Latest / The Dr. Psych Mom Show with clinical psychologist Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten / Are There Really Men Who Do "Everything"?

Transcript

Are There Really Men Who Do "Everything"? · The Dr. Psych Mom Show with clinical psychologist Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten

• 0:05
  Hi everybody, and welcome to the dr.
• 0:07
  Psych mom show, today, we're going to be talking about
• 0:10
  whether there are really men who do quote everything in the way
• 0:13
  that women do quote, everything. Of course, there are.
• 0:16
  But many women tell me there aren't.
• 0:18
  So I figured I would share a bit about what I've learned
• 0:21
  throughout my career, working with couples and individuals in
• 0:25
  order to two things really validate, the experience of men
• 0:29
  who are in this situation, who for reasons, I'll discuss
• 0:32
  frequently feel ashamed and don't share about.
• 0:35
  What's going on with anybody and be just to help people
• 0:39
  interrogate their gender biases, which is a big part of listening
• 0:43
  to the doctor psych mom show for you.
• 0:44
  Hopefully because that's a major piece of feedback that I get
• 0:48
  from both genders is that they never understood how women / men
• 0:52
  thought until they listen. You know.
• 0:55
  So that's a big component of what I do.
• 0:58
  Please do subscribe, before we get any further.
• 1:01
  My most recent subscriber episode was well, I had one On
• 1:05
  why would your partner want to make you happy if you never act
• 1:08
  happy and then most recently, I had another one that I honestly
• 1:12
  can't remember now let's see, it's one you cannot talk in
• 1:18
  couples counseling, freely about all topics and why this happens.
• 1:23
  And of course, if you can't talk freely and couples counseling
• 1:26
  about everything that's going on, then it's going to be not as
• 1:29
  useful to put it mildly. So we talked about that.
• 1:32
  All right. So what do I mean by doing
• 1:34
  everything? So, what women usually mean,
• 1:36
  when they say that they do everything is that not only do
• 1:39
  they have a job, sometimes they don't sometimes their stay at
• 1:41
  home and they say they basically just do everything to make the
• 1:44
  house, Ron, but increasingly more women are working and are
• 1:48
  equal earners. If not higher earners, like, 30%
• 1:51
  of women are primary Breadwinners, I think, according
• 1:53
  to the most recent statistics, so there are definitely women
• 1:57
  that do mostly everything. So we don't want to, you know
• 2:03
  what, the same counselors who talk.
• 2:05
  And I feel statements talk about never saying, always, or never
• 2:09
  will you know, what you could say?
• 2:10
  Always Endeavor, you heard it here first, you know, because
• 2:14
  it's literally a video camera. If your if your home was a
• 2:18
  reality TV show, and everybody would be like, why is that woman
• 2:22
  doing everything? Then you're doing everything
• 2:24
  right. I'd be like, let's be real and
• 2:26
  not be stuck on semantics or bullshit.
• 2:29
  So everything means the house care, the child care.
• 2:33
  The housework, the childcare, the cooking, the cleaning.
• 2:35
  Meaning the figuring out who has to call a handyman for this or
• 2:38
  that, maybe he mows the lawn every two weeks, maybe he mows
• 2:41
  it every two months, maybe Moses never never.
• 2:43
  And if he's also unemployed, then you really have a good case
• 2:47
  that you do everything. I hear you right and frequently,
• 2:50
  you know, he is in some of these situations, the man is always
• 2:54
  between jobs or is always about to lose a job, or you're always
• 2:56
  just lost a job and what's going on with these men frequently?
• 3:00
  There's addiction there's depression, or there's ADHD or a
• 3:03
  mix of any of those. But, but there are men who are
• 3:08
  the ones who do everything to, they just don't verbalize it as
• 3:12
  much, why? Because they're ashamed.
