I’m putting it behind a paid subscription to ensure the folks that read it are interested enough to have some skin in the game. I want your feedback, I want this book to help people, and I want the accountability of my peers.

Here is the introduction for the book. It tells the story that started my advocacy, the places I’m pulling from, and the giants I am standing on. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please consider seeing the next chapter.

Introduction — An Odd Advocate

Osan

The first time I understood the problem I’d spend my life working on, a woman was screaming at a room full of men.

I was two weeks into my first assignment. Osan Air Base, Korea. We were told that Osan had one of the worst sexual assault problems in the Air Force, and the Air Force’s answer was a PowerPoint. You’ve seen a version of it. Rape is bad, reporting is required, and what happens if you get caught. We sat through it monthly, so nearly knew it by heart.

They put the new arrivals in a room and walked the base’s services past us: here’s the chaplain, here’s finance, here’s who to call. The woman running the sexual assault piece got up in front of thirty brand-new airmen and started clicking through the slides we’d all seen dozens of times.

About halfway through, a young cop raised his hand. “Ma’am, I’m a police officer. I get this briefing every week. Is there any way we can have a different conversation?”

For a brand-new airman, talking to a sergeant like that isn’t a great look, but her response was way out of proportion. She barked: “If you’d stop fucking raping people, I could stop giving this goddamn briefing. Now sit down and shut the fuck up.” That kind of barking is normal in the other branches. It isn’t in the Air Force.

The room went cold. However she meant it, thirty men heard themselves called rapists, and they seethed. I was furious, but a sergeant had told us to be quiet, so we were quiet. That silence gave me a second to actually look at her.

She was exhausted. Not angry-exhausted. Worn down to nothing. And when I asked around later, I found out why. At the time, this was the protocol across the entire Air Force: one coordinator, one assistant, and whatever volunteers they could round up. A base that size, a problem that big, and she was one of a handful standing between the base and its worst impulses.

So I volunteered. That’s where this started, not with a theory about men, but with a tired woman yelling into the dark, and finally getting someone’s attention.

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The odd advocate

I spent six years doing advocacy. Three in the Air Force, three more on college campuses after I got out. I trained a few thousand airmen and a few hundred students in bystander intervention. I sat with survivors, staffed crisis lines, and did my best to learn how to help. Once I was out of the Air Force, I was almost always the only man in the room, and usually the only one who ever had been.

That does something to you. I walked into space after space built by women, to deal with harm done mostly by men. And I looked like the thing everyone in the room was afraid of. A big guy. I spent years running the math of whether my presence was a comfort or a threat, and never being sure of the answer.

After years of mostly serving women, when I became a clinician, I built a practice around men, veterans, and first responders. The accused, the hurt, and the much larger group of men just terrified of becoming either. I was so tired of hearing the end of the story, I wanted to hear the beginning, to get ahead of things with guys, give male survivors somewhere to go, and hopefully move the damn ball.

I’m not a men’s-rights guy who wandered in off the internet. The first third of my career was survivor advocacy, in rooms built and led by women. Now, with over a decade of clinical work with men, I’ve got an informed view and frame that’s helped a few hundred men.

Service

You are likely wondering why Captain Privilege over here has spent a life in service.

I grew up in a house suffering through addiction. The story I learned as a kid was simple: if I was useful, if I did the right thing, if I was of service, I could make the world safe and get loved for it. Service wasn’t a value I chose, it was a survival strategy.

There was a teacher, third grade, who rigged a student-government election so the kid nobody would vote for got a seat. That showed me service goes further than family. At nineteen, a couple named John and DD took me in, two PhDs in a house full of books, who showed me what kindness and service look like together. I’ve written about all of them elsewhere. What matters here is that they handed me a map toward community, and I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to earn that feeling back.

All of them led to nearly a decade of student government, various kinds of advocacy, and like most of us, a gnawing hope that my simple story might be true.

The ledger

Here’s the part I’m less proud of.

When you build a whole self on being of service, you get very good at one thing and very bad at everything around it. In my teens it was parenting my parents, in my twenties it was white knighting, in my thirties it was burnout, and in my forties it crashed my life.

Underneath all of it, I ran a private ledger. I guessed what people needed, gave it without being asked, and kept a quiet tally of what I was owed. That kind of service is not connection. It’s a spreadsheet with feelings. And it goes exactly one place, a man who thinks he’s useful to everyone, resentful underneath, slowly going bitter that nobody is reading a ledger never seen.

That was my overdeveloped need to be seen serving. Every drive I had, squeezing through one channel, and, at times, breaking the dam. If you’re like me, and many of the men I work with, you’ve got one too. A channel you lean on until it breaks something you love. I’m telling you this now because it is the whole thesis of this book, and I ran it on myself for years before I started addressing it. Hold onto it. Yours will be named later.

The curdle

When MeToo hit in 2017, I was vindicated and righteous.

I’d been pounding on this problem for years, seeing it mostly ignored or dismissed, and suddenly the whole culture was catching up. Survivors were taking up space. Accountability was landing on men who’d spent decades sure it never would. That was good.

Then, over a couple of years, it widened, and I wasn’t the only one seeing it. “Toxic masculinity” stopped being a phrase about specific behaviors. In my circles, it became a standing charge against men in general, putting the awkward teenager, the clumsy flirt, and the actual predator in one box and calling the box the problem. I watched decent men get told the issue was them. Not what they’d done. Them. What landed on them was all fault and no direction. Be small or join in the destruction of others.

I didn’t know what to do with it. I spent the back half of the movement getting more uncomfortable and having nowhere to put the discomfort. I couldn’t say it in the advocacy spaces without sounding like I was defending the indefensible. I couldn’t ignore it in my office, because it walked in the door every week, men shutting down in shame or firing up in defense the second the words came out.

Reeves

Then Dr. Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway showed up.

Dr. Reeves published Of Boys and Men at exactly the right moment. It was the first time I’d heard the struggles of boys and men gain real traction in the mainstream. Spoken clearly, publicly, with data, all without minimizing what had been done to women and everyone else. He held both: he could sit with the harm done to women and others while still holding ground on men in trouble, and he did it firmly, kindly, and most importantly, effectively. Galloway got people to listen, his blunt, everywhere voice carried the argument to men who’d never open a Brookings book. All of a sudden, I had voices I could emulate, a way to hold the whole of it instead of picking a side.

I took it as a call to action. I cut back on teaching other clinicians to start talking to the public. I started a podcast and writing to get the lessons I’ve seen move men in private to the guys who will never step into my office. This book is what came out of it.

The frame

Dr. Reeves does something careful. He names three masculine drives — aggression, sexual drive, risk-taking and treats them as description of masculine, not prescriptions on males. Drives to understand, not pathologies to moralize. I add a fourth he circles but never names outright: status-seeking.

To call these traits toxic is to call humanity toxic. It writes off half of us, and the choices we have. In accepting our nature, we get to pick how these traits get channeled for the better. But most need more than one channel for each; when pushed through just one, the traits go dark fast. Reeves gave structural answers, the policies society can put in place to support men’s healthy choices and connect in their communities. What he didn’t map was what an individual man does with his masculine drives in his own life. This is my attempt to fill that need.

The book is built on the pain of all of us: the people I’ve listened to on the crisis lines, the people I’ve taught brave enough to argue, and the hundreds of men who’ve shared their deepest pain and greatest success with me.

Their gift is why this book exists. Pain without purpose is just suffering. My hope is that using theirs to help other men wash the toxic sludge off gives this pain purpose. By the end of this book, you’ll know how to use the different channels for the ones that are in you.

Copyright Timothy Wienecke, 2026-Present

Almost every week, I sit across from some version of the same man. Everybody seems to like him. But he feels almost entirely unknown, and increasingly taken advantage of.

He’s dependable. Easy to work with. The guy people call when something breaks, when a shift needs covering, or when somebody needs to talk at eleven o’clock at night. And he’s genuinely lonely. He’s spent years being agreeable and can’t understand why it isn’t paying off. Why he keeps getting more work without more money. Why people trust him with their problems but rarely ask about his. Why he feels useful everywhere and chosen almost nowhere.

Somewhere along the way, he learned how to be useful without ever learning how to be cared for.

It all comes back to a similar set of patterns, and good therapy breaks bad patterns. As a recovering people-pleaser and someone with more than a decade of counseling guys out of it, I’m going to show you how that pattern develops, what it costs at work and in friendship, and four ways to interrupt it without tripping into being an asshole.

The Hidden Bargain

Kindness is generosity with choice. People-pleasing is generosity under threat.

You’ve probably heard the terms. The nice guy problem. People-pleasing. The guy’s version of the pick-me. From the outside they all look the same, because the outward behavior is identical. You’re the one who shows up. What separates kindness from compliance isn’t the behavior. It’s the math a man runs while he does it.

Kindness is an equation with three terms. Someone’s need, your capacity, and a choice. You see what a person needs, you take a beat to assess what it will cost you, and then you decide whether to engage. People-pleasing skips the middle term entirely. There’s no pause to check capacity, because the act isn’t a choice. It’s a defense. If I’m not useful, something bad happens. I get conflict I can’t manage, rejection I can’t survive, or the quiet confirmation that I don’t deserve care. So instead of choosing, you scramble.

For a lot of men, the pattern starts early. At some point, a kid looks to a caregiver for something and doesn’t get it. It doesn’t take a capital-T trauma. Nobody’s caregivers are perfect, and every child eventually finds the gap. One story a kid tells to feel safe goes like this: I shouldn’t have needs, my needs are only met if I’m of service, or my needs are disruptive to the functioning of my home. My job is to take care of the people who are supposed to take care of me, and if I do it well enough, I’ll get what I need without ever having to ask. That’s a smart strategy for a small person in a world that feels too big to manage. It works. You become the well-behaved kid, the one adults like, and it pays off in attention and approval. But the strategy has a shelf life. A child therapist I respect told me once that they worry more for the perfect kid than the one who gets in some trouble. The older and more capable you get, the less it works, and the more it curdles.

Because underneath it runs a formula. If I do X, eventually you’ll give me Y. At work: if I take the extra shift and finish the project early, the raise comes. In relationships: endless availability, delivered like it costs nothing, in exchange for affection that never quite arrives. But nobody agreed to those terms. There was no request, no negotiation, no consent to the exchange. The people pleaser keeps a ledger the other person can’t see, and then bills them for a debt they never signed for.

So it escalates. Disappointment becomes resentment. Resentment becomes entitlement, the quiet conviction that you’re owed. And entitlement, left long enough, turns into punishment, manipulation, coercion, the ugly end of a strategy that started as a child’s attempt to stay safe. Not only does it fail the man running it. In the long run, it hurts the people he cares about most.

Nobody can violate an agreement they never knew existed. Most of the time, you don’t get what you don’t ask for.

The Screen

If you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering whether it’s you. There’s a quick screen for that. It won’t prove anything. It’ll just tell you whether there’s something worth looking at.

Think back to the last time you were genuinely angry at someone. Not annoyed. Angry. Somewhere in that internal monologue, listen for the line. But I’m a nice guy. After everything I do. I deserve better than this. That thought, on its own, doesn’t mean you’re a people-pleaser. It’s a check-engine light, not a diagnosis. But it means the engine is worth opening up, because what you’re doing in that moment might be presenting an invoice for an agreement the other person never made.

So run the screen. Four questions, in order.

1. What did I give?

2. What did I expect back?

3. Did I say it?

4. Did they agree?

If the honest answer to the last two is no, then you’re furious at someone for failing to meet a term they were never told about. And underneath that fury, if you look, is usually fear. You didn’t ask because asking felt dangerous. Conflict you wanted to avoid, a no you didn’t want to hear, a need you weren’t sure you were allowed to have.

Now the harder part. Picture actually doing something about it. Making a direct request for the thing you wanted. Holding a boundary and saying no to the next ask. Accepting their no when you’re the one who asks. Naming a relationship that only runs one direction, out loud, to the person on the other end of it. Picture taking one of those actions instead of quietly adding another line to the ledger.

If that made your stomach drop, pay attention to that. The queasiness is the screen coming back positive. It might mean there’s conflict you’re built to avoid, and somewhere a belief that you don’t get to ask for things and receive them. It can also just mean the relationship matters to you. That’s not a comfortable thing to take a look at, but decide which it is. Now you’ll know, and that’s the whole point.

Because your disappointment contains information. Whatever is making you angry is telling you exactly where you handed something over and expected a return you never negotiated. Trace it back and you’ll usually find the same thing: you never said what you needed, or you never asked, or you asked once, got a no, and kept paying anyway expecting the answer to change.

Kindness doesn’t purchase anything. Not affection, not loyalty, not sex, not a promotion, not care. Kindness is showing up for someone you have some genuine care or obligation toward, and then letting the relationship be whatever it honestly is. If the terms were never stated, the other person isn’t a cheat for not paying out. They just never knew they were at the table.

If the terms were never stated, it wasn’t an agreement. It was a bet. And this time you lost.

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss as bad news but is actually the opening. Not knowing the pattern didn’t protect you. It just kept you from being able to change it. You can’t fix a problem you can’t name. Now it has a name. Which means it’s yours to work on, just like every person that’s walked into my office and left lighter. Pattern breaking is hard, and sometimes painful, but the alternative is to keep living on a ledger no one else sees.

The Disappearing Act

Follow the pattern into a man’s job and it shows up as a specific kind of math. The agreeable man gets more work. He does not get more authority, and he does not get more money.

That’s not a hunch. In a 2012 paper, Timothy Judge, Beth Livingston, and Charlice Hurst found across three studies that men low in agreeableness earned roughly 18% more than their highly agreeable counterparts, and a fourth experiment suggested that backlash against agreeable men helped explain the gap. These are observational income findings, and the association is smaller for women, though not zero. Part of that is that women get socialized into the nice-guy bargain from a different direction. Agreeableness isn’t the same thing as people-pleasing, and the study can’t tell us that weak boundaries caused the gap. But it does show that men can pay, in real dollars, for behavior others read as too accommodating. I see the workplace version of that in my office constantly, and most of the men living it have no idea it’s there.

Here’s what it looks like from the inside. He walks into a salary conversation already having lost it, because he ran the other side’s argument for them before he showed up. They’re not going to give me that, so why ask. That’s a pre-compromised negotiation. He underquotes what he’s worth and overdelivers to make up the difference, as if effort were a substitute for terms. He takes on the leadership work without ever asking for the title or the pay that’s supposed to come with it. And when he wants more, he doesn’t advocate for himself. He just does more, on the theory that the ledger will eventually balance on its own. My boss needs me this weekend, but if I come in, the promotion’s coming. If I do this, he’ll get off my back.

He’s always scrambling to earn what he could be negotiating for. And don’t misread me, hustle is real, and it goes a long way. But a raise doesn’t get decided on the floor at eleven at night. It gets decided in a conversation he’s too afraid to have.

If your takeaway from any of this is I need to be more of an asshole, you’ve missed the point entirely. The problem was never your kindness. The problem is that you disappeared. Quality doesn’t negotiate. People do.

And understand what you’re negotiating against. A company will pay you as much as it thinks it needs to in order to keep you, and not a dollar more. That’s not cruelty. That’s the arrangement. You are trading labor for money and status, and the company will push that trade as far in its favor as you let it. Some managers will knowingly lean on the man least likely to push back, and that’s on them. But your job isn’t to resent the game. It’s to account for it, and your silence about what it costs to keep you is the part that’s yours to change.

This matters more to men than we usually admit out loud. Work is bound up in being a provider, and being a provider is bound up in identity. So when the labor doesn’t convert into money or standing, it doesn’t just cost a man a raise. It costs him something closer to his sense of whether he keeps his man card.

So that’s the bill at work. The bill in friendship is quieter, and it comes due later.

The Resource

We talk constantly now about a male loneliness epidemic, and most of the talk assumes loneliness means an absence of people. For a lot of men it doesn’t. They’re surrounded, in rooms full of people. And they’re still profoundly alone, because somewhere they absorbed the idea that usefulness is the price of admission to a friendship.

A lot of us learned that watching the men who raised us. My grandfather was a company man. Every friend he had, he worked with. He got the gold watch at the end, and when he retired, most of his community went with the job, and it was hard on him. My father and his buddies were trades guys. They traded favors, showed up for each other’s projects, and then hung out, but I rarely remember them having conversations about anything underneath. That model isn’t universal, but it’s deeply American, and a lot of men inherited it whole. Be useful, and belonging follows. A lot of men know how to be useful to a friend. Far fewer know how to let a friend actually know them.

I know this one from the inside. I like helping people move. I like being the guy who shows up when my people are in trouble. But that was never why anyone was my friend, and for a long time I had it backwards. I heard it named in my first graduate school class. A professor stood up and told a room full of us that we were probably the people our friends called at two in the morning, the ones who showed up for everybody. Fine quality, he said. But once you do this for a living, that energy goes into the work, and you’ll have to start asking what your community gives back… or you’ll burn out and lose the friendships anyway.

That was me. Between the military and moving around for school, I had friends scattered everywhere, and for a lot of them, I only heard from them when they needed something. That was how I understood my own value as a friend. Just like my professor said, I couldn’t do my job for my clients and one-way relationships. The energy was spoken for, and if I spent it all at home, there was nothing left for the people actually paying me to have it. The calls kept coming, same friend, same problem, and I started saying no. Do you remember what I told you last time? Do you want help finding a therapist? Then do that. I’m going to go. And they’d say, whoa, don’t you want to catch up? And I’d say, I can’t remember the last time you called to ask how I was. I’d love to hear from you. Just not tonight.

