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.

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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by Doug Glanville (appeared in the New York Times online edition, Sunday, June 7, 2009)

I haven’t spent a lot of time watching “MTV Cribs,” but I know the host likes to check the featured homeowner’s DVD collection for a copy of “Scarface.” Apparently, owning this movie is the key to street credibility (by “MTV Cribs” standards), and it is understood that the homeowner will play it for anyone who sets foot inside.

We all have our favorite movies, and I have some staples of my own in my collection — “A Few Good Men,” “Sixth Sense” — but I would never demand that visitors watch those movies as a rite of passage into my “crib.” However, a few months ago, the executive producer of MLB Productions, who is a friend of mine, sent me a housewarming gift of some classic documentaries about baseball. The jewel of the package was a contemporary piece called “We Are Young,” and if you are ever in my home, expect to sit down and take it all in. (Alternative plan: It will air on MLB Network this coming Friday at 3 p.m. EST.)

I have seen a lot of footage on the life of a baseball player, but this story captures the essence of what a lot of players carry with them at all times: the worry about failure, the need to be driven. At times these forces are couched as inspiration and motivation, at times they come from a convergence of fear and a desire for approval — and this documentary shows that dichotomy, unapologetically and realistically.
I happen to know the family, at least the older son, Dmitri Young. I played most of my career against Dmitri and he was a fun-loving opponent. Always laughing, always having time to chat at first base. From the outside, you would think he didn’t have a care in the world, especially since he was also a stone-cold hitter. But this documentary took me inside his life. I learned about the family dynamic that shaped him.

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Feeling like you’re stuck in a rut these days? Feel down and depleted and like a flat tire, and not your usual self? Here’s some ideas to lift you out of the mud and spinning your wheels on ground again.

There’s a lot of reasons for being stuck. First, it is possible that you aren’t enjoying something major in your life, whether that’s your relationship or your work? Do you hate waking up in the morning because you don’t want to face that certain someone or something? I know when I was employed, and not working for myself, I dreaded going to work because I knw I wasn’t living my passion, what I was meant to do, which was to have a counseling practice for men and couples.

Second, it’s possible that you are experiencing depression, or at least the blues. Sometimes, depression is biochemical in nature, but just as often it’s a reaction to a situation or an environment that we think we have no power over, yet feel helpless to change it. We resort to depressing about it because it’s easier in some senses than to take action, or even know how to take action. Now, now, I’m not saying that people always choose depression, but I want you to consider that it’s one of several contributing factors to depression. Biochemical or nutritional imbalances can be as much to blame, as well as other lifestyle factors.

Third, do you know what you really want? Are you living your life aligned with your values – what you blieve in and the way you really see your life being lived (without all those messy mental constraints you put up). If your self-critic wasn’t saying “no, no, no” to everything, what would your life look like? Is being in a rut an expression of giving into that “no, no, no” and not enough “yes, yes, yes”? I doubt you’d be stuck in a rut if you were living your life saying “yes, yes, yes.”

Sometimes situations keep us in a rut, but, as Victor Frankl (well, and the Buddhists) say, it’s our perception of events that we have control over, not the actual events. So, how can you make lemons out of lemonade if life keeps you in a holding pattern right now?

If we listen closely to our inner voice, our true nature, we usually come up with a lot of good things. We know because we listen inside, not outside. It’s hard to be in a rut when we listen to that inner knowing, which almost always knows the answer. Meditate on it, and see what comes up.

I hope this helps you spin right out of the mud onto the road that awaits you.

As men and women, we get a lot of our self-esteem and identity through outside sources: work, sport, friends, partners and through roles we play. But how much of that is internally-derived self-esteem?

Depending on outside sources for primary self-esteem needs is a losing proposition in the long run. Because outside sources sometimes fail to provide or to come through for us when we need them, we need to look to inner sources of self-esteem inside of ourselves.

How do you create self-esteem from the inside?

From my work with men, a lot of self-esteem comes from identity sources, like the work that they do. Men often overidentify with their work and careers in a way that their self-esteem becomes overly contingent on their professional life. When the professional life fails to come through, then self-esteem becomes damaged. Depression and stress, as well as relationship difficulty, often come as byproducts of external sources that fail to provide for our self-esteem needs.

Refining your inner self-esteem, that place of knowing and centeredness inside yourself, is an important step in “living from the inside.” It becomes easier to weather the storms of our lives and our environment, especially when those “external” sources that we expect will come through for us fail to do so. We cling less to those sources for the fuel that we need, because we become generators of that self-esteem from within.

The importance of a father’s impact on his son cannot be underestimated. The father-son relationship is as important as it is underestimated in the successful development of a man, who becomes a partner, husband and parent himself. 

For a lot of men in our culture, men are either physically absent, or emotionally absent. The problem is that a lot of men don’t have a clue about how to be emotional, or to use the tools that they don’t have to solve relationship or communication problems. With that inability to use the necessary tools to create and navigate successful relationships, men get into trouble, and then unconsciously pass down to their sons the things that creates problems for themselves.

