MEN’S ISSUES

There is often an inner war within men between three different selves: the primitive, where man’s survival depended on war, hunting, and procreation; the traditional, in which society taught our fathers and grandfathers that being a man meant being strong and silent, with a stable career to support a family; and the modern, with its unstable jobs, a recognition of what it means to be a part of “the patriarchy,” and the awareness that gender and sexual identities can exist on a spectrum. We will examine your different identities to sculpt your personal definition, then integrate their parts into a healthy whole. 

As children, we were “trained” for manhood by playing with toys often centered around war and superheroes. We were taught that our worth was determined through sports. We were taught that feelings meant weakness. This can leave us with emotional unavailability, where a lack of skills to process feelings in healthy ways can lead to aggression and other behaviors harmful to ourselves, our professional lives, and our intimate relationships. It can also lead to issues with intimacy and sexual performance, an area of our lives in which we often feel pressure to be both the conquering alpha and the vulnerable lover. Other issues resulting from a lack of connectedness with ourselves can be narcissism as well as addictions such as substance abuse, porn, and over-competitiveness.

We will work to reconcile the various dual identities men often struggle with, such as career versus family, alpha beast versus vulnerable inner child, infidelity versus family man, or society’s heteronormative male image versus feeling something different inside.