No Man Is An Island: How I Came To Be Involved In The Men's Movement

August 21, 2004

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by David E. Reiser, MD.

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“No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

--John Donne, 1572-1631

In July, 2000, a bailiff in a Colorado courtroom ordered me to rise. My lawyer was beside me and just before we stood up he had whispered in my ear, “Now, I’m warning you! Just shut up! Don’t you dare say a single word!”

“Is this the defendant?” the judge asked my lawyer.

My lawyer said, “Yes, Your Honor. This is Dr. Reiser.”

I was not a defendant. I had been charged with no wrongdoing. But at a time like this, that didn’t seem to matter. The judge cleared his throat and began to read the terms and conditions of the court’s will. I was to obey all stipulations of a permanent restraining order. It prohibited me from having any further contact with my son.

I listened in silence, my wrists handcuffed in front of me. I wore the crumpled blue cotton scrubs issued by the Denver City Jail the night before. My eyes were swollen and red from crying, and the left side of my face was abraded, caked with grime after lying all night on the concrete floor of my cell. Although my vision was blurry, I could see my son sitting two rows back. His expression was wooden; his eyes were blank. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“When I specify that you are to have no contact with your son,” the judge said, “I mean no contact of any kind. You are not to see him. You are not to call him. You cannot write to him—not so much as a birthday card. If you attempt to do this, I will see you back in my Court. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

He turned to my lawyer. “Make sure than he does understand, Counselor.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Memory can be quirky at times of great intensity, such as when your life is falling apart. In crisis, it may fail to register certain details altogether. Others it burns into the circuitry with too much intensity. There doesn’t appear to be any logic to this—it’s more like a power outage. If you view it on a PET Scan, you feel as though you’re flying over some vast city late at night, just as the power grid starts to go. Some sectors disappear into the darkness. Next to them, others are blazing islands of light.

In the courtroom that morning there was a clock. It hung on a bare section of wall above and directly behind the judge, large in size and exceedingly plain—a clock of the standard institutional variety that every child remembers from elementary school. It had a black plastic rim, white face, unadorned black Arabic numerals, and a red sweep-hand.

In memory, there is always that clock, only it has grown much larger with time. Between each numeral there are four cross-hatches, each denoting one second. Thus I can tell you that the hearing began at 10:37. 15 AM and was adjourned at 10:48.45 AM.

In memory, the sweep-hand ratcheted ahead to the next notch in ultra-slow motion. The judge scowled down at me, peering over his bifocals with disdain. He held a sheet of paper and read from it, glancing up frequently to interject a comment, or simply for emphasis. Behind him was the clock. It was huge—four feet at least in diameter. And the sweep-hand was a sword blade. It was red because it had been dipped in blood.

I couldn’t hear the judge’s words. They came out silently, one-by-one, like small rodents emerging from a cave —blind and ugly, creeping out only after dark. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could see what he was saying—his reddened face and the way his lips curled around the words he formed told the story. He was saying: “Blah-blah-blah-blah…You disgusting subhuman piece of shit… Blah-blah-blah-blah…..Wife beater! Stalker! Scum! Scuzzball! Lowlife!...Blah-blah-blah-blah…If I could, I’d hang you myself… Blah-blah-blah-blah…”

I kept my gaze directly on the sweep-hand of the clock as it ticked off the seconds. It advanced slowly, lurching ahead suddenly to the next notch and then pausing there. It would be still for quite a while. Then it would suddenly twitch and lunge ahead to the next notch. When it arrived, it made a sound, a sound that was in every way what you would expect a sweep-hand to sound like, except that its volume was turned up too high. It was as loud as a Tibetan Gong. TICK…TOCK…TICK…TOCK…

What can I say about all of this? I had done nothing wrong, but I had lost my son. I didn’t believe it could really be happening. Even as I write this now, four years later, I realize that I still haven’t fully conceded it in the innermost core of my being.

I lost my son. I lost him for absolutely no reason other than the fact that my ex-wife was determined to seek vengeance during a divorce and, shockingly, was assisted by an extensive cadre of people eager to assist her in wreaking as much damage as possible—the courts themselves. I believed in America and I believed in its system of laws. Then this happened. So—what can I say?

