As I do at the end of every year (and the beginning of every new year), I think about why I do this work in the first place. I ask myself, “How can I best serve the men in my community?” or “What is it that I think men need most in my community?” 

Counseling for men developed this past year after I did some soul searching, and figured out that to sustain a practice and myself over the long term in counseling, I needed to work with men because I enjoyed it so much. I found that a lot of the issues that I have worked through personally come up with men all the time. I wanted to dedicate my practice to working with guys who are struggling the same way I did in my past, and help them to find their voice and change their lives, whether it be to find a relationship that is good for them, to reduce stress in their lives, to find meaningful work, to access their emotions better or to have deeper and more intimate relationships with their partners, wives or girlfriends.

In some ways, I see that there are a lot of expectations on men to succeed in parts of their lives that they have not been able to be successful with, i.e. emotional intelligence and intimacy. I think that, compared to 50 years ago, the expectations of a mate have changed, and men are expected to do so much more. Just pick up any womens’ magazine and see what they are saying. Culture states that men are expected to be both the breadwinner and the heart opener. It’s hard to do both.
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The things that make us the men that we are are largely attributable to the relationships that we have with our fathers. Our intimate relationships, in some ways, are also results of the things that we learn from how to be in the world from our fathers, too. 

Too many men simply cannot be the fathers that they should to their sons, because they never got the right role modeling. Men go on to have imperfect relationships, and don’t know how to be effective intimate partners to their wives and girlfriends. Often times, it’s a combination of two problems.

First, men learn how to be emotionally withdrawn from their women. They learn, over time from the environment they grew up in, to shut down, stay in their heads and generally not be present to their feelings. This is the nucleus of the problem.

Second, as children we model behavioral patterns from our parents. As boys, we model the ways of being in a relationship from our fathers (and mothers). Many times, our fathers never got it right, so we simply take from them what we see, because unconsciously, if we do what they did, we just might get our needs met after all. This is child’s logic, and somewhere down the road, we fail to drop those tools when they don’t work for us anymore. As kids, they might have had some basic effectiveness. But as adults, we continue to use outdated tools to create similarly neurotic and ineffective relationships today.

The key is to understand these behavioral patterns, and the emotions that we avoid buried underneath. In seeing these, often for the first time, and experiencing them in the present moment unconditionally, they begin to transform themselves and set us free from the patterns that keep us stuck in conflict and unsatisfying relationships. We can work towards freedom from these blocks if we can first see them. Our fathers might not have been able to do it for themselves, but we can for ourselves.