Therapy for men: Answering the Challenge of Being a Man
If you’re a man, you know The Male Code: What you’re supposed to do. The way you’re supposed to be.
You’ve heard it your whole life.
Be strong. Be smart. Be tough.
Be athletic. Compete. Succeed.
Find a partner. Protect. Provide.
Whether you’re great at these things or terrible, or somewhere in between, you know these are the yardsticks by which the world — and you yourself — measure your manhood.
These measures aren’t all bad, but they have their limitations.
For one thing, they don’t help you understand yourself, and what’s really going on inside you.
They also don’t give you much guidance in understanding or dealing with any problems that arise between you and a person you love.
Finally, they don’t give you much to fall back on if something goes wrong and — even though Heaven knows you’re really trying — you can’t keep the whole show going anymore.
You can end up feeling cut and disconnected, from yourself and everyone else–feeling like you’re living from an image and nothing else.
Or maybe you feel like you’re alright, but the people who matter to you most aren’t happy and tell you they don’t feel good around you, and you don’t know why. That’s a big problem too.
It’s a “guy thing” to ignore pain, but pain exists for a reason. Just like with physical pain, if you ignore emotional pain long enough, it comes back to bite you. You feel really awful, and you may even find yourself doing things that aren’t who really are, that go against what you truly value.
Finally one day you have to admit to yourself — though others may have been telling you this for months, even years — that whatever you learned about making it in this world isn’t working anymore. It isn’t enough.
The only way out is through
Therapy is about facing yourself and your life — taking stock of what’s really going on inside you and around you, and possibly figuring out what’s going on inside someone you love as well.
It isn’t easy, but it isn’t as awful as it sounds, either.
I give you the tools to understand yourself, and the keys to unlock a few doors inside that you haven’t known how to open.
I give you the skills to connect with your emotions in a way that doesn’t weaken or overwhelm you, but empowers you and makes you stronger. From that stronger place, you might choose to look (with my help) at some difficult things you’ve collected on the way to being the man you are today, so that they know longer have the power to throw you off course.
Last — but hardly least! — I can give you real, solid information and training, based on valid, proven scientific data, on how to make your most important relationship better, assuming the relationship isn’t already too injured. Believe it or not, both your own inner emotions and the emotions in relationships are predictable. They follow understandable patterns, and make internal sense. If you understand the code and are willing to apply some skill and knowledge, you can cause your relationship to improve — without losing yourself or giving yourself away.
What Do You Want?
Sadly, a lot of men spend so many years blocking out what’s going on inside them, they end up like batteries that have slowly run out of juice. All the “spark” has gone out of them. I bet you’ve known men like this.
To live from yourself and in yourself, knowing yourself and feeling yourself, isn’t weak or self-indulgent. Rather, it’s the only way to make sure you’ll have the strength and the juice to show up and continue to show up for yourself and the people who matter to you. Able to face whatever life throws at you.
It’s not a guarantee that life will go your way, but at least you’ll feel alive.
Do you want that? What do you want? Let me help you.
