5 Things Men Need To Know About Therapy.

Real men don’t need therapy. They just need to watch a game, hit the bottle, hit each other (or their loved ones) keep going, and push it all down into a tense, numb zone somewhere in the gut until the body falls apart. Am I right?

Wrong.

In this blog here are 5 things men* need to know about therapy in order to lead a more enjoyable life and be better men.

1. More and more men are going to a therapist.

You may not realise it but it’s highly likely that men who you know are in therapy. A recent millennial health survey found that 42% of men aged 18-32 believed that seeing a therapist is as essential as other self-care activities such as exercising. Men still have a way to go, especially Gen-X and Boomers, but something is (very slowly) shifting; Gen-Z and Geriatric Millennial men are wanting to talk about how their life is impacting on their mental health and don’t feel stigmatised for doing so. This is very good news as we explore below.

In my therapy practice the majority of clients I see are men across the age ranges, and once they make it through the door they flourish. Research in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has also suggested that once men engage in therapy their recovery rate is higher and faster than other genders. The problem isn’t men being in therapy, it’s men getting to therapy. In my own experience, arriving at a therapist’s office and not seeing any representations of men or masculinities can give a message of “you’re not welcome here” “masculinity is always toxic/problematic,” or “this is not for you” and nothing could be further from the truth.

The old school “suck it up buttercup” approach to managing men’s mental health and wellbeing is doing them no favours - just look at the high suicide, alcoholism and recidivism rates for proof. Therapy offers a way of short-circuiting some of the social pressures that damage men by exploring other ways of getting in relationship with “maleness” in all of its man(y) dimensions.

2. Not all therapy involves over-wrought emoting, lying on a couch or talking about your mother.

Or maybe it will - it all depends on you. Many men come to therapy with specific problems they want to work on and prefer to approach therapy in terms of goal setting and problem solving. And that’s fine. Other times men will come along with one problem in mind but then find it connects to other things going on in their life:

• they feel overwhelmed/exhausted;

• they feel anger, rage or resentment;

• they feel anxious;

• they are having disturbing or intrusive thoughts;

• they feel hopeless, numb, and have stopped caring about things;

• they’ve withdrawn from friends and loved ones;

• they struggle with sex, sexuality, intimacy, performance anxiety, and erectile dysfunction;

• their behaviour is getting them into trouble and hurting people;

• they are compulsively using drugs, alcohol, food, sex and porn, or other things to regulate their distress;

• their physical health is impacting on their psychological wellbeing;

• there is no sense of meaning to family life, work, relationships or what it means to “be a man.”

You can come to therapy and never discuss “feelings” directly, but sooner or later most men do start to give it a go, and then they never look back. But don’t worry, it won’t be like The Sopranos, Good Will Hunting, or involve endless primal howling…unless you want it to!

3. Your therapist is not there to judge you or spar with you

Most men’s dealings with other men regardless of race, class, gender identity or sexuality, involves banter, criticism and competitive one upmanship and put-downs. Many of the institutions we deal with - school, work, sports, the Armed Forces - replicate and reinforce this too. This then shapes how we relate to each other when we meet each other, sizing each other up, jostling for top-dog position and so on. Many of us then decide that friendships with other men just aren’t worth the hassle. It’s well known that many men don’t have any close friends outside of their relationship, or that their friendships with other men soon peter out. There’s an epidemic of loneliness amongst men.

In my experience, many men bring this competitive dynamic into their relationship with their male therapist and it can take a while for them to realise that the therapist isn’t going to be playing those particular games. It’s not helpful for a therapist to make their client feel judged or powerless - that’s usually what’s brought the person into therapy in the first place. Initially this “refusal” can be unsettling and uncomfortable as both sides co-create a new game - one where they collaboratively and honestly meet each other in a different way, perhaps for the first time ever. Once a sense of safety and trust has been established, incredible things can happen, including practicing a more helpful way of being in relationship with other men and of “being a man” too.

As therapist Manu Bazzano puts it in this article “ ‘There aren’t many places where we can think aloud without being judged. So maybe therapists [and therapy] can dare to offer that space.”

4. Therapy assumes a) that there is no one way to perform manliness and b) there are many masculinities and many ways to show up in Mansville.

Yep. Mansville or the Man Box as it’s also known. This is the performative process all (Western) men experience growing up which involves those subtle and not so subtle messages about being tough, not showing emotions, being in control, being the breadwinner, solving problems through violence and always being on the prowl for sex with as many people as possible. We either measure up or we don’t, we opt in or we opt out, we succeed or we fail. We’re either “hypermasculine warriors” or “being feminised by metrosexual wokeness.” Of course this is all a made up nonsensical story, but it’s a story that sits deep within patriarchal, colonialist Western culture and reinforces binary thinking about gender, “maleness” and “being a man.” This prohibition on vulnerability causes us (and others) a lot of damage.

Therapy invites you to be curious about what it would look like to let go of some of this heavy baggage we carry around. And to explore what happens when we bring awareness to our maleness and our race, maleness and our class, maleness and the body, maleness and the many other intersections we have with culture, sexuality, spirituality, politics and playing with different aspects of masculinity. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a whole new story and a whole new way to show up in your life as a man.

5. Working on yourself in therapy will ripple out from you: people will feel safer to be around you.

I’ve saved the best until last. When you work on yourself in therapy it starts to have effects on your relationships. Instead of channeling frustration, anger anxiety and depression into people around you and making them miserable, a space starts to open up. This is the space of mindful responding. Prior to this you will have been automatically reacting to stressors in your life. Your body’s fight/flight response will have been in the driving seat and your stress hormones would have been flooding your nervous system. The net result of this? Snappiness, irritation and a tendency to physically lash out followed by periods of withdrawal, shame and depression. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Imagine what it feels like to be around that - maybe you don’t have to because you grew up around, or work with, people like that. It feels unsafe and just as you feel like you could explode at any minute, people around you will feel like they are walking through a minefield too. All of those activated nervous systems in one place does not create a happy home or work life.

The good news is that therapy gives you the tools to safely explore and express those issues and as those feelings become more contained, your fight/flight powers down and the stress response switches off. You feel calmer and in more control, your brain and body start to settle and regulate themselves and you find yourself feeling unbothered by things that used to push your buttons. As people around you realise you’ve changed, they start to feel safer around you and their nervous system and brain starts to calm down too.

One of the most important ways we can show up as men is to do our best to ensure that other people feel safe around us. This involves owning and being with the dysfunctional power dynamics we bring to a situation, and then seeking to transform those dynamics by noticing, naming and then stepping away from them. There’s real liberation in being able to refuse other people’s attempts to get us to “be a real man.” It’s a win-win for everyone; men get to dump some of the unhelpful, harmful stories they’ve had to believe in, and everyone else gets time and space to tell their stories too. The world gets more interesting, more varied and more engaging.

In conclusion, we have just explored 5 things men need to know about therapy, and how the space to play and think in therapy may be a way through and out of the self-limiting beliefs we have about what it means to “be a man.”

If you think it's time to do some work on yourself (or your Significant Others are dropping pretty heavy hints/telling you it's time) and you want to start showing up in your own life again, you know where we are.

*Note: I use the term “men” and “man” to include transmen, cismen, queer men, gay/bi/straight men, transmasc, non-binary, gender fluid/non-conforming, agender, demi, femme and other gender and sexual minorities. I do not subscribe to a biologically essentialist framework of sex and its relationship to gender. If sex and gender diversity is a problem for you, then I am not the therapist for you.