Why Are Men So Angry?

September 26, 2012 By 3 Comments

“Last month a man came home from work with my husband’s face but he did not act at all like the man I married,” says Marie, a 42 year-old wife and mother of three. “I’ve known this man for 30 years, married 22 of them and have never met this guy before.  Angry, nasty, and cruel are just a few words to describe him.  He used to be the most upbeat, happy person I knew.  Now it’s like being married to an angry brick.  In spite of how he treats me I still love my husband and want to save our marriage.  Please, can you help me?”

This is typical of the thousands of letters and e-mails I have received from women all over the world since The Irritable Male Syndrome:  Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression was first published by Rodale in 2004.  More and more women are feeling the pain of living with angry men and want help for themselves, their children, and for the man they all love.

Although anger has a negative impact on men, I learned that it is often the women and children who suffer the most.  “Recently, he has begun venting, to anyone who will listen, about how horrible we all are,” 53 year-old Jennifer wrote me.  “If our adult-children aren’t living up to his standards, it is my fault.  If he can’t find his socks, he accuses me of misplacing them, just to piss him off.  I’m not kidding—that’s what he tells me.  What hurts the most is that he has withdrawn all affection.  It’s like someone transformed him from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.  I want my husband back!”

Anger is an increasingly serious problem in our society today according to Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and former President of the American Psychological Association. “Out-of-hand anger ruins many lives,” he says.  “More, I believe, than schizophrenia, more than alcohol, more than AIDS.  Maybe even more than depression.”  Seligman’s research also shows that when couples fight, it can damage their children, often in lasting ways.

Anger Comes in Different Forms 

Paul Ekman, Ph.D., one of the world’s experts on emotions and author of Emotions Revealed, says that anger is expressed in many ways.  “There is a range of angry feelings, from slight annoyance to rage.  There are not just differences in the strength of angry feelings, but also differences in the kind of anger felt.  Indignation is self-righteous anger, sulking is passive anger; exasperation refers to having one’s patience tried excessively.  Revenge is a type of angry action usually committed after a period of reflection about the offense.”

We often perceive anger as a negative emotion that can damage people and their relationships, yet anger can also lead to emotional and spiritual growth.  The practices readers will learn in the book can deepen and enrich their ability to be more loving to their partner and to others.  In his book Anger:  Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hahn says, “In the past, we were allied in making each other suffer more, allied in the escalation of anger.  “Now we want to be allied in taking good care of our sorrow, our anger, and our frustration.  We want to negotiate a strategy for peace.”

Healing Ourselves, Healing Our Planet 

Most of us are tired of war and would like human beings to get along with each other.  But it seems that wars go on and on.    The truth is that we can’t stop wars until we learn to stop fighting with our mates.  If we can’t learn to get along with the one we love, how can we expect to get along with people we don’t know and don’t understand?  The good news is that we are learning how to become more peaceful partners.  We are learning the skills of non-violent communication.  We are learning how to listen with a more open heart, to put ourselves in the shoes of the other person.

Here’s a little exercise I describe in my recent book, MenAlive:  Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools.  It was developed by the folks at the Institute of HeartMath and it’s guaranteed to reduce stress in your life and help you feel more loving:

  1. Put your attention on the area around your heart.  Place your hand there to feel the life pulsing through you.
  2. Imagine that with each breath you breathe in you are taking in healing energy through your heart and with each breath you breathe out you send that loving energy out to someone you’d like to feel more loving towards.
  3. Think of a time when you felt deep gratitude.  It could be a memory of one of your children, or when you first fell in love, or the time you were overwhelmed by the beauty of a sunset.
  4. Continue to breathe while you hold this memory of gratitude.

Think what it would mean if everyone in the world did this exercise three or four times a day.  Are you willing to start?  It’s easy and you have nothing to lose but your anger.

Photo Credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/jelles/2656101758/sizes/z/in/photostream/

If you found this post helpful you may like Jekyll and Hyde and Irritable Males and Why Is My Husband Depressed and How Do I Help Him

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Jekyll and Hyde, Irritable Males, and Attachment Love: What Men, and the Women Who Love Them, Need to Know

July 15, 2012 By 12 Comments


Before I wrote my book, The Irritable Male Syndrome, I thought I might call it The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome, since men often seem to change rapidly from “Mr. Nice to Mr. Mean.”  The book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886 and has become a mainstay of stage and screen throughout the world.  It seems to speak to something in the human psyche, particularly the male mind.  The story is about Dr. Henry Jekyll who is pursuing his life-long quest to separate the two natures of man to get at the essence of good and evil.

Refused help by his peers and superiors, he begins experiments on himself with his formula. He meets with success, and shocking results.  The evil nature of Dr. Jekyll surfaces as a separate identity: Edward Hyde. Hyde begins murdering the members of the Board of Governors who previously refused assistance to Jekyll’s cause. Throughout the story Jekyll fights in vain to keep his darker half under control.

We often see this kind of transformation in how men are in their love relations.  In a blog post “Should I Stay or Should I Go Now,” Helena Madsen reports a woman’s experience with the man in her life:

“I had a revelation today. During my son’s graduation ceremony at his high school, my husband came up to me and squatted down to share a story with me. Without thinking I ran my hand over his hair and down his arm. I’m still in love with this guy. He can be very nice. He can be very sweet. I married him because of this. This is why I find his behavior so baffling. I’ve known this guy just shy of 25 years. That is a long time. The meanness, the temper tantrums, the spitefulness is all new. I’ve never seen this in him before. Living with someone for 25 years means this isn’t behavior that has been hidden away. It is brand spanking new. It is why I’ve been blindsided with it. I so didn’t see this coming. It also makes the whole idea of divorce so messy. If he was always nasty this would be a no-brainer. I would up and leave in a heartbeat. But he swings hot and cold. One day he is super nice to me; takes good care of me and even gives me hugs. The next day he is slamming doors and telling me he wants out. I am so very confused.”