I was sure that was the end of those friendships, and it was the end of some of them. But about half called back within a few days. Hey man, I’m sorry. How have you been? What’s going on with you? I was relieved past what I expected, because it turned out my friends showed up if I asked. I’d just trained them to treat me like a resource instead of a person.

That’s the trap, and it’s precise. The nice guy gets stuck at the starting line of every friendship. He provides, he fixes, he listens, he agrees. He almost never reveals a preference, an ache, or a need. He becomes indispensable to the group and stays unknown inside it. Helping someone move might start a friendship. It was never going to be enough to build one.

It doesn’t just cost the guy suffering in it. When a man has no real intimacy anywhere in his friendships, all of it gets routed to one place. His partner becomes his confidant, his emotional regulator, his social secretary, and his entire support network at once. In a frequently cited 1996 study, 49% of men named their spouse as their primary confidant, compared with 20% of women, who tended to draw support from a wider range of relationships. The numbers are old, but the pattern they point to, men routing their emotional support through one romantic partner, hasn’t gone away. One person cannot be a whole community. And when a partner is carrying the entire weight, the relationship turns brittle. You become more afraid of losing them, because losing them isn’t just the end of one relationship. It’s the collapse of the whole system. A man with a real net underneath him can negotiate for a better relationship, because he knows that if the worst comes, he’ll be okay. Not happy. Not living the life he pictured. But okay. The man with no net can’t afford to ask her for anything, because he can’t afford to lose the only infrastructure he has.

So run the friendship version of the screen.

Who still calls you when you can’t fix it, pay for it, or serve them in some way?

Who calls just to be around you?

Which friend actually knows what’s happening inside your life right now?

When did you last ask a friend for something?

Where in your life are you sharing yourself instead of exchanging services?

And if the honest answer is nowhere, sit with the hard version of this before you decide nobody shows up for you. Because I’d bet some of them do ask how you’re doing, and you tell them you’re fine. Hidden needs can’t prove that no one cares. If you never signal that you have any, you train the people around you to believe you don’t. Every time someone asks and you say you’re fine, you set another brick. The isolation starts to look like proof of something the world did to you, when a lot of it is a wall you’ve been building from the inside. Just like me, you’ve likely trained them to treat you as a service instead of a friend.

The Reps

Naming the pattern doesn’t break it. Awareness helps, but awareness alone rarely changes behavior. What changes it is a different set of moves, practiced small, until they stop feeling like a threat. I pull most of mine from one place. In her DBT Skills Training Manual, Dr. Marsha Linehan made interpersonal effectiveness one of the four core skill areas, and organized it around three goals a man is usually trying to hold at once: getting what he needs, keeping the relationship intact, and keeping his self-respect. The nice guy has spent his whole life sacrificing the first and third to protect the second. These moves put all three back on the table.

The first move is to buy time before the yes. Your knee-jerk as a people-pleaser is to say yes before the other person finishes the sentence. So stop answering on reflex. Let me check and get back to you. Ten minutes, or twenty-four hours, whatever the situation allows, enough time to actually find out whether you mean it. Then run the private test. What is it going to cost me? Is this something I want to do? Take the beat, find the honest answer, and don’t use the delay as a soft no. You’re going to come back either way.

The second move is to give a clean no when no is the answer. Brief, honest, proportionate. I can’t make that work. I don’t have the capacity this week. No apology preamble, no justification essay, because you didn’t do anything wrong. Apologies are for when we’ve wronged someone, not for declining a request you never agreed to. If you genuinely want to offer part of it, offer part of it. But say the no plainly and then manage what comes up, because something will come up. There’s a small, scared part of you, the kid who built this whole strategy, that will start yelling that you’re about to lose everything. Your job in that moment is to steady him, and hold the no anyway. Once you’ve managed yourself, keep the line clean. Their disappointment is theirs to carry, and your responsibility is to be clear, respectful, and to honor the commitments you actually made. That’s not the same as making sure nobody ever feels let down.

The third move is the one that’s done the most for me personally. When you have some capacity but not much, don’t disappear into a yes or slam the door with a no. Tell the truth about the cost and let the other person decide what to do with it. A friend texts at the end of a brutal day. Hey, it’s been a long one — how important is this? That single question hands them the information they never had before: that showing up costs you something. If it’s a want, they’ll wait. If it’s a real need, you can choose to push through, and now it’s a gift instead of a reflex. At work it sounds like this: You’ve already got me on X, Y, and Z. If this comes in, which one drops? Because I can’t do all four. You’re not refusing. You’re making the invisible ledger visible, out loud, where an agreement can actually happen.

The fourth move is to make an ask of your own, small and specific enough that a no won’t wreck you, but a yes would genuinely land. With a friend, it’s a phone call. Can you talk Tuesday night? I’d like to catch up. If there’s time to scroll, there’s time for a call. With a coworker, it’s one defined piece of a project, with the limits attached. Can you own the slides by Thursday? I can review them, but I can’t build them this week. If they pass, you’re still fine. The point isn’t to engineer a yes. The point is to practice being someone who asks, and to notice what it feels like when the answer comes back yes — and to survive it when it comes back no. The other person stays free the whole time. That’s what makes it real.

Start smaller than you think you need to. Guys read this and walk straight into a salary negotiation expecting to knock it out of the park, and that’s not how it works. You get your reps in on the small stuff first, where you can tolerate the discomfort, and you build toward the hard conversations. Try to do it all at once and you’ll drown.

And if you run these and they don’t get you anywhere, that’s not failure. That’s information. It tells you that you’re carrying something that needs a hand you can’t give yourself, and that’s most people. When something breaks in my house, I dig around, find a guide, and take a swing at fixing it. If it goes well, great money saved. If not, I’ve got to make the call. Same for you. You’ll try this. If enough of it works, great. If not, find a therapist or a coach, bring them what you learned trying, and let someone help you carry the pattern while you change it. There’s no shame in that. I needed therapy for this, and I teach other clinicians how to work with you guys. Nearly everything worthwhile that I know how to do, I learned from someone else first.

Chosen

None of this comes with a guarantee. Boundaries don’t buy you approval, a raise, or a relationship. What they buy is room. Some will meet you, but those that don’t leave space; for a different job, a different friendship, a version of your life that isn’t run entirely off a ledger nobody else can see. Some of what you’re currently calling a relationship won’t survive the change. Remember my friends: half called back, half didn’t. Losing them cost me less than keeping them did. That loss is information too. It’s not the same thing as failure.

So think back to the man from the beginning. He doesn’t need to become less generous. His generosity was never the problem. Being useful feels good. It can earn him access, work, and praise for the rest of his life, but none of it will ever add up to being known without speaking up for himself. You cannot perform your way into being chosen. You have to let yourself be seen, needs and all, and let the people around you choose the actual man instead of the service he provides.

The recovery community has a response when someone says “I’m fine”. Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional. Stop saying you’re fine, and instead of being of use, you might be chosen. Instead of being alone in a room full of people, you’ll be connected to the important ones.

Originally Published on Menstherapy.online on 8/7/2026:

https://menstherapy.online/people-pleasing-in-men/

References

Judge, T. A., Livingston, B. A., & Hurst, C. (2012). Do nice guys—and gals—really finish last? The joint effects of sex and agreeableness on income. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(2), 390–407. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026021

Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. https://www.guilford.com/books/DBT-Skills-Training-Manual/Marsha-Linehan/ 9781462516995

Umberson, D., Chen, M. D., House, J. S., Hopkins, K., & Slaten, E. (1996). The effect of social relationships on psychological well-being: Are men and women really so different? American Sociological Review, 61(5), 837–857. https://doi.org/10.2307/2096456

Most of the men who sit down across from me looking to get better are already quoting a dead Roman.

Not all of them know it’s Stoicism. Some just say they’re trying to control what they can and let the rest go. But it’s Marcus, or Seneca, or something they picked up thirdhand from a podcast, and it’s on the table before we’ve done much else. In my practice here in Colorado, it’s one of the most common frames a man carries through the door. That doesn’t surprise me. After 2023, it shouldn’t surprise anyone.

That was the year the question went around: how often do you think about the Roman Empire? Women asked the men in their lives half-expecting a shrug. What went viral wasn’t the question, it was the answers. The frequency. The specificity. Men who couldn’t name a great-grandfather could walk you through the Punic Wars. Everyone laughed. Almost nobody asked what the men were reaching for.

My read is pretty basic. Stoicism is a good tool. It’s one of the cleaner ways I know to help a man name his values and run a hard decision through a frame that asks who he wants to be instead of what he’s afraid of. As philosophy for building yourself, it holds weight. And when done well, it justifies a millennia-old practice.

Why it feels natural for a Western man specifically isn’t mystical, and it isn’t about race. It’s inheritance. Our law, our language, our idea of a republic all run back through Rome in a documented line. A man reaching for the Stoics is reaching for the foundation of the order he already lives inside. And he can hold it without the sticky feeling, that quiet sense of borrowing something that was never his, that can come with reaching for Buddhist mindfulness or an Indigenous practice built by people whose history isn’t his to claim. The West has taken plenty, and still does. This is one of the few things a Western man gets to feel is his, clean. Not because the guilt was ever settled, because time moved it out of reach. The slavery, the conquest, the blood in the arena are real and documented, but they’ve passed out of living memory into myth, and myth is easy to admire. You can run your hand over the marble because no one you love was crushed under it.

None of that is incidental. Culture isn’t a backdrop to how a man changes — it’s load-bearing. What I was trained on, and what I train other clinicians on, is that a man’s biology, his individual history, and the culture he’s standing in are all building him at the same time. So when a man walks in already braced by a philosophy that feels like his, the clinical work tends to stick faster. He isn’t starting from bare ground.

But the same frame that braces a man can also wall him off. Some men use the Stoics to decide who to be. Others use them to avoid the question entirely — to go numb and call it discipline, to go cold and call it strength. That isn’t what the Stoics taught. It isn’t even good Stoicism. Ryan Holiday, the reason most of these men have any Stoic vocabulary at all, has built a career on the same correction: the feel-nothing tough guy is small-s stoic, damaging himself and keeping himself small. Not someone practicing the philosophy. That’s where good clinical work picks up. It takes wisdom the Stoics started two thousand years ago, adds the century of clinical study we’ve built since, and turns both toward bringing a man back toward himself and the people around him.

Same Dance, New Shoes:

Here’s the part most men miss: Romans didn’t found Stoicism. They inherited it. A Cypriot named Zeno started it in an Athens colonnade around 300 BCE, and Chrysippus built it into a full system a generation later. It stayed Greek for the better part of two centuries, until another Greek, Panaetius, carried it to Rome, and Romans made it their own. Seneca wrote it into Roman life. A published Emperor’s private journal gave it the marketing to survive millennia. Rome’s contribution wasn’t the idea. It was taking someone else’s idea and rebuilding it for the load its own time put on it.

Why it matters for us is, we’ve done the same thing all over again. Some of our most proven clinical theories did exactly that with the Stoics: they took the work and expanded it for our time and culture.

The Middle Step

You don’t react to what happens to you. You react to the judgment you make about what happened. Event, then verdict, then feeling… In that order, every time. Epictetus immortalized the idea: men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about things. Miss the middle step and your anger looks like the world handed it to you. Catch it, and you’ve got a lever most men never knew was in reach.

I watch this land in real time. A man comes in certain his boss, his ex, the traffic made him feel what he feels. The work isn’t talking him out of the feeling. It’s helping him catch the half second between the event and his reaction — the half second where he gets to decide instead of react. He can’t control the feeling. He can’t control the first thought. The response is the only thing that was ever his.

This isn’t a resemblance or a loose parallel. Albert Ellis built rational emotive behavior therapy directly on Epictetus and said so on the record. Aaron Beck acknowledged the same debt for cognitive therapy. The road from a former slave’s lecture notes to the most tested psychotherapy on the planet is written down, not poetic. When Rome took the Greeks’ work and rebuilt it, this is the part that survived the trip. When clinical science picked it up two thousand years later, this is the part it started from. Started from, not stopped at.

But here’s what’s lost in the sound bites. The Stoics never told you to feel nothing. They had a word for healthy emotion: “eupatheia”. There is a whole taxonomy under it: joy in place of mere pleasure, caution in place of fear, considered wish in place of raw craving. Removing emotion from a mammal is a biological impossibility. They aspired to be men whose feelings had been run through judgment and come out clean. Kill the emotion entirely and you haven’t advanced the philosophy. You’ve failed its first test.

The Outward Read

Thoughts, feelings, and behaviors happen together, all at once. We break them into a process: event, verdict, feeling, response. Not because that’s the real order, but because a process is something you can work. A thread you can pull to loosen the whole tangle.

That’s the middle step, and it runs in two directions. You learned to catch your own verdict. The same move, aimed outward, is empathy: slowing another person’s tangle into something you can read, the judgment under the feeling, the reason under the reaction. Marcus said it in a line. Enter into the ruling faculty of every man, and let every man enter into yours.

Empathy is cognitive before it’s anything else. Not absorbing someone’s pain, not drowning in it. Modeling another mind accurately enough to act well toward it. The Stoics had a word for widening that circle: oikeiōsis. You start with yourself, and a life lived well keeps drawing the ring outward: family, neighbor, stranger… until “mine” and “not mine” stop meaning what they used to. That isn’t softness. It’s attention, aimed at someone who isn’t you.

Empathy is the compass and the four virtues are the map. The virtues show you what a good life looks like; empathy shows you where the people are in it. Who to pull close, who to keep at a distance, and how to tell the two apart so you can grow your circle instead of shrinking it. Wisdom without it sees clearly and speaks to no one. Courage without it defends a position instead of a person. Temperance without it is a cold man congratulating himself on how little he needs. And justice without it isn’t hard but impossible. You cannot do right by someone whose inside you won’t read. Run the virtues with no read on the people around you, and you get the exact thing the sound-bite version produces: a disciplined man, pointed at nothing but himself.

The Cost of Practicing Alone

Cherry-picking Stoic ideas of controlling yourself, discounting what you can’t govern, and convincing yourself that the only way to be whole is to remove all need for outside approval curdles a life. Strip out the emotional side, the acknowledging and the connecting, and self-mastery is just isolation. A man who can’t find safety in connection goes looking for it elsewhere. Most guys riding the sound-bite version of Stoicism are chasing efficacy, command over their circumstances, and they reach for it through the things that look like control: power. Money. Influence. Dominance.

The research on this is unkind. It’s a pattern, not a verdict on any one man. Dacher Keltner has spent decades documenting what he calls the power paradox: the same capacities that earn a man influence start to erode once he has it. And power here isn’t always the corner office. It’s being the man others defer to: in a marriage, a company, a family. In his data, powerful people stop simulating the experience of others, and the empathy slips. Sukhvinder Obhi’s neuroscience put a mechanism under it: run power up and the brain’s mirroring system, the wiring that lets you feel what another person feels, measurably quiets. This is directional, population-level. It doesn’t mean every man with power is cruel. It means the erosion is a current, and a man practicing self-mastery in isolation is swimming with it, not against it.

Then comparison does the rest, and it cuts both ways. The drive to measure yourself against other people is old; research named that, then found that looking up and down do very different things. Look down, and you guard your self-image at the cost of your regard for the people beneath you. Look up, and you trade your footing for a despair you didn’t earn. One breeds contempt. The other breeds a quiet, gnawing sense of falling behind. Comparison isn’t on Burns’s original list of cognitive distortions, but it earned a spot on the expanded ones for a reason, it’s one of the most reliable ways a man talks himself into misery (Festinger, 1954; Wheeler, 1966; Wills, 1981).

Social media is the accelerant, and only in one direction. It’s a highlight reel, and a man scrolling it runs roughly three upward comparisons every twenty minutes against the maybe one a day he’d make offline. While research is contested, the newest reviews find the damage real but uneven, heavier on some men than others. You can’t stare at everyone’s best moment all day and keep your sense of proportion.

Some read all of this as a symptom of an economy tilting toward a new oligarchy. That’s a live argument among the people who study it, and I’ll leave it there. The erosion I can speak to happens one man at a time, in a life that got smaller than it had to.

The Fourth Virtue

Guys love imagining themselves as the emperor. Here’s what they skip: the emperor built his whole discipline on the words of a man born a slave.

Pierre Hadot put it plainly: the essential substance of the Meditations comes from Epictetus. The most powerful man in the world ran his private philosophy off a former slave’s lecture notes and didn’t hold himself above the debt. He wrote it down as gratitude.

It’s a man with every reason to believe he owed no one anything, admitting he owed almost everything to a lineage that ran through a former slave with none of his power, and the teacher who carried it to him. That’s stoic Justice, and without it the table falls over.

Because justice is one of the four. The Stoics named four cardinal virtues, and every serious account of the philosophy carries all of them: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Right conduct toward other people, built into the frame from the start, equal to self-control, not bolted on after. You can’t run three of the four and call the set complete.

The sound-bite version keeps the discipline; the self-mastery, the grip, the grind and quietly drops the one virtue that points outward. Then it calls what’s left Stoicism. It isn’t. I watch it in the room: men with real self-command who have no idea the coldness they’re proud of is the tell. The contempt, the thinned-out empathy, the life that got smaller.

