I’m reminded of Al Bundy, patriarch of the Bundy family, from the TV show “ Married With Children.” In the show, Al’s proudest moment in life was scoring four touchdowns in one game. He didn’t achieve what he sought out to, and, long story short, ends up working as a shoe salesman. Al often spends time attempting to recapture his glory days, but usually trips himself up with bad decisions and worse judgment. Al blames and resents his family, and attributes his problems to them, which provides the crux of the show’s humor.

Al’s life ended up very differently than he planned. In high school, he shined. it was a successful football player but hopes of getting a college scholarship, but after he impregnated his girlfriend and broke his leg, everything changed. Al lives in his private world filled with the best times of his life, and it’s a place that’s too many men resort to living in when their realities prove disappointing and unfulfilling.

As men (or people in general), we have a tendency to avoid ourselves, our situations or our lives as they are in the present moment. Often times, we’re too busy living in and out our private universes of the past or of the future. We hold on to the good memories, often to escape the reality of our current situation.

We may have been star athletes, president of the debate squad, or more successful with women in the past. We may have felt happier at a time in the past where we were more secure, fitter, healthier, happier, and generally more equipped to deal with the world.

Through the process of stagnation, those experience wane over time. Maybe our lives didn’t end up the way we planned. Maybe our spouses didn’t bring us the happiness that we so hoped. Maybe our children disappoint us, or maybe we disappoint ourselves. Maybe we didn’t make a million dollars, or become a pilot or a deep sea diver like we planned when we were 8 years old.

Life is short, and it’s never too late to turn it around. So what can you do?

• Admit that you’re stuck/angry/unhappy, to yourself, your spouse, your pet iguana, whomever
• Take some time for contemplation, and start to understand if you are living in an alternative universe, where your past self (or a happy future self) take up most of your headspace.
• Get help. Seek out professional help to allow you to deal with the blocks that prevent your happiness in the here and now.
• If you’re victimizing (read: blaming others for your miseries or failures), stop doing that right now. Think of Al Bundy when you do, and realize that you help keep yourself in a cycle of avoidance and unconsciousness when you do. It may be easier to place the blame on others (your wife, your boss, your pet iguana), and it’s a hell of a lot harder to look in the mirror and take ownership for your pain, disappointment and anger at yourself.
• Understand that as long as you have a skinsuit, and fresh air to breath, you can make a change for yourself. It may be scary, and it may not be what others want of you, but it’s your life, and you choose happiness or unhappiness.
• Life is neutral. You are the decider. You can choose to work on issues and change them, or you choose to sit back and stagnate. They’re all choices. One choice is to not choose.

Anger has so many negative mental health implications, not to mention societal ones like domestic violence, road rage, job termination and the like. Anger has gotten a bad rap, especially with men. Men are afraid of their anger, and they often tell me that they’re “not an angry person.” Identifying ourselves as angry people - instead of people who get angry - is certainly a difference.

We’ll take a quick look at 7 simple anger management techniques to help you out when your anger feels out of control to you. Practice these with regularity, and you’ll be able to quiet down the anger that might otherwise lead to into some otherwise sticky situations.

1. Walk away from a situation that inspires your anger. It may be helpful to communicate to a person that is inspiring your anger (e.g. your wife or girlfriend) that you need a few minutes away from the situation. But, make sure and come back to the problem to resolve it diplomatically: too often, men walk away from conflict and fail to go back to resolve it.

2. Reset with your breath. You know, that active life force right under your nose that you overlook during the day. Focus on your breath for ten deep breaths, or two minutes, whichever comes first. You can anchor yourself and reset in the present moment with attention to conscious breathing.

3. Say “I’m angry.” Say it to yourself, or say it to someone else.

4. Ask yourself: “What would be the implications to me in this moment if I acted on this anger?” Even if I want to rage out or thrown or hit something or someone, what would that get me? How would that work for me? Think about how a destructive impulse leads to the behavior, and think about the consequences for yourself, or someone else you care about, like a child or employer you are interacting with.

5. The Lifesaver Technique: I learned this last week from the anger expert W. Doyle Gentry, Ph.D, in a training I took. He says that the next time you find yourself angry, suck on a lifesaver until it’s all gone before you respond in anger. You buy some time to respond, as well as take advantage of the sucking reflex to achieve a state of calm. You’re also consuming something sweet, which the brain likes as something pleasurable.

6. Don’t criticize, judge, manipulate or say that someone “always” or “never” does something. Refer back to tip #3 to help yourself.

7. Stay with the felt sense of anger as it arises in your body. Usually we get angry with our heads, but if you can pull back and attend to the anger rising in your body - sometimes in your heart or stomach region - you’re disconnecting from the reactive anger response and training yourself to look at other, less obvious sources of anger.

Use these tips frequently for best results, and you’ll be a anger management pro in no time. Make a conscious effort to turn around your relationship with anger, and you’ll see your other relationships start to change for the better.

Men dealing with fear is one issue that is so common among guys, yet hardly talked about.

Questions to consider:

• How much of a man’s defensive posturing covers up his feelings of fear?
• Are we really that far removed from that scared little 5 or 6 year old boy inside of us?
• How does running from the fear hurt us and our loved ones?

The culture of men has no room for fear in our culture. American culture encourages guys to stuff it, annihilate it, drink it away, or obscure it with enough anger or rage. Men and fear don’t mix: they never have.

From ancient icons of warrior-kings to modern movie archetypes, men have historically been engaged in a war on fear, which has had negative effects on the planet and the environment, as well as in our families and relationships with ourselves.

Instead of staying with the emotional (and often physiological) experience of fear, men run from it. They hide, and, over time, construct fantasies and illusions that feed the fear and make it exponentially larger than it really is. We suppress and avoid the construct of fear, not really the fear itself. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” proclaimed Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address in 1932. The walls we construct around our fear makes us avoid it more.

We create imaginary sand castle fortresses, when the reality is that when we can truly experience our fear - in a lived, experiential way, and not just thinking about - then it reduces and goes away. Fear, like any emotion, is a natural emotion that needs to be processed. Think bodily functions, or how the body maintains itself in homeostasis.

Dealing with fear is critical to improving our relationships with others, be they business partners, wives and girlfriends, our children or, most importantly, with ourselves. Fear can be dealt with, but it needs acknowledgement. What it doesn’t need is to be swept under the rug anymore, because that just doesn’t work.

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.

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.