In The Irritable Male Syndrome:  Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Aggression and Depression, I describe a number of key symptoms of IMS, including hypersensitivity.

The women who live with these men say things like the following:

  • I feel like I have to walk on eggshells when I’m around him.
  • I never know when I’m going to say something that will set him off.
  • He’s like a time bomb ready to explode but I never know when.
  • Nothing I do pleases him.

The men don’t often recognize their own hypersensitivity.  Rather, their perception is that they are fine but everyone else is going out of their way to irritate them.  The guys say things like:

  • Quit bothering me.
  • Leave me alone.
  • No, nothing’s wrong.  I’m fine. 
  • Or they don’t say anything.  They increasingly withdraw into a numbing silence.

One concept I have found helpful is the notion that many of us are “emotionally sunburned,” but our partners don’t know it.  We might think of a man who is extremely sunburned and gets a loving hug from his wife.  He cries out in anger and pain.  He assumes she knows he’s sunburned so if she “grabs” him she must be trying to hurt him.  She has no idea he is sunburned and can’t understand why he reacts angrily to her loving touch.  You can see how this can lead a couple down a road of escalating confusion.

Why Do Men Suddenly Become Hypersensitive and Irritable?  Could It Be We Don’t Feel Attached?

Here’s a letter I received recently:  “Last month a man came home from work with my husband’s face but he did not act at all like the man I married.  I’ve known this man for 30 years, married 22 of them and have never met this guy before.  Angry, nasty, and cruel are just a few words to describe him.  He used to be the most upbeat, happy person I knew.  Now he’s gone from Mr. Nice to Mr. Mean.  In spite of how he treats me I still love my husband and want to save our marriage.  Please, can you help me?

Both the man and the woman are baffled.  What’s going on here?  The answer may lie in ways in which we feel a loss of connection with our partner.  We all struggle with vulnerable feelings in love whether we want to admit it or not. It’s inevitable that we will hurt each other with careless words or selfish actions. While these occasions sting, the pain is often fleeting and we get over it quickly.

But according to Dr. Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, “Countless studies on infant and adult attachment suggest that our close encounters with loved ones are where most of us attain and learn to hold on to our emotional balance.”  We are all sensitive to being rejected or abandoned by a loved one.  And almost all of us have at least one hypersensitivity – a raw spot in our emotional skin- that is tender to the touch, easily rubbed, and deeply painful.  When this spot gets rubbed often enough, it can bleed all over our relationship.

When our need for attachment and connection is repeatedly neglected, ignored or dismissed, it results in two potential raw spots: feeling emotionally deprived or deserted/abandoned.  It may not be obvious to us, but when a man becomes irritable and angry or hostile and blaming or withdrawn and cold-hearted, it is often because he feels a disconnection from his partner.  He feels rejected or not cared for.  Of course, his hostile reaction often drives his partner farther away, which makes him even more fearful of loss.  It’s easy to get caught up in the blame game.  He blames her and she blames him.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.

So how do you identify your raw spot?  Here’s what psychotherapist Helena Madsen recommends:

Think about a time in your marriage when you got suddenly thrown off balance, when a small response or lack of response suddenly seemed to change your sense of safety or connection with your spouse, or when you got totally caught up in reacting in a way that you knew would spiral you into your usual dysfunctional pattern of relating. Maybe you are aware of a moment when you found yourself reacting very angrily or numbing out.

Let’s unpack the “Jekyll and Hyde, Irritable Male” sensitivity:

What was happening in the relationship?  What was the trigger that created a sense of emotional disconnection for you?  What was your general feeling in the split second before you reacted and got mad or numb?  What did your spouse specifically do or say that sparked this response?  As you think of a moment when your own raw spot is rubbed, what happens to your body?  You might feel spacey, detached, hot, breathless, tight in the chest, very small, empty, shaky, tearful, cold, on fire.

What does your brain decide about the meaning of all this?  What do you say to yourself when this happens?  What did you do then?  How do you move into action?

See if you can tie in all these elements together by filling in the blanks below:

In this incident, the trigger for my raw feeling was _________.  On the surface, I probably showed _____________.  But deep down, I just felt (pick one of the basic negative emotions, sadness, anger, shame, fear).  What I longed for was ___________.  The main message I got about our bond, about me or my love was _________________.

I’ve found in my own work that recognizing our need for emotional support does not mean we’re acting like children.  In fact, these needs for emotional support are important throughout our lives, not just when we are children.

I’d like to hear from you.  Have you noticed yourself or someone you love going from “nice” to “mean?”  Can you slow down and recognize the feelings of fear and how you react to them?  When we can share these universal emotions rather than blaming ourselves or our partners we can once again become friends and allies and sort things out together.

Photo Credit: maxREM Creative Commons

 

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The 25 Most Helpful Things Ever Said About Men, Masculinity, and Marriage

June 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

 

My father tried to commit suicide when I was five years old.  He recovered, but my life was never the same.  I went to medical school, then graduate school.  For the last 44 years I have specialized in helping men and the women who love them.  I think I’ve been trying, on some level, to understand what happened to my father so that I can be a better father to my sons and daughter, a better husband to my wife, and a better friend to myself.

My first book, Inside Out:  Becoming My Own Man, was published in 1983.  In the introduction I wrote, “The Women’s Movement first helped me question the roles we had all built our lives upon.  It stimulated a desire to have the support of men who were going through similar changes.  I joined a men’s group and received tremendous help and insight.”

Inside Out was a very personal book and most publishers refused to take it on.  One editor confided in me that “it was just too raw.  It cut too close to home.”  I didn’t pull any punches.  In the first chapter I listed the Fears That Drive Me including:

1.    My feelings will destroy me if I let them.
2.    I’ll go crazy like my father.
3.    I’ll be a failure at work and lose my family’s respect.
4.    There’s something dangerous and violent in me waiting to destroy the people I love the most.
5.    Women will “love me, but underneath the surface, they’ll feel pity and contempt (like my mother felt for my father).