• 3:14
  They're just as ashamed as the 20% of women, but probably 30%
• 3:20
  of women in couples counseling. Who are the constant sexual
• 3:24
  initiators. There is shame because this
• 3:26
  defies the conventional gender narrative and people don't like
• 3:30
  to stick out and bad ways. And and so a man that marries a
• 3:34
  woman that literally does does barely anything around the house
• 3:37
  doesn't work and barely engages with the kids.
• 3:40
  And there are those men in those situations are incredibly
• 3:43
  embarrassed to talk about it to anybody because all these guys
• 3:48
  were like, oh, I wouldn't even know where the bread was in the
• 3:50
  fridge. If my lovely wife, you know,
• 3:53
  didn't point it out, ha ha. Those men are like, proud of the
• 3:56
  fact that the woman is so competent at the home making
• 3:59
  sphere. So it's just like the women who
• 4:01
  were like, oh my God, I can't even take off a sock.
• 4:04
  This is like a joke on. Doc where women like take off a
• 4:07
  sock and the man like a tax on to have sex, not a tax in a bad
• 4:11
  way attacks in a good way. Like he's like, you know,
• 4:15
  frothing at the mouth because she's even taking off a sock.
• 4:18
  And that's like a joke based on how the guys, so attracted to
• 4:21
  her that anytime she takes off any piece of clothing.
• 4:24
  In this case, you could be a nasty like robe with curlers and
• 4:28
  whatever she takes off a sock and he wants to have sex.
• 4:30
  So that's the joke is like my husband wants me so much that
• 4:33
  even this would make him. On it.
• 4:35
  And so the same kind of joke like people don't talk anymore
• 4:40
  about the good aspect. The women who are proud when
• 4:44
  their husband is like, oh man, I couldn't survive without her.
• 4:46
  I couldn't even make myself a sandwich like, nowadays.
• 4:49
  It's thought that that would always be bad.
• 4:51
  Like, why can't you make yourself a fucking sandwich?
• 4:53
  Because a lot of couples relationships are based with
• 4:57
  pride on her, having the whole making sphere, and him having to
• 5:00
  work outside the house, fear, that's still a thing.
• 5:03
  But people who are In their relationships, my friend DSO,
• 5:08
  calls it. The vocal minority is the ones
• 5:10
  who are unhappy. So people who are resentful that
• 5:13
  their husband doesn't know how to make a sandwich.
• 5:15
  Wait, of course, he does know how to make a sandwich.
• 5:17
  He's like, just like making a joke.
• 5:19
  He isn't gonna die. If you divorce him, I never saw
• 5:21
  a guy yet who after divorce died of starvation, because he was
• 5:25
  unable to figure out how to eat. So, anyway, in, there are still
• 5:29
  many many couples, often more conservative or traditional
• 5:33
  couples, where the man? Bragg's in this way, about the
• 5:36
  woman's ability to be a good Homemaker and she's actually
• 5:39
  happy about it. And it's the equivalent of the
• 5:42
  idea of how repellent it would seem to women in unhappy
• 5:47
  relationships or with bad sex lives.
• 5:49
  That whole Tick-Tock about taking off the sock.
• 5:52
  They would be like, oh my God. What an animal like her
• 5:55
  boundaries are being violated. Yeah, but like the woman making
• 5:57
  the tick, tock is laughing. My husband loves me so much,
• 6:00
  he's so attracted to me that he's so into even be taking off
• 6:03
  a sock. So Wait, the idea that you would
• 6:08
  marry a woman or marry a man. So marry a woman who cannot do
• 6:14
  basically. Anything is like just as
• 6:18
  upsetting as it is to marry a man who doesn't want any sex,
• 6:22
  you know, because it goes so against the conventional
• 6:24
  Narrative of like the woman as the competent Homemaker and
• 6:27
  child, you know, child Whisperer, you know, loving
• 6:31
  mother attentive mother baking cookies, Etc.
• 6:35
  Tara. Now, am I saying that?
• 6:36
  This is how everything should be or whatever?
