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How I Finally Got Men to Talk About Their Feelings in Therapy
The therapeutic solution, I realized, wasn’t something I’d learned in my training
Therapists aren’t supposed to say this, but when my old client Ryan reached out after taking a long break from therapy, I wasn’t excited to hear from him. In fact, just thinking about our work together made my stomach and jaw clench.
The thing was, I liked Ryan. He was the product of a mother who struggled with mental illness and an absent father, yet he had overcome years of neglect to miraculously raise himself. His story was sometimes painful, but being with pain is the nature of my profession.
What made me uneasy was how absent the felt sense of that pain was from our work.
What bound our sessions together instead was their boring, lifeless quality. He wanted clear, actionable skills, he said, as he worked to repair infidelity in his relationship with his girlfriend. But I knew skills couldn’t change the underlying factors that led him to sabotage his relationship. Instead of helping him see that, I mostly managed to collude with him in avoiding the very pain that had brought him to my office. Each week, he’d leave the session and I’d watch him go, fighting off a sinking sense of futility.
Working with male clients is a challenge for most therapists. In the early days of my career, co-workers at the clinic where I worked would share our frustrations. (I can clearly remember the client who just sat and stared past me week after excruciating week.)
But therapists, often blinded by expectations of what therapy should be and how men should act, are part of the problem. This bias can even lead us to misdiagnose men and boys suffering from depression. Men, feeling the gendered social pressure to be stoic and deal with problems on their own, often avoid seeking help when they have problems. In fact, the failure of therapists to attune to male clients, in combination with an expanding body of research regarding the emotional and mental costs of “traditional” masculinity, prompted the American Psychological Association to issue new guidelines for working with men and boys last year.
