I was watching a video of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina yesterday, stumble through his atonement from his bewildering escapades to South America. He explained his extramarital affair, and all the people he hurt, and uses a lot of “believer”-type vocabulary - basically his “fall from grace”. This type of thing happens so frequently with men, and it is embodied in our fallen politicians, such as Govs. Sanford, fmr. Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York and others.

Repentance is, well, kind of obligatory these days, and even promotional and accepted, to ensure a continued politcal career. But, what I am concerned about is ensuring that guys stop this self-destructive behavior, and start to embrace their “shadow sides”. Shadow sides, you may ask?

Carl Jung talked about the concept of the “shadow” to mean those repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts in us. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

As men, the fact that we act on our repressed and unsatisfied sexual drives and urges, and hurt those we love, is testimony to the “blackened and dense” qualities of extramarital affairs.

Embracing one’s shadow side is not easy. It takes guts. It takes courage. And it takes someone trained in exploration of these matter, such as a counselor or psychotherapist. So long as your shadow side lurks in your unconscious mind, creating unconscious thoughts, words and behaviors, you’re as good as on autopilot. It’s really hard to seize control back from those impulses when your shadow runs the show.

Shadow Man

Where is your shadow lurking?

Upon assimilation of one’s shadow, the behaviors diminish and stop. The impulses drop, and the behaviors quit. With extramarital sex, which is often unmet needs in a marriage or relationship (not so much the actual sex), we lose the sense of personal responsibility, both for our actions and for communicating to our partner what we are failing to get within the relationship.

Most of the time, when guys are asked, the reasons for cheating on their women is not about the sex: again, it’s what needs are not being met in the marriage, which could include sex, but not limited to. Maybe a guy doesn’t feel seen or heard. Maybe they’re angry, and wanting to unconsciously “get back” at their wife. There are reasons that motivate men more than just the sex.

I’m aware of this contingent of men who are in marriages and who are having feelings for other men, or who are interested in exploring same-sex relationships, whether that’s an emotional relationship with another man, a sexual relationship or a full-out committed relationship.

The issues becomes twofold: first, these men need to deal with the emotional confusion that comes with being attracted to another man, yet feeling ashamed or resistant to admitting that to themselves, let alone their wives or girlfriends. Second, the issue of infidelity is just as pertinent to the discussion, as many times, women end up discovering their guy’s penchant for other men in an inadvertent way - maybe from visited web sites, or from phone calls, or maybe from gay-related materials (such as porn or community magazines) that they find there guy to have brought home.

These issues can be explored in counseling, but it’s important to differentiate the two issues, and understand that they are linked. To differentiate them is to peel them away from one another, as hard as this may be, because the confusion of lumping them together creates more pain, confusion and reactivity in both partners.

It can be extraordinarily difficult for straight men to come to admit that they have strong feelings for other men (whether those are emotional or sexual feelings), as well as admit to themselves that they have possibly wasted time living with their wife of x years, and experiencing the guilt that comes from not being honest about who they are to themselves or their wife.The fear of admitting to themselves their own truth is sometimes debilitating, especially when these guys fear that they will lose their whole lives as they know it.

I’m not going to start out by saying that depression is merely a function of not getting what you want. Depression has roots deeper than that explanation. It can be caused, or related to, nutritional imbalances, individual and varying biochemistry, neurochemical reasons (such as serotonin imbalances, or other neurotransmitters), and so on.

Many men I work with, however, experience depression as a reaction to deeply unmet needs. Many times, these men don’t know how to go about getting those needs met, so they will resort to employing the ineffective skills that they have learned growing up, which cause them to sink into depression. For men, being afraid of their anger, or speaking up for themselves, is threatening, so depression becomes “more comfortable” (relatively speaking) than activating their energy and going out into the world to get what they need.