• 6:38
  No. Just I mean, literally like I'm
• 6:41
  just get I mean, I don't get a lot of people who listen to the
• 6:44
  podcast for super long and then say, oh my God, you're not PC
• 6:50
  because, you know, you'd be in a coma if you didn't know, I
• 6:52
  wasn't PC by now. But so of course, of course,
• 6:56
  there's so many people like to split the whole making right
• 6:58
  down the middle. Wonderful.
• 7:00
  Cool. But there's also, the idea that
• 7:04
  a lot of men, Marry a woman who's going to be a quote good
• 7:06
  mother. That's reality.
• 7:08
  You know and woman marries a man is going to be a good father and
• 7:11
  those things mean, different things to different people but
• 7:14
  the idea. So okay, so what does it look
• 7:17
  like in this situation? It's usually a woman who has
• 7:19
  depression ADHD substance abuse or all three.
• 7:24
  What did I just say that? Is also for men who are in the
• 7:27
  same situation so think, depression doesn't know any
• 7:32
  gender. You know, I mean, of course more
• 7:33
  women are in fact, depressed. Than men but also women have
• 7:37
  fewer. They have a lower prevalence of
• 7:39
  ADHD. There could be discussions about
• 7:41
  diagnosis in men versus women. Either way, in terms of what's
• 7:44
  diagnosed men more with ADHD, women more with depression and
• 7:48
  substance abuse. I assume is, is a cross, you
• 7:52
  know, there's a cross-gender but I don't remember the exact
• 7:55
  statistics on that one. Doesn't matter if you have an
• 7:57
  itching, a hankering to know Google, it prevalence of
• 8:00
  substance abuse rates across gender, but the point is that I
• 8:04
  see a lot of men who Go out and they make, you know, money and
• 8:07
  their job and then they come home and they cook meal and then
• 8:10
  they clean it up. And then they do bath time, then
• 8:12
  they do bedtime. And what is the woman doing?
• 8:15
  Frequently nowadays with smartphone?
• 8:17
  She's on her phone and she's like saying that she's doing
• 8:20
  something for the family but she's either not or she's doing
• 8:26
  something that could also be done by him in two seconds.
• 8:29
  So a lot of women who are depressed will say like I'm
• 8:31
  shopping online for clothes for the kids but the kids don't
• 8:35
  Really need any more clothes like they have enough clothes
• 8:38
  and she's doing it for the dopamine, hit the small dopamine
• 8:40
  hit of scrolling and purchasing. So that's like, one that I see
• 8:43
  or she's like, researching. I'm researching activities for
• 8:46
  the children. Well, he'll who can tell you,
• 8:48
  you're not right. Research.
• 8:49
  Is it endless activity? I know this from graduate
• 8:51
  school. You could always be researching
• 8:53
  more. So you know while men who are
• 8:57
  more depressed will be like video gaming or they'll be just
• 9:00
  watching TV or whatever women are more likely to say because
• 9:05
  Gender roles indicate that they should be more embarrassed about
• 9:09
  not being present with the children versus men and that is
• 9:14
  bad etcetera. Etcetera.
• 9:15
  But anyway, so they will more likely say that they're doing
• 9:18
  something for the kids and of course, they may well be.
• 9:21
  But the thing that they're doing isn't like feeding the kids or
• 9:24
  bathing the kids that they really can't do because they're
• 9:27
  either depressed or they're drinking or they can't
• 9:29
  concentrate on it or whatever. So who ends up in these
• 9:33
  situations men that are What I've called the Workhorse or the
• 9:37
  over function Ur, So, they're very codependent.
• 9:40
  They usually had a mother who struggled with drinking or
• 9:42
  depression, or ADHD or grief, or trauma.
• 9:47
  And the mother just couldn't function.
• 9:49
  And so the dad either did everything or the sun did
• 9:52
  everything. So he knows this, he knows this
• 9:56
  is a very, very familiar, obviously dysfunctional Dynamic,
• 10:00
  and he just starts to do it, and even in the early stages, She
• 10:05
  was like, tired all the time, or like she was overwhelmed or she
• 10:09
  was like, you know, she was in college or graduate school and
• 10:12
  she just couldn't do everything and things were going to change
• 10:15
  after. She didn't have classes on her
• 10:16
  plate or after she didn't have work on her plate, but nothing
• 10:19
  has ever changed. It's only gotten One Direction,
• 10:21
  she said, less and less and less.