One example of what I mean is the ability for men to connect to their anger. Men traditionally either explode in rage and anger to get what they want, or will internalize their anger, and let it turn into anxiety, depression and a host of other secondary problems. Depression and anxiety have other roots and causes, but interpersonally, anger is created a lot of times and then suppressed when our needs for love, affection, importance, to be seen, etc. are not met.

Men pass these things down to their sons, who then get modeled these ineffective and destructive ways of being in relationships. They learn to not meet their needs, quiet their voice, and generally suppress their various needs within a relationship and in their lives. To the extent that women are emotional beings, men could learn a thing or two about how to connect to and speak from their emotional pain.

Men can be good at doing the things that they do well: teach a kid how to fish, shoot hoops or change a tire. Men can be supportive of their sons, and provide a model in a lot of ways. Men can model being good fathers, but unfortunately, men don’t know how to model being a well-rounded man. A lot of our culture says that to be emotional is not ‘manly’, and is responsible for this, I believe. This is a problem, and a myth. 

Until we accept that connecting to our emotional selves is not a bad thing, and is not “unmanly,” I believe we are only operating with half of our full selves. I think that it’s time to break the generational cycle that fails to hand down all the tools needed for personal and relationship success for men.

If you think you struggle with not having the right tools that you need for your relationship (for example, you don’t know how to communicate with your wife or girlfriend, or you avoid conflict at all costs), I ask that you contact me for an appointment at 602.309.0568.

- Jason

I wanted to post about a topic that I hold pretty dear, which is the relationship between your mental functioning and your mood – two things that are probably affecting your well-being, and possibly your relationship.

How you eat and take care of yourself is a reflection of the way that you respect yourself (or not), and take interest in the quality of you life. Failing to eat the right foods and not exercise will lead to obesity, other cardiovascular problems, and depression, anxiety and more stress.

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Do we really need Prozac? James Gordon, founder of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C., says there’s a better way to treat depression—through diet, exercise and meditation. Roll your eyes all you like. He’s used the approach for 35 years with a wide range of patients, from runaway children and middle-class adults in Washington, D.C., to victims of war in Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel and the Gaza Strip. This week, Gordon is heading to flood-stricken Iowa to see if he can be of assistance there. About 10 percent of American women and 4 percent of men now take antidepressants (according to a 2004 CDC report). Gordon’s new book, “Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression,” outlines a treatment program he believes can be an alternative to medication. NEWSWEEK’s Anne Underwood spoke to Gordon about his recommendations and how he’s implemented them around the world. Excerpts: 

NEWSWEEK: So many people have been helped by Prozac and other antidepressant medications. Why do you say these drugs should only be used as a last resort? 
James Gordon: Depression is not the end stage of a disease process but a wakeup call to examine our lives. There are better ways to do that than taking drugs, which have side effects and don’t address the underlying message that depression is bringing—that our lives are out of balance and significant change is necessary. Instead they tell us, “You have a biochemical disorder, here’s a drug.”

But people with depression do have imbalances in levels of neurotransmitters. 
Some people do, I wouldn’t deny that. What I’m saying is that there are many ways to address those changes that do less harm and may be more productive in the long run because they give people the sense of control that comes from helping themselves.

Do psychiatrists hate your program? 
I’ve heard some do, but I hope that will change as they take a closer look at the evidence.  After all, I’m a psychiatrist myself. I have my medical degree from Harvard, and I worked for 10 years at the National Institute of Mental Health. I’m not the only clinician who believes antidepressant drugs are overused and that we need other ways to treat depression. A major study that appeared recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, which reviewed both unpublished and published studies submitted to the FDA, found that, when the unpublished trials were included, antidepressants were not nearly as effective as they’ve been thought to be. A second study that appeared in February in PLoS Medicine, the online journal, reviewed similar data and found that antidepressants were no better than placebos for mild to moderate depression and only slightly more effective for severe depression. 

How did you get interested in alternative treatments in the first place? 
At the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1970s, I worked with runaway and homeless children on the streets, in runaway houses and group foster homes. They came from chaotic households. Running away for some of them was the sanest thing they could have done. I wanted to develop programs to help them help themselves. Later I ran the adolescent service at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington. Virtually all the patients were minorities, and many were in trouble with the law. I created a holistic, or integrative, approach to their treatment. I brought in a kung fu instructor to work with them. I started meditating with them. I changed their diets and significantly increased their amount of exercise—lots of basketball, a running club and so on. The level of violence went down on the ward.

Describe the program you use with patients. 
It’s a good deal like what I describe in “Unstuck,” but done in a group setting. Each group opens with quiet meditation. You then introduce yourself and say what’s going on with you, focusing on your present experience. There is no analyzing, interpreting or interrupting. You become aware of what’s going on inside. In the first session, we have participants draw three pictures—one of themselves, then themselves with their biggest problem and finally themselves with the problem solved. It shows people they can identify their biggest problem and imagine a solution, a powerful experience when they’re feeling hopeless.