Men’s Issues

Let me help you make that connection.

When you sit down across from me, I believe you’ll quickly get the sense that this guy gets me. But my approach to dealing with this stuff is different. Many people – especially men – look at all the issues at the top of this page as things we need to overcome. They are the bad guys, and we’re the good guys, and we just need to kill them off so that we can live happily without them.

But what if the key to dealing with this stuff was not getting away from it but leaning into it? What if these struggles try to tell you something important that you need to listen to? Maybe your anger and rage are telling you that, on a deep level, you feel hurt and violated.

Maybe your workaholism is telling you that you believe others won’t value you if you don’t stop working.

Maybe your loneliness is telling you that at some point, you were made to feel so alone that you thought you would always be that way.

If we can slow down enough to listen to the things that our struggles are telling us, then we can work toward real healing and growth. Then you can really get to the core of what’s going on and deal with it once and for all. I see a lot of men’s therapists who say that men don’t want deep self-knowledge but that they want to find quick solutions to their problems. And maybe some men want that.

But I don’t believe that’s what men need.

I think it takes a real man to be willing to acknowledge and face even those deep down and dark areas of yourself that you don’t like so much. It takes a lot of courage to really know yourself. And that’s exactly what you can expect to do when you work with me.

But you’ll also find that I have this deep, fundamental belief which is so important to the process: that underneath all of that anger, rage, addiction, inadequacy, frustration, and loneliness, there is a man who is inherently good and capable of being the best man he can be. As you face the darkness of these painful parts of your life, move further in and deeper down, and really get to know yourself as you truly are, I believe that you might be surprised to find yourself saying, “Hey, I really think I can like this guy.”

In more technical terms, my approach to working with you is based on attachment theory and informed by Internal Family Systems. This is a way of thinking about people as having parts. If you struggle with anger, this does not describe the whole of you. Part of you has a lot of anger and gets angry over certain things. But that’s not all of you. What if you could focus on and get to know that part? Maybe it would have a lot to tell you about why it does what it does, and maybe you could negotiate with it to release some of the anger and try a different approach to things. Shifting to this way of thinking will really help you understand yourself in a new way.

And when you understand yourself and why you do the things you do and accept yourself as the person you are, you can move into meaningful and lasting change.