Stefan Bechtel, author

This article was published in Men’s Health.

I recently turned my back on corporate life and moved my family down to rural Virginia to become a full-time writer. This was exceedingly foolish, as I was quick to discover after it was too late. For what seemed like months and months, I was unable to write at all. Instead, I found myself landscaping the yard in some sort of pyschoneurotic frenzy. Day after day I was out there in the thick heat, oozing sweat like Cro-Magnon man, stooping over little holes in the ground. Burying things.

Ostensibly, I was planting azaleas and rhododendron (a culturally sanctioned practise). Actually, though, the gardening was just a cover for some other process, something elaborately secretive and twisted.
“What am I actually burying here?” I finally thought to ask myself. “What are these little gravesites all over my front yard?”

I was, I realized, interring dark matters of the heart down there among the worms and the peat. I was burying my own terrible doubts that I could make this thing work. I was covering up my guilt that I might be forcing my family to suffer for my dreams; my guilt about not writing; my guilt at spending a fortune at the nursery (in effect lining each little tomb with a $20 bill or two). There was some process of ritual substitution going on. The more troubled my heart became, the harder I worked. It was guilt and avoidance that lent my labor its savage, unbalanced intensity.

This act of burying, I realized, was related to an old male habit, that of silence. I loved getting out there, slathered with muddy sweat, digging, and not having to say anything to anybody. At the peak of my dirt-ecstasy, I was thrashing around in the pitch dark, in the rain, dragging a cart down to the creek to heave up huge ferns by the roots. Later I stumbled into the kitchen wearing a foolish, illiterate grin, like something that shouldn’t be let into the house. I didn’t want to talk about it or have to explain it to anyone.

Eventually, my own peculiar behavior began to remind me of a few frighteningly observant comments I’d once read in a book called The Secrets Men Keep, by business psychologist Ken Druck, a man accustomed to unravelling the ruses men use to cover what they’re actually doing.

“Work,” says Druck, “is male license for avoiding just about anything.” It’s a culturally sanctioned hiding place where men go to escape marriages, emotional guilt, unfulfilled dreams and anything they don’t want to do. It also becomes a burial ground for all manner of hazardous psychological waste.

When you bury something in the “real” world, it’s usually already dead. But in the psychological world, we bury things we want to make dead, things we want to forget, blot out, turn our backs on. Men often bury emotional needs that were never satisfied in childhood, like the unanswered longing for a father’s approval, in their work. And since society condones the idea that a man’s true value lies in how well he performs his job, we can put in long hours turning our careers into mass graves for all kinds of inner torments, and nobody will ever notice. We usually don’t even notice it ourselves.

But these deeply buried desires and longings don’t always cooperate with their own interment; they continue to live and control us from beyond the grave, like B-movie zombies. They become what Druck calls “negative drivers.” He finds them in abundance among compulsively driven executives – those guys whose entire lives are dominated by their work, whose relationships are just what’s left over after their job is done. These guys have, in effect, buried everything in their work, incuding themselves.

“Men get the idea that becoming a big success will somehow satisfy the unmet needs of childhood,” says Druck. “We think: ‘If I can just make a million bucks; if I can just make vice president; if I can just afford a Mercedes, then I can get off my own back. Then I can cross the finish line and relax.’”

Of course, it’s fair to ask: What’s so bad about that? How many highly accomplished men are there whose great achievements grew out of buried insecurities, buried yearning for the approval of stony fathers, buried loneliness?

The problem, says Druck, is that the achievements are an inadequate substitute for what these men really want. Making a million is never enough. Winning a promotion won’t satisfy. That’s not it. Many of the highly successful men he treats are unable to experience what it feels like to be successful because, somehow, they have also buried their ability to enjoy anything. They’re numbed out, frozen, dead.

Symbols of success will never be sufficient to satisfy the doubting, disclaiming part of you; they just bump you up to the next level. So what if you make a million? There are lots of millionares. So what if you make vice president? The world is full of them.

