When something really horrible occurs everybody reacts and begins to cope with the situation. Everyone copes in their own ways. I have noticed that there are clear differences between the genders when it comes to coping. I’ve seen how women cope but I can only speak from my own experiences and how men cope.
It came to me tonight while talking with Scott over some drinks. Men cope by doing, Women cope by feeling. Not to say that either gender can’t cope like the others, Men can feel and Women can do, but in every situation I’ve been in it seems to follow the pattern above.
Men cope by doing. We fix things, we tend to things, we prepare. In many ways, men are like rescue dogs. We are very good in the thick of things with the practical angles but relatively retarded as a gender when it comes to simply feeling the situation out. Men would rather struggle, fight, act, or do, to cope. Men as rescue dogs goes further, if we go too long and we don’t rescue someone we seize with hopelessness and eventually just plod along seemingly desensitized to our surroundings. I have experienced that myself during the entire situation here in New York. I can’t DO anything, so I launch upon any situation that allows me to DO. I covet the little places where I can help, where I can do things to assuage pain, perform some needful action, do some task. Standing around crying has its place, but in almost any situation you’ll see a man retrieving tissues to give to his loved one – that’s an act of doing, how we cope when those we care about are suffering.
Today I was coping. Helping my family cope with the manifold complications that arose today. I met new family, extended family, and a member of that new family (pack?) had a problem with a bit of technology. I found myself acting without thinking, mindlessly responding. I popped out of my seat and offered to help fix the technological problem. I was playing out this theme of do’er, I was helping and that was my coping. It was an unusual feeling, I was bolt upright and swinging into action before I even really gave it any thought, it wasn’t something I had to weigh or even consider, it felt like a reflex. Someone had a problem that I could help with and up I went, reacting, doing, helping, fixing.
This has its uses, but it’s also a source of consternation and eventually conflict between the genders and even among ourselves. Men don’t feel. I like to pin the blame on the fact that in general, most men have very weak corpus callosums, while women tend to have bigger and more well-defined corpus callosums. This bit in the brain helps the two hemispheres communicate. The theory goes that the more nerve fibers between the hemispheres, the more overall cooperation between the hemispheres. Women can access and manipulate more of their emotional power because they have the hardware to do so, while men are running around, coping with the situation and coping with brains ill-suited to handling the highly integrative needs of a crisis. We can’t feel as well as women can, we have the emotions, but we can’t really ever do the same mental tricks that women can because the hardware wasn’t ever meant to actually do that. It gives me a cold comfort to know that my difficulty with expressing, harnessing, and controlling my emotions might be a purely mechanical matter. Instead of a comprehensive approach like women can achieve, men tend towards whichever their dominant hemisphere is. I am right-handed, therefore my dominant hemisphere is on the left. The left hemisphere specializes in mechanical things, matters of language and taking things apart and repair. I would bet money that when a male is stuffed in a fMRI scanner and forced into a highly stressful situation where coping is absolutely required the left side of their brains lights up like a christmas tree and the right side sparkles like blinking individual strands of christmas lights.
All this biology and psychology boils down to how we cope. Women want us to stop, to not do, to sit and cry and grieve and to feel with them. Rescue dogs want to find people, they don’t want to sit and take a moment, take in the totality of what happened and feel. Rescue dogs want to dig, tug, find people, do things.
I find myself giving advice and thinking about how we all react to stressful situations that demand coping. Males have to give women time to cope in their own way, and women need to understand that we, the rescue dogs, cope best by being able to act. I’ve found that once I understand my own gender-based deficiencies that understanding even stress between people who are attempting to cope is more clearly understood from my vantage point. Someday I may have enough mental fortitude to sit back and feel, but not really yet, I’m a boy, and quite firmly a rescue dog.