That isn’t Stoicism. It’s Stoicism amputated and still called whole.

The Frame That’s Already Yours

Most of the men who sit down across from me looking to get better are already quoting a dead Roman.

Not all of them know it’s Stoicism. Some just say they’re trying to control what they can and let the rest go. But it’s Marcus, or Seneca, or something they picked up thirdhand from a podcast, and it’s on the table before we’ve done much else. In my practice here in Colorado, it’s one of the most common frames a man carries through the door. That doesn’t surprise me. After 2023, it shouldn’t surprise anybody.

That was the year the question went around: How often do you think about the Roman Empire? Women asked the men in their lives half-expecting a shrug. What went viral wasn’t the question, it was the answers. The frequency. The specificity. Men who couldn’t name a great-grandfather could walk you through the Punic Wars. Everyone laughed. Almost nobody asked what the men were reaching for.

My read is pretty basic. Stoicism is a good tool. It’s one of the cleaner ways I know to help a man name his values and run a hard decision through a frame that asks who he wants to be instead of what he’s afraid of. As philosophy for building yourself, it holds weight. Tools that don’t work don’t survive two thousand years of hard use.

Why it feels natural for an American man specifically isn’t mystical, and it isn’t about race. It’s inheritance, and a documented one. The men who framed this country’s government read Cicero and Cato. They built the republic on Rome, the Senate, the checks, the civic language of duty and self-command. Reaching for the Stoics, a man is reaching into the foundation of the order he already lives inside, which is why it doesn’t land as an import. And Rome sits at a distance that lets him hold it without the flinch. This country’s wrongs are recent, still in living memory, still raw. Rome’s are real and documented too, the slavery, the conquest, the blood in the arena, but they happened far enough back to pass into myth, and myth is easy to admire. You can run your hand over the marble because the people crushed under it are beyond anyone’s memory.

None of that is incidental. Culture isn’t a backdrop to how a man changes; it’s load-bearing. What I was trained on, and what I train other clinicians on, is that a man’s biology, individual history, and the culture he’s standing in are all building him at the same time. So when a man walks in already braced by a philosophy that feels like his, the clinical work tends to stick faster because he isn’t starting from bare ground.

But the same frame that braces a man can also wall him off. Some men use the Stoics to decide who to be. Others use them to avoid the question entirely, to go numb and call it discipline, to go cold and call it strength. That isn’t what the Stoics taught. It’s just cold and stoic. Ryan Holiday, the reason most of these men have any Stoic vocabulary at all, has built a career on the same correction: the feel-nothing tough guy is small-s stoic, damaging himself and keeping himself small. Not someone practicing the philosophy. That’s where good clinical work picks up. It takes wisdom the Stoics started two thousand years ago, adds the century of clinical study we’ve built since, and leverages both to help a man move toward himself and the people around him.

Same Dance, New Shoes

Here’s the part most men miss: Romans didn’t found Stoicism. They inherited it. A Cypriot named Zeno started it in an Athens colonnade around 300 BCE, and Chrysippus built it into a full system a generation later. It stayed Greek for the better part of two centuries, until another Greek, Panaetius, carried it to Rome, and Romans made it their own. Seneca wrote it into Roman life. A published Emperor’s private journal gave it the marketing to survive millennia. Rome’s contribution wasn’t the idea. It was taking someone else’s idea and rebuilding it for its own time and place.

Why it matters for us is that we’ve done the same thing all over again. Some of our most proven clinical theories did exactly that with the Stoics: they took the work and expanded it for our time and culture.

The Middle Step

You don’t just react to what happens to you. You react to the judgment you make about what happened. Event, then verdict, then feeling. The verdict often fires faster than you can catch it, but it’s the step the whole reaction hangs on. Epictetus immortalized the idea: men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about things. Miss the middle step and your anger looks like the world handed it to you. Catch it, and you’ve got a lever most men never knew was in reach.

A man comes in certain his boss, his ex, the traffic made him feel what he feels. The work isn’t talking him out of the feeling. A clinician’s job is to help him catch the half-second between the event and his reaction, the half-second when he gets to decide instead of react. He can’t control the feeling. He can’t control the first thought. The response is the only thing that was ever his.

This isn’t a simple cultural influence. Albert Ellis built rational emotive behavior therapy directly on Epictetus and said it on the record. Aaron Beck traced cognitive therapy’s philosophical roots to the same Stoic source. The road from a former slave’s lecture notes to the most tested psychotherapy on the planet is written down, not poetic. When clinical science picked it up two thousand years later, this is the part it started from. Started from, not stopped at.

Here’s what’s lost in the sound bites. The Stoics never told you to feel nothing. They had a word for healthy emotion: eupatheia. There is a whole taxonomy under it: joy in place of mere pleasure, caution in place of fear, considered wish in place of raw craving. Removing emotion from a mammal is a biological impossibility. They aspired to be men whose feelings had been run through judgment and come out clean. Kill the emotion entirely, and you haven’t advanced the philosophy. You’ve failed its first test.

The Outward Read

Thoughts, feelings, and behaviors happen together, all at once. We break them into a process: event, verdict, feeling, response. Not because that’s the real order, but because a process is something you can work. A thread you can pull to loosen the whole tangle.

That’s the middle step, and it runs in two directions. You learned to catch your own verdict. The same move, aimed outward, is empathy: slowing another person’s tangle into something you can read, the judgment under the feeling, the reason under the reaction. Marcus said it in a line. Enter into the ruling faculty of every man, and let every man enter into yours.

Empathy is cognitive before it’s anything else. Not absorbing someone’s pain, not drowning in it. Modeling another mind accurately enough to act well toward it. The Stoics had a word for widening that circle: oikeiōsis. You start with yourself, and a life lived well keeps drawing the ring outward: family, neighbor, stranger… until “mine” and “not mine” stop meaning what they used to. That isn’t softness. It’s attention, aimed at someone who isn’t you.

Empathy is the compass and the four virtues are the map. The virtues show you what a good life looks like; empathy shows you where the people are in it. Who to pull close, who to keep at a distance, and how to tell the two apart so you can grow your circle instead of shrinking it. Wisdom without it sees clearly and speaks to no one. Courage without it defends a position instead of a person. Temperance without it is a cold man congratulating himself on how little he needs. And justice without it isn’t hard but impossible. You cannot do right by someone whose inside you won’t read. Run the virtues with no read on the people around you, and you get the exact thing the sound-bite version produces: a disciplined man, pointed at nothing but himself.

The Cost of Practicing Alone

Cherry-picking Stoic ideas of controlling yourself, discounting what you can’t govern, and convincing yourself that the only way to be whole is to remove all need for outside approval curdles a life. Strip out the emotional side, the acknowledging and the connecting, and self-mastery is just isolation. A man who can’t find safety in connection goes looking for it elsewhere. Most guys riding the sound-bite version of Stoicism are chasing efficacy, command over their circumstances, and they reach for it through the things that look like control: Power. Money. Influence. Dominance.

The research on this is unkind. It’s a pattern, not a verdict on any one man. Dacher Keltner has spent decades documenting what he calls the power paradox: the same capacities that earn a man influence start to erode once he has it. And power here isn’t always the corner office. It’s being the man others defer to: in a marriage, a company, a family. In his data, powerful people stop simulating the experience of others, and the empathy slips. Sukhvinder Obhi’s neuroscience put a mechanism under it: run power up and the brain’s mirroring system, part of how we resonate with other people, measurably quiets. This is directional, population-level. It doesn’t mean every man with power is cruel. It means the erosion is a current, and a man practicing self-mastery in isolation is swimming with it, not against it.

The drive to measure yourself against other people is old; research named it, then found that looking up and looking down do very different things. Look down, and you guard your self-image at the cost of your regard for the people beneath you. Look up, and you trade your footing for a despair you didn’t earn. One breeds contempt. The other breeds a quiet, gnawing sense of falling behind. Comparison does not always appear on the standard lists of cognitive distortions, but clinicians recognize how reliably it can talk a man into misery.

Social media is the accelerant, and its dominant pull is upward. It’s a highlight reel. In one study, people made about three comparisons during twenty minutes of social-media browsing, most of them upward. The broader research is contested, but experimental and observational studies find that upward comparison on social media can lower self-evaluation, mood, and life satisfaction, with some people more vulnerable than others. You can’t stare at everyone’s best moment all day and keep your sense of proportion.

Some read all of this as a symptom of an economy tilting toward a new oligarchy. That’s a live argument among the people who study it, and I’ll leave it there. The erosion I can speak to happens one man at a time, in lives that got smaller than they had to.

The Fourth Virtue

Guys love imagining themselves as the emperor. Here’s what they skip: the emperor built his whole discipline on the words of a man born a slave.

The line scholars keep coming back to is Pierre Hadot’s: the essential substance of the Meditations comes from Epictetus. The most powerful man in the world ran his private philosophy off a former slave’s lecture notes, handed to him by his own teacher, and didn’t ignore that debt. He wrote it down as gratitude.

It’s an emperor with every reason to believe he owed no one anything, admitting he owed almost everything to a lineage that ran through a former slave with none of his power, and the teacher who carried it to him. That’s Stoic justice, and without it the table falls over.

Because justice is one of the four. The Stoics named four cardinal virtues, and every serious account of the philosophy carries all of them: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Right conduct toward other people, built into the frame from the start, equal to self-control, not bolted on after. You can’t run three of the four and call the set complete.

The sound-bite version keeps the discipline. The self-mastery, the grip, the grind. And it quietly drops the one virtue that points outward. Then it calls what’s left Stoicism. It isn’t. I watch it in the room: men with real self-command who have no idea the coldness they’re proud of is the tell. The contempt, the thinned-out empathy, the life that got smaller.

That isn’t Stoicism. It’s Stoicism amputated by fear of rejection.

And it runs in a cycle. The men selling this the hardest package the stunted version and pass it to the next round of lost young men. Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere put the machinery on Netflix: the provocation, the mentorship pose, the young men lined up to buy. Theroux went back through several of their histories and found the vulnerability beneath the performance: absent fathers, trauma, no one to show them that strength and needing people can coexist. That’s the part I recognize in the room. They reached for power because no one modeled justice. Some aren’t just grifting. They believe every word of it because, somewhere along the way, it became the only thing that ever kept them safe.

Building on a Foundation

Therapy isn’t a fifth virtue. We can use the four as the base and build from there. Most of the men I see walk in already carrying the Stoic virtues, or the echo of them. I don’t hand them a new value system. I help them name the values they’ve got, in their own language, grounded in their actual life, until it’s a narrative they can measure their behavior against. That’s therapy helping a man find his own voice instead of borrowing a sound bite’s. It meets him where he stands, helps him take stock of where he is, and helps him map a route toward who he hopes to be.

Just like good Stoicism, good therapy doesn’t stop at the internal world. The frame is good at getting a man to audit himself, but left alone, it’s just navel-gazing. Once he has a clear view of himself, the work turns him outward. It examines his connections and gives him a place to practice connecting until he proves to himself he can. Empathy — the read we called a compass — is a skill, not a temperament, and it sharpens with the reps. Emotion he was taught to distort or ignore becomes another view of the map. The people he was told he didn’t need become the brace that steadies him. Three things discipline can’t manufacture on its own: a mirror, a purpose, and a community.

Believing that safety only exists alone makes starting therapy a heavy lift. Men remain substantially less likely to enter therapy. Among Australian men who had accessed mental health care, 44.8% reported having dropped out at some point without discussing it with their therapist, and the most common reason, by far, was a lack of connection or understanding between client and therapist. In my experience, that disconnect opens for one of two reasons: either the therapist couldn’t communicate, or even see, where the man was starting from, or the man couldn’t believe the therapist actually saw him clearly. We have to do better at meeting men in their language instead of reflecting back our own. Until a man hears his own words, in his own world, no amount of positive regard will bridge the gap.

American culture is, for many of us, our own. The Stoics are bedrock in it. Therapy doesn’t need to take that frame from a man or begin by listing where it fails. It can help him recover the whole of it: wisdom to see clearly, courage to face what he finds, temperance to choose what he does next, and justice to remember that a good life is lived with and for other people. The sound-bite stoic becomes a Stoic thinker. The isolated man finds safety with someone, then learns he can do it again.

A note on this version: after it first posted, I sent it to Stoic scholar William Spears, a great former guest on the podcast, and he pointed out that empathy was doing real work in the piece without ever being named. He was right. This edit adds a section on it. Good colleagues make the work sharper.

References

Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. International Universities Press. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL5207244M/Cognitive_therapy_and_the_emotional_disorders

Choa, A. (Director). (2026). Louis Theroux: Inside the manosphere [Film]. Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/title/81920687

David, D., Cristea, I., & Hofmann, S. G. (2018). Why cognitive behavioral therapy is the current gold standard of psychotherapy. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 9, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00004

Diogenes Laertius. (1925). Lives of the eminent philosophers (R. D. Hicks, Trans.). Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_VII (Original work published ca. 3rd century CE)

Ellis, A. (1962). Reason and emotion in psychotherapy. Lyle Stuart. https://archive.org/details/reasonemotioninp00elli

Epictetus. (n.d.). The Enchiridion (E. Carter, Trans.). The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html (Original work published ca. 125 CE)

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202

Graver, M. R. (2007). Stoicism and emotion. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo5503948.html

Hadot, P. (1998). The inner citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (M. Chase, Trans.). Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674007079

Hogeveen, J., Inzlicht, M., & Obhi, S. S. (2014). Power changes how the brain responds to others. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 755–762. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033477

Holiday, R., & Hanselman, S. (2016). The daily stoic: 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. Portfolio. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545426/the-daily-stoic-by-ryan-holiday-and-stephen-hanselman/

Keltner, D. (2016). The power paradox: How we gain and lose influence. Penguin Press. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312367/the-power-paradox-by-dacher-keltner/

Marcus Aurelius. (n.d.). The meditations (G. Long, Trans.). The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html (Original work published ca. 180 CE)

Mendez, M. (2023, September 15). According to a new TikTok trend, men think about the Roman Empire all the time. TIME. https://time.com/6314544/tiktok-roman-empire-trend/

Midgley, C., Thai, S., Lockwood, P., Kovacheff, C., & Page-Gould, E. (2021). When every day is a high school reunion: Social media comparisons and self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(2), 285–307. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000336

Netflix. (2026). Louis Theroux goes inside the manosphere: Interview and what to know. Tudum. https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/louis-theroux-inside-the-manosphere-release-date-news

Richard, C. J. (1994). The founders and the classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674314269

Robertson, D. (2019). The philosophy of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT): Stoic philosophy as rational and cognitive psychotherapy (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Philosophy-of-Cognitive-Behavioural-Therapy-CBT-Stoic-Philosophy-as-Rational-and-Cognitive-Psychotherapy/Robertson/p/book/9780367219147

Seidler, Z. E., Wilson, M. J., Kealy, D., Oliffe, J. L., Ogrodniczuk, J. S., & Rice, S. M. (2021). Men’s dropout from mental health services: Results from a survey of Australian men across the life span. American Journal of Men’s Health, 15(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/15579883211014776

Steers, M. L. N., Wickham, R. E., & Acitelli, L. K. (2014). Seeing everyone else’s highlight reels: How Facebook usage is linked to depressive symptoms. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 33(8), 701–731. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.8.701

Wheeler, L. (1966). Motivation as a determinant of upward comparison. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1, 27–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(66)90062-X

Wienecke, T. (2026, April 17). Why the manosphere is winning. American Masculinity.

Timothy Wienecke, MA, LPC, LAC

Why The Manosphere Is Winning

Louis Theroux went inside the manosphere, and I’ll give him credit — he got access most journalists can’t get. He put a camera on something real. If you watched it and walked away thinking these poor young men, hold onto that instinct. It’s the right read…

Read more

4 months ago · 1 like · Timothy Wienecke, MA, LPC, LAC

Wills, T. A. (1981). Downward comparison principles in social psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 90(2), 245–271. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.90.2.245

Most men don’t end up here because no one credible ever told them they could. Counseling is an oddly isolated profession. You don’t see behind the curtain unless you’re already in it. So men who would be good at clinical work never seriously consider it.

In first response and the military, certain roles don’t start with an application. They start with a conversation... Someone established inside the work looks at you and says you should be doing this.

They call it the tap.

Mine came from a trainer on interpersonal violence in the Air Force. This is me paying it forward.

After ten years in the field, hundreds of clients, and training upward of a thousand clinicians, I keep coming back to the same five questions when men ask me whether this work is for them. These aren’t admissions questions. Programs will handle those. These are the questions that tell you whether you actually want this kind of hard.

If you want the job, you’ll chase down the rest. This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s informed consent.

1. Do Strangers Tell You Things?

It’s the core of this job. Not people who know you, people who have no reason to trust you yet. The guy next to you on the flight. The coworker who barely knows you. The person who didn’t walk in looking for conversation but starts one with you.

If that’s a pattern in your life, pay attention to it. That’s not personality. I call it passive magnetism. It’s how you hold space, and people read it before they consciously decide to trust you. For me, it showed up first with kids and dogs. I’m the guy the shy dog comes to and the three-year-old falls asleep on. You develop this in a good program, but most men who have it didn’t learn it there. They built it early, usually because they had to. They became the person people came to, earning a role in their community.