On the other hand, the male rituals of burial are not always self-indulgent. Sometimes men bury their inner turmoil in their work simply because they’re honoring the great ethic of Handling It: We’re supposed to deal with stress, pain and pressure privately and alone. We’re not supposed to be a burden on anybody or ask anybody for help. We’re supposed to shut up and get the job done.

Personally, I think this is one of men’s great under-appreciated, overridiculed virtues. The price we pay for it, though, is that we wind up burying the pain and stress. Our bodies become the burial ground. And some researchers now believe that this venerable male habit of emotional stoicism may at least partly account for our increased risk of all manner of physical ills, from cancer to ulcers and heart disease. Though the specific evidence to support this notion is still relatively sparse, it’s certainly not hard to believe.

Now, most guys (yourself included) are probably not totally deluded when it comes to work. We’re conscious, albeit dimly, that there are some relatively unsound processes going on in our heads. We know something is driving us, and it’s not entirely healthy, but if it helps us make our sales quotient or put in those impossibly long weeks, we don’t want to understand it. That could destroy our competitive edge. We might decide to quit. So, we keep self-knowledge just out of reach, just outside the rim of consciousness, so we won’t lose our corporate libido.

In the end, we risk living in the half-light of semi-consciousness, tormented by the guilt and fear and emotional needs we have buried in our work, but unwilling to give them up or do anything about them.

“Unless you’re able to get in control of whatever is negatively driving you – what’s wrong with you, what’s inadequate in you – unless you change that belief at the very core, you’re just playing a game,” says Druck.

Fortunately, there are signs and symptoms that can tell you if you’re being negatively driven by something you’ve buried in your work:

• Your commitment to work seems endless. No matter how many hours you put in, it never seems to be enough. (That’s because work will never solve the problem; it’s not the right solution.) You’re never totally there in relationships, because you’re always thinking about work. When somebody or something stops you from working, you get depressed. You don’t know what else to do with yourself.
• The more successful you get, the harder you work. You always thought it would be just the opposite – that things would get easier as you got more successful – but if you’re using work as a burial ground, it doesn’t happen that way. If you’re working compulsively in order to avoid problems in your relationships, for instance, working harder will only create more problems and give you more need to escape.
• As a consequence of an unhealthy relationship to work, you may experience episodes of depression , as well as feelings of unaccountable sadness or inadequacy, chronic fatigue or boredom. Things that were always challenging and interesting to you begin to lose their allure. You spend more time thinking about how you’re going to get away from work than working.
• Declining job performance. The ultimate irony of this kind of workaholism is that, eventually, your obsession with work begins to destroy your ability to work. If you’re a creative person, the ideas just won’t come. If you’re a salesman, your commissions are going down.

The way you start digging out of this mess is to honestly confront whatever it is you’ve entombed in your work. This is deep, muddy, messy work; there’s no self-help cassette tape that will do it for you overnight. Self-awareness, the key to breaking through, usually comes slowly and painfully. It may take therapy. Or it may simply take someone you trust – your mate, a friend — who can give you a no-baloney reality check. You need to ask them: “Do you think I’m running away from something by putting in all these hours?’ “Am I getting weird or obsessive about work?” “Is she going to leave me if I don’t stop doing this?” “Am I nuts?”

It’s possible, says Druck, that one of the things you buried was you. Maybe you’re going to have to dig yourself out of your job before you can move forward. That may require renewing your vision of what it was you wanted to get out of work in the first place. Ask yourself: “If money weren’t a factor, what would I be doing now?” Lots of guys start out doing what they love, but gradually they start asking their jobs to be everything to them. Maybe digging yourself out will mean working less. Maybe it will mean changing jobs completely.

Or maybe it will mean a different sort of transformation: turning yourself into a gardener instead of a gravedigger. Learning to load your work with positive aspirations, rather than murky fears and insecurities. After all, I’m out there in the muddy yard burying roots, not corpses. I’m dreaming of spring. I’m imagining a day, long after I’ve washed my hands of this red Virginia mud, when all my work will turn to flowers.

END