Should I strive for eloquence, picking my words with extreme care, seeking to draw certain emotions from you? What emotions? To what end? Or should I just say that I was inwardly destroyed, knowing that such a phrase is just meaningless words, but also knowing that nothing I say can ever explain what it is like to go through this. It is shattering.

It’s simplest in the end just to say that I lost my son and that losing him has left a void in me. Remembering him now brings a feeling of hollowness in me, and yet strangely it is a hollowness that is full of him. After four years, I don’t think about him less, which is what most people believe should be my goal. I think about him all the time.

Every holiday I think back to times I spent with him. I’ll start to smile at a memory when suddenly a fist clutches me from within. It feels like a cold hand that is only half-alive, existing inside of me for one reason only—to remind me of the truth. Whenever I recall loving times, the hand reaches up and starts to squeeze. Every day I remember him. And every day the fist clenches its fingers tighter.

I can tell you this: If grief were really about gradually withdrawing love from someone until none remains, and then watching with growing indifference as the person’s image fades away—then I would want no part of grief. No pain is so great that I would be willing to forget the love I have for my son.

It’s curious. For all of my own anguish that morning, no one else in the courtroom seemed to feel much of anything. I exclude my son from this assessment. He had to cram his pain so far down that he became almost robotic. My ex-wife chattered away breezily with three “Victim’s Assistance Advocates” who had accompanied her to court. As nearly as I could determine, the judge seemed completely unaffected. I suppose that’s because for him the matter was so routine. He’d done it hundreds of times. My lawyer also seemed indifferent. I suppose that he had known the outcome all along, had known that the judge’s ruling was a foregone conclusion. I suppose that for him this was all in a day’s work.

At one point I recall scanning the spectators in the gallery. Every one of them had that stupid blank expression that people get when they’ve been watching hours of TV. Collectively they reminded me of cloth dolls, the ones that have buttons sewn in for eyes and a nose, the kind in which the buttons quickly come off. I beheld three rows of washed out terrycloth sacks. Their eyes had all been chewed away. Their mouths were comprised of a single puckered purse-stitch. They looked as though they were all saying, “Oh! What a surprise!” Or, perhaps they might have been blowing on soup that was still too hot to swallow.

Am I the only one who is disturbed by this? Shouldn’t more people react when a man’s son is taken from him for absolutely no reason? Does everyone honestly believe that a tragedy similar to this one could never happen to him? John Donne wrote his Seventeenth Meditation four hundred years ago. It’s always a favorite of junior high school civics teachers who are trying to instill proper values in their students. But when I look at the world around me I see little evidence for brotherhood. I see people huddled in the shadows, keeping to themselves. They’re saying, “I don’t want to get involved”… “It’s not my problem.”…”I can’t handle this.”…

And it’s too bad because the bell really does toll for all of us. When I was writing this column, I came across an article in Men’s News Daily by Jim Manion. In it he raised the very real possibility that Al Q’uaeda already has nuclear devices hidden in the United States. If the worst comes true, what are the rest of us going to do when CNN reports that Detroit and Buffalo are gone?

I lost my son. Let’s just leave it at that…

This is the place in such a narrative where I am expected to tell you that living through the trauma was sheer hell, but somehow I managed to succeed and get on with my life. OK—Somehow I endured. Let’s fast forward.

After a year I was still spiraling deeper into depression. I was that astronaut in 2001 that HAL sent hurtling out into the universe by cutting his oxygen line. That guy went ass over tea-kettle straight into the void, and Kubrick kept the camera trained on his eyes the entire time. He was conscious all right. He knew what was happening.

So did I. I knew that I had to do something, too. I was dying inside and no one else could or would help me. What I did was to become active in the Men’s Movement. What I did not do is just as important. I did not go back into psychoanalysis. I figured that seven years ought to have been enough. It’s important for me to say that because I’m a psychiatrist. We all tend at times of duress to fall back on what is familiar and I might logically have been expected to seek psychotherapy.

I knew enough about psychotherapy, however, to know that it would not work. In saying this, I wish to make it clear that I am not being cynical. I am not opposed to therapy—not at all. But when a problem originates in a societal injustice, treating it with a form of therapy that focuses on one’s inner psychic world is the opposite of what is needed.