That comes with a cost. If you’re that guy, you already know: the late calls, one-way conversations, friends who only reach out when something’s wrong. You’ve listened anyway, because somewhere along the way you got rewarded for carrying other people’s pain. Between the status and that it just feels good to help, it’s built part of your life.

This is a great thing to already have for the work, but it’ll have to change. The shift is specific. You can’t carry it anymore; you work with it. That’s a different physical experience in the room. A clinician who absorbs client pain doesn’t last. A clinician who can hold space for it without taking it home does. If you’ve spent your life doing the first, the second is learnable. But you may mourn the old role as you make the new one.

2. What Happens When You Sit In Someone Else’s Pain?

Are you a fixer, a listener, or a runner? Most guys fall into fixing or running. This isn’t a disqualifier, but it helps you know where you’re starting.

I’ve trained all three. Fixers can be taught to listen first and listeners can gain the confidence to help people map solutions. Runners are the ones who struggle most. Getting someone to sit with another person’s pain from zero takes more grit than most grad students have.

The job is about 80% listening and 20% fixing. A professor broke it down early in a way that’s stuck with me. If you think you know how to solve someone’s problems after five minutes, when they and all their loved ones have failed, you’re wrong. I take that a bit further… You’re an asshole. It assumes a basic lack of competence in the person in front of you and an ego flex that can almost never be backed up. Even if you’re right, you’ve just made yourself necessary. All that does is keep them coming back for the next fix, until you’re inevitably wrong. I’ve certainly been that asshole, but I’ve fought the instinct hard to do the job.

Know if you can be a fulcrum instead of a hammer.

3. Can You Hold Your Own Identity In A Field That Isn’t Built For You?

The field wasn’t always like this. The foundational frameworks, the research, the clinical models, the names on the textbooks, all came from men. Those generations built the architecture and didn’t do women many favors. Over the decades, who showed up and who practiced changed. Women dominate as three-quarters of clinicians and seek mental health treatment at nearly twice the rate of men (Zippia, 2026; CDC, 2020). The culture of the profession shifted with the demographics, and it’s done it fast.

Good, bad, or indifferent, that’s the environment you’re walking into.

The question isn’t whether you can handle being outnumbered. Most men reading this have done that somewhere. The question is whether you can code-switch for a feminized professional culture without losing yourself in the process. That’s a specific skill, and it’s worth knowing now if you have what it takes to build it.

I came into a multicultural counselor program straight out of the Air Force. To say the culture shock was powerful is an understatement. I got my teeth kicked in, and needed it to learn the job. What held me together was my veteran community and trusted women to process with when half the room was triggered when I opened my mouth regardless of what I said.

I’ve watched good men leave programs not because they couldn’t do the work, but because they couldn’t find themselves in it. The language and models didn’t fit, and no one helped them build a reliable framework to determine if it was their failure or a structural one. They either assumed they were always the problem or that the field is inherently broken. Like most things, it’s usually a mix.

Disengage and you’re useless to your clients. Overcorrect and you become another guy blaming women for our problems. Neither lasts. Do you have the character and support required to hold your masculine in the feminine?

4. Do You Actually Work In Your Own Head?

Unexamined material travels. The guy who hasn’t looked at his relationship with his father will find a way to make it relevant in rooms where it doesn’t belong. The guy who ignores his nightmares about a bully will flinch when a client gets angry. It’s not malicious. It’s physics. Your blind spots don’t stay yours in this job — they land on your clients.

Most good programs will require you to be in therapy while you’re training to get ahead of the problem. You cannot ask people to go places you’ve never been willing to go yourself. If you’re not in your own work, you’re asking clients to do something you won’t. That’s not a therapeutic relationship. It’s an avoidance and a power imbalance.

But therapy is the floor, not the ceiling. I’ve sat across from clinicians who had years of it and still consistently don’t catch themselves in a session. The hours on the couch don’t automatically transfer to self-awareness; a lot of bad therapy is out there just validating and never pushing. Do you like playing in your own head? Do you enjoy figuring out your buttons and depth knowing that it never ends?

It happens to us all. I still catch myself doing it. A client pushes back hard, and I notice I’m more invested in being right than in what’s useful for them. I jump to a story that isn’t useful to them because I needed a moment to process, or I just get pissed at the client for things they didn’t do. Those aren’t therapeutic moments, but they can be. When you drop your ego, notice it’s happening, and repair, the client’s work goes deeper and they get better. Clinicians who catch that mid-session and adjust are doing good work. Those who don’t are failing.

The question isn’t whether you have blind spots. Everyone does. The question is whether you’re willing to be consistently curious for the rest of your career.

5. Why Do You Care?

I can train you to do the rest. No one can make you care.

Do you give a shit? If not, this is a waste of time.

If you do, you need to understand why. Not the answer you’d give in an admissions interview… The real one. For most, it’s because the system helped or failed them in some way. Your brother’s rehab, your school counselor, and the grief pastor at a hospital can all inspire with their failures and successes. Know your entry point and keep digging.

What happened in your life that made you care about strangers enough to sit with them in their worst moments? We’ve all had to sit with that. My honest answers took longer than I expected, and they’re still evolving.

Most clients won’t give you validation. They won’t show obvious progress. They’ll get stuck, cancel, push back on the work, and some will quit right before they would have turned a corner. You’ll never know. One in five clients won’t do a closing session (Swift & Greenberg, 2012). They just stop coming. There’s no closing argument, no verdict, no moment where the work declares itself finished and useful. You have to be able to care without that feedback loop, consistently, across a full caseload, for the length of a career.

That’s a specific kind of stamina and it has to come from somewhere real. If it’s coming from needing to be needed, the work will hollow you out. If it’s coming from ego, the clients who don’t get better will become evidence of your failure instead of people who needed something you couldn’t provide. Neither of those lasts.

You have to be able to care about the person in front of you and take care of yourself at the same time. Not alternately, simultaneously. That’s the difference between a clinician who lasts and one who burns out quietly and keeps showing up anyway, which is its own kind of harm.

Why do you care? Make sure you know. Because that keeps the engine running for the length of a career.

Keep Going

If you’ve made it this far, it’s worth taking a serious look at this field.

Don’t guess and don’t listen to me, go find out. Talk to people doing the work. Not one or two, five or six. That probably means reaching out to a dozen or more. You’ll mostly hear from the people who love it and the people who hate it. You don’t need the uninvested; the ends tell you everything.

American men are struggling:

4 out of 5 suicides, men.

70% of overdose deaths, men.

90% of incarcerated individuals, men.

90% of workplace fatalities, men.

(CDC, 2024a; CDC, 2024b; BJS, 2025; BLS, 2026)

Our work can change this. If it resonated, make the calls, find a program, and get to work. We need you in the room.

References

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2025). Prisoners in 2023 – Statistical tables. U.S. Department of Justice. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p23st.pdf

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026). Worker injuries and illnesses by sex. U.S. Department of Labor, National Safety Council. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/work/industry-incidence-rates/worker-injuries-and-illnesses-by-sex/

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020). Mental health treatment among adults: United States, 2019 (NCHS Data Brief No. 380). National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db380.htm

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024a). Suicide data and statistics. National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024b). Drug overdose deaths in the United States, 2003–2023 (NCHS Data Brief No. 522). National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db522.htm

Swift, J. K., & Greenberg, R. P. (2012). Premature discontinuation in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 80(4), 547–559. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028226

Zippia. (2026). Psychotherapist demographics and statistics in the US. https://www.zippia.com/psychotherapist-jobs/demographics/

We perform to show value, but a performance is rarely what builds trust.

The client called and said a colleague of mine had spent six months pushing hard to convince them I could help. My name made sense. Their background and story were things I had worked with, more severe and varied than most, but definitely in my wheelhouse. I asked them who else they’d called. They said no one. It was me or bust. Six months of careful work by someone I respected, and one phone call from a person who was ready to risk trusting a stranger.

I was nervous. There’s a reason clinicians aren’t supposed to give single referrals. We all know mistakes happen, fit is never guaranteed, and it’s just a good idea to make sure we think of ourselves as a service and not some kind of hero.

About fifteen minutes in I made a reflection. Small push. The kind of move that can open a door or close one depending on the timing and the trust in the room. I think part of me needed them to know I could see them, that the colleague wasn’t wrong to send just my name. That need distracted me from being more gentle and curious. I was trying to show value instead of see need.

I saw it land. They froze for a moment, shook their head, and went into another story. I saw the trigger happen in real time and spent the next ten minutes looking for a way to help them ground, to hold space for the pain I knew was about to come. It didn’t work. They spun up into a full panic attack and fled the office.

It was one of the most shameful failures of my career. Not because the miss was catastrophic, it’s the kind of miss most of us have made at one point or another. Because of what caused it. I wasn’t tracking them or managing myself. I was playing a role. The weight of six months of someone else’s work had loaded the session before they walked in and I spent the first fifteen minutes performing competence instead of doing my job. The perfection trap doesn’t make you more careful. It makes you more self-focused. And like most jobs involving other people, self-focus is exactly where failures happen.

I share this story with most cohorts of students I train. Not because it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened in my career, it isn’t. Because it’s instructive. Every clinician makes mistakes. The ones who don’t talk about them are the ones who keep making them, and the ones who make their students afraid to make them at all break them before their careers get off the ground.

The pressure of perfection is a dangerous thing I see in new clinicians. Not the lack of deep skill or knowledge. The terror of getting it wrong produces exactly the kind of self-focus that gets people hurt. They stop tracking the client, stop tracking themselves, all in an effort to perform instead of do.

I tell them about the panic attack. I tell them about the airman I’ll get to in a moment. I tell them about the patient I yelled at two months into practice, and how she later became a clinician. I tell them because the field needs people who can survive their own failures and keep showing up.

My last year in the Air Force I had a supervisory role over a handful of airmen. One of them was sharp. Bright, motivated, the kind of person you want to invest in because you can see what they’re capable of before they can.

Quarterly awards are a big deal in the Air Force. Going above and beyond, mission work that stands out, community involvement… It all feeds into a competition that runs from your section, through the entire Air Force. It matters for careers. I told him he was sharp enough to win one and that we should put everything into a single quarter. Hit it hard. Do the volunteer work, show up in every way that gets noticed, make his mission work clean and impactful. He believed me. He worked his ass off.

Nothing interesting happened at work that quarter. Not his fault. Just the reality of when and where he was stationed. Meanwhile another airman had a series of genuinely impactful moments on the job and was showing up in other ways too. At the end of the quarter when my airman didn’t get anything, all I had for him was you never get to control who you’re up against.

That was true, but inadequate. I had sold him on an outcome I couldn’t guarantee and when the outcome didn’t come, I had nothing to stand behind. I’d built his investment around a result instead of around the value of the work itself. When the result didn’t arrive, the investment felt like it meant nothing. It broke something between us. The trust that a supervisor is supposed to earn through clarity and grounded information.

He learned things that quarter, the habits he built were real. But I’d framed them wrong from the start and when it didn’t pay out the way I’d promised, I couldn’t repair that framing fast enough to save what I’d broken.

One of the biggest lessons from my time in service is the relationship between authority and responsibility. You can’t have authority over something you aren’t responsible for. The inverse is just as true. You can’t be accountable for something you have no authority over. That airman had full authority over his effort. He had no authority over what his peers accomplished that quarter. When I tied his accountability to the outcome instead of the work, I broke that relationship. I failed to mentor him.

We’ve known for a long time that my story isn’t unique. Bandura’s work on self-efficacy and Rotter’s locus of control research both map the same territory: tie accountability to outcomes outside someone’s control and you teach them that effort is irrelevant (Bandura, 1977; Rotter, 1966).

I forgot that lesson with the airman who didn’t win his award. I wish I had remembered.

I was a student at Airmen Leadership School (ALS), older than most of my classmates and already holding a bachelor’s. My job was technical and academic, so studying came easy to me in a way it didn’t for a lot of the airmen in that room. They were mechanics, police, and combat arms, dropped into an academic environment, some for the first time since high school. ALS rarely fails anyone outright, but students often fail exams, and while it doesn’t hurt careers, it can be a small professional hit and a confidence crusher. I watched a handful of classmates heading there in the first week.

I had an opportunity to step in. I was traveling away from my unit and had no other responsibilities outside of the program. I told the group I’d be at the bar with a pitcher of beer and our books, Monday through Thursday. Anyone could show up. When I saw someone falling behind, I didn’t wait for them to ask. I reminded them where I’d be and they had a choice to succeed.

We had no failures on any test in the course. Not one. I left with the Commandant’s Award. It’s the one award out of everything I’ve earned that’s still on my wall because it was lobbied for by my peers.

That’s the difference. The airman I pushed to compete had no control over what his peers accomplished that quarter. My classmates had complete control over whether they sat down with their books four nights a week. Challenge only works when the bar you set is something the other person can actually reach by their own effort. Anything else isn’t challenge; it’s expectation of control they don’t have.

Most men either show up with bluster or fail to show up at all. Both are responses to the same fear; being seen as less than they think a mentor is supposed to be. Bluster is performing perfection. Absence is avoiding the exposure of not having it. Both are self-protection dressed up as something else.

Find the drive or skill that gets you started. For me it was an overly developed need to be seen serving. For others it’s knowing they’re good at something and being willing to learn how to teach it. Whatever gets you in the door, use it. But learn from these stories.

In the first piece in this series, Mrs. Thompson put a fifth grader in front of her third grade class to talk about dinosaurs. It didn’t go well. She let me see her disappointment without making it cruel. I don’t think that was a carefully designed lesson. I think her plan fell apart in real time and her frustration showed. What I learned from it wasn’t from her intention. It was from her honesty. That’s challenge. Not a curriculum. Just a real person with real expectations letting you feel the gap when you don’t meet them.

In the second piece, John never named the deficiency, he kept raising the bar by putting better things in front of me, quietly, consistently, without fanfare. I’m certain there were moments he and DD questioned how hard to push, how much to say, whether they were getting the balance right. Good mentors aren’t certain. They’re just committed enough to keep going through the uncertainty.

I’m sure all of them remember these moments differently than I do. That’s normal, memory is individual. What matters is they were present, honest, and challenged me. That’s the imperfect gift I try to honor by passing it forward.

If you take nothing else from this, remember to meet young men where they are. What are their interests, goals, and desires... Most people prejudge the answers they expect to hear instead of discerning what the person is actually saying. I don’t set my clients’ goals. I hold accountability for their efforts.

If you’re not sure where you land, start here. Every time you ask someone a question, reflect back what you heard. Boys aren’t used to that. They’re used to people talking at them and dismissing their view. By mirroring their words they can go deeper. If they get lost, you’re building trust that they may ask you for your map.

Mrs. Thompson didn’t have a program. John didn’t have a curriculum. Lt. Col. Downs didn’t run a mentorship initiative. They just showed up in the specific way they could, present enough that their disappointment stung, and trusted that was enough. It was.

Find your point of access: a program, a single relationship, your area of excellence, anything that allows you to show up. Then be an honest adult about what you have to offer and show up imperfect enough that the people watching you know it’s real. Stop freezing or performing, and start being there for someone who needs you. You never know if you’ll be someone’s Mrs. Thompson.

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191

Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976

I was 19 before I learned that masculine protection isn’t synonymous with projecting violence.

The first time the guy showed up, John answered the door and the man gave him a song and dance about getting his life right, trying to do better, and it would really help him out if John paid him to clean the gutters. John said sure, handed him the money, and thanked him.

Sure enough, a week or two later he’s back. Clearly intoxicated this time, and he’s got a new story about how he’s owed more for the work he did. I watched John listen to him, nod, and hand him more money. I was furious. Part of it was the obvious, this guy was running a con on John, a man I owed a lot to, at a house I was trying to call home. But part of it was something I didn’t have words for yet. John and DD had taken me in without asking for anything in return, and I was scared people would think the same of me. I was nineteen and unsure of the kindness I found myself in. So watching someone take advantage of John felt like something I needed to stop, a way to earn my place.

I made sure I was at the door the next time.

The guy showed up again and I was ready for him. I lit into him, threatened that if he ever came back I’d beat his ass and call the police and he’d be going to jail. At nineteen, I almost certainly couldn’t back any of that up, but the guy took off. Instead of the pride or relief I expected, I just felt empty. Slowly, anger built in the void. Anger at John for being the kind of man who let that happen.

It ate at me for a while before I finally asked him. John, why the hell did you give that guy money again? You knew he was lying. Why would you let somebody take advantage of you like that?

John thought about it for a second and said, first of all, I don’t know that he was lying. And second, twenty dollars isn’t a big deal to me. I’d rather have somebody take advantage of me for twenty dollars than live in a world where I have to run around worrying about everybody lying. That guy clearly needed the money. I’m not worried about it.

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I’d just threatened a man in a doorway and felt nothing, and here was John explaining that the twenty dollars was the cheaper price. Staying open to people cost less in the long run than closing yourself off to protect against all the small hurts. That sometimes what a man does is take the hit so somebody else doesn’t have to.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

Albert Bandura spent decades documenting what most of us know intuitively. Observational learning, watching someone do something and filing it away, encodes behavior more durably than instruction ever does (Bandura, 1977). Explanation builds understanding. Modeling builds capability. The difference matters because understanding something and being able to do it are not the same thing. I understood plenty at nineteen. What I didn’t have was a template for the kind of man I wanted to be. John didn’t explain it to me that night. He just lived it in front of me as an example to work from. I say a version of this to fathers in my office constantly. Your kids aren’t listening, they’re watching.

