Money helps, but if you don’t have the right foundation to creating a marriage or relationship, you are building a house cards. I talk with too many guys who still are committed to the idea that working their asses off, making money, and providing the right lifestyle for themselves and their wives or girlfriends is what is going to create happiness and a successful relationship. Wrong.

Money is never all satisfying. Even though it has evolutionary roots, the idea of being a mate who can acquire access to resources (i.e. money) has its limitations. And yet guys don’t seem to get this. They seem to think that they can buy their mate’s happiness, which may be true in a fleeting sense.  The sense of material acquisition can never be fully experience — there always has to be more. Money cannot become a surrogate for lack of the emotional connection or expression, or as a substitute for love and respect.

When we fight about money, it may be true that were fighting about other issues in our relationships. When we have no money, that may be absurd proposition, but I think that money is often the materialization of power and control dynamics within a relationship or household. When we try to gain control or power over our mate (to distract us from our own powerlessness or feelings of being out of control), there are various ways that we can do this. Sex and money are two common “power currencies” that keep tension between two people who are vying for more power and control in their relationship.

The psychology of money between couples is very subtle, and requires a keen eye and willingness to change behaviors to remedy this type of problem. Even just considering that money, or the lack of it, is the tip of the iceberg, and has many primary causes and secondary symptoms is a great start. Seeing money in this way, as a form of a psychological currency, is difficult, but it may shed some perspective on the way that you have traditionally dealt with it in your relationships.

If there could be a point in time where a couple realizes that there is a problem, I would have to say that one that I hear more often than not is when the guy ends up with his fist through the wall, or does a number of other scary behaviors that frighten or intimidate their partner. In this blog post, I want to talk about  the volcanic anger that guys experience, and how to help stave it off before it erupts.

I’m not just talking about “those guys.” One universal phenomenon that I see with many men is that they say that “I’m not that guy.” A lot of men are quick to push away the label of “angry guy”, because “that’s just not me.”

I think that there is a difference between being angry, and identifying yourself as an angry guy. The two are different. Having an experience of anger is different from taking on the identity of “angry guy.” the angry guys are always other guys — the violent types that have their fragile, crying women backed up into the corner, cowering in fear. You know who I’m talking about.

Once we get past that distinction, I’m interested to know what happens between point A and point B. This is the hard part because we unconsciously get sucked into reactivity when we get angry, and for many people, it’s extremely difficult to slowdown and become mindful of the thoughts and feelings that arise in us when our partner triggers that anger in us. It’s like she’s lighting the fuse, and it’s a matter of time until the explosion. The reactive experience seems out of our control, and then our fist ends up in the wall.

I could talk about ways to cool down, like simple breathing or “going to take a walk”, but that doesn’t relieve you of the experience of anger.

What’s really important is to get in touch with the anger and to see it as an experience that you’re having, no different than happiness or sadness or whatever. To see it as an experience instead of your identity, it creates more ease about allowing yourself to have that experience. So many guys that I talk with are afraid of their anger, and thus afraid of being “that angry guy.”

The ideal situation is to extinguish the lit fuse while it’s creeping up towards detonating your bomb. How do you do this? It’s critical to stay connected to your wife or girlfriend, get in touch with your anger (bonus: getting in touch with the physical sensation of anger in your heart or chest panel as it comes up and speaking from that place)  and to communicate what is happening with you in the present moment.

To speak from your anger, and not to react against it, is so key. Being able to speak your needs and that you’re angry, by simply saying “I’m furious” or “I’m so angry at you”, are things that will actually bring you closer, and shorten the distance between you and her. It sounds a little strange, but so is putting up this through the wall. Ultimately, counseling is cheaper than drywall repair.

One thing that guys have a very hard time doing is expressing affection to the women in my life. Small acts of kindness go a long way. For a lot of men, showing their wives and girlfriends how they are feeling about them, or communicating to them positivity through verbal validation and affirmation is the hardest thing under the sun to do.

When an end up feeling neglected, angry that they are working too hard in their relationship or marriage, and often don’t know exactly how to communicate what they’re wanting from the men in their lives. This frustration or anger often gets mutated, and expressed back to their men in unhealthy ways.  The needs that women have from men should be met, and men should know how to meet them, but when those two things don’t happen, a lot of unnecessary conflict ensues.

