the ceremony was proceeding nicely--smiles and the occasional dewy moment--until I stood to thank our parents and was overcome with weeping. Not the dignified, solitary-tear-down-the-cheek bit, but a full-on, snot-snorting hee-haw. I am grateful that these feelings reside within me, but I wish they'd just sort of ease out now and then, not slosh over like a kicked bucket. Now I'll never be able to sit through the wedding video. And recently, on a goose-hunting trip with a fellow firefighter in a cow pasture, we got to reminiscing and I got teary. I don't know what he thought (later, to relieve the tension, he tricked me into grabbing the electric fence), but the point is, aspiring to the stoic aesthetic doesn't mean you give up on feelings. Stone-faced doesn't necessarily mean stone-hearted.
Still, stoicism is my starting point. That same firefighter and I have handled brains blown across a shower stall and woken up the next morning feeling just fine. We have discovered dead guys smashed beneath trees, found corpses deep in the woods after dark. Sometimes we talk about it afterward, sometimes we don't. It's about knowing yourself, and knowing when you're in trouble.
Five years ago, my brother Jed was the first firefighter to arrive on the scene of a car crash. The damage to the car was such that he didn't recognize it, and then he looked inside and saw his young wife of 7 weeks. Sarah still had a heartbeat, and he did what he could, but she was declared dead at the scene.
Jed walked a black path in the year that followed. Sometimes he and I would work a call, and an hour after the hoses were hung to dry, we would still be leaning against his pickup while he talked against the darkness, holding out against returning to the empty bed. He threw his sleeping bag in his pickup and drove across the country to California and then came back. He tried medication but didn't like how it made him feel. He put a lot of tears on our mother's shoulder.
It became worse in the winter. He just wanted to sleep. My brother John took to prying Jed from bed and force-marching him to the woods. Jed was in no condition to run logging equipment, so John left him to tend the stove in the portable shack at the timber landing. No hugging or gnashing of teeth, just a refusal to let Jed go blind in the cave. One stoic caring for another stoic. This is the kind of strap-steel love overlooked by those who misconstrue stoicism as a failure to engage.
A week after Jed's wife was killed, the entire department met in the fire hall. A team of five volunteers--EMTs and firefighters, led by a minister--took us through a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing. The experts will tell you CISD is "an integrated system of interventions designed to mitigate the adverse psychological reactions that accompany an event with the potential to overwhelm the coping skills of an individual or group." What you basically do is get together and talk the whole thing over, with outside supervision and support.
I have experienced two CISD sessions. Anecdotally speaking, both proved beneficial for some of the participants, but experts in the mental-health field are beginning to reconsider the power of the human spirit to endure, and to endure quietly. The evidence is preliminary and diffuse--a study of heart-attack survivors, investigations conducted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the London bombings, a piece in the New York Times by a psychiatrist who feels that a small percentage of patients are better off not coming to therapy--but it is accumulating.
While we have grown used to the idea of counselors rushing in to talk people through tragedy even as the smoke is still clearing, more and more research indicates that this response is not only questionable, it can sometimes make things worse for those who can least withstand it. When we have a bad call, a few of us will phone the rookie and offer to talk. But if the rookie would rather not, we let it go. We'll work the incident into conversation again later and watch his demeanor, but we will not push or prod. We are learning that, yes, perhaps you may need to talk, but in good time, and not while your ears are still ringing.
In all things psychological, much depends on the emotional makeup of the individual. There are also critical differences between the trauma of one horrific incident and a sustained series of incidents (as in the case of long-term abuse). But from the analyst's couch to the firehouse, I couldn't be happier that we are second-guessing accepted practice when it comes to spilling your guts.
"It's different for everybody," says Jed. "Ya kinda gotta plow through it on your own."
Of course, he didn't do it by himself. He did it with the help of his family and friends and now and then a stranger. But in the end, he was the only one who made the journey. He agreed to do the CISD session 7 days after Sarah's death on the premise that it might help someone else, but he didn't seek it out. "And I'll tell ya, every time someone handed me a book on how to grieve . . . " Jed doesn't finish the sentence, but the implication is the books went straight into the woodstove.
Of course we need to talk. Of course we need friendly ears and caring hearts. The world could do with a few more thoughtful men. But the idea that we all fit some template is absurd. Sometimes it really is best to get tough and walk it off. After years of being told the strong, silent type is headed for a crackup, I'm beginning to suspect he is simply durable.
In the end, the broken circle of Jed's life closed beautifully: Sarah's mother came to Jed one night and said there was a woman he should meet. Her name was Leanne. It worked out, and they were married. He is back among the living.
We had a get-together at the family farm last Sunday. Mark brought Sidrock. He's better on two legs now, although he tends to watch where he was going, which explains the bruise on his forehead. He got the bruise when he tried to walk under the steel hay elevator. My dad says he heard a thunk and turned to see Sidrock on his butt, blinking and rubbing his head. "Grandpa," he said, "you gotta move that."
And then he got up and resumed walking.
The boy is learning.