I continued with a list of the 10 Commandments That Move Me.

1.    Thou shalt not be weak, nor have weak gods before thee.
2.    Thou shalt not fail thyself, nor fail as thy father before thee.
3.    Thou shalt not keep holy any day that denies thy work.
4.    Thou shalt not express strong emotions, neither high nor low.
5.    Thou shalt not cry, complain, or ask for help.
6.    Thou shalt not be hostile or angry, especially towards women.
7.    Thou sahlt not be uncertain or ambivalent.
8.    Thou shalt not be dependent on anyone, but must always be strong.
9.    Thou shalt not acknowledge they death or thy limitations.
10.     Thou shalt do unto other men before they do unto you.

Over the last 44 years, I have accumulated hundreds of quotes and bits of information about men that I have found helpful.  I offer the following 25 for your consideration.  Let me know what you think.

25.    “When a woman calls, you must go.”  –Zorba the Greek.

24.    “My own preference, if I had the good fortune to have another son, would be to avoid circumcision, and leave his little penis alone.”  –Benjamin Spock.

23.    “The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives—the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the death of awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or glory of other men in oneself.”  –Norman Cousins

22.      “Wake up.  Men have traditionally been the guardians of the earth.  We need a new kind of warrior.  Men are now called on to be warriors for the earth.”  –John Stokes.

21.    “The man who has the soul of the wolf knows the self-restraint of the wolf.  Aimless executions and slaughterings are not the work of wolves and eagles but the work of hysterical sheep.”
–Gary Snyder.

20.     “Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain.  And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.”  –Normal Mailer

19.      “She called to me from across her beauty.  It stretched between us like a maze.  I disappeared inside it, never to be seen again.”  –Sy Safransky

18.      “If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still seeing the world through the eyes of a child.  I have a feeling that man’s fear of woman comes from having first seen her as the mother, creator of men.”  –Anais Nin.

17.    “It was slow in dawning on me that WOMAN had an overwhelming influence on my life and on the lives of all the  men I knew.  If the text of my life was ‘successful independent man,’ the subtext was ‘engulfed by WOMAN.’”  –Sam Keen

16.    “There are two questions a man must ask himself:  The first is ‘Where am I going?’ and the second is ‘Who will go with me?’  If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.”  –Howard Thurman

15.    “The male has paid a heavy price for his masculine ‘privilege’ and power.  He is out of touch with his emotions and his body.  He is playing by the rules of the male game plan and with lemming-like purpose he is destroying himself—emotionally, psychologically and physically.”  –Herb Goldberg

14.  “It was a great mistake, my being born a man.  I would have Been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish.  As it is, I Will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, and who must always be a little in love with death!”  –Eugene O’Neill

13.    “A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.”  –Henry David Thoreau

12.     “Men do not face enemy machine guns because they have been treated with kindness.  They face them because they have a bayonet up their ass.”  Neil Simon

11.  “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.”  –James Gilligan

10.  “If menopause is the silent passage, ‘male menopause’ is the unspeakable passage.  It is fraught with secrecy, shame, and denial.  It is much more fundamental than the ending of the fertile period of a woman’s life, because it strikes at the core of what it is to be a man.”  –Gail Sheehy

9.  “One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form.  Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.”  –Robert Bly

8.  “When a man does not live with his children and does not get along with the mother of his children, his fatherhood becomes essentially untenable, regardless of how he feels, how hard he tries, or whether he is a good guy.  Almost by definition, he has become de-fathered.”  –David Blankenhorn

7.  “We can’t be comfortable in intimacy with women because we have never been comfortable in being distant from them.”  –Sam Keen

6.  “The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.  The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy.”  –Simon Baron-Cohen.

5.  “There is a biological basis for the observation that ‘Men never remember and women never forget.  It plays out through our hormones.”  –Marianne J. Legato

4.  “Testosterone is a sex hormone, and I think it is the most social of hormones.  The major social effect of testosterone is to orient us toward issues of sex and power.  By the end of puberty testosterone levels in males are 8 to 10 times higher than in females, but decrease with age.”  –James McBride

3.  “Try not to become a man of success, rather become a man of value.” –Albert Einstein.

2.  “A Cree Indian legend says that when the Earth is sick and the animals disappear, there will come a tribe of people from all creeds, colors and cultures who believe in deeds, not words and who will restore the Earth to its former beauty.  This tribe will be called The Warrior of the Rainbow.”  –Twyla Dell

1.    “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.  This is the judgment.  Life’s most urgent question is, what are you doing for others.”  –Martin Luther King, Jr.

I hope you find these helpful whether you are male or female.  Of course I don’t really claim that these are the “most helpful things ever said about men.”  They are just the ones that resonate with me.  I look forward to hearing your own.  Post here or you can write me direct.

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For Love or Money: The New Male Vocation Is….

June 6, 2012 By 7 Comments

The cover story in Time magazine headlines:  The Richer Sex:  Women, Money, and Power. It reports on studies showing that almost 40% of working wives make more money than their husbands and goes on to say, “Assuming present trends continue, by the next generation, more families will be supported by women than by men.”

This raises some interesting questions:  Will present trends continue, or will things shift back again towards men carrying more of the load to support the family?  If present trends do continue will it be good for men, women, and children?  Could the new male vocation be learning how to love more rather than learning to make more money?

I think there’s a wonderful opportunity here.  I’d offer it in the form of an equation (thanks to author Chip Conley for the idea of turning big ideas into short equations):

Love
________    =  Happiness
Money

Love divided by money equals happiness.  I know for most of my adult life, I thought I created happiness for myself and my family by working harder and harder to make more and more money.  I put a lot more effort into making money than learning the skills to love myself, love my wife, and love my children.  I knew I loved them, but I thought I expressed it best by making money.

My equation of effort might have looked like this  1/10 = 0.1.  I put in 1 unit of learning to love for every 10 units on making money.  Now, with so many men finding it difficult to make money, perhaps we can reverse this equation.  10/1 = 10, where we can put ten units into learning to love for every unit on making money.

What do you think?

Photo Credit: Time Magazine Cover March 26, 2012

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MenAlive Updates

May 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Friends,

I’m excited to be sharing my recent book, MenAlive:  Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, with you.

In the book I describe the ways in which stress contributes to many problems men, and the women who love them, face today including:  Depression, chronic pain, male menopause, and irritable male syndrome.  I describe four energy healing tools that you can learn to use to heal these and other problems.  The four tools I have found most effective are Earthing, Heart Coherence, Attachment Love, and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT).

The field is changing rapidly and I want to keep you updated on the latest information.  Here I’ll be posting new findings that you can put into practice.  Its also where you can share your own experiences.

A comprehensive review of the health implications of Earthing has been published in The Journal of Environmental and Public Health.  You can read it here:

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jeph/2012/291541/

I’ll be posting other information on this emerging field of Energy Healing.  Stay tuned.

Jed

 

 

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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: 7 Not So Simple Steps

May 28, 2012 By 2 Comments

As we reflect on those who have died in support of the American way of life, I think about what it takes to be truly happy.  Too often we live in fear or anger and it contributes to heart problems, relationship breakups, and conflict with other nations.

We all want to be happy and are looking for simple steps to getting there, yet scientific evidence makes it seem unlikely that you can change your level of happiness in any sustainable way.  Sad people don’t become lastingly happy and happy people don’t become lastingly sad.  But new research shows us all how to find lasting happiness.

In his book, Authentic Happiness:  Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, Martin Seligman, the father of happiness research tells us, “The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a right of all Americans, as well as on the self-improvement shelves of every American bookstore.”

But achieving lasting happiness isn’t easy.  Scientific evidence suggests that we each have a fixed range for happiness just as we do for weight. “New research into happiness,” says Seligman, “demonstrates that it can be lastingly increased.  And a new movement, Positive Psychology, shows how you can come to live in the upper reaches of your set range of happiness.”

How a Born Pessimist Learned to Be Happy

Martin Seligman is a world renowned author and psychologist who describes himself as a born pessimist.  In 1965 he stumbled on to field of study that would change his life and the life of all of us who suffer from things like irritability and depression.  In doing experiments with dogs he found something completely unexpected.  He gave dogs a mild shock paired with a tone (rather than pairing a tone with food as had been done in classical conditioning).

He expected that once the dog was conditioned, whenever the dog heard the tone he would associate it with the shock, feel fear, and run away.  Instead he found that the conditioned dogs just pathetically laid back and took the shocks.  Apparently, what the conditioned dog learned was that trying to escape from the shocks is futile. This dog learned to be helpless.

A new field of study was born, one perfectly fitted to a born pessimist.  The theory of learned helplessness was then extended to human behavior, providing a model for explaining depression, a state characterized by a lack of affect and feeling. Depressed people became that way, Seligman felt, because they learned to be helpless. Depressed people learned that whatever they did, it was futile. During the course of their lives, depressed people apparently learned that they have no control.

On a summer’s day in 1998 Seligman had another critical insight and his personal and professional life shifted once again.  “It took place in my garden while I was weeding with my five-year old daughter,” Seligman remembers.  “I am goal-oriented and time-urgent and when I’m weeding in the garden, I’m actually trying to get the weeding done. Nikki, however, was throwing weeds into the air and dancing around. I yelled at her. She walked away, came back, and said, ‘Daddy, I want to talk to you.’

‘Yes, Nikki?’

‘Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. When I turned five, I decided not to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.’

“This was an epiphany for me. As for my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch. I had spent fifty years mostly enduring wet weather in my soul, and the last ten years being a nimbus cloud in a household of sunshine. Any good fortune I had was probably not due to my grouchiness, but in spite of it. In that moment, I resolved to change.”

7 Steps for Becoming Happy

1.    Learn the Happiness Formula

Here is the happiness formula developed by Dr. Seligman:  H=S + C + V.

H is your enduring level of happiness.

S is your set range.

C is the circumstances of your life

V represents the factors under your voluntary control.

There are many things that will increase our momentary happiness:  Chocolate, a good movie, flowers, new clothes, sex.  But to achieve enduring happiness takes more work.

2.    Take the Happiness Test

The following scale was devised by Dr. Sonja Lyubominsky, one of the world’s leading happiness researchers.

For each of the following statements and/or questions, please circle the point on the scale that you feel is most appropriate in describing you.

A.    In general I consider myself:

1                  2                       3                     4               5                   6             7
Not a very                                                                                                      A very
Happy person                                                                                    Happy person

B.    Compared to most of my peers, I consider myself:

1                 2                       3                     4               5                    6              7
Less happy                                                                                            More happy

C.    Some people are generally happy no matter what is going on.  To what extent is this true for you?

1                2                       3                      4                5                  6               7
Not at all                                                                                               A great deal

D.  Some people are generally not very happy, never as happy as they might be.    To what extent is this true for you?

1                2                       3                      4                5                  6               7
Not at all                                                                                               A great deal

To score the test, total your answers for the questions and divide by 4.  The mean for adult Americans is 4.8.  Two-thirds of people score between 3.8 and 5.8.

3.    Imagine Your Parents Taking the Test.  How would they score?

Research shows that half of your score on the happiness test is accounted for by the score your biological parents would have gotten had they taken the test.  This may mean that we inherit a “steersman” who urges us toward a specific level of happiness or sadness.  This is our set range.

4.    Change the Circumstances in Your Life That Really Matter.

“The good news about circumstances,” says Seligman, “is that some do change happiness for the better.  The bad news is that changing these circumstances is usually impractical and expensive.”  Here are some of the circumstances that people believe will increase happiness:

  • Having more money.
  • Getting married.
  • Being healthy.
  • Good social life.
  • Avoiding negative events and emotions.
  • Getting a good education.
  • Live in a sunnier climate.
  • Engaging in religious practice.