Through poor interpersonal communication skills, a lot of guys can’t simply language what they need, either from a friend, a lover or an employer. The verbal skills aren’t there, and then these depressed men end up creating false assumptions about themselves that they link to that person or event. “Well, if I was worthy enough for their attention, then so-and-so would give me the time of day,” or “Well,if she really loved me, she wouldn’t be acting this way towards me. I must be flawed, or unlovable, and therefore unacceptable to her.” These are examples of the kind of self-talk that puts us in the depressed state.

We end up fabricating evidence based on assumptions we make up about other people’s intentions, that reinforce the negative and critical beliefs we have about ourselves. This perpetuates the cycle of depression, and we continue to look for that “evidence” out in the world, to continually reinforce those beliefs over and over again, getting us more and more depressed. We are creating our own reality, because our beliefs about ourselves are negative, all-consuming, and powerful.

Fortunately, we can change those beliefs, burn out what is not working in our lives, and start to look for “affirming evidence.” The negative messages are not us - as many guys falsely believe - but when we take those messages on as our identity, we end up creating a lot of problems for ourselves, such as depression.

Conflicts get fueled when one partner unconsciously reacts to the other partner’s behavior, and then the snowball starts. It accumulates, picks up speed, and, before you know it, the snowball is mammoth and careening down the mountain towards an imminent destruction of whatever lies in its path. Let’s work on ways to keep the snowball palm-sized.

1. When one person is angry or upset, watch your reactions. Are you able to be aware of your emotions and your tendencies to make the situation worse? What do you traditionally do or say, or, rather, what would your partner say that you do to contribute to their reactivity. If asked, what would they experience you doing to them that fans their flames, so to speak?

2. Be present to the feeling, not the thoughts, that arise in your body. 99.9% of the time, relationship partners speak from the head, which, for guys, is “natural and normal”, yet makes it all worse. When you’re angry, are you really angry? What does your body have to say about it. Are you heating up - in your chest, in your stomach, in your head? Stay with that feeling, and try to not figure out why it’s there. Stay in your body, and speak from wherever in your body is heating up. It’s a more direct experience of what’s going on, instead of talking from your head and messing things like you’re used to.

3. Take a breath. Hug your partner. Throw a joke into the mix (not one which might hurt your mate). The idea is to de-fuse the situation, and stop the snowball from careening down that mountain. If you can reset, start over, and depressurize from all that accumulated negative energy you both have helpd to create, you’ll have a better perspective on the argument. Most of the times, couples forget what they’ve been arguing about in the first place, and lose themselves in the details. So, breath, step out of yourself for a second, and stay present without avoiding your partner.

Try these tips to help you fight fair, and have more productive conflict. The fact that you want to argue with awareness says you care about the relationship, and even if those things don’t work, they will the next time. With persistence, keep going, and keep trying.

On this Father’s Day, what will you to to acknowledge the man that brought you into this Earth, and who showed you the ropes about how to be the good guy you’ve grown into? Remember your first little league game where he cheered you on from the stands? How about that first bike ride? Maybe you remember the fumbled and universally awkward sex talk from Dear Old Dad (D.O.D.)

It’s so rare for sons to have that “heart” conversation with their Dads, because in our culture, “it’s just something that guys don’t do.” It’s hard for guys to connect with their fathers through an emotional connection. It’s usually through activity, or sport, or some shared hobby or activity, that dads and sons can meet, connect, and come together.

So, on this Father’s Day, I challenge you to come together and connect with your Dad. Remind him how great of a guy he is, and how much he has given to you over the years. Say it in words or actions, not in another electronic gadget that he may not really need anyways. Say it in a way that he’ll understand. You may have negative feelings towards D.O.D., but can you push them aside (or deal with them) for trying to make a connection with him on this special day.

In addition, I also see Father’s Day as a kind of “Fathering Day,” where the things that dads aren’t quite able to give their sons - whatever that may be for you - you learn to give to yourself. It’s kind of a “self-fathering”: giving to yourself what you needed, and didn’t get, from your dad.