My son and I had been subjected to an act of unpardonable cruelty. If anything was pathological, it was the system that had done this. I joined the Men’s Movement, educated myself about the issues, and commenced to strive along with many others to fight back.

In my previous column, I described a phone call that I received from an old friend. After we had caught one another up on recent events in our lives, he had grown awkward and uncharacteristically tongue-tied. Finally, he blurted out what was on his mind. He told me he hoped, now that I was moving ahead once again in my life, that I had come to my senses and disavowed “all of that crap with the Men’s Movement.”

When someone feels this adamantly about something, I am inclined to wonder whether my experience might be stirring up conflicts in him, perhaps unconsciously. I suspected this in my friend and although I was annoyed I wasn’t surprised. I’ve heard similar sentiments any number of times and have come to believe that this reaction is very common.

I think that my friend’s attitude came from denial and that underneath it he felt very threatened. I also think that my friend’s denial is widespread. As a society, we are all, in my view, minimizing and denying the significance of divorce.

There is an epidemic right now. In fact, there’s a pandemic. The problem has spread across the globe. With one in two marriages ending in divorce, something is obviously gravely wrong. It’s absolutely astonishing, therefore, that no one is saying this straight out, screaming it, bellowing it at the top of his lungs— “THIS IS A TOTAL CATASTROPHIE!” I can only explain that as being due to our mass denial.

We minimize divorce’s significance all the time: Nightly TV talk show hosts engage in clever repartee about it. We all nod and agree that it “happens to just about everybody” Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm in one of the funnier scenes captured in a movie. And I would say, “Kudos,” except that the subject of divorce isn’t all that funny. Its shadow falls over the landscape of everything that we do, all that we are. It falls across our schools (where we see the children who inevitably suffer the most); it falls across our churches (where most moral leaders seem to be more baffled than helpful); and it falls across our mental health centers and counseling suites. Organized psychiatry and psychology have done their usual abysmal job of seeing the problem for what it is. These institutions partake in a level of denial that is at least as great as the rest of society. Perhaps they’ll come up with a new position on the matter in a few years after taking a vote.

It also falls across this country’s lawyers, only they don’t seem to notice. They’re too busy driving their BMW’s through the rush-hour congestion to the Deposit window at the bank.

No one seems to be cutting through the bullshit and declaring a state of emergency, so the shadow keeps growing. No one is confronting the truth except for the Men’s Movement.

Here we come to a vexing situation, a bona fide puzzlement. Perhaps you have noticed, as I have, that most people in this society are completely oblivious to the struggles of the Men’s Movement. Most men and women who have not been recent victims of a divorce seem to be absurdly insouciant about the whole matter. Such noblisse oblige certainly cannot be justified on the basis that divorce won’t happen to them. It’s closer to fifty-fifty that it will.

I have yet to view a single substantive television documentary on the Men’s Movement. Where are Sixty Minutes, Front Line, CNN, and PBS? It has to be denial. We live in a society where political action groups mobilize around almost anything, but it’s very strange indeed to consider that more citizens are apparently worried about irradiated produce in supermarkets than they are about the way we are nuking the psychological futures of half our children. It has to be denial.

It has to be denial and I am convinced that our culture’s astonishing indifference to this Movement, which is the only one that is confronting reality at this time, stems from massive levels of denial. We are dealing with a classical case of “stoning the messenger” here. I fear the consequences of it.

I’m going to discuss the implications of this further in Part III of this series, “The Uses of Shame,” in which I will address the unconscious conflicts, impulses, and fears that abound in divorce. Unconscious conflicts comprise, in fact, an enormous ocean which surrounds the small island of our (apparent) reason when we deal with this subject. If you stop and consider the matter for a moment, I think you’ll agree that the path of any serious conjecture leads directly here.

What is really amazing is that these matters are never mentioned. But then, that’s the way people have always been about these matters. If sexuality was our culture’s ultimate taboo in Victorian times, it seems to me that the demise of marriage and the nuclear family is what we dare not speak of now.

Before I proceed to the subject of all that we deny, repress, and disavow, however, I believe that it is important to clear away some underbrush that’s grown in right where we are standing, and in plain view. Since a surprising number of people haven’t got a clue about what this Movement stands for, perhaps it’s time to review some of the basics.