What guys need to know about The Affection Factor is that affection — whether it’s physical, sexual, emotional, or through validating statements — is an essential nutrient to the growth of your marriage or relationship. Without it, it’s like you’re failing to feed the relationship, or her, and neglect the very thing that you may feel most proud of.

To help, try creating the time that you and your wife or girlfriend need to spend together. Regularly creating the time, and prioritizing your marriage, is essential. How you spend that time together is even more  important. As a guy, you can begin to listen with more intention, and ask your partner if indeed she needs affection from you and how she needs from you. A lot of women respond very positively to you being assertive physically, and not waiting to take her lead. Whether that means putting her arm around her, holding her hand, kissing her, or generally communicating interest and energy in her are all good things. Doing the same things sexually towards her is also showing affection. She likes when you take the lead and display your assertiveness.

The hardest way for guys to communicate affection towards their women is by verbally validating them, or making them steal special through words. Women love this. And if you’re not doing enough of it, you and your relationship are really missing out. Telling her how good she looks, how special she is to you, praising her efforts or the work that she does, or  generally validating her are all examples of verbal validation. This is where guys fail to mine the potential in their relationship or marriage. They’re missing out on a whole lot of undiscovered happiness, if their wives and girlfriends do indeed thrive on hearing these things from you.

Try some of these tips to deepen  the strong bonds you’re looking to create with your wife or girlfriend. Be aware that simple things can make a lot of difference, and employing just a few of the strategies could change a whole lot.

Sometimes, for potential clients, the hardest part is working up both the courage to admit that there is a problem in their life that needs attention. For clients, especially guys, it’s easy to avoid admitting or knowing when to admit there’s a problem. That’s the first step. Actually finding a professional therapist is a whole other matter.

People don’t always know who they need – they just know that they need help. When it comes time to research a counselor or therapist, many seek out the recommendations of their friends and family. They trust that they’ll feel safe and comfortable with that professional if those they love vouch for the therapist (like any good service provider).

But if there’s no personal referral, the search for help becomes like hiding your eyes and throwing the dart at the board. You hope for a hit, and you could just as well throw it way off the target.

Knowing who does what is an important start. Here’s a quick primer to get you going, and a simple way to understand the alphabet soup of credentials that your next therapist might have:

LPC = Licensed Professional Counselor. In the State of Arizona, LPC’s are licensed by the state through the Board of Behavioral Health Examiners, and are educated and trained to work with a variety of problems. Many specialize, so it’s important to know which speciality the LPC you are interviewing works with – kids, relationships, depression, trauma? Many generalize, and it’s important to know that yours will have experience working with your unique issues.

PhD/PsyD = Psychologist. These professionals are also licensed, and have a Doctorate in Psychology (as opposed to LPC’s who are Master’s Level in Counseling and Psychology). Psychologists can do individual and couples therapy, and have an advantage of administering tests and batteries, aside from clinical work.

LMFT = Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Background in working with families and marriages, and workj in therapy with those populations. These professionals are Master’s level, and licensed by their state’s licensing board.

MSW = Social Worker. Social workers often do therapy with individuals and couples, and are Master’s level in education, trained, and licensed by the state in which they practice.

Life coach = Life coach. Life coaches are newer to the scene, and do not perform psychotherapy. Life coaches are not therapists, but can help you in areas of life management, goal setting and much more. They are not licensed by the State of Arizona, but are certified through private organizations.

MD = Psychiatrist. Many psychiatrists do not do individual therapy much anymore. They are trained medical doctors, who specialize in psychiatry and psychiatric disorders. They are who you want for medications (including antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications) and psychiatric problems and illnesses, and often times refer out for therapy these days.

Hope this little guide to decoding the search for a therapist helps you understand you you need to get to to help you and your problems. Remember: the most important element to counseling is the relationship that you develop with that professional, and it’s important that you know, like and trust the person you are confiding in and opening up to.

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At Phoenix Mens Counseling, I work extensively with gay clients and couples to help them better their lives and relationships. My practice is same-sex friendly, and I work with couples to help communicate better, lessen anger and cool tension, and learn to have successful relationships.

Some of the issues that I help same-sex clients with include:

- dealing with family members that haven’t accepted their gay lifestyle

- working with the ill effects of social stigma, and feeling comfortable with themselves

- having fulfilling relationships with their partners

- sexuality issues

- working through difficult emotions dealing with HIV and AIDS

I invite you to contact me at 602.309.0568 to find our about my services that are tailored to the gay community, or check out PFLAG Phoenix to learn more about me.

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.

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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