Maybe it’s money management. Maybe it’s the art of communication. Maybe it’s learning about different relationship survival skills. Good old dad may be the greatest, but there may be some things that he didn’t pass down to you that you needed to thrive in some of your relationships, or things that you actually needed to unlearn.

“Fathering Day” is helping yourself fill in the gaps to help yourself thrive in the places where Dad might not have been able to help you. It’s honoring what you have been given from him, and making adjustments to help you thrive and succeed on top of what you’ve already got.

Remember how great your “A-Game” once was? Remember how you felt in control and really enjoyed what you were doing, whether in work or in your personal life? Yeah, we’re talking about that quality of life were you’ve achieved that sense of mastery, enjoyment and free flow, where everything seems to just line up for you - that effortless zone of achievement and happiness that makes it all happen the way it should happen.

For a lot of guys, before they know it, they’ve lost their game. Or maybe they’ve never had it. Whatever the case, bringing your “A-Game” back to your life will help drive you past feeling unmotivated and uninspired by your life. Life is way too short for a “B-Game.”

Bringing your “A-Game” back is about facing what needs to be faced in your life. It’s about summoning up the strength to burn out the barriers that are right in front of you that prevent your forward motion. It’s about taking responsibility for your self, your success and your own happiness, and taking the actions needed to optimize yourself, your life and your relationships.

Consider these possible barriers to losing your “A-Game”:

• Losing focus on what your values or goals are
• Losing your sense of self - “Who am I anymore?” (e.g. the midlife - or quarterlife - crisis)
• Avoiding anger or other negative feelings that, if dealt with, can push you through back to playing ball on the “A-Game” field
• You’ve been job hopping, unsatisfied by your work, or unstimulated by what you’re doing to earn money
• You feel blue, de-energized, lazy or shiftless a lot
• You’re angry, or just plain irritable, most of the time with others who don’t deserve to get it from you
• You are dwelling in the “it sucks to be me” state, and are pissed when others are enjoying themselves.

Setting an action plan for Bringing Your “A-Game” Back is important. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Where do I really want to be in my life? In my job? In my health? In my marriage or relationship?
2. Be specific: what does that look like? Write down the images, thoughts, ideas or draw pictures/make a collage about what that looks like in your head. Communicate it to yourself before you can clearly communicate it with anyone else, including your partner.
3. Identify the barriers to those changes: stress? depression? money? fear? lack of support from others? There are always barriers, so becoming clear on those things are important, as they tend to be a bit out of our daily consciousness.
4. Design ways to overcome those barriers: how will you figure out what it will take to conquer those things - do you need exercise? More money? More time? More communication from someone? Counseling? Time management? It could be more than one of these things you need.
5. Rank and prioritize those things that need your attention and resources. Set a reasonable time frame in which to chunk off small “baby step” goals, and then commit to the small goals every so often - once or twice a week, once a month. Remember: achieving the smaller goals, en route to the larger one, is the path to success, not chewing off a huge goal and then disappointing yourself.

Bringing your “A-Game” back will take some time, but with effort, diligence, patience and foresight, you’ll be getting back to the happy flow of your life that you’ve been missing all this time.

I counsel both men and women who are struggling in their lives and relationships, but my interest and specialty is working with men who need help. You know the guy - he’s too proud to pull over for directions (which isn’t this guy), too “strong” to admit anything that will wound his ego or his pride, has a tough time admitting responsibility for the things that he has done to negatively affect his relationship. I work with all of that.

A lot of guys I work with are guys that are “too nice”. Some people go so far as to call these guys “doormats”, but doormats are inanimate. “Nice guys” are just passive, and they aren;t used to looking out for their own needs. They can’t say ‘no’ and they sweep their own needs under the rug because they’re too afraid of actually speaking up for fear that they’ll get swatted down - especially by their woman. These guys live in fear and silence, and can be powderkegs waiting to explode.

