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Trevor Mahony Crow, LMFT
When Our Male Spouses or Partners Have Emotional Meltdowns
7/28/10

It seems that in my practice, my own life and hearing from family and friends, there is a high rate of men having emotional meltdowns in families and couples. Perhaps it is the economy, or my age group, but it seems to be prevalent right now.

We once looked at male mid life crisis as being somewhat silly, it was about aging, loosing hair, loosing his “mojo” or a widening girth that translated into a purchase of a sports car, or more seriously, trading out the older wife for the younger version. Today, with the extreme pressure the economy and lack of jobs is putting on the family, the mid life crisis has turned into a major meltdown for our men.

Men have been especially hit by the joblessness: http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/health/news-article.aspx?storyid=160203. Men now have to lean on wives to support the family. So many of our men have their identities tied up in their job and society’s perceived view of success. Specifically many men feel their self worth is connected to his paycheck.

With the loss of a paycheck comes loss of self-esteem, depression, anxiety and full-blown self-doubt. When our men loose sight of who they are, they have a great deal of trouble being there for us.

At the core of this self-doubt is shame. We as a society have expected our men to often be the sole support of the family. As companies have downsized, getting rid of middle-aged men has caused costs to fall and profits to rise. The problem is there are fewer well paying jobs for middle-aged men and women today. (Women will tend to take lower paying jobs before a man would).

Shame is one of the toughest emotions to tolerate or discuss, for men or women. For men, especially middle-aged men who have not had the vocabulary to discuss their emotions in general, talking about shame is particularly difficult. What tends to happen is our good men go ahead and behave badly, they become reactive and angry, blaming us for their misfortunes, or they go to the bar, or gamble, or withdraw from us in some other way.  Think of the bad behavior as a man’s version of a good cry.