Don’t Call That Man Newsletter!
Http://WWW.RhondaFindling.com
January Issue # 13
This issue will include:
1. Don’t Call That Man is available in more languages
“Don’t Call That Man!” is coming out in three more languages! Publishing companies in Japan, Korea and Germany will be publishing, “Don’t Call That Man!” in Korean, Japanese and German next year. So by 2006, “Don’t Call That Man!” will officially be in 5 languages (English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and German).
2. Rhonda presenting at The Training Institute for Mental Health on February 10th
I will be presenting the workshop “The Dating Cure: What's Love Got To Do With It?” at The Training Institute of Mental Health on Friday, February 10th , 2006 from 7:30 to 9 PM
Here is a description of the workshop:
Why do some women and some men continue to be unable to create lasting and mature relationships? How are men and women different and similar? And why do men and women play approach and avoidance games differently?
This workshop will address these psychological issues and how they affect the treatment relationship. Topics to be addressed in the workshop with include: dependency needs, separation and individuation issues, control needs, acting out and passive aggressive styles, and more. I will examine the unconscious underpinnings and discuss how she has successfully treated these types of women with a behavioral cognitive approach. In addition, I will present case material, and will welcome audience participation.
The address of the Institute is 22 West 21st Street, between 5th and 6th Ave. The phone number for the Institute is 212 627 8151. The fee is $15. It’s on a Friday, February 10th from 7:30 PM to 9:00 PM.
3. New group starting on Monday evenings in Manhattan
New Beginnings Group
In order to reinvent oneself and start anew, one has to work through and process losses, regrets and disappointments. To achieve this goal the following are topics we will be discussing in the group:
This group will meet on Monday evenings in Rhonda’s office starting January 20th in Manhattan at 32 Gramercy Park South from 6:15 PM to 7:45 PM. The fee is $50 per group but a 2 month commitment is required.
If you are interested in being a member of this group, please email me at rhondadctm@aol.com with your phone number.
4. Free 30-minute phone consultation with Rhonda Findling
The message board on the secured area of my website is now as busy as it was when it was public. To keep the momentum going I’m offering a free 30-minute phone consultation to members re-registering and members registering for the first time. Just email me at rhondadctm@aol.com and let me know when you registered or reregistered with your name and phone number and we can schedule an appointment.
ALSO
One of our website members Jody, was generous enough to sponsor the first 10 people to re-register or register for the first time. So if you want to take advantage of this opportunity email me at rhondafindling.com with your phone number and the date you need to re-register if you’re already registered. If you’re not sure about when you originally registered, call up CCBill at 1 800 510 2859 and tell them that you’re a member of rhondafindling.com.
5. Rhonda’s memoir picks.
The following three memoirs are written by women about their relationships with men. All of them can be found on Amazon.
The Turkish Lover
By Esmeralda Santiago
A memoir of an intense, abusive relationship between memoirist Esmeralda Santiago and Turkish filmmaker Ulvi Dogan. Santiago tells the story of their seven-year relationship with uncommon candor and directness. Dogan controls Santiago’s every moment, yet Santiago believes he “was gentle and understanding” of why she couldn’t always obey him. In their nomadic lives (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; New York; Syracuse, N.Y.; Lubbock, Tex.), they make up and break up as Santiago devotes herself to Dogan’s graduate studies and career. But when a traffic jam unexpectedly delivers them to Harvard Square, Santiago blurs out, “I belong here.” So it happens that at 25, she enters Harvard. It’s the being of the end with a man who “might love me, as he claimed, but he had no idea, no clue whatsoever, of what was important to me.” Ultimately, she leaves him with the astute realization that “there’s always another train on the way.”
Without a Net - Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in America: My Story
by Michelle Kennedy
Kennedy recounts how she metamorphosed from a carefree college student into a homeless 24-year-old with three children by making some "bad judgment calls," the first of which was marrying her boyfriend to be eligible for financial aid. Three children come in unplanned succession, her back-to-nature husband moves the family to a rural cabin with no electricity, and his negligence nearly kills their daughter. These are the catalysts leading to Kennedy's decision to leave her husband ultimately leading to homelessness.
What Happens When Brothers go to Prison and Leave Sisters Alone?
By Jaki McCalvin
A memoir about a woman whose husband goes to prison and what she endures as a result of her decision to stay committed to the relationship. This book is also about incarcerated men and the families they leave behind and all that they do in the name of love but also their own personal battles with their decisions to wait. Told by a young woman after she went to court and watched her husband be sentenced to many years in prison. After she decides that she wants to stand by him and begin visiting the prisons she recounts her dealings with other women who were visiting also and what they were doing for these men. She opens the doors to a world many people don't know exist.
6.Feature article: Why is a good man hard to find?
Are good men are hard to find? Maybe some of it has nothing to do with you and in fact is out of your hands. From my research I’ve found that some of women’s difficulties finding a good man can be due to a man’s psychological make-up, culture and our primitive brain chemistry.
Terry Real the relationship guru I quoted in a previous chapter told me that in his practice, which primarily consists of couples, he’s found, “In 3 out 4 couples, that I see, the man is grandiose and the women is more shame filled. In our culture the men lead with grandiosity and have covert shame and the women lead from the same position and have covert grandiosity.”
In his book “How Can I Get Through To You: Closing The Gap Between Men And Women”, Terry Real defines grandiosity as “A kind of empathy deficiency towards others. What is missing is a capacity to sufficiently cherish those around us.” (1)
He continues to explain how he works with men who are grandiose:
“In those instances supplying empathy towards the client while necessary is not sufficient, ore to the point is helping the object regain sensitivity to his impact on others.”(2)
So according to Real’s definition, men who are grandiose are not sensitive to their impact on you. And according to his observation, that’s referring to 3 out of 4 men he is seeing. A very high percentage!
Men’s grandiosity is also discussed by psychoanalyst & academic Janet Sayes in her book “Boy Crazy”. She writes:
“Researchers find that young men often idolize themselves, and grandiosely identify with the superlatives, such figures represent. Asked to describe their actual and ideal self, men are more likely than women to deflate the two. They grandly describe themselves as though they were already their ideal selves. They are more likely to describe themselves in self-inflating terms. They reckon themselves to be more attractive than young women reckon themselves to be.”(3)
So, if there is a reality that men tend to be grandiose, or not as caring about others why then are we so attracted to “bad boys”, who are notorious for being self absorbed, insensitive to our needs and grandiose?
I discussed this question with famous anthropologist and Rutgers professor Dr. Helen Fisher who told me that women have been immensely attracted to very aggressive men who have elevated testosterone levels, for millions of years! They’ve always gone for the macho, resourceful leader of the pack. So do women just naturally dig the primitive, brutal caveman? Is it just our biological instincts we’re struggling with and not our traumatic childhood? A woman on my message board on my website posts on a forum about women who are attracted to cops:
“Women go nuts for cops. It’s not just the uniform. The gun equals manhood & safety. It’s testosterone in a holster. They’re the ultimate “Bad Boy” except they’re “safe” because they’re law enforcement.”
I recently saw the movie “In the Cut” about an English teacher (played by Meg Ryan) who falls for macho, “bad boy”, aggressive, seductive detective (played by Mark Ruffalo). On the DVD of the movie, Mark Ruffalo is interviewed, where he appears down to earth, sensitive, kind, almost gentle. Quite the opposite of the character he portrays in the movie.
To investigate Helen Fisher’s finding further, I asked 20 women to watch Ruffalo in character as Terry Malloy the “Bad Boy” cop, and as himself in the DVD interview:
14 out of the 20 women I interviewed were more attracted to Ruffalo as the aggressive “bad boy” cop then when he was his sweet vulnerable self. So my experiment supported Dr. Fisher’s observation that more women were attracted to the aggressive primitive man.