• 10:22
  So there are men who do everything, you know, and this
• 10:27
  is the truth and they're just like, there's women that do
• 10:30
  everything and now is the woman still, can she still be a loving
• 10:34
  mother? Sure and man.
• 10:35
  And that situation can still be a loving, father, the kids will
• 10:37
  come over and cuddle with them. Let's say on the couch, you
• 10:40
  know. But but they get all their needs
• 10:44
  met by the other parent really, except for love, you know, and
• 10:47
  and frequently though, unfortunately if a person is
• 10:50
  very depressed, they are angry. They do snap at the kids, they
• 10:53
  are asleep or virtually sleep and so they can't really provide
• 10:58
  love that well either. But they do love the child and
• 11:00
  they exist in the world. So that is a net benefit for the
• 11:04
  child versus Having a parent of course.
• 11:06
  But in terms of what do they do in order to, you know, people
• 11:10
  say Love Is A Verb so do they love as a verb?
• 11:13
  The kid? Not really, you know, because
• 11:15
  they can. So in this situation it really
• 11:19
  you got to refer back to my podcast on what's helping and
• 11:22
  what's enabling and also what to do when your wife is depressed
• 11:25
  because that can be the same for substance abuse or depression or
• 11:28
  anything, you got to get them into treatment.
• 11:30
  You got if this really resonates with your experience and many
• 11:34
  men in the Equation. You can refer back to my
• 11:36
  elephants in the room podcast. They don't tell anybody because
• 11:39
  again, it's very, very embarrassing to have their
• 11:43
  family or their friends know that they not only are working
• 11:46
  outside the home. But they are basically also
• 11:47
  coming in and doing a hundred percent pretty much of of the
• 11:52
  meaningful activities that keep the children alive.
• 11:56
  You know, isn't isn't something that you really want to
• 11:58
  advertise. You want us to help your wife
• 12:00
  safe face. You know, you don't want people
• 12:02
  to look at her like that, especially, if you Open it
• 12:05
  dysfunctional, family and you're used to keeping a big secret of
• 12:08
  one parent or both parents dysfunction.
• 12:10
  So in this situation, you got to go to therapy would be good.
• 12:14
  And you got to start talking to somebody about this elephant in
• 12:17
  the room, like I said on the elephant in the room podcast and
• 12:20
  if you're in couples counseling already, we refer back to my
• 12:24
  other. So you see I've been doing a
• 12:25
  theme recently because more and more, I realized that what
• 12:28
  people struggle with his secrets, you know, when you grew
• 12:31
  up in a home where there were Secrets, then you have secrets
• 12:33
  in your marriage, Times. It's the secret.
• 12:36
  Is that one person drinks every night, you know, bottle of wine.
• 12:39
  Sometimes the secret is that y'all don't have any physical
• 12:42
  relationship. Sometimes the secret is that
• 12:44
  your partner is just like not a functional adult, you know?
• 12:49
  And all they do is kind of lay around, but these are all
• 12:53
  secrets and people who were raised with secrets in their
• 12:56
  family of origin and up with secrets of their relationship.
• 12:59
  So if you're a man in the situation, getting to therapy
• 13:01
  and talking to somebody about what's going on, they could talk
• 13:03
  you through it, to talk to you. Rue kind of like what you should
• 13:06
  do. Next frequently, you got to put
• 13:09
  down, put your foot down and say, you've got to get into
• 13:12
  treatment. We got to get you into a therapy
• 13:14
  therapists office. We got to get you in with a
• 13:16
  psychiatrist. Maybe there's medication that
• 13:18
  can help, you're not doing anything, you know, I mean, I
• 13:21
  feel for you and I know this isn't what you are trying to do
• 13:25
  as a person, but you don't, you don't do anything, you know?
