therapy for dudes

Walk into any all-female book club gathering on a random Wednesday evening and along with phrases like “Can you pour me another glass of wine?” or “Where is this cheese from?”, you are just as likely to hear phrases along the lines of, “I was telling my therapist the other day” or “I learned this thing in therapy last week”. Being a millennial female therapist myself, I slide comfortably into and invite these discussions among peers.

I noticed, however, that in working with heterosexual couples in my therapy practice, it was almost always the male partners first touchpoint to therapy. Though each couple is so uniquely wonderful and painful in their own ways, I continuously noticed a specific sense of emotional discomfort in the male partner. Their female counterpart showed high levels of willingness to have emotional conversations and would often label his discomfort as an uncaring and blunt unwillingness. It was a frustrating pattern to watch play out.

So as I attempt to do with all patterns I see in the therapy room, especially the ones that frustrate me, I set out to be curious and attempted to prove my predetermined hypotheses wrong. I opened my therapy practice specifically to males and this is what I learned.

Hypothesis 1: Men experience less emotion than women

Hypothesis 2: