I have been a psychotherapist specializing in men’s mental, emotional, and relational health for more than fifty years. Like many men, I have had challenges with my love life. Those who visit me at MenAlive see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.” I recently interviewed a kindred spirit, Sean Hotchkiss, author of a new book, Hating Women: A Memoir of Male Rage and Recovery.
I was given an early copy of the book and found it resonated with my own personal and professional experiences. Like Sean, I grew up without the support of a father and became very attached to my mother who called me her “brave little man” after my father was hospitalized following a failed suicide attempt. For years I denied the impact of my early experiences on the reality that my relationship life was a disaster.
Sean shared some of his own experiences growing up and how he came to recognize how early trauma impacted his life and how writing the book helped him come to peace with himself and eventually to share what he learned with the world. Here is what Sean says in the book about his healing journey:
“Hating Women tells the story of my struggles in romantic relationships for two decades,” he says. “It highlights a handful of key relationships that, with some distance, all went down pretty much exactly the same way: I’d get excited about a woman, and we’d launch into an intense connection. Eventually, either that connection would start to feel too confining, and I’d run away from it. Or, occasionally, the woman I was dating would run away from me. Rinse. Repeat.
“My apparent inability to have a healthy relationship with a woman drove me insane. I’ve always been someone who has claimed to want great love. But every time I felt like I was getting close, something blew up. I felt powerless. Many times, the pattern felt larger than me. And every breakup, every betrayal, every loss, made me even more wary about commitment.
“Back in 2015, I began a deep dive into my past and my childhood trauma, and it started to become much clearer to me why I’d always struggled in relationships.
“First, my father was largely missing from my childhood. He and my mother got divorced when I was 4, and I only saw him about eight days a month for the next ten years. When I was 22, he committed suicide. I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone reading this to hear that the loss I experienced in that relationship ran deep. I longed for my father and never felt I got the love I wanted from him. That left an imprint. And for years after his death, I mainly focused on him in my healing. His absence was just so big and obvious, and I had a lot of unresolved grief and rage towards him for the way he lived and left.
“Second, following my parent’s divorce and the disappearance of my father, I became an emotional support and a sort of surrogate partner for my mother, as many boys do. In the years she was single, and even when she had a boyfriend or husband, she and I had a connection that felt equal parts comforting and strange. She confided in me about her problems, asked me for advice, and put me on a pedestal. And I did the same with her. There were very few boundaries between us. And because our bond seemed close on the surface, it took me much longer to see the shadow of it and how it was affecting all my relationships with women.
“That combination of feeling abandoned by my father, and overwhelmed and under-nurtured by my mother created a very particular belief system in my mind and body: Intimacy was not safe. Surely, I’d either be left, or be smothered. I’m not a big fan of attachment labels, but therapists would have called me a fearful avoidant. As in: Please love me, but not too much!
“Because these beliefs — and the unprocessed grief and rage attached to them — went untouched for many years, I found myself always recreating these conditions in relationships. (This is how our psyche works: it wants us to heal, so it puts us in familiar (family) dynamics so the buried feelings emerge and we have a chance to heal). But, like so many of us, instead of facing those feelings head-on and attempting to work on my relationships, I often just ran to the next woman hoping for a different result.
“Things finally came to a head over the last several years: First, I was in a relationship with a woman who always seemed out of reach, just like my dad. And then I rebounded into a relationship with a woman where there was a lot of love between us, but also a lot of codependency just like with my mom. Thanks to these relationships, I came out of denial: I was dating women like my parents. And in order to cease this pattern, I would have to stop getting into one relationship after the next, and sort out the feelings that emerged when I was alone.
“I see that the coaching work I’ve been doing with men the last six years all connects back to the same root trauma of childhood, and that most, if not all, of the men who have come into my practice through the years experienced the same set up I did: emotionally or physically absent father, enmeshed mother.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. As a society, we’re now between eight and eleven generations removed from the Industrial Revolution — a time that is largely credited by Men’s Movement authors like Robert Bly and James Hillman as the time when fathers began spending less time in the home. And it’s become clear to me that this gradual and expanding absence of fathers (and of male presence) has led to an increasing dependency on mothers through the formative years. In boys, this dependency on our mothers often becomes enmeshed: with mothers leaning on sons to make up for the lack of male presence in the home, and sons clinging to mothers as the only source of love they’re receiving.”
You can pre-order Sean’s important book on Amazon. It will be out in July. After that you can order it wherever books are sold. Pre-orders help the author and the publisher. They also help us all to get books about important topics that may be controversial.
When I wrote my first book, Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man, in 1983, I was told that women buy most books and men weren’t interested in a men’s memoir about love, loss, and healing. I believed in the book and so did many others. The psychologist, Dr. Herb Goldberg said,
“For me this is the best kind of ‘Men’s Liberation’ book — a personal, honest, expressive account of the inner life of a man in the process of search and change.”
Natalie Rogers said,
“We know the personal is political — feminists have proved that point — yet few, (if any) men have had the courage to be as vulnerable at Jed Diamond. Women and men will find this book provocative and illuminating.”
I believe these quotes also apply to Sean Hotchkiss and his book, Hating Women: A Memoir of Male Rage and Recovery.
You can order the book here. You can learn more about Sean by visiting his Substack, One Man’s Heart, here.
You can watch and listen to my interview with Sean here.