On the flipside, I also work with alpha males, guys who are the power drivers in their lives and relationships. Some of these guys go so far as to attract the label “narcissist”, but we’ll reserve that for some of this group. Sometimes, guys in this group, have a hard time with control issues in their marriage or relationship, or even on the job for that matter. They are consumed with winning, which, as we know, comes at a cost either in the breakdown of a marriage, total stress burnout, neglect of relationships with their kids or a host of other problemss and fissures in their life. They may be chronically unhappy, never enjoying the spoils of their victories and fruits of their labor. Is this you?

But, generally, I work everyday with guys who these days are worried about their jobs, preoccupied with wanting their wives to love them and not be mad at them, suffering from emotional withdrawal, and generally want to be free of the problems that brought them in. They want successful relationships, as women do, and they want to be able to connect with their women they way that their women connect with their man. We want what you want!

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One of the biggest issues that I work with is a guy’s simple inability to communicate his needs and feelings. It’s this lack of ability to communicate that creates seismic tensions in his marriage or relationship.

Guys are just generally less attuned to their feelings, and couldn’t possibly access their needs if their life depended on it, right? No so much. Guys are very much emotionally-based, as their women are, and need the same satisfaction of getting those emotions accessed and released as their ladies do. The problem has many origins and explanations, and to understand some of them, we look to understanding one simple fact.

A lot of the time, guys don’t have the tools to access their emotions and needs, and yet their women have a certain expectation that they should. This expectation wasn’t there 50 years ago, as society and culture shifted its focused towards the individual, self-expression and liberation in the 1960’s in America.

On top of that, guys have fathers that haven’t been able to teach them these critical tools. A lot of the time, their fathers behaved in the same ways that they did, although it’s harder to get away with it these days because of social pressures and expectations of men in relationships that we’re there back in the 1950’s.

What guys do if to suffer in silence, resort to pornography or alcohol, seek out friends whose advice is often not helpful (the friends are often struggling just as much as the guys themselves), or avoid conflict or adverse situations that would elicit their true feelings, which are often just “too difficult to deal with.”

What might help in relationships is to create a space to let those needs and feelings be more well known. Too often, we, as partners, get caught up in our reactivity patterns and can’t really listen to what is happening with our mate. We react to assumptions and expectations that our guy “read our minds” (read: women) and that “they should know what I need.” This type of false thinking contributes to the very communication problems that got us here in the first place.

Creating a space for your guy to communicate, or at least not react and avoid you, is key. Understanding what he is needing - straight from his mouth - is essential in helping your relationship along, because what you think he needs, and what he thinks he needs, are often two very different things. And not making the assumptions about where he is coming from is very important, because you may be reacting to him through your own assumptions. And that will make it worse.

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The biggest reason to work with a male relationship counselor (i.e. me) is because men often feel more comfortable talking with a guy. It’s true. I think that men feel like they have an alliance, although the reality is that counselors are neutral, shouldn’t take sides and should communicate impartiality in working with the couple.

Men often assume that female therapists are there to gang up on them, and that they’ll have two women in the same room barking at him. I understand the fear there for guys.As it happens, I get a lot of women calling me because I work with couples, and because they think two things: that a guy will indeed feel “safer”, but also because they will have a better chance of getting their guy into counseling at all. A large number of wives, girlfriends and women who care about their guys are the ones that initiate counseling.

Counseling is still seen as a self-improvement vehicle, and something that men just don’t do. We don’t help ourselves, and we surely don’t go to counseling. Part of my mission - personal and business - is to break that cultural stigma or messaging. It’s got truth to it, but it’s not totally true.

For women, the golden benefit of having a male relationship or marriage counselor is being able to work through the issues from a guy’s perspective. I have found that women are much more likely to empathize with men with they hear it from a guy counselor (your truly), and then they are more ready and able to hear, translate and assimilate what is going on for their guy. It’s very effective, because I am helping the guy to communicate to his wife in a way that only another guy can.