• 13:28
  I mean, you say that you're doing something all the time on
• 13:31
  your phone, but you haven't helped with bedtime or bath
• 13:34
  time. I'm or whatever, the case may be
• 13:36
  in years, we don't really have a physical relationship at all.
• 13:40
  We don't have a romantic relationship.
• 13:41
  We don't do this. We don't do that.
• 13:43
  You know, like, you got to come out and say it, you know,
• 13:45
  instead of keeping it a secret. So to summarize, yes, there are
• 13:50
  men in the situation and now I've given you quite a good
• 13:53
  picture with detail about the many wind up in this situation.
• 13:57
  Are there men were married to women that are completely
• 14:01
  emotionally healthy that are in this situation.
• 14:03
  Obviously not I mean you know, No, human doesn't want to in a
• 14:08
  best-case no healthy human being, that is not struggling
• 14:11
  with some sort of disorder doesn't want to help in their
• 14:14
  home. I mean that just isn't to say
• 14:16
  not men and not women. So based on how you were raised
• 14:19
  and the gender Norms. There are men who think that
• 14:22
  their main thing to do is home project and the outside and
• 14:27
  power washing, the house, and doing the yard, and this and
• 14:30
  that. And the woman is upset, they
• 14:31
  don't do enough laundry fine. That's something that you can
• 14:33
  negotiate, you know, maybe in a couple.
• 14:35
  It's counseling. May be may not even need couples
• 14:37
  counseling, but if you have a man that doesn't do any of, it
• 14:41
  doesn't give a shit about anything in the home at all.
• 14:43
  That's likely somebody who's depressed, you know.
• 14:45
  And the same thing for a woman you know there is there's not
• 14:48
  really they're not really women that have like a philosophical
• 14:52
  reason. There are healthy person with a
• 14:54
  philosophical reason that you do literally everything in the
• 14:58
  home. That's not accurate.
• 14:59
  So if that's what you've been thinking that's wrong.
• 15:02
  That's always. Somebody who's struggling with
• 15:04
  either depression and Chin, post-trauma ath to whatever the
• 15:09
  case may be. So healthy, human beings want to
• 15:12
  help make their environment, healthy, safe and productive,
• 15:17
  place for themselves and their children.
• 15:20
  That's true. I mean like I've gerbils even
• 15:22
  like you know healthy gerbils are trying to like dig tunnels
• 15:26
  in their home like like a healthy mammal is like doing
• 15:29
  something. They're not just sitting around
• 15:32
  so men and women are in a situation where the He just
• 15:35
  basically sits around sometimes, they work eight hours a day and
• 15:38
  then they sit around. And if that's the case, then you
• 15:41
  can, you know, tell yourself that their salary is, is worth
• 15:45
  it. But really, if they're working
• 15:47
  eight hours and then they're just sitting around before and
• 15:49
  afterwards there's usually something going on.
• 15:52
  This isn't this isn't normal, you know, that is not normal and
• 15:55
  healthy to just literally sit around and do nothing.
• 15:58
  Even if you could rally to work 48 hours and many people with
• 16:01
  quote, high functioning depression or alcoholism can do
• 16:04
  that. But that's the high functioning
• 16:06
  part is they can actually have a job but then the rest of the
• 16:09
  time they're not doing anything and they're kind of living
• 16:10
  almost in their own filth. If you would let them, that is
• 16:13
  not normal that needs to be thought about and that needs to
• 16:16
  be helped and addressed and confronted directly in a way
• 16:19
  that it wasn't in your family of origin, which is how you got
• 16:21
  into this mess, unfortunately. And I have the most empathy for
• 16:24
  you because you didn't know anything different, but now you
• 16:26
  got to know something different so that your children don't end
• 16:29
  up perpetuating the same cycle and enabling the same kind of
• 16:32
  person and being in the same kind of marriage.
• 16:35
  With an elephant in the room of this.
• 16:37
  All right. Well, I hope this was useful and
• 16:39
  I'll talk to you soon. Bye.