Surprisingly money, health, education and living in a sunny climate had no effect on happiness.

Getting married and having a rich social network had a strong effect on happiness.  Avoiding negative events and emotions and engaging religious practice had a moderate effect.

5.    Don’t Dwell on the Negative.

Many people believe that in order to be happy they have to focus on all the negative things in their lives, find out what is causing them, and fix what is wrong.  In fact, research shows that the more we focus on what we don’t like in our lives, the more unhappy we will become.

Depressed men and women tend to ruminate and chew on all the things that are going wrong in their lives.  They believe that a bad events that happen to them are permanent and will persist.  Those people who are generally happy have a different view of the world.

6.    Focus on Gratitude and Forgiveness.

Those who would be happy ruminate on happiness.  They assume if something bad happens, it is temporary and will soon pass.  They focus their attention on feeling gratitude for what they have and look forward to more good things happening in the future.

I tell my clients that life has two windows. Look out one window and you will see all the negative things going on in the world:  Anger, violence, wars, poverty, death, suffering.  Look out the other window and you will see a different world:  Love, compassion, care, support, emotional richness, hope.  Both exist, both are real.

Happiness depends on which window you spend most of your time looking through.  When we look out one window we feel gratitude for all that we have.  When we look out the other window, we see all that we do not want.  Which window are you looking through?

Many of us carry old wounds from times we were hurt.  We also carry a lot of anger and blame within us.  We hold on to grudges for years.  Forgiveness is one of the most difficult, yet healing things we can do.  At some point in our lives we have to accept that the wounds inflicted on us were done by people who themselves were wounded.  At that point, we don’t forget, but we do forgive.

7.    Reach out today and let someone know that you care.

In our busy lives we often forget that a little recognition and appreciation can go a long way in making someone’s life a little more cheerful.  We can all use a little more love today as we reflect on those we have lost.  Make this a day that we show we care.

I value your comments.  What do you think about these 7 steps?  What are some things you do to be happier?

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The Masculine Mystique and Male Depression: Embracing Your Vocation of Destiny

May 17, 2012 By 13 Comments

 

There is something amiss with men today, and I’m still trying to figure it out.  I’ve been working with men, and the women who love them, for more than 40 years.  Actually, I’ve been on a quest to understand what is happening to men since 1948.  I was five years old that year and my father was 42.  I knew he was unhappy, but I never understood what troubled him.  He would disappear for long periods of time and when he was home he seemed irritable and angry much of the time.  My mother was perpetually worried—about him, about me, about money, about the state of the world.

The Masculine Mystique

I still remember the day my mother told me my father had been hospitalized.  She might have been crying, but she covered her emotions and simply told me my father was in a hospital.  She never explained exactly why he was there or when he would be coming home.  It was years later, when I was already in graduate school, that I found out he had tried to commit suicide.   My father was a writer and had boxes of journals with plays, poetry, radio shows, and short stories of all kinds.  I had read many of them, but they were hand-written and not easy to decipher.  When I came across a big box with personal journals I read them with a mounting excitement and apprehension.

Here is a note from my father’s first journal, written when he was his old self, full of hope and joy for life:

“I feel full of confidence in my writing ability.  I know for certain that someone will buy one of my radio shows.  I know for certain that I will get a good part in a play.  Last night I dreamt about candy.  There was more candy than I could eat.  Does it mean I’ll be rewarded for all my efforts?  Has it anything to do with sex?”

Journal number three was written a year later.  The economic depression of the time and the depression going on within his mind had come together.  His entries are more terse, staccato, and disheartening.  I still get tears when I feel how much was lost in such a short time.

“June 4th:

Your flesh crawls, your scalp wrinkles when you look around and see good writers, established writers, writers with credits a block long, unable to sell, unable to find work,  Yes, it’s enough to make anyone, blanch, turn pale and sicken.

August 15th:

Faster, faster, faster, I walk.  I plug away looking for work, anything to support my family.  I try, try, try, try, try.  I always try and never stop.

November 8th:

A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, has run completely out.  Middle aged, I stand and gaze ahead, numb, confused, and desperately worried.  All around me I see the young in spirit, the young in heart, with ten times my confidence, twice my youth, ten times my fervor, twice my education.

I see them all, a whole army of them, battering at the same doors I’m battering, trying in the same field I’m trying.  Yes, on a Sunday morning in early November, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank curtain is about to descend.”

Six days after his November 8th entry, my father tried to kill himself.  Though he survived physically, emotionally he was never again the same.  For nearly 40 years I’ve treated more and more men who are facing similar stresses to those my father experienced.  The economic conditions and social dislocations that contributed to his feelings of shame and hopelessness continue to weigh heavily on men today.

The Feminine Mystique:  The Problem That Has No Name

I’ve been reading Birth 2012 and Beyond:  Humanity’s Great Shift to the Age of Conscious Evolution by Barbara Marx Hubbard.  In the book Hubbard, talks about those key figures that had influenced her personal and professional life.  The two primal people she mentions, the psychologist Abraham Maslow and feminist author Betty Friedan, also had a profound influence on me.

The Feminine Mystique

I was in college when I read The Feminine Mystique.  I still have my original copy written in 1963 with a quote of support from anthropologist Ashley Montague, “the wisest, sanest, soundest, most understanding and compassionate treatment of contemporary American woman’s greatest problem.”  In her book she talked about the fact that in the years following World War II American women seemed to have it all.  She described “the American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the angers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother.  She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home.  She had true feminine fulfillment.”

