Men’s Therapy

A sense of masculinity is important to you—you’ve worked hard to provide for and protect your loved ones, taken calculated risks, and have been self-reliant and even heroic in the face of stress. If you are a father, you’ve sought to ensure that your children have clear boundaries, demonstrate respect, and are emotionally mature. These are the positive aspects of your identity as a man. You cherish these parts of yourself and are proud of what you have been able to accomplish through them. They give you a sense of direction when things become difficult. These are parts of you that no counselor or course of therapy should ask you to change (Kiselica & Englar-Carlson, 2010).

At the same time, there have likely been moments when you’ve struggled in private. As men, there are many rules about how we must behave, both outwardly and inwardly. We may have learned, in addition to all these positive aspects that we cherish, that being a man means we must always solve our hardships on our own and that asking for help means we have already failed. We may have learned that being a man implies that not only must we act tough, but that we also must always feel tough. That numbness is preferable to weakness. That the only safe emotion to express is anger. That we should shield others—our partners, our spouse, our children, or our parents—from our internal suffering. Overtime we may have grown more and more isolated. Somewhere along the line we may have also learned that we have value not for who we are, but for what we produce. That our worth should be measured by the number of projects we finish, lines on our resume, or the salary we bring home. As a result, we may have turned to whatever quick rewards we can get—be it video games, gambling, exercise, or porn—just to feel at least some reprieve and joy among the numbness and monotony. We may have, through it all, decided that we are just no good at all because our internal experience—which is frequently uncertain, sad, self-doubting, alone, or just plain terrified—does not match what we expect ourselves to be (O’Neil, 2008).

Men’s counseling is about taking an intentional look at all of these things. It is not about getting rid of our sense of masculinity, “male-bashing,” or letting go of what we cherish. Instead, it is about examining what we have learned about how we must act, both overtly and covertly, by watching teachers, peers, our fathers, and our father’s fathers over days, months, and years. It is about taking a step back to appraise the house that’s been built by these lessons. Perhaps there are many things we would like to keep the same about this house, and perhaps there are some things—a clogged pipe, a locked room, a closed window, an crumbling facade—that we would like to let go of. Perhaps there are things that, while our fathers weren’t able to stop them from becoming ours, we would like to prevent our own children from inheriting.

At the Center for Couples & Self, we truly enjoy the process of working through the depressive episodes, workplace concerns, emotional numbness, anger issues, and addictive behaviors that regularly bring men to therapy. We have extensive experience working with boys and men of all ages and are happy to accompany you or your loved one on the journey toward vitality, belonging, and self-worth. Let’s get to work.