At 56 years of age to the day and to the very hour as I write this, in the life-threatening shadow of undiagnosable CPTSD, I stand in the wreckage of a future I once believed was reasonable, even probable. Structures I once leaned on, with mind and body, lie broken beyond repair, and the disorientation is as real as it is dangerous. My work now is not to rebuild what was washed away but to recollect whatever can still notice, decide, and create. Day after day I face the truth we men always learn the hard way: survival demands a gruesome act of self-reconstruction that nobody else can perform. On the good days, each deliberate act to pull myself back together feels like an assertion of agency. On the bad days, it is an enraged refusal to disappear. Most days, though, are filed with little more than morbid curiosity. The future has always been uncertain, and somehow I rise again to meet it.
There comes a moment after a relationship ends when a man’s world shifts from becoming gradually unfamiliar to being suddenly completely unrecognizable. It continues to spin, of course, as worlds will, but the problem is that it no longer points anywhere. Time moves forward, wherever that is, but the frame has dissolved. Routines may remain, or they may not, but the axis of meaning is gone … without the mercy of being forgotten.
This collapse is not felt in memory, after all, for the past does not change. What breaks is the projected continuity between what happened and what was supposed to happen next. It does not matter that no real future was ever guaranteed, for the imagined one had become as inhabited as a mortgaged dream. The lived-in weight of the emotional furniture was real, and therefore so is the loss.
What causes a man the most pain, if not the absence of the other person, his other half?
It is the apparent loss of direction that he lacks, once as obvious as his morning coffee. Icy drafts of midnight air now whistle through the hole where his heart once sat, leaving him utterly restless and perfectly still. Not only were there plans, but there were even plans to make plans within plans. Some version of him was anchored in that forward-leaning life. When that other self forgets where to go, it does not immediately disappear, even if it wants to, because it never needed to know how.
A sense of displacement, not sentimental but systemic, grips the man and, like a rip tide, will not let him go. The pain that follows is not merely emotional. Like a severed arm, whatever part him had begun to live in the future cannot claw its own way back. This state very slowly becomes life-threatening if left unchecked, as the pain mutates from sharp to dull, and any will to live smells like the bait on an even worse trap: survival. Anything other than winning feels like losing.
The fancy name for the pathology of investing emotional capital into an object, a person, or a vision, is cathexis.
In relationships, this fixation extends beyond the individual, attaching itself to an entire imagined life, with all its details great and small—the garden gate, the dinner table, a child’s name—the shared language of private life. Even after all that collapses, the investment remains on the books, inked in blood. Emotions do not withdraw automatically. They spiral. They replay scenes, searching for continuity where none remains. The mind, ever eager to rationalize and find a name, calls it heartbreak, but the body experiences only disorientation.
Some men try to burn it all down fast, seeking closure through elimination. Many believe that if they can erase the memory, they can escape the pain … but experience teaches otherwise. Erasure without retrieval is an unsound move. If the parts of him that were projected into the future are not first retrieved, then the collapse will claim more than the relationship. Without the ability to trust, to cooperate, communal life is impossible. Survival alone is not enough to create any meaning.
A man begins his recovery with a recognition, a visceral recollection, of a self was never lost, but too long misplaced. He might be tempted to forgive if only he could forget, but his work is to re-member, as literally as possible. The work is to retrieve what he left inside the structure that collapsed around him.
This act has an even better name, anamnesis, the re-collection of what is always there.
Now the man who wandered too far into the future hears a call to return where he is needed. The temptation to detach, to let go and not return, remains, but remembering reignites his divine spark of curiosity. It is tempting to confuse longing for rage, or grief, but on close inspection it is exhaustion, the kind that follows hard work. Whatever else it is, it is not apathy. His longing proves that where once was heap of bones, now he has some skin in the game.
Anamnesis disrupts a man’s erasure of “his story” by accepting pain as the price to retrieve the better part of his investment. The future is still gone, but the man himself is no longer missing. For now, that is enough . . .
Leave a comment