Yet, with all that she had—a husband, children, a nice house, T.V. and new “labor-saving devices,” she was becoming increasingly unhappy.  In the secret confines of her heart and soul she knew there was more to her life than a husband, house, and children; and she felt ashamed for wanting more when she had so much.  “She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction,” said Friedan, “that she never knew how many other women shared it.  If she tried to tell her husband, he didn’t understand what she was taking about.”  When she’d go to a psychiatrist for help, he didn’t understand either.  Until Friedan called it “the feminine mystique,” it was a “problem that has no name.”

Barbara Marx Hubbard remembers her reaction to The Feminine Mystique.  “When I read that book, I realized that I was depressed because I had accepted the role of wife and mother as my exclusive identity….Once I read Betty Friedan, I was encouraged by one major thought:  I knew I wasn’t alone.  And I wasn’t willing to accept this depression as normal for me.  The meme of the feminine mystique liberated and encouraged me to keep seeking.”  She shared the feelings of so many women of that time.  “So much was given to me, yet there was this feeling of depression caused by a loss of identity—a deep longing for something more.”

The Masculine Mystique:  Why Men Are Angry and Depressed

It doesn’t take social science research to prove that men are angry and depressed.  One measure of this trend is the increase in the rates of homicide and suicide we see in males.  According to Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), homicide rates for males are 3 to 4 times higher than they are for females.  Among persons aged 20–24, the male homicide rate is 6 times higher than it is for females and it is much worse among minorities than among whites.   For those ages 10-19, the homicide rate is 10 times higher for blacks than for whites.

Differences in suicide rates are even more dramatic, according to the CDC.   Overall, males kill themselves at rates that are 4 times higher than females.  But as with homicide, certain groups are even more vulnerable.  The suicide rate for those ages 20-24 is 5.4 times higher for males than for females of the same age.  In the older age groups suicide is predominantly a male problem.  After retirement, the suicide rate skyrockets for men, but not for women.  Between the ages of 65-74 the rate is 6.3 times higher for males.  Between the ages of 75-84, the suicide rate is 7 times higher.  And for those over 85, it is nearly 18 times higher for men than it is for women.

Why are men so unhappy?  The Feminine Mystique told women that they should be satisfied with being wives, mothers, and homemakers.  The Masculine Mystique told men that they should be happy to compete with other men to find a woman and then compete with other “breadwinners” to create ever greater material wealth for themselves and their families.  We were told that “he who dies with the most toys, wins” and “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”  Both women and men become depressed trying to fit into roles that no longer work for us.

Men are losing out on three fronts.  First, as women become more self-sufficient, men don’t feel they are needed as the sole “breadwinner.”  Second, as the economy continues to move from one based on continued material growth to one based on sustainable living, more males are losing their jobs.  Third, as stresses from economic and ecological imbalances continue to increase, men are no longer able to succeed in love and work.  More women are seeking divorces than ever before and more men are stuck in dead-end jobs working longer and longer hours for less and less pay.

Anti-depressants and psychotherapy aren’t the answer.  Both the feminine mystique and the masculine mystique would have us believe that we are depressed because there is something wrong inside us—with our brains, our serotonin levels, or self-esteem.  The “experts” tell us that we need to take something or do something to better fit into the world as we know it.  Liberation for men and for women requires that we break free of the old constraints and find our true purpose and direction in life.  Depression isn’t merely an illness.  It is a wake-up call from the soul.

Depression is More About Loss of Love Than Loss of Serotonin

We’ve all seen the pharmaceutical ads for the latest antidepressants.  They show two nerve fibers greatly magnified with a few little black dots representing the neurotransmitter, serotonin, in the synapse between the nerves.  The ad informs us that too little serotonin causes depression and when we take their anti-depressant we immediately see many more little dots of serotonin flooding the synapse and connecting to the next nerve.  But as usual, there is more to the story than the pharmaceutical companies would have us believe.

Depression is About Loss of Love

Andrew Solomon is a well-known writer who has dealt with depression in his own life. Although he acknowledges that anti-depressants can be of help to some people who suffer, he describes the problem in much different terms than the simplified view we see in the ads.  In his comprehensive book, The Noonday Demon:  An Atlas of Depression, he begins the book this says:  “Depression,” says Solomon, “is the flaw in love.  To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.  When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection.  It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself….In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident.  The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.”

The Male Vocation of Destiny:   How to Love Ourselves, Each Other, and Embrace Our Calling in Life

Many men are ready to shed old roles, but don’t know what it means to be a good man in these changing times.  Barbara Marx Hubbard says we must embrace our “vocation of destiny.”  I suggest that our work requires that we learn to devote ourselves to three, inter-related, grand, causes.

  • We must learn to love and accept ourselves just the way we are.
  • We must learn to love our partner (wife, spouse, lover, or “special someone”)
  • We must learn to love and embrace our calling in life.

Part of the masculine (and feminine) mystique is that men must be a certain way and women must be different.  In fact, it tells us that the very things that men must be women cannot be and vice versa.

For instance, psychologist Ann Neitlich says that men must be and women cannot be:  Cool, stoic, economically powerful, physically strong, logical, aggressive, athletic, hairy, muscular, outspoken, rugged, and tough.

She says that men cannot be and women must be:  Nurturing, tender, feeling, loving, beautiful, soft, curvy, thin, passive, receptive, nice, sweet, hairless, quiet, giving, and apologetic.

It’s not easy going against the mystique of masculinity, but we must do so if we are going to truly love ourselves.  “When I get to heaven,” said the Hasidic rabbi Susya shortly before his death, “they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ but ‘Why were you not Susya?  Why did you not become what only you could become?’”  The first grand cause is to learn to love ourselves.

When I first heard Ann Neitlich talk about the things that women must be and the things that men cannot be, I wasn’t surprised to hear words like “beautiful, soft, curvy, thin, passive, receptive, and hairless.”  But I was surprised to hear words like “tender, feeling, and loving” included.  But the more I thought about it, I realized it was true.  Even qualities as important and universal as these, we are taught are for women, not for men.

I hate to admit it, but learning to love my wife and even my children at the same level that my wife loves me and our children, has been a real challenge.  The second great cause of our lives is to learn to love those we are closest too.  If we’re not married or “in relationship,” we all have someone special in our lives that we need to love more fully and unconditionally.

Finally, we have to learn to embrace and love our calling in life.  I believe that we each have a calling, something that goes far beyond our job or career, something that we were born to do.  It isn’t always easy to find, embrace, and love, but we must do so if we are going to be the men we’ve always wanted to be.  Barbara Marx Hubbard says, “So, the question for each of us is, ‘what is my unique way of expressing my essence that is both self-rewarding and of service to others?”

I’ve found that for many of us our calling emerges out of our wound.  It was my father’s attempted suicide when I was five that started me on the path of my life’s calling.  It wasn’t always obvious to me, but became more and more clear that my calling has to do with awakening the masculine soul and helping men, and the women who love them, to live long and well on this beautiful planet we all share.

As men, we must come home to the essence of who we are in order to love ourselves, our partner, and our calling.  We live at an important transition time in human history.  An old way of life is coming to an end and a new path is opening before us.  David C. Korten, author of The Great Turning calls it the transition from Empire to Earth Community.  Psychologist and philosopher Sam Keen puts the challenge we face simply:

“The radical vision of the future rests on the belief that the logic that determines either our survival or our destruction is simple:

1.    The new human vocation is to heal the Earth.
2.    We can only heal what we love.
3.    We can only love what we know.
4.    We can only know what we touch.”

Are you ready to step up and embrace the challenge to accept and love yourself?  Are you ready to reach out to others and love more fully and unconditionally?  Are you ready to seek out and embrace your life’s calling?  Let me hear from you.  We can help each other on our journey.  As my friend Joseph Jastrab reminds us, “The world needs a man’s heart.”

Jed

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The Simple Solution the Richest 1% Hope You’ll Never Find

May 8, 2012 By 8 Comments

 

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that we humans in the world are experiencing some serious problems.  Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, two research scientists working through The Equality Trust in the U.K., have identified the following fourteen problems and one simple solution.  When I first read about their work in their book, The Spirit Level:  Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, I was immediately interested.

The fourteen problems they identified for study include the following:

  1. Physical health—Too many people die too young from diseases that could be prevented.
  2. Mental health—Too many people suffer from anxiety, depression, and other mental ills.
  3. Drug abuse—Too many people abuse drugs and many die before their time.
  4. Education—Too many children leave school too soon and others stay, but do poorly.
  5. Imprisonment—Too many people are in prison and prison does little good to prevent future crime.
  6. Obesity—Too many children and adults are overweight and suffer many ailments, including diabetes, as a result.
  7. Equal opportunity—Too many people feel locked into the lower classes with no way to escape.
  8. Trust in community—Too many people divide the world between “us” and “them” and fear there is not enough of us and too many of them.
  9. Violence—Too many people live with the fear of violence, both in their home, in their communities, and in the world.
  10. Teenage Births—Too many young males and females are bringing children into the world, while they are children themselves.
  11. Child health—Too many children die young or fail to thrive and grow in health.
  12. The end of growth—It used to be true that economic growth was good and more was better.  But too many people live as through we could grow without limit, even though we live on a finite planet.
  13. Foreign aid—Too many people suffer because too many rich countries give too little to aid to others.
  14. Climate change—Too many people in the world face calamity as we continue to heat our planet and weather becomes increasingly weird.

The Simple Solution to Many of Our Most Difficult Problems 

After years of research Wilkinson and Pickett have found that all these problems can be improved if we narrowed the income gap between the rich and the poor.  The following diagram shows the health and well-being of those in wealthy countries on the vertical axis and income inequality on the horizontal.  As you see the USA has the highest level of social problems and also has the highest level of income inequality.


Evidence shows that:

1) In rich countries, a smaller gap between rich and poor means a happier, healthier, and more successful population. Just look at the US, the UK, Portugal, and New Zealand in the top right of this graph, doing much worse than Japan, Sweden or Norway in the bottom left.

2) Meanwhile, more economic growth will NOT lead to a happier, healthier, or more successful population. In fact, there is no relation between income per head and social well-being in rich countries.

3) If the US were to reduce income inequality to something like the average of the four most equal of the rich countries (Japan, Norway, Sweden and Finland) evidence shows we could expect the following:

    • Trust within the population would rise by 75%;
    • Mental illness and obesity would be cut by two thirds;
    • Teen births could be more than halved;
    • Prison populations could be reduced by 75%;
    • People could live longer while working the equivalent of two months less per year.

4) It’s not just people in poorer communities who would do better. The evidence suggests people all the way up would benefit, although it’s true that the poorest would gain the most.

5) These findings hold true, whether you look across developed nations, or across the 50 states of the USA.

Dr. Wilkinson offers a compelling summary of years of research at a recent TED talk.

The Rich Are Getting Richer But It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way

In the introduction to The Spirit Level:  Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Robert B. Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, says “Most American families are worse off today than they were three decades ago.  The Great Recession of 2008-2009 destroyed the value of their homes, undermined their savings, and too often left them without jobs.

“But even before the Great Recession began, most Americans had gained little from the economic expansion that began almost three decades before.  Today, the Great Recession notwithstanding, the U.S. economy is far larger than it was in 1980.  But where has all the wealth gone?  Mostly to the very top.  The latest data shows that by 2007, America’s top 1 percent of earners received 23% of the nation’s total income—almost triple their 8% share in 1980.”

Martin Luther King said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  As Bob Dylan reminded us “the times they are a changin.’”

Look over the list of problems such as poor physical health, poor mental health, drug abuse, obesity, violence, etc.  Which ones are you most concerned about?  Would you be willing to work to reduce income inequality if these problems could be significantly improved?