Even Karen Horney one of the first psychoanalyst, and colleague of Sigmond Freud, who was notorious for her beliefs in women’s independence, was openly attracted to “bad boys”. In her research Janet Sayers found that Horney had a self-confessed attraction to “brutal and rather forceful men”.
So is it all about testosterone or is it more? Helen Fisher also explained that the arousal system in the brain wants to “win”. So if we see something that us hard to get we want it. She refers to this as “Frustration Attraction” and further explains that as the Dopamine in our brain increases it results in focused attention and increased energy. In the other words if a reward, or something we want is delayed the dopamine increases making us more alert and focused on attaining it.
A “bad boys” characteristics (which includes distancing, unreliability, unpredictability and of course grandiosity) creates emotional barriers which lead to a woman’s frustration resulting in her brain releasing lots of Dopamine making her obsessive in her attempts to capture her unavailable man’s heart.
So with all that said then maybe its just our brain chemistry that sets us up to be so focused on men who do not necessarily make good boyfriend or husband material.
However some experts (many of which are men!) claim it’s men’s psychological makeup that make them so difficult to have relationship with.
Terry Real states, “ The skills needed to tolerate strong emotions are both daunting and unfamiliar to many men.”(4)
Psychologist Dr. Herb Goldberg author of “What Men Really Want”: writes:
“The way men love and what they need in relationship are different & often the opposite of what women need. Indeed men’s needs in relationship for better or for worse, because of their conditionally as men, has been to suppress or deny vulnerability and personal needs to avoid losing control or getting too close.”(5)
Reknowned psychiatrist Dr. Otto Kernberg, claim that men and women are developmentally different and that “ the adult woman has potentially greater courage and capacity for a heterosexual commitment that the adult man.”(6)
I was very happy to meet New York Psychoanalyst Dr. Janet Leiberman at woman’s conference where she presented her breakthrough paper “Issues in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Single Females Over Thirty”. Leiberman says that a woman’s inability to marry is not necessarily due to her psychological issues, that perhaps some of the problems is sociological. She states in her paper:
“Women reach their late twenties and increasingly as they get older, there is a scarcity of suitable men available to them. The shortage of heterosexual men capable of long commitment like marriage to women over 30 seems to be a fact of reality that is commonly overlooked or even denied by society. If the reports I hear are true, many analysts deny this fact as well. Person acknowledges this scarcity of men as one of the major problems that confronts women today, and contributes to the transformation of a perfectly healthy longing for love into kind of deadly preoccupation. The frequent female obsession with love is in part the result of a demographic imbalance with profound psychological ramifications; unlike men, women live in a scarcity economy: there simply aren’t enough men to go around. This problem is compounded by the fact that men often consider women less desirable as they grow older… After a certain age women know their chance of finding love and sex are greatly reduced. A much-quoted recent study by Bennett and Bloom conducted at Yale and Harvard, entitled “Why Fewer American Women Marry,” reported that college educated women at 30 have only a 20 percent chance of marrying and those of 35 have a 5 percent chance. These statistics seem to be the result of number factors, including the greater longevity of women and social norms that permit men to marry women younger and less educated than themselves. Marrying younger women is considered to be status symbol for middle- and upper class men. Men find it acceptable to marry women who are intellectually, socially and professionally beneath the, whereas women usually do not find such marriages acceptable. There may even be rise in the population of men who are overtly homosexual and of men who are unable to make commitments. Additionally, many men report that they are threatened by the recent advances women have made, both professionally and socially.”(7)
So between our ancient brain chemistry, culture and men still lagging behind is in relationship skills, it is possible that a good man is hard to find even when you’ve done all of our emotional work and are at our psychological best!
Footnotes:
Wishing everybody a happy and healthy new year
All best,
Rhonda Findling