John and DD are both PhDs from Cornell. My father didn’t finish ninth grade. My mother walked her graduation pregnant with me. Neither of them was any kind of stupid, but they stopped being able to help me academically in fourth grade. Books weren’t part of my home until I became a part of theirs.

John is a big nerd. Science fiction, fantasy, the kind of reading that other people write off as escapism and he treats as literature. He never sat me down and told me I needed to read. Never framed it as something I was missing. He just started sharing what he loved. And without me knowing it, he was curating. He started me on smaller works, things easier to pick up and finish, and over the course of years handed me writing that got more and more complicated. I didn’t notice the progression. I just noticed I kept wanting the next one.

I remember the first time he came downstairs and found me at six in the morning finishing Ender’s Game. I’d started it the night before and couldn’t put it down. The look on his face was something. Pride, but quieter than that. Like he’d watched something take root.

He would go to the bookstore and come back with over a hundred dollars in books, enough to make DD annoyed at the paperbacks filling every available space. He was undeterred.

What John and DD never told me how bad my reading and writing were. They couldn’t read anything I wrote down. Grocery lists, phone messages, notes… Illegible. I didn’t find that out until my 30’s in grad school, sitting with them and talking about my research, excited about what I was writing and how it was coming together. They gave each other that look that couples who’ve been together for decades give each other, an entire conversation in less than a second. And then they told me where I’d started and how far I’d come. They’d known the whole time and never once made it a thing.

John moves through the world with a quiet confidence that the men I grew up around didn’t have. Not the confidence that needs the room to know it. The kind that doesn’t check to see if anyone’s watching. A story that lines that up is one his kids and DD would tell often enough it feels like a memory.

DD and her two kids competed in judo at a serious level. Olympic training camp level. John showed up to every meet with juice boxes and sandwiches and sat in the bleachers and cheered while his wife and kids flattened people for trophies. In the 90’s. No performance or discomfort, just a man completely at ease supporting his family in an arena that had nothing to do with him, in a role that a lot of men would have found some reason to make complicated.

I think about that image a lot. A quiet man in the bleachers cheering while his wife hucks people around. It’s not a small thing dressed up as a big thing. It’s a man who knew who he was well enough that none of the rest of it required his attention. John never told me how to be a man. Him just being one in front of me was the counterpoint to all the men who felt the need to lecture me on manhood.

There’s a reason all of this mattered as much as it did for a kid from my environment. Belsky noticed boys are more impacted by missing models than girls on average (Belsky, 1997). Boyce and Ellis built on that, using flowers to illustrate the idea — orchids are beautiful flowers that require specific environments to thrive where dandelions grow nearly anywhere (Boyce & Ellis, 2005). In modern times, Richard Reeves uses the data we have to continue to prove the point (Reeves, 2022). Boys need models to become good men. John didn’t just give me something to borrow. He changed what was possible for me to become.

John was one example. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Downs was another. The kind of leader you don’t forget. Confident and kind in a way that didn’t compete with each other. The last time I checked he was a three star general, which surprised nobody who served under him in Korea.

Lt. Col. Downs carried himself like a man who knew exactly where he was going and his calm assumption that you were going to the same place motivated more of us than the loud sergeants backing him up.

My Master Sergeant arranged a shadowing day for me. I was a junior airman being pushed toward an officer track by people who saw something, and Lt. Col. Downs was willing to give me a day to see what that life actually looked like. Three moments from that day have never left me.

The first was lunch with his wife. His standing calendar blocked lunch twice a week with her, and short of one time when North Korea got froggy, I never heard of that moving. He sat across from me and said something I’ve repeated to patients ever since. Whenever you’re around your family, be there for them. Go home for dinner. Read your kids to sleep. Come back to work afterwards if you have to, but don’t miss those moments. The Air Force won’t always be there for you. Your family will be. He didn’t lecture it. He just said it, plainly, with his wife sitting as quiet proof.

The second was a phone call I happened to be in the room for. A peer was pushing back on something the unit needed. Lt. Col. Downs listened, and then told him calmly, without malice, without making it a flex: you’re going to do this for me, and you’re going to do it because you know that in four years I’m going to be your boss. Let’s make sure we have a good relationship when that happens. Said goodbye and moved on. No performance around it. Just a man completely comfortable in his own trajectory.

The third was something I’ve only heard about other leaders pulling off. At least once every few weeks, he would walk the night shift unannounced. Just to see how things were going, check on people. He knew everyone’s name. He knew their families. He knew what was happening in their lives. That’s not charm. That’s discipline that looks like warmth. That’s a decision made repeatedly over time until it becomes who you are.

What Lt. Col. Downs was doing has a name in the leadership literature. Bass and Avolio’s research on transformational leadership identifies the specific behaviors that shape organizations through modeling rather than authority (Bass & Avolio, 1994). Visibility, consistency, personal investment in the people you lead. The night shift walk-throughs, the standing lunch with his wife, the phone call handled without ego. Those aren’t management techniques. They’re a value system made visible through repeated behavior. Research on military mentorship shows that the quality of the relationship and how long it lasts matter more than whether it’s formally structured (Lyle & Smith, 2014). He didn’t run a mentorship program. He just kept showing up in ways that were worth watching.

None of this is new. Marcus Aurelius wrote waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be, be one (Aurelius, 180 CE/2006). The original shit or get off the pot. Writing this feels a bit like the pot, but how else can we share the lessons of men we don’t witness?

Witnessing John showed me what strength looks like when it has nothing to prove, Lt. Col. Downs showed me what confidence looks like when the proof of it fuels others.

I see both of them in my clinical work more than anywhere else. John in the bleachers, Downs on the night shift, men who knew what they were capable of and existed in their roles with comfortable competence. Men come into my office looking for masculine credibility first. They need to know I can handle what they’re carrying before they’ll put it down, as they should. My role protects me, like the Lt. Col.’s did for him. Sometimes earned authority and a role give us the space to be the men people need. I lead with enough grounding, information, and acknowledgment that satisfies, and then I go soft when soft is the right tool. Not performed softness. The kind that comes from a decade of skill built to know I can handle it. I watch them notice. I watch something shift when hard, violently capable men decide that this moment calls for something quieter. They see it’s available, that it doesn’t cost what they thought it cost. Most start trying it themselves.

I haven’t fully pulled it off outside the container of a therapy room. In unstructured public settings, I worry. Wondering what people see. John never seemed to run that calculation at all. That’s the gap between borrowing a template and fully inhabiting one. You don’t have to be them, just the parts of them you see yourself in… Just have to be a bit further along than those you’re helping. Not perfect.

My year serving under Lt Col Downs left a mark that’s lasted decades. John has never stopped.

John is too soft sometimes. I’ve been frustrated with him for not advocating for himself or his family the way I think he should. He’s been frustrated with me for how direct I can be, how quickly I move to the point when the point might need more time to land. We’ve had those conversations. The love has never been in question. That’s what a real modeling relationship looks like. Not a perfect man handing down perfect lessons. Two people who care about each other bumping up against their own edges and staying anyway.

A man who became family and a man I worked for. Both gave me something to build with. That’s enough for me to build for the next guy.

References

Aurelius, M. (180 CE/1964). Meditations (M. Staniforth, Trans.). Penguin Classics. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Meditations_of_the_Emperor_Marcus_Aurelius_Antoninus

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall. https://archive.org/details/sociallearningth0000band

Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1994). Improving organizational effectiveness through transformational leadership. Sage Publications.

Belsky, J. (1997). Variation in susceptibility to rearing influences: An evolutionary argument. Psychological Inquiry, 8, 182–186. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1997.tb04221.x

Boyce, W. T., & Ellis, B. J. (2005). Biological sensitivity to context: I. An evolutionary-developmental theory of the origins and functions of stress reactivity. Development and Psychopathology, 17(2), 271–301. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579405050145

Lyle, D. S., & Smith, J. Z. (2014). The effect of high-performing mentors on junior officer promotion in the US Army. Journal of Labor Economics, 32(2), 229–258. https://doi.org/10.1086/673372

Reeves, R. V. (2022). Of boys and men: Why the modern male is struggling, why it matters, and what to do about it. Brookings Institution Press. https://www.brookings.edu/books/of-boys-and-men/

After a year of conversations with clinicians and researchers about men’s mental health, one thing has come up consistently: mentorship is required to make good men, and it’s largely missing. These are stories from the mentors and mentees in my own life: what they did, what it cost, and what it made possible.

I was in third grade when Mrs. Thompson changed the direction of my life. I don’t think she knew she was doing it. That’s usually how it works.

Our elementary school had decided to start a student government. Looking back it wasn’t much, getting kids in a room, teaching them some basic rules, giving them the feeling of community engagement. Nobody was letting fourth graders make real calls. But for whatever reason, the day she announced it, it sounded interesting to me. Not because it made sense for a kid in my position. Something just lit up.

My family were outcasts in the neighborhood. Other parents knew them, visited with them, but nobody approved of the lives they led. That meant their kids weren’t often allowed to play with me, and a lot of them bullied me with what their parents said when they thought their kids weren’t listening. I was the kid nobody voted for. I was pretty sure of that, but nervously decided to throw my name in. No other kid nominated themselves.

Mrs. Thompson looked at me and smiled. Not with pity. With something that had more spine to it than that. She said, “Oh Tim, don’t take that away from me. I want to nominate you.”

She had us put our heads down on our desks and raise our hands for who we wanted. I agonized a bit over voting for myself but did so with a bit of guilt. The bullying and exclusion never changed, so I’m fairly certain she rigged that election. But she saw something, and she had a way to hand it to somebody who needed it. Even though others might have deserved it.

Seneca called it Ad exemplar in his letters to Lucilius; without someone to measure ourselves against, we get lost (Seneca, trans. 1917). It's what serious people in every culture have always known; development doesn't happen in isolation. Even cultures that venerate the wisdom found in isolation acknowledge the need to connect it back to the whole. It happens in relationship with someone further along who can share a map. The Greeks knew it, the Stoics built a philosophy around it, and Indigenous cultures across every continent structured it into how they raised their kids. Chesterton called it a fence; don't tear down a tradition until you understand what it was built to contain (Chesterton, 1929). We've quietly dismantled most of that and then act surprised when men struggle.

Research has backed that up as long as we’ve been doing it. Rosenthal and Jacobson called it the Pygmalion effect; when authority figures communicate genuine high expectations, the window of tolerance opens, people can take in more and go bigger (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). Oyserman’s work at Michigan took it further, showing that possible selves only move behavior when they’re linked to plausible strategies and made to feel attainable (Oyserman et al., 2006).

In other words, if you don’t see parts of yourself in a role, it’s hard to imagine, and harder to achieve. It’s not enough to hand someone a vision. Kids from certain environments don’t imagine what they can’t see. Mrs. Thompson put one in front of me and made sure I knew it was real.

Mrs. Thompson was one of those teachers who was ahead of the curve. She noticed I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up and instead of flagging it as my problem, she made special paper for me with my name already printed at the top so I didn’t have an excuse not to finish my work. I think she also knew I was using it as an excuse to coast. She saw both things at once and handled both without making it a thing.

When I moved on to fourth grade she was the only teacher from elementary school who consistently followed up. If she saw me in the hallway she’d stop and give me a hug and ask how I was doing. Not every time. Just enough that I knew she was still paying attention. That’s a small thing that isn’t small at all.

About halfway through fifth grade, two years after I’d left her class, she found me and got excited. She was teaching her third graders about dinosaurs and she knew I was into them and she wanted an expert to come in and speak. I said yes immediately. Not because I was ready. Because she was asking and I didn’t want to let her down.

The problem was I liked dinosaurs the way a kid likes things. I thought they were cool. I certainly wasn’t reading about them. So I brought my dinosaur toys and walked into her classroom and those third graders knew more than me. A fifth grader, standing in front of a room full of eight year olds, getting corrected on the name of his own toys. Mrs. Thompson covered for me where she could. She’d say, that’s right Tim, isn’t it? And I’d just freeze.

The presentation bombed. And she looked disappointed. Not cruel about it. Just disappointed in the way that people who believe in you get disappointed when you show up unprepared. She still stopped to give me hugs after that. She still checked in. But I never forgot that look. It’s the reason I forever hate walking into a room unprepared. A lifetime of public speaking, a podcast, years of teaching… it runs back to a bombed dinosaur presentation in a third grade classroom and a teacher who expected better.

That follow-through mattered as much as the tap. DuBois and colleagues, in the largest meta-analysis of mentorship outcomes to date, found that relationships lasting a year or more produced stronger outcomes (DuBois et al., 2011). Grossman and Rhodes found a brutal caveat, early termination of a mentorship relationship produces worse outcomes than none at all (Grossman & Rhodes, 2002). Bailing before the job is done is worse than not trying. Mrs. Thompson stayed two years. She didn’t have to. That’s not warmth, that’s a decision.

If you’ve had any success in your life, you likely had someone like Mrs. Thompson. You might not have called them a mentor, most of us don’t while it’s happening. But if you think back, there were people who showed up when it counted and stayed afterwards to make sure that it stuck. That’s not random. That’s an adult having the presence to see an opportunity and follow through. That’s reproducible and worth emulating.

I see it in my own work now. Students from classes I taught years ago still reach out. Usually it’s when they’re newly licensed and trying to figure out how to leverage that professionally, or when they need someone who has actually watched them work to write a recommendation. That’s a hard thing to find in this field. You don’t get to witness many colleagues’ clinical work up close.

When I can write it honestly I do. And when I can’t I say so, and if they ask I tell them why. That’s not gatekeeping for its own sake. That’s the Mrs. Thompson move done completely. Being seen accurately by someone who showed up long enough to know the difference does something a generic endorsement never can. It tells the person receiving it that someone watched, that what they saw was real, and that they see a future you can earn.

It doesn’t require a long relationship. It doesn’t require a perfect one. It requires showing up consistently enough that people learn they can count on you and meaning it enough that your disappointment registers when they don’t bring their best. Mrs. Thompson did that over one school year and a handful of hallway conversations. The dinosaur presentation was the proof. She didn’t protect me from flopping. She just made sure I knew she expected better.

John and Lieutenant Colonel Downs did versions of the same thing. Different relationships, different contexts. One taught me the quiet strength. One showed me the sharp edge. The next two pieces are about what they modeled and demanded by example. But it started here. With a teacher who rigged an election for a kid nobody was voting for and then stayed around long enough to make sure it meant something.

Presence isn’t warmth. It’s consistency with stakes. Simple, but not easy.

Here are links to Part 2 and Part: 3.

References:

Chesterton, G. K. (1929). The thing: Why I am a Catholic. Dodd, Mead and Company. https://archive.org/details/G.K.ChestertonTheThing

DuBois, D. L., Portillo, N., Rhodes, J. E., Silverthorn, N., & Valentine, J. C. (2011). How effective are mentoring programs for youth? A systematic assessment of the evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 12(2), 57–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100611414806

Grossman, J. B., & Rhodes, J. E. (2002). The test of time: Predictors and effects of duration in youth mentoring relationships. American Journal of Community Psychology, 30(2), 199–219. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014680827552

Oyserman, D., Bybee, D., & Terry, K. (2006). Possible selves and academic outcomes: How and when possible selves impel action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(1), 188–204. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.1.188

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupils’ intellectual development. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. https://gwern.net/docs/statistics/bias/1968-rosenthal-pygmalionintheclassroom.pdf

Seneca, L. A. (1917). Moral letters to Lucilius (R. M. Gummere, Trans.). Harvard University Press. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius

The Promise

Economics in the United States is existential. “Land of Opportunity” isn’t a catchphrase, it’s what the American Dream is built on. Colonists, pioneers, and refugees were told America was theirs for the conquering. So they came, conquered, and built a social system on the backs of others. Those folks sold the dream to everybody else. And now, if you’re in the States, most of us come from people who bought into that dream. Whether your family were immigrants, here and then Americanized, or brought over against their will, a generation or three later, they’re American. And in America, a man provides.

We protect that story. As economic stratification grows, the strain on everyone increases. It’s not just groceries and basic needs. Men carry the added pressure of the provider role. At its best, feminism argues that people should not be trapped inside prescribed roles. But American culture has been much slower to release men from the provider role than it has been to question women’s confinement to domestic life. For younger guys in particular, providing has gotten harder as women continue to outperform them in education and increasingly in the workforce. That’s hard to see because the people at the top, the ones making it ever harder to live, are white men. So when you see a man not doing well, you look for his privileges, see people at the top looking like him, and wonder what’s wrong with him. It can’t be that the people standing on the backs of the rest of us are causing problems. It must be the failures of individual men.

That individual responsibility for systemic challenges starts early. Boys are twice as likely to be suspended or expelled for similar infractions as girls (U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2023). Men consistently receive over sixty percent longer sentences for equivalent crimes (Starr, 2012; U.S. Sentencing Commission, 2023). Single-parent families headed by men access means-tested assistance at roughly half the rate of families headed by women (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018).

The generations that were supposed to leave fertile ground for the next generation to build lives on get angry at the young instead of taking on the monumental lift of addressing the mistakes that got us here.

The Cost

If the system can’t be failing, it must be men. Otherwise, the system failure collapses our national story.

The men at the top need that story to protect the unimaginable power they have collected. When nearly every face you see at the top looks like me, it’s hard not to see other men as their peers. We’re not. Privilege is real and unevenly distributed across race, class, and circumstance. A data point about rich white men doesn’t help the white guy with limited means or the Black man fighting for the next rung. Because a man’s achievements are undercut by his privileges, and his needs are assumed to be provided for by those same privileges. He can’t win or lose.

There are three kinds of young men who come to my office.

The first has completely given up the game. Over 700,000 men between the ages of 25 and 35 are no longer participating in the job market. That’s the highest it’s been since we started measuring it (Coglianese & Dohlman, 2023). These are young men so disillusioned they’ve stopped trying to enter the workforce and, often, society at large.

The second group is trying to follow the classic model. They take on student loans, go to school, try to get the degree while watching as that plan fails the guys ahead of them. We now have entire graduating classes of computer science majors who took on personal debt to open a door, only to find the door sealed up behind the programmers that came before. Now these graduates sit with a skill they can’t market and student loans that are going to crush any ability to try something else.

The third group didn’t try college. They looked at what student debt does and decided it wasn’t worth it, so they entered the workforce. These young men often work more than one job and end up stuck at home, called failures to launch — not because they aren’t working hard, but because, no matter how hard they work, there isn’t enough money to start without outside support. Look around any major city, and most young residents are there on their family’s dime.

Financial therapist Khara Croswaite Brindle came on the podcast (Episode) and named the thing many men feel but rarely say directly: for us, money means belonging. At every stage of life spending increases, in part because men are status motivated. To feel safe in the world, to have access to belonging and connection, we present what we can provide. 78% of women still list financial security as a key factor when choosing a date. The apps can’t filter for effort, the thing 72% of women actually value more, so finances become the hard filter by default (Hinge Labs, 2025). For the young man who doesn’t clear the threshold, he doesn’t just lose the date. He disappears.

There are men reading this who know exactly what I’m about to describe and won’t say it out loud. The ones who made it got lucky. A family connection, a gamble that paid, a hustle that landed at the right moment. The script says to call it merit, because if luck was a key factor, the whole story falls apart. These men can’t have problems. They have means. What they have instead is a terror most of them won’t name. That they’re one mistake, one market shift, one door change away from joining the men they drove past to get where they are. Never mind that what it takes to keep the fear of losing it at bay quietly replaces security with anxiety. They can’t say that out loud. It would cost them the only thing that separates them from the men behind them.

The disengaged man, the basement guy, the one working two jobs and still coming up short, they aren’t complaining either. They don’t talk about it. And when they do, they get reminded that men are solo actors. It must be on them. The system isn’t the problem. They are.

What Khara and I see in our work is that for most men the cost of carrying this lives in the body before it lives anywhere else. The physical response comes before any conscious thought. Chest tight. Jaw clenched. Hands in fists. That’s information he’s been trained to ignore. The gap between what he’s carrying and what he’s allowed to name is where the real damage lives. Not in the debt itself. Not in the failed business or the degree that didn’t open the door. In the silence around it. In the conclusion he’s reached before anyone else could reach it for him.

While the system offers no solutions, it allows other systems to take advantage.

The App

They’re two clicks away from betting on a game, taking a gamble on crypto or day trading. Because the distance between taking a chance and being where they want to be looks far more reasonable than the gamble on their labor and patience.

That’s gone badly. Every state that has collected data on mobile sports betting shows the same pattern: rising hotline calls, younger callers, more financial distress, and worsening mental health indicators (Humphreys & Ruseski, 2024; Grubbs & Kraus, 2022; Grubbs & Kraus, 2024). Clinicians have known this for a while. There’s enough money to drown us out with celebrities and influencers promising opportunity and a good time.

Males between 18 and 34 are twice as likely as women to place a bet every week (American Gaming Association, 2023). The boards of these companies know that, so their algorithms target the desperate across every platform they can reach. The men with the least to lose get milked the hardest and the house always wins has never been truer. Gambling apps, crypto hype, and day-trading platforms are different machines, but they sell the same fantasy: a shortcut out of economic humiliation. They profit on the attempt, not the success.

Khara saw this in her work too: most young people she works with believe that if they’re not a millionaire by their mid-twenties, they’re failures. The degree, the new business, the job. None of it is going to get them there fast enough. So the gamble makes sense.

What the rest of us are doing is telling young men these platforms are bad while not giving them a believable alternative. We need to stop pretending these apps are recreational fun. For far too many, they destroy lives.

Young men aren’t stupid. They’re not chumps. They’re paying attention to a system that has closed every reliable door and left a betting app in their pocket. The gamble makes sense when the alternative is doing nothing, or winning a drag race in a Pinto. The problem isn’t that they’re swinging. The problem is the only swings available to them are rigged.

We see the failures. We live in the broken story. That’s only hopeless if we keep trying to fix it alone. You can’t find your way until you know where you’re starting from. Look around, you’ll find bearing and allies.

So What Do We Do

It is about people.

On a systemic level, we need to start reprioritizing the individual worker and the small business owner. When you see something about wages going up, remember the kid working a job his degree doesn’t cover. When you see programs to help people take on different vocations, remember the guy stuck in the basement. When small business tax policies come up, think about the young man working two jobs who decides to give up one of them to bet on himself. We need to make room for the voices of these young men. We can’t predict the job market any better than they can, but we can hear what they see, how they live, and what they think could help. The next time you see a young man struggling, ask questions instead of making statements. Trust them to see their lives and help them describe it before you start dictating old stories as a path forward.

Your inner circle is the next lever. Look for people who see your struggles without trying to fix them or blame you for them. Mentor where you can, seek mentorship where you can’t. You don’t have to be an expert, you just need to know a little more than the person you’re trying to help and be honest about how you know it. Helping others opens doors that waiting never will. Find people you enjoy who have nothing to do with getting ahead. The uncle who makes you laugh. The neighbor who’s been around long enough to know something. The group without an admissions fee. They’ll remind you that you’re more than what you produce.

On your own, start with Khara’s word association exercise. One word at a time. Savings. Debt. Wealth. Credit… Don’t think about it. Notice what your body does before your brain does anything. Then go back one generation. What did your father do with money when things got tight? You are an amalgam of who you came from. You can’t know where you’re going until you know what you inherited. Then find one person and say it out loud. Not to fix it. Just to hear yourself say it.

For the guys making it, we have to be the help instead of listing our struggles as reasons others have to struggle. Vote, mentor, and help guys, rather than just driving past them hoping you never end up where they are.

A guy living in his car might be depressed. He’s definitely living in his fucking car. You can’t solve one without solving the other. Money isn’t just survival for American men — it’s personhood. It’s who we are. Start fixing the system instead of swatting at those run over by it.

Providing is still on most men’s minds. But for the younger ones, it’s becoming A role instead of The role. That shift is partly chosen and partly forced. Some young men are genuinely freer than their fathers were. Others are calling it freedom because the old bargain is no longer available.

The work is now building a version of manhood in which being a provider is just way to be a man Being a Dad, a community leader, an artist, or just a good guy in the world. Different expressions, all valid paths to manhood, if we do it right.

References

American Gaming Association. (2023). 2023 American Sports Fanship Survey. Males are twice as likely as females to engage in weekly sports betting; individuals 18–34 are more likely than those 35–49 to place bets online. Cited in: Klein, T. J., et al. (2024). Impact of sports gambling on mental health. Economics Letters. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165176524004063

Coglianese, J., & Dohlman, L. (2023, October). Men’s falling labor force participation across generations. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Letter. https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/economic-letter/2023/10/mens-falling-labor-force-participation-across-generations/

Grubbs, J. B., & Kraus, S. W. (2022). Symptoms of problem gambling among US adults who wager on sports. JAMA Network Open, 5(10), e2239670. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.39670

Grubbs, J. B., & Kraus, S. W. (2024). Binge drinking among sports gamblers. JAMA Network Open, 7(4), e245473. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.5473

Hinge Labs. (2025, September). Most desirable partner of cuffing season is the planner. Hinge Newsroom. https://hinge.co/newsroom/cuffing-season-2025

Humphreys, B. R., & Ruseski, J. E. (2024). Legalized sports betting and mental health. West Virginia University Economics Working Papers. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/econ_working-papers/77/

Starr, S. B. (2012). Estimating gender disparities in federal criminal cases. University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper No. 12-18. https://repository.law.umich.edu/law_econ_current/57

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2018). Program participation and spending patterns of families receiving government means-tested assistance. Monthly Labor Review. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/article/program-participation-and-spending-patterns-of-families-receiving-means-tested-assistance.htm

U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. (2023). 2020–21 Civil Rights Data Collection: Student discipline and school climate in U.S. public schools.

https://civilrightsdata.ed.gov

U.S. Sentencing Commission. (2023). Demographic differences in federal sentencing: Fiscal years 2017–2021. https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/2023-demographic-differences-federal-sentencing

I’ve got a great neighbor, and only recently understand why.

Oscar has owned his house for decades. He’s watched the neighborhood change around him, welcomed the new faces, and shown up for everyone on the block without being asked. His boys have his disposition. The whole household does. They’re the kind of neighbors you’d be lucky to have and I almost missed what I was actually looking at.

It started with pizza.

Moving day was the chaos it always is. Nothing unpacked, no plan for dinner, so we did what you do, ordered Domino’s. Two hours late and apparently feeling guilty about it, the driver showed up with three cold pizzas instead of a hot one. My ex-wife and I couldn’t eat three pizzas and day old Dominos is trash. My neighbor has four boys at home, so I figured, like boys everywhere, pizza will get eaten. I knocked on the door, and offered them over. Mostly from a poor kid’s sense of hating to waste food.

That was it. No grand gesture. No cultural competency. Just a surplus of cold pizza and a guess that boys would eat it.

I’ve been getting plates and invites for years. Cookouts, holidays, random Tuesdays. One of the boys shows up at my door with food I didn’t make and can’t replicate. He and his wife’s cooking is amazing. I try to keep up: cakes, casseroles, cookies, occasional ribs or roasts… It’s my best. They seem to appreciate it, the plates come back clean. But it never feels even. What they give me doesn’t have a white guy equivalent and I’ve stopped pretending it does.

I’ve been working with Latino men long enough to know I was operating with an incomplete map. Living in brown neighborhoods and the Air Force gave me proximity. Graduate training gave me frameworks. Even with that exposure, I was left with the thin view that machismo was simply masculinity with a Latino accent. More emotionally and sexually charged in its presentation, but underneath it the same bluster and posturing protecting sharp, but brittle male egos. I knew that framing was too thin. The more time you spend in a community the more clearly you can see the edges of what you don’t understand. But finding more isn’t always easy.

Alejandro Castro gave me something more specific than a framework. He grew up the firstborn male in a Mexican immigrant family in Southern California, earned a scholarship to Colorado, and stayed. He went from a drug court probation officer to respected dual licensed clinician. He’s a decade ahead of me. He’s trained the FBI on vicarious trauma, ran spiritual retreats, and stepped onto a TEDx stage. He’s also a friend, so he agreed to be my first ever podcast guest to help me understand what I’d been missing.

What he said stayed with me. Not because it was comfortable. Because it made the plates of food at my door make sense.

Familismo

What I read it as, and still do, is that Oscar is an exceedingly generous man. He cares about his home, his neighbors, and shows it through actions. But that’s a thin read. He’s also doing it because of culture and systems that Alejandro names.

Machismo gets read as aggression. My first real exposure to the word was Razor Ramon, a wrestler from my childhood. Heel swagger, chest out, toothpick dangling, oozing a kind of performative Latino menace that was likely written by a white racist. That’s the cultural shorthand most middle-aged white guys inherit. What Alejandro describes is something different. The firstborn male as a fulcrum the family moves around. Someone has to fill the space, hold the line, and absorb what comes at the family from the outside. The aggression people see is often the visible edge of a role that was assigned and is valued, if not chosen. That’s Alejandro’s experience and the pattern he sees clinically. It’s not every Latino family. It’s a map, not the territory.

Familismo is the system that assigns it.

In Latino culture, you are faithful to the family. Like all cultures, there are unspoken rules. The underlining of all of it is loyalty: how you present to the world as a son, a brother, a spouse, a neighbor reflects on the system you came from. You don’t just represent yourself. You represent the Castros, or the Garcias, or whoever came before you and built something worth protecting.

Alejandro is the first male born in his family. That weight is specific. That fact alone carried a list of expectations nobody handed him in writing. Continue the name. Stay close. When the parents age, you take care of them. When a brother starts his own family, he takes the template you modeled and builds from it. If you leave, you haven’t just moved. You’ve abandoned a post.

He left anyway. As a gay man, he had to, even with the rupture his family bled from. He understood why. “I abandoned my brothers,” he said. Not his word for it, the culture’s word for it. He had to survive. Eventually they understood that too. But the weight of leaving never fully dissolves. Every time he goes home to California, someone asks when he’s moving back. The hope is still there. The expectation is patient.

What makes familismo load-bearing rather than just warm is that the system enforces itself. Alejandro was clear about this. He doesn’t police his brothers. The family does it for him. Step out of line, challenge the firstborn in public, break from the norm… The consequence isn’t a conversation. It’s shunning. It’s shame. It comes from every direction at once, which is exactly what makes it effective. No single person has to carry the enforcement because everyone carries a piece of it.

That was the correction I didn’t see coming. My family is white white — Irish, English, German. The men enforced. The women held the quiet. The lanes didn’t cross, they leaned. Everyone carrying their own weight in their own lane. Backpacks, not a cart.

What Alejandro described is a cart. No single driver. Everyone’s hands on it, including the neighborhood.

Oscar has been on our block for decades. His boys have watched him show up for the neighborhood their entire lives. They didn’t get a lecture about it. They got a model. When I knocked on the door, I wasn’t just meeting a generous man. I was meeting a Latino family with him at head of his household. The food comes back because that’s what the role requires. The neighborhood is part of what he’s responsible for. I knocked. That was enough to be folded in.

The generosity is real. The architecture holding it is different.

The Cost of the Role

Familismo holds things together. It also extracts a price.

Alejandro told me about his cousin Richard. Oldest male in his family line. When his father died, the torch passed to him: the finances, the family decisions, the anchor position everyone else organized around. Then his husband got a job offer in Kansas City. They sold the house and left Southern California. The family didn’t fall apart. But the rupture was as real as it was for Alejandro. Some said it out loud. Most didn’t have to. Richard felt it anyway.

When Alejandro talked to him about it, Richard said he felt like he’d abandoned his family. Ashamed. Guilty. Disconnected. Not because anyone handed him a verdict. Because he knew what leaving meant inside the system he’d inherited. He broke cultural expectation. That’s the invoice familismo sends when you step out of the role.

I can’t help but think Richard is onto something in his guilt.

White-collar culture has spent two generations treating mobility as progress. It’s not stupidity. It’s inheritance. We’re a country built by people willing to leave continents for opportunity. You go where the opportunity is. You move for the job, the promotion, the next thing. The nuclear family in a new city, figuring it out on their own. What we’ve quietly built is a generation of parents who are dual income, geographically isolated from extended family, and holding things together by their fingernails with no system underneath them. No one to take the kids when things get hard. No one to show up with food on a Tuesday. No aunt, no cousin, no Oscar next door who’s been there long enough to know what the neighborhood needs. I’ve written about what that costs new fathers specifically, the isolation that sets in around month four when the meals stop and the support fades and two people discover they can’t be a village by themselves.

Familismo extracts a price when you leave. White-collar mobility extracts one when you stay gone. We just don’t have a word for what we’ve lost.

Be a Good Neighbor

Understanding familismo doesn’t require fluency in Spanish or a course in cultural competency. It requires a different question. One we rarely ask about men. Not what is this man doing. What is he carrying.

Alejandro’s word for the practical intervention is grace. Not as a soft concept. As a useful one. He described a client who couldn’t bring himself to fully participate in Dia de los Muertos: the family altar, the gathering, the expectation to hold it together in public was too much. Alejandro didn’t tell him to push through. He didn’t tell him to opt out. He told him to make his own altar at home. Spend what time with the family he could. Give himself permission to grieve on his own terms without abandoning the system entirely. Not dismantling the structure. Working with it.

The same logic applies to being a neighbor.

Oscar didn’t need me to understand familismo before he folded me in. I just had to knock. But understanding it now changes how I receive what comes back. The food isn’t just food. The boys showing up isn’t just generosity. It’s a system extending itself outward the way it was built to, with me on the receiving end of something I didn’t earn and can’t fully repay. I’ve stopped trying to make it even. What I can do is show up for my part of it. Keep the plates moving. Pay attention to what the neighborhood needs.

There’s a NIMBY version of me that moves into this neighborhood, sees the change, and organizes against it. Calls the city. Complains about noise. Builds walls instead of knocking on doors. That guy never gets the plates. He’s an island that never learns he doesn’t have to be. He stays the stranger in his own neighborhood and calls it protecting his investment.

All it takes to do something different is knock. I tripped on it. You can just do it.

If you’d like to listen to our conversation, here is a link to the episode:

It was my first time doing an interview, it came out well because Alejandro is a great speaker. So, please don’t judge the podcast as a whole on my first at bat :)

I was a year out of the Air Force and six months into a graduate program to become a counselor when I finally tried therapy. I called the campus center, did a three‑minute intake, and got put on a caseload. The counselor was their veteran’s specialist. He seemed like a reasonable fit. He wasn’t.