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3 Little Known Stressors Killing Men and the Women Who Love Them

May 1, 2012 By 18 Comments

 

It’s no secret that stress levels are on the rise.  Much of our present-day stress involves our minds going around and around worrying about what could happen. “Stress—or as I like to think of it, the mind that’s running on overdrive—is now considered to be a leading factor in numerous illnesses,” says Woodson Merrell, MD, chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center and author of The Source. “By some estimates, up to 80 percent of all illnesses are stress induced.”

Although stress impacts everyone, men are particularly vulnerable.  We see that in the fact that men die sooner and live sicker than do women.  A chart that I shared in my last post is worth sharing again.  It contains  statistics from the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that men have a higher death rate for the ten leading causes of death (numbers are deaths per 100,000 population):

 

These statistics show, for instance, that for every 100 women who die of heart disease 150 men die.  For every 100 women who commit suicide 400 men kill themselves and for every 100 women who are killed in a homicide 390 men are killed.

Since we know that stress is implicated in most causes of death, what are the most common stressors?  We often think of such things as time pressures, unhealthy lifestyles, traffic jams, and financial worries.  But major new research reported by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book, The Spirit Level:  Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, indicates that more important stressors are ones we probably are not even aware exist.

The Three Killer Stressors Few People Know About

If we take a moment to think about it, the stress that impacts us the most strongly have to do with other people, particularly those who are close to us. Wilkinson and Pickett say that “the most powerful sources of stress affecting health seem to fall into three intensely social categories.”

  1.  Trauma experienced when we were children.
  2.   Low social status.
  3.   Lack of friends.

Early Trauma Affects Health Years After It Occurs

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study has demonstrated that childhood experiences affect adult health decades after they first occur.  The ACE Study is a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego.  They found that childhood abuse, neglect, and exposure to other adverse experiences are common. Almost two-thirds of study participants reported at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more.

Further, it was found that each adverse childhood experience increased the risk of health problems later in life.   For instance, compared to people with an ACE score of 0, those with an ACE score of 4 or more were twice as likely to be smokers, 7 times more likely to be alcoholic, 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs, and 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

 Low Social Status Is Stressful 

Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny, both psychologists at the U.C.L.A. found that the stressors that most impacted our health were ones that threatened our sense of self-worth in the eyes of others.  They collected findings from 208 published reports of experiments in which people’s cortisol (stress hormone) levels were measured while they were exposed to an experimental stressor.

They classified all the different kinds of stressors used in experiments and found that “tasks that included a social-evaluative threat (such as threats to self-esteem or social status), in which others could negatively judge performance, particularly when the outcome of the performance was uncontrollable, provoked larger and more reliable cortisol changes than stressors without these particular threats.”

Lack of Friends Can Be a Real Killer

“All the usual risk factors for heart disease—smoking, obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, and a high-fat diet—account for only half of all cases of heart disease,” says heart expert Dr. Dean Ornish. “Every so-called lifestyle risk factor laid at the door of cardiovascular illness by the medical community has less to do with someone having a heart attack than does simple isolation—from other people, from our own feelings and from a higher power.”

Thomas Joiner, author of Lonely at the Top:  The High Cost of Men’s Success, calls men “the lonely sex.”  And it points out that it gets worse as we age.  “Men’s main problem is not self-loathing, stupidity, greed, or any of the legions of other things they’re accused of,” says Joiner. “The problem, instead, is loneliness; as they age, they gradually lose contacts with friends and family, and here’s the important part, they don’t replenish them.”

As the suicide statistics verify, men often feel increasingly alone as they get older, even when they are surrounded by those who care about them. “A postmortem report on a suicide decedent,” says Joiner, “a man in his sixties read, ‘He did not have friends…he did not feel comfortable with other men…he did not trust doctors and would not seek help even though he was aware that he needed help.’”

The importance of friends reminds me of the refrain from Desperado by the Eagles.  “You better let somebody love you, you better let somebody love you, you better let somebody love you…before it’s too late.”

What do you think?  How have these categories impacted your stress levels?

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Help Me Keep A Million Men Alive

April 19, 2012 By 10 Comments


“If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer.”  Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.

When I was five-years old and my father was forty-two, he tried to commit suicide.  The stresses of trying to earn a living and provide for his family during difficult economic times overwhelmed him.  Though he didn’t die physically, he was crippled emotionally and our lives were never the same.  I grew up wondering what happened to my father and to so many other wounded fathers.

According to the National Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, each year nearly 35,000 people kill themselves.  28,000 (nearly 80%) are male.  Eleven times that number attempt suicide.

But suicide isn’t the only way men’s lives are cut short.  “80 percent of all illnesses are stress induced,”   says Woodson Merrell, MD, Chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center.   Although stress impacts everyone, men are particularly vulnerable.  According to social scientist Dr. Thomas Joiner, “Males experience higher mortality rates than females at all stages of life from conception to old age.”

Statistics from the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that men have a higher death rate for the ten leading causes of death (numbers are deaths per 100,000 population):

“Over 330,000 lives would be saved in a single year in the U.S. alone if men’s risk of dying was as low as women’s,” says University of Michigan researcher, Daniel J. Kruger, PhD.  “Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death,” says Kruger’s colleague, Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.

I grieve for the men and boys whose lives are cut short and for the women and families left behind.  I’ve been looking for a way to reduce stress that is simple to learn, easy to practice, scientifically sound, and, most importantly, effective.  I’ve found what I’ve been looking for, have tested it extensively, and now want to get this life-saving information to as many men as I can.  My new book, MenAlive:  Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, gives men what they need to stop the stress that shortens lives and destroys relationships.

Do you know of other resources you believe could help save men’s lives?  Let’s work together to make them available to men and the women who love them.

Here’s my simple idea:  We know stress kills, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  If we can reduce men’s risk of death to the same level as women’s, we can save nearly a million men within three years.  Let’s get started.  Please comment on this blog post with your idea or resource.  You can also contact me directly at Jed@MenAlive.com

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