If you’re considering marriage or couples counseling in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, or anywhere in the Valley, consider the benefits of working with a male relationship counselor for those reasons I wrote about. I think you might find added value to the experience, and it’ll help your marriage or relationship a lot more than you might have expected.

by Morgan Neill
CNN

TOKYO, Japan (CNN) — They are young, earn little and spend little, and take a keen interest in fashion and personal appearance — meet the “herbivore men” of Japan.

Former CNN intern Junichiro Hori is a self-described ‘herbivore.’

Author and pop culture columnist Maki Fukasawa coined the term in 2006 in a series of articles on marketing to a younger generation of Japanese men. She used it to describe some men who she said were changing the country’s ideas about just what is — and isn’t — masculine.

“In Japan, sex is translated as ‘relationship in flesh,’” she said, “so I named those boys ‘herbivorous boys’ since they are not interested in flesh.”

Typically, “herbivore men” are in their 20s and 30s, and believe that friendship without sex can exist between men and women, Fukasawa said.

The term has become a buzzword in Japan. Many people in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood were familiar with “herbivore men” — and had opinions about them.

Shigeyuki Nagayama said such men were not eager to find girlfriends and tend to be clumsy in love, and he admitted he seemed to fit the mold himself.

“My father always asks me if I got a girlfriend. He tells me I’m no good because I can’t get a girlfriend.”

Midori Saida, a 24-year-old woman sporting oversized aviators and her dyed brown hair in long ringlets, said “herbivore men” were “flaky and weak.”

“We like manly men,” she said. “We are not interested in those boys — at all.”

Takahito Kaji, 21, said he has been told he is “totally herbivorous.”

“Herbivorous boys are fragile, do not have a stocky body — skinny.”

Fukasawa said Japanese men from the baby boomer generation were typically aggressive and proactive when it came to romance and sex. But as a result of growing up during Japan’s troubled economy in the 1990s, their children’s generation was not as assertive and goal-oriented. Their outlook came, in part, from seeing their fathers’ model of masculinity falter even as Japanese women gained more lifestyle options.

Former CNN intern Junichiro Hori, a self-described herbivore, said the idea goes beyond looks and attitudes toward sex.

“Some guys still try to be manly and try to be like strong and stuff, but you know personally I’m not afraid to show my vulnerability because being vulnerable or being sensitive is not a weakness.”

Older generations of Japanese men are not happy about the changes. At a bar frequented by businessmen after work, one man said: “You need to be carnivorous when you make decisions in your life. You should be proactive, not passive.”

Fukasawa said the group does not care so much about making money — a quality tied to the fact that there are fewer jobs available during the current global economic recession.

Japan’s economy recently saw its largest-ever recorded contraction and has shrunk for four straight quarters. Blue chip companies Sony, Panasonic, Toyota and Nissan all reported losses in May, and most are forecasting the same for the current fiscal year. Though still low by international standards, Japan’s reported 5 percent unemployment is the highest since 2003.

Hori agreed economics has played a role. When he finished university, “a lot of my friends were trying to work for a big company that pays well and I wasn’t interested in that. I am kind of struggling financially and my father is not very happy about it,” he said.

Fukasawa estimated some 20 percent of men are what she would call “herbivorous” and said their attitudes were influencing others. Indeed, she said, it was a return to the norm for Japanese men, rather than a departure.

“It was after World War II and the post-war economic growth that Japanese men gained the reputation as a sex animal through the competition with the West. Looking back beyond that time, older literature talks a lot about men with the kind of character we see in the herbivorous boys.”

Will these men simply grow out of this? Fukasawa said it was anyone’s guess.

Some of them may, but Japan’s image of masculinity is nonetheless changing.

“The men in dark suits are changing, too,” she said. “Today’s young people in dark suits are different from the baby boomers in dark suits. They are evolving, too.”