He was late to all three sessions. Not lost‑track‑of‑time late, I watched him walk past me into his office before the hour started and then sat waiting until 5 after for him to bring me in. If you’ve spent any time around the military, you know that timeliness is a value to us. But I was dedicated to becoming a counselor, maybe this was just part of a more liberal culture…

Once we were in the room, he didn’t do much. Every session, he sat there and reflected, sounding tired and annoyed. It felt like I was boring, annoying, or that he didn’t think I had real problems. My gut told me something was off, but I needed to be good at this, so tried to lean in anyway.

In our third and final session, I made the mistake most men make when they finally get in that chair. I ignored my gut and “trusted the process”. I dumped one of the painful ones. It left me raw and unguided in a way that takes real grounding and guidance to manage. I got neither.

When I finished, he sighed and asked if I’d tried journaling. I didn’t understand all the ways you could use journaling back then; I thought it was just to help you remember things. So, I asked him what part it sounded like I wasn’t clear on. He threw his hands in the air, yelling, “If you don’t want to fucking work!”

I froze, coming closer to putting hands on someone than I had in years. Instead of leveling him, I looked at him and said, “I’m a large man, and we’re in a room alone together; you need to be very careful how you speak to me.” He froze. We sat in silence until the time was up.

Three weeks later, a slightly frantic staff member called to move me to a different therapist. He’d been put on leave and eventually fired. I didn’t make the complaint, but someone else did. I just got the call. That’s not the system working. That’s the system catching up after enough damage was done.

The problem isn’t just one punchable face

It’s telling that an ethics violation was a lucky break. The system reached out after it failed, but it took something extreme enough to get a counselor terminated. Most guys get bad or mismatched therapy and no follow‑up call. They leave, no one reaches out, and the data quietly records another dropout.

• Only 35% of men say they’d seek help from a mental health professional in the first place.

• Of the ones who make it in, 44.8% drop out before the work is done.

• More than a quarter attend exactly once and never return.

• A bad first experience predicts long‑term avoidance of care altogether.

  (Seidler et al. 2020, Seidler et al. 2018)

This is a bigger problem than one bad therapist; it’s a lack of a map for guys to find therapists that fit. Here is the five‑question map I’ve drawn over the last decade.

What is your cost-benefit analysis of therapy?

You’ve run the numbers. Money. Time. Exposure. The embarrassment of admitting you can’t handle something on your own. Those are real costs and they’re worth taking seriously.

But the calculation usually stops there. It accounts for the cost of going and ignores the cost of not going. Sleep. Relationships. The slow erosion of your ability to function at the level you want to. Deferred maintenance doesn’t disappear; it racks up the bill until the worst possible moment.

Good therapy has goals, timelines, and something concrete you’re working toward. It’s the difference between learning to drive in traffic alone and learning from an instructor in a parking lot.

What are you actually looking for?

How you feel in the room with a therapist isn’t a preference. It’s one of the strongest predictors of whether the work actually takes, researchers call it the therapeutic alliance, and 54.9% of men who drop out cite lack of connection with their therapist as the reason (Flückiger et al., 2018). Your gut is doing real work in that chair. Don’t ignore it like I did.

Read their profile before you call to see if their language lines up with how you think and talk. That narrows the pool before you spend time on a few phone screens. Most therapists will do a fifteen-minute phone call at no charge. Use it.

On the phone, come in with an elevator pitch for your problem, one or two sentences about what’s going on.

• “I’m struggling to hold it together after the divorce.”

• “I can’t stop blowing up at my kids.”

• “I know something’s wrong and I can’t name it.”

Then listen. How do they take it in? How do they reflect it, do they understand what you’ve said?

You’re allowed to interview your therapist. If they’re uncomfortable being interviewed, that’s your first data point.

Ask them how they work and what type of therapy they specialize in, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or other modalities. If you don’t understand them on the phone, being in the room isn’t likely to be any different. Ask about money, frequency, and roughly how long this kind of work usually takes. They can’t give you a precise timeline, and they shouldn’t pretend they can. But if they won’t give clear answers about what the first phase of work looks like, that’s not a philosophical position; it’s an ethics violation (American Psychological Association, 2017). They’re required to tell you what you’re walking into.

Green flags, red flags

• Green flags: directness, comfort with silence, someone who doesn’t flinch at anger or dark humor.

• Red flags: over-validation, visible discomfort when you show up angry or flat.

Reflection is half the job. The other half is doing something with what gets reflected. Make sure they have both.

Call at least two. Three is better. Then go with your gut. It does a lot of work, and most of the time it’s all you need.

Was that actually therapy?

Lazy reflection and outright disrespect, like I experienced, are versions of bad therapy. There are others worth knowing before you walk in.

They agree with everything

Over-validation is common and easy to miss at first. It feels good initially, someone finally agreeing with everything you say. But if every feeling you bring gets met with “that makes complete sense” and never a clarification or challenge, regardless of what you say, you’re not in therapy. You’re paying someone to tell you what you want to hear. I probably go too hard the other way… More than once, some version of “so you were the asshole there” comes out of my mouth. Not because shame helps, but because directness matters enough to risk discomfort. Reflection without direction isn’t care; it’s just expensive validation.

The parrot

Some therapists mirror your words back without adding anything, and when you push or show up angry, dark, or flat, they stiffen. When you feel like you’re hearing an echo, that’s what we call passive reflection. That isn’t to say they shouldn’t reflect to make sure you hear yourself, or correct you if you get out of hand, they should. But if they get stuck on repeat or freeze, they’re triggered, not working. You end up managing their reaction instead of working on yours. If they can’t consistently hold the room when you bring something real, it just feels like you can’t be helped.

Their story dominates

Some therapists forget it’s your session. They share their own struggles, process, and story… and suddenly you’re forty minutes in and you’ve heard more about their divorce than your own. Sharing common ground normalizes what you’re going through and gives the clinician some skin in the game. It’s called therapeutic self-disclosure, a useful tool that should be used like chili powder at a white cookout, sparingly. When it becomes more about them than you, you’re not a client anymore. You’re an audience.

Any of these is worth paying attention to. A bad fit is a personnel problem, not a verdict on the work. What went wrong in that room is useful information. It tells you something specific about what you need in that chair. Use it.

What is therapy actually for?

A good therapist will have your goals named by the end of your second session. If you’ve done a business class, you’re familiar. SMART goals are popular everywhere because without metrics, it’s almost impossible to get on the same page. If you’ve been in the room for two sessions and still don’t know what you’re working on, say something. It’s their job to help you name your goals.

Most men need a target. Exploring your feelings or practicing mindfulness isn’t enough. To what end? The exploration matters, but there has to be something to do with what you find. You can’t change what you’re doing if you don’t notice what’s happening. And you can’t change what happens if you don’t change how you respond. Awareness and skill acquisition. Not one or the other, both. That’s what the room is for.

I’ve noticed a consistent difference in how masculine and feminine folks enter the work. Feminine folks usually need emotional safety and understanding to get to behaviors without feeling attacked. The skills, much like those taught in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) or humanistic therapy, come after the safety. For guys, the safety isn’t explored until a skill is learned. They need to leave the first few sessions with something concrete: a new tool or insight. Something they can use Tuesday. Once they trust the tool works, they can go deeper. The emotional territory that felt too risky at the start becomes accessible. Both are required to get real progress, but the order matters.

Most of us need different types of therapy, from psychodynamic therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) to behavioral work or acceptance and commitment therapy, at different points in our lives. If you don’t know which end you’re entering from, you’re flipping a coin on how the work goes.

When do you leave?

Knowing when and how to leave makes it a lot safer to show up. A lot of the men I work with come in worried about wasting time or getting stuck… Putting in the time, effort, and money only to be disappointed or broken. That’s worth addressing before you walk in the door.

Take this as explicit permission to fire your therapist. No apology, no hedging. Therapy is a partnership and a service you’re paying for. Both things are true at the same time.

Ethical misses

These are clear-cut reasons to leave. Repeatedly late, consistently distracted, dozing off, or trying to show up as anything other than your therapist. Those don’t require a conversation or an explanation. If telling them why feels right, fine, but it needs to be for you, not them. You can just stop going for any of these.

They’re not always the asshole

Ethical Misses gives you the clear-cut list and the confidence to hold a hard boundary. But most of the time it’s murkier than that. There usually isn’t an asshole.

Watch for avoidance dressed as discernment. Did things feel unworkable right after a session that pushed on something real? Did they say something that stung and all of a sudden the whole thing felt off? That’s the exit ramp your nervous system has always taken. The question isn’t whether it feels comfortable. It’s whether it feels safe enough to explore with them.

My therapist has made plenty of mistakes, one of which was so bad that I cut the session off early. Luckily, it happened after we’d done good work long enough for me to trust her. The reason she’s still my therapist and still doing good work is that we’ve built the safety to address our mistakes, not because she’s perfect.

The stall

The work always slows down, sometimes into a straight up stall. If you and your therapist name it and keep working, you pull out of it. But sometimes it’s just time to go somewhere else. If the relationship still feels solid, say something in the room before you walk out. That’s not a complaint, that’s the work. And if you do decide to leave, whether you are managing anxiety disorders, everyday stress, or a complex diagnosis like borderline personality disorder, aim for a closing session. They know your history, know what you’ve tried, and can help your next therapist start from where you actually are instead of the beginning, or find a resource better suited to where you’re at now than therapy. About half of all therapy relationships never reach a formal ending, and the outcomes for those clients are consistently worse.

How you leave matters

How therapy ends is part of what makes it work. Leaving isn’t quitting. Staying in the room because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, that’s quitting on your work. The guy who never goes back is still playing in traffic. Don’t be that guy. Get back to real work.

Originally published at menstherapy.online

References

American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct (Standard 10.01). https://www.apa.org/ethics/code

Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316–340. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000172

Seidler, Z. E., Rice, S. M., Kealy, D., Oliffe, J. L., & Ogrodniczuk, J. S. (2020). What gets in the way? Men’s perspectives of barriers to mental health services. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 66(2), 105–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020764019886336

Seidler, Z. E., Rice, S. M., Ogrodniczuk, J. S., Oliffe, J. L., & Dhillon, H. M. (2018). Engaging men in psychological treatment: A scoping review. American Journal of Men’s Health, 12(6), 1882–1900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557988318792157

Seidler, Z. E., Wilson, M. J., Kealy, D., Oliffe, J. L., Ogrodniczuk, J. S., & Rice, S. M. (2021). Men’s dropout from mental health services: Results from a survey of Australian men across the life span. American Journal of Men’s Health, 15(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/15579883211014776

Swift, J. K., & Greenberg, R. P. (2012). Premature discontinuation in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 80(4), 547–559. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028226

Somewhere around the second day I did the math. A hundred leaders in one room: therapists, coaches, facilitators, researchers, spiritualists, community organizers, men who founded the very concepts the rest of us build our work from, some of them doing this since before several attendees were born. If you average it out, you’re looking at roughly ten years of experience per person. Multiply that out, and you get something close to a millennium of combined wisdom under one roof in downtown Denver.

I sat with that number for a minute. It felt big, then started to ring hollow.

I looked around the room and realized it wasn’t a thousand years of wisdom. It was ten years, repeated in various silos. Most moving in different directions: different methodologies, frameworks, revenue models, and origin stories. The bulk of us sincere and effective in our lanes, but few of us talking to each other in any coordinated way that was going to change what’s happening to boys and men outside that hotel.

That’s the problem I walked out of the Big Tent carrying. What Chris Kyle, Tim Wade, and George Kansas pulled off in getting that room together was overdue, amazing, and powerful. The problem is older than the Big Tent and bigger than any single gathering can fix, but maybe not bigger than what that room could grow into together.

The men in that room have spent decades trying to close a gap that keeps widening. The question most of us walked out with was: what the hell do we do about it?

The Gap

80% of suicides (Drapeau & McIntosh, American Association of Suicidology, 2026), 93% of the incarcerated (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2023), 79% of violent offenders (BJS National Crime Victimization Survey, 2022)… All men. And worse, there is a decreasing hope in the future of boys as they continue to fall behind girls and continue to struggle to find the healthy masculinity that those in the “men’s work” world advocate for. Believe me when I say few in that room agreed on what "men's work" means, but we're all sure our version helps.

A hundred people in a hotel who care deeply, work hard, and are quietly burning through their reserves trying to hold back something much larger than any of them. Not all of them, there were plenty of people running hot, energized, building, already coordinating across lanes in ways worth paying attention to. Those pockets matter, and their examples are the hope within this article.

But in small group conversations, especially with people who had been in the work for years, the cost surfaced. Not complaint, moreso accounting. The longer someone had been in it, the more likely that accounting was to appear. Luckily, it wasn’t universal. There were elders and jolly warriors in that room still running on full conviction, sustained by decades of watching their approach change men’s lives. They inspired me. At our best, that’s one of the keys to a long career.

What I kept coming back to wasn’t the burnout itself. It was what the burnout was pointing at. These are not people lacking effort, passion, or skill. What I saw was the cumulative cost of carrying a lane alone, or with just a few others. Of being the place men land without a coordinated structure underneath you that catches what you can’t and knowing it hasn’t been enough.

I put skin in the game, four days and real money to be in that room. Still, it’s hard to sit in a space like that without your defenses coming up. I spent a decade of my life in formal education and over a hundred thousand dollars to earn the responsibility and privilege of my licenses. Licenses I could lose if I become unethical or harmful to my patients. To sit with the pained and in danger and know I can help. I value that system enough to work in it as a professor and as a gatekeeper for those hoping to earn the same.

Even with that, I know I am not everything to every patient. I refer men to men’s groups when I can find good ones or advise my patients to build their own when I can’t. I regularly work with department chaplains for my first responders. I look for the right retreats for the right client. But I rarely refer to executive coaches or spiritual leaders, unless the need is narrow and explicit. Some of that is scope. As a trained clinician, I can cover a lot of that ground and cover it well. Some of it is trust. Because of the work I put in, both in maintaining my training and the clinical training of others, I distrust broad clinical reach from someone without clinical training. Many of the others in that room would say the same thing about me from the other direction, that I haven’t done the spiritual work, their version of “the work”, that I’m not far enough along in frameworks they’ve spent decades developing. They’re not entirely wrong. The clinical lens is the right primary lens for what I do, but some men change more through spiritual growth than through anything I can offer them in a room. At my best, I don’t fall into my own silo. Nobody is their best all the time.

I come at my field hard for its failures. I’ve published articles here highlighting how my field does not do enough and often does harm to men struggling. It’s still my field, my people, my passion, my version of “the work.” So, when I hear someone say everyone that comes to me gets better, and it only takes a weekend or a few months, or when I hear others offer similar critiques to mine while pitching their alternative... It feels like a civilian making fun of soldiers in front of me. Only I, in my vast superiority as an Airman, get to do that. Not someone who hasn’t served in uniform. Not someone without a license.

It’s ego, and largely nonsense. Harm is done by the undertrained and well-meaning, and it’s more common than my field likes to admit. Harm is also done by the overtrained and under-observed, though the training at least provides a floor, a standard, and someone to answer to when things go wrong. I promise there wasn’t anyone in that room who hadn’t cleaned up messes made by other disciplines and felt superior and furious at the pain caused. I wasn’t even fully licensed the first time it happened to me. A patient came in with a problem. They had spent two years and $50,000, half of their yearly income, on a predator guru pitching empowerment through weekends and courses. Six months into our work, which totaled less than a twentieth of that number, their primary problem was under control, and they were ready for the next steps toward the person they wanted to be.

I also hear from about every fourth client about how their previous therapist wasn’t a fit, or worse, actively hurt them with their failures. And rarely, my mistakes hurt my patients, leaving them either believing they can’t be helped or continuing to search for answers. I use those mistakes in my teaching. I help clinicians see and own theirs so they don’t burn out under the weight of expecting perfection from themselves. Maybe that’s what accountability across all of our lanes looks like, being honest enough about our failures that we trust each other when we share our successes.

The One in Ten

I was angry every day.

Not at anyone specific, and not all the time. At the feeling of being sold to in a space I’d come to learn in. At pitches for methodology and programs on how to make millions with your practice woven into conversations I’d hoped would be collegial. At the lack of diverse voices holding the floor when the room was full of them. Somewhere between the first and second day it started feeling like I’d walked into a sales floor wearing my clinical hat and nobody had told me the dress code.

I wasn’t alone in it. There was a tension in that room that some named quietly and others named loudly. On one end, people trying to figure out how to massively scale and profit while helping men. On the other, people offended at the idea that anyone should make money on a lonely man’s pain. Most fell somewhere in the middle, making the same uncomfortable calculations I’ve made throughout my career. I don’t take insurance, but I find ways to work with guys through reduced rates and grants. I still charge people outside the medical field, first responders, and veterans the going rate in my area: $180 per session. I’ve just accepted the uncomfortable reality that I need that money to live and work here. That question: What is this work actually for, and who does it serve when the revenue model shapes the room? It didn’t get answered that weekend. It never does.

I have a framework I use with patients navigating unfamiliar social spaces. I call it the rule of ten. In any large room of strangers, one person will resonate, someone whose presence or words pull you toward them without much effort. Eight will fade into background, faces you might recognize later but won’t carry with you. And one will rub you wrong. Not because they’re a bad person. Because your mind is running social triage at speed, sorting signal from noise, and sometimes what registers as threat is just unfamiliar. I’ve taught this framework enough times that it’s become automatic. That weekend it became something else… A handhold. When someone rubbed me wrong, I could name it, give it its proportional weight, and keep moving to the ones who resonated. It gave me enough grace to stay in the room when the anger wanted to walk me out, and find the joy in folks I was drawn to.

