Awakening from the Deep Sleep

📖 The Scoop

After years of socialization mandating fierce independence, invulnerability, and strength, many men fall into what psychotherapist Robert Pasick calls a "deep sleep": an emotional and behavioral state often characterized by excessive dependence on work, wives, or addictive substances. By their late thirties or forties, these men feel pressured to prove themselves, wary of the career track they're on (whether or not they've been successful), socially isolated, emotionally distant and hypercritical, and uncertain about what they really want. Drawing on years of experience counseling men. Pasick explores how they relate to work, anger, grief, women, sexuality, fatherhood, and addiction. Through the stories of men who come together in a men's group, Pasick examines the male socialization process that eventually leads to the "deep sleep". The author explores why men believe they must constantly prove themselves, how the women's movement has frightened and confused men and how it may liberate them, how men are overburdened by an unreasonable expectation to constantly produce, and the differences in male and female language and worldviews. In defining the meaning of sex in men's lives, Pasick tracks men's changing sexual attitudes and behaviors as they proceed through mid-life. He outlines the importance of men coming to terms with their own fathers, ways in which men can learn to be better fathers, and ways for men to better connect to their children from infancy through adulthood. Ultimately, Pasick provides a new definition of manhood that builds upon the strengths men already have and leads men toward a new discovery of how to take care of themselves and others. This is an invaluable bookfor men who long to better understand themselves and their relationships, as well as for women who wish to better understand men.

Genre: Family & Relationships / Life Stages / Mid-Life (fancy, right?)