I did my best to rotate tables every time we broke into small groups; six people, different configurations, as many perspectives as I could collect. By the end of the weekend the anger was just sitting in my chest. So when it came time to share in one of those groups, I did. I let it show. The sales pitches, the frustration at whose voices were taking up the most space, the not knowing how to put it down and get to work.

I’m fairly certain I was someone’s difficult one that afternoon. Probably more than one someone. The anger had been peeking in and out all weekend, and I knew it.

Ravi Rothenberg was at that table. A stranger. A yogi. A different lane than mine in most ways. He pushed back a little. Not a fight, just a nudge in the right direction. Told me he wanted the work to move too. That I didn’t have to hold all of it the way I was holding it. The anger, as it usually does once witnessed, settled. It was enough to loosen something.

Others helped me stay engaged. Marc Azoulay has been a friend and colleague for years. He didn’t need context that weekend. He knows me well enough to hold me without explanation, and he did. Jake Fishbein was introduced to me for his rigor and kindness, a coach whose reputation arrived before he did. He validated the misses in his industry without being asked, and gave me a clearer picture of what good actually looks like in his lane. A dozen others catching a smile, depth, or a nod. The last person I spent real time with was Martin X. Henderson, activist and writer, who had been on the podcast before the weekend, so we came in warm. We got breakfast, talked between sessions, and processed what we were seeing in the room together. When it was over, I drove him to the airport.

By the end of the drive Martin and I talked ourselves into the same place. These things are imperfect. Hard. Rough to wrangle. Chris Kyle, Tim, and George did something meaningful. They brought their all and were strong enough to hear the critics and stick with it to push for even better next year. He believes their efforts, and so do I.

I came in looking for a structure. A model. Some organized way to build something that could hold more than any one lane can carry alone. What I left with was something messier and more useful: a room full of people who give a shit. Egos, quirks, fault lines, and all.

I left with more support in my work, and I can’t wait to show up better next year.

References

Drapeau, C. W., & McIntosh, J. L. (2026). U.S.A. suicide: 2024 official final data. American Association of Suicidology.

https://suicidology.org

Carson, E. A. (2024). Prisoners in 2023: Preliminary data (NCJ 308449). Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisons-report-series-preliminary-data-release-2023

Gramlich, J. (2024, April 24). What the data says about crime in the U.S. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/

Then I went to Denver for college and had a surreal moment a few months in. I realized I had not seen a Black guy in over a month. That got even worse when I went to Salt Lake City to finish my bachelor’s. Two of the whitest towns in the country for five years. I was young enough to think I was still informed, but I wasn’t. You don’t know what’s happening in a community when you’re not around anyone in it, no matter what you can extrapolate from your history.

Then I joined the Air Force and served alongside Black men from across this country and around the world. It was a relief to be back around a diverse group of folks and even more, people that become family. Serving overseas with people makes you close if you want to be or not. You spend half your life, literally, half your waking hours with the same people. All the conversations and arguments happen. It showed me how out of touch I had gotten, and helped me find something I had lost.

I managed to get my last year stationed in Denver, and once I discharged I went back to going weeks without seeing a Black face again. The back and forth of the exposure and information has been jarring. It makes it easy for me to become defensive when I make a well-meaning mistake or fall into holier than thou virtue signaling.

When Black Lives Matter became impossible to ignore, I remembered things I hadn’t thought about in years. The faces. The county. What it felt like to grow up somewhere that didn’t treat diversity as remarkable. By then I was two years into teaching at a school run by Black leadership and working clinically with police and first responders, which added a layer of reality most people miss. White cops flying the Blue Lives Matter flag in one room. Black first responders exhausted not just by what was happening in the country, but having to represent an entire movement inside their own departments as the only Black person in the room. I wasn’t a passive observer. But being an authority inside a system limits what’s possible, no matter how good your intentions are. The two Black men I talk to regularly were already fielding calls from white friends looking for comfort, guidance, absolution… Shopping for friends like identity Pokémon cards isn’t a solution, it’s gross in a way I struggle to describe. I kept finding myself not enough for the men in my care, or for my work in the way I want to.

That’s part of why this podcast has mattered to me in ways I didn’t fully anticipate. It gave me a legitimate reason to find Martin X. Henson and have a conversation that most white men don’t have honest access to. Martin is a former clinician, activist, and the founder of the BMen Foundation (BMenfoundation.org), which has been running support spaces for Black men since 2017. He thinks carefully and precisely about what it costs Black men to move through a world that wasn’t built for them. He was generous enough to talk to a white guy in Denver and help us be better neighbors.

What he said stayed with me. Not because it was comfortable. Because it was precise.

I asked Martin what one thing every white man could know that would make his life easier. He didn’t hesitate.

“Talk to me like a regular person.”

That’s it. Not a policy position. Not a framework. Not a reading list. The bar is that low and it’s consistently missed.

Martin described what missing it looks like at the local YMCA, where he plays basketball. White guys talk to each other as peers: carrying history, trading jokes, reading each other as equals. When they talk to Martin, something shifts. The tone goes authoritative. Directive. He put it plainly: “White people talk to you like you work for them.” Nobody announces it. Nobody decides it. It just happens, reflexively, in the space between hello and whatever comes next. And Martin has to respond to it. More assertive than he wants to be, just to establish basic standing in a shared space. “I don’t like that I have to do that,” he said.

What he’s describing isn’t hostility. Hostility is easier to name and easier to address. Most moderate guys have fantasies of punching Nazis like their grandpa. This is the assumption of a hierarchy that nobody voted on, operating below the threshold of awareness for the person enforcing it. That’s the clinical problem with middle-ground masculinity. The men I’m writing to aren’t the ones burning crosses. We hate those guys. They’re the ones who freeze, or walk into a room and make Martin prove he belongs there.

Martin told me a story that I haven’t been able to put down since.

He was canvassing for a progressive candidate, doing what we’re supposed to in a democracy, engage. He was walking his assigned area in a retirement community, knocking doors. A white woman pulled up with a camera. Demanded to know what he was doing and drove off after he explained.

By the time he got back to his car, a police officer had pulled up behind him.

Martin went robotic. His word. He said everything he needed to say, looked where he needed to look, gave just enough to get the situation resolved without scaring the guy with the gun. The officer left. And then Martin sat in his car, alone, taking deep breaths. Shook. Because the danger in that moment wasn’t hypothetical. He knew that. He’d known it before he left the house that morning. He’d been telling himself the whole canvassing season that just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s probable. He needed that to keep showing up for work he believed in. The process was so deep in him that he described wanting to be remembered while he was alive, not just another Black man put forward after being killed.

His shift supervisor pulled up. Older white guy, bolt on the back of his truck, working on his neighborhood. He got out, looked at Martin, and came over and held him. No debrief. No processing. Just held him. Martin cried. “He knew how heavy it was,” Martin told me. “He knew what it was without me having to say it.”

Martin got emotional telling me that story, powerful enough to hit me then and continue to show up in my chest as I write this months after the conversation.

That’s what a good neighbor looks like. Not a framework. Not an intervention. A man who had been around enough, paid enough attention, accumulated enough actual contact with people different from himself, that he knew what that moment required before Martin could ask for it. He didn’t make Martin explain it. He didn’t make Martin manage his reaction to it. He just showed up with the right thing at the right time because he’d done enough living to know what the right thing was.

That’s not a skill you read your way into.

Most guys want the “punch a Nazi” moment. Clean villain, clear action, obvious right side to be on. I used to white knight hard in my twenties, the minute I spotted an injustice I was excited to get in somebody’s face about it. So, when I asked him what I could do, it was a gut punch to hear in all his years of activism he has never once seen a white man correct another white man in a mixed space and have it feel like support to the Black man it was supposedly for. It always reads as performance. And worse, it infantilizes instead of backing up the guy you’re trying to help because it steps over them. You’re not protecting him. You’re using him as the backdrop for your own decency.

Correct the assholes in your circle. Do it in your own spaces, on your own time, without a Black man present to validate the effort. That’s not a lesser version of showing up. That’s the version that actually works because what they say when no one is watching is closer to what they’re thinking. It’s where we can change minds instead of stop actions.

The harder thing is a smaller ask. He didn’t give me a curriculum. He gave me something smaller and more demanding than that.

“You good?”

That’s the ask. Two words that do more work than most men realize, because the ask itself is the thing. It communicates that you noticed. That you give a shit about how the other person is doing. That you’re not going to pretend the moment didn’t happen and move on because moving on is more comfortable for you. Martin was clear about what makes it land and what makes it fall apart. You have to ask more than once. The first time, most men will say they’re fine. That’s the armor, and the expectation for most. The second ask is the one that signals it’s actually okay not to be.

Then comes the harder part. You have to be ready for the answer.

This is where most moderate men fail. Not at the ask. At what comes after it. Martin named it precisely. People don’t owe you a response that makes you feel better about what just happened. If you ask and he tells you he’s not good, that’s not an invitation to process your feelings about having asked. That’s not the moment to explain your intentions or inventory your allyship. The ask opened a door. What he needs is for you to stand in it without making him take care of you while he’s still bleeding.

I’ve watched this pattern in clinical work more times than I can count. Male ego is a fragile thing, just ask your wife. The well-meaning man who creates a moment of genuine contact and then immediately needs that contact to be affirmed, witnessed, validated. The repair becomes about him. Martin called it clearly: “You don’t owe me forgiveness just because I’m sorry.” The same logic runs the other direction. He doesn’t owe you absolution just because you noticed.

What he’s describing is a form of emotional load-bearing that Black men absorb constantly and that most white men in the middle never think to account for. The cost isn’t just the original slight. It’s every moment after it where he has to manage your discomfort about the slight on top of his own. That’s the invoice. Most men in the middle never see it because they’re focused on their own intentions rather than the other person’s experience of the impact. As white guys we’re told, loudly and often, that we’re fucking up. Of course we’re hyper-focused on not being the asshole, and of course we need comfort to put that worry down. But it can’t be from the person you’ve hurt or are trying to help in the moment. You need other guys who share your values, women in your life that see you and can help you process after. It’s the only way to stay sane and keep pushing for the world and the man you want to be.

The ask costs you something. Being ready for the answer costs you more. That’s the difference between a gesture and a practice.

I’m lucky to know Martin, and we’re lucky he’s in the world sharing competent accountability. If you haven’t read his writing, you should. It’s solid, clear, and doesn’t punch harder than required to be heard. White guys aren’t going to stop taking hits as we improve the beautiful experiment our forefathers started, but we need clear voices, support, and a willingness to do the hard thing. Martin is a clear voice. Build your support and show up. If we keep doing that, we can move things toward better.

References

Maryland Department of Planning. (n.d.). Prince George’s County population characteristics. Retrieved May 2026, from https://planning.maryland.gov/MSDC/Documents/county/prin.pdf

Guest & Resource Links

Martin X. Henson — martinhspeaks.com

(B) Men Foundation —https://bmenfoundation.org/

American Masculinity - Ep 14: What It Takes for White Men to Be Good Neighbors: Lessons a Black Man Taught Me

I’ve watched men do real, serious clinical work, years of it… and still come in saying “I did it again.” The insight we’ve built together is real. The behavior stalled. Marc Azoulay, a therapist and friend with fifteen years running clinical groups for men, came on the podcast and articulated it with his normal flair for straightforward answers. Solo therapy can’t do it all.

The Unreliable Narrator

Good therapy requires structure and confidentiality, but the same things required for it to work limit how far it can go. The only information in the room is what the client and clinician bring in. For the client: shame, blind spots, years of self-protective framing, and a narrative they’ve been refining since childhood. For the therapist: clinical focus, education, and our own blind spots. Marc put it plainly: “When you’re doing individual work, and you’re just sitting there talking to your therapist, or if you are a therapist, hearing from your client, you only get one perspective... it’s going to be twisted through that person’s experience.”

That’s not dishonesty. Most men I work with are trying hard to be straight with me and I have never stopped working to earn the kind of honesty that’s hard to give. But you can’t bring what you can’t see. The guy who always casts himself as the one trying his best, the guy who’s always the victim, the guy who can never quite understand why people keep disappointing him… those narratives are invisible to the men carrying them. They feel like accurate reporting. They’re not lying. They’re just the unreliable narrator of their own story, and I’m working with the edited version.

Bad therapy makes this worse. Passive reflection and automatic validation hand the narrative back to the man in slightly different words and call it progress. Good therapy uses reflection to build understanding and validates what a man is capable of, not just what he feels (Miller & Rollnick, 2023). It pushes on the edges of the story rather than confirming it. That’s the difference between a clinician who helps a man see his narrative more clearly and one who just makes him more comfortable inside it.

Good therapy still has a ceiling. A paid professional trained to hold space is the last person in a man’s life to get annoyed. That’s a feature of the work. It’s also a limitation. I can be patient with a story for months, and I have been, before it’s my turn to tell them what their loved ones have been saying. The story can run a long time in an office when everyone in the room is trying their best with what they’ve got.

No Single Relationship Has the Whole Picture

The therapist sees the narrator. The wife sees the partner. The coworkers see the performer. The kids see the dad. None of them are wrong. None of them are complete.

You cannot get the full picture of yourself in one place. Not in a therapist’s office, not in a marriage, not in a friendship that’s been running on the same two or three topics for fifteen years. Every relationship reflects a portion of who you are back at you. The portion it can see. The rest stays dark.

That frame isn’t accidental. Carl Jung built shadow work on something as old as Greek philosophy (Jung, 1951; Plato, 2000). Robert Bly carried it into men’s work (Bly, 1990). It keeps getting rediscovered because it keeps being true. You need others for the contrast.

Most men aren’t working with many sources at all. Young guys have a hard time getting into the world, and older guys’ world shrinks down. Neither usually has a full roster. Part of that is circumstance. Part of it is that most of us built our relational worlds around our fears instead of our joys, siloed by what we were afraid people would think rather than what we actually wanted to share.

I’m not exempt from that. I am consistently aware of how I’m perceived, aware enough that I’ve made it my job. For much of my life I built my relational world the same way. It still creeps in. But seeking different lights has been life changing. A veterans group. Case consultations with clinicians I respect. Friends to nerd out on sci-fi with. Buddies who remember my pimples. Each of those places helps me know more about myself.

Marc made the point that isolation does something specific to men in groups; they show up convinced they are uniquely broken, the most messed-up person in the room. “You get in a group,” he said, “and you’re like, oh, wow, okay, I’m not alone.” That recognition isn’t just comfort. It’s data. It’s the first accurate read a lot of men get on themselves that didn’t come filtered through their own narrative or a single relationship that’s had them mapped a certain way for years.

A full life isn’t lived through one relationship. It requires enough breadth that the picture starts to emerge across all of them.

What Stakes Actually Do

The thing that makes an all-male therapy group different isn’t just the friction. It’s the room. Marc works with almost entirely heterosexual cis guys, and the gendered nature of that space is doing specific work that a mixed group or individual therapy can’t replicate. “Male emotions, especially if you’re a nice guy, which means you don’t have a lot of experience expressing them… are really brutal… super mean… women they say they want honesty but they don’t often know what they’re asking for especially for a guy that hasn’t expressed his emotions because a raw masculine emotion is really scary.”

Most men I work with know this from experience. They’ve tried to say the honest thing and watched it land like an attack. So they stop trying, or they wait until the pressure is high enough that what comes out is so cruel and brutal, the need that brought it on is overshadowed by the shame of it. The shame/anger cycle runs itself on repeat until something breaks. What breaks is usually the relationship, not the pattern. It’s one of the most common and most damaging things I see, and it deserves more than a paragraph. We’re giving it a full episode.

Marc’s solution is what he calls the shitty first draft. You bring the brutal, unfiltered version to the group first. The rage, the resentment, the things you’d never say to your partner because they’d end the relationship. The group can handle it. “Give all that to the group,” he said. “We know what male aggression is like. We know what male pain is like.” From there, the group helps you figure out what’s actually worth bringing home, and how to bring it in a way that might actually work.

That translation layer is what’s missing for most men. Without it you’re either swallowing everything until the iceberg cracks, or you’re giving your partner the unedited version that keeps not working. The question is who’s in the room when it finally comes out.

The other thing the group does that the office can’t is hold you accountable to showing up after the explosion. Marc calls it the initiation: the moment a man stops performing and actually joins. “…after that first explosion… we’re just like, okay, welcome… now you’re actually in the group.” That sequence of explosion, return, and repair is something individual therapy can prepare you for, but you need other people to actually do it. You need people who don’t leave after they’ve seen you at your worst and help you do it better. The stakes are what make the feedback honest.

The Destination

Therapy does heavy lifting. A good men’s group does heavy lifting. Neither one means anything if it doesn’t come into the world. The office is where you learn the language. The group is where you practice it. The world is where it counts.

The bravery this requires is different from walking into a therapist’s office. That’s admitting a problem and that you need help, fucking terrifying for most of us. It’s the bravery of showing up imperfect in community, in relationship, in the parts of life where no one is paid to be patient with you, where the stakes are real. That’s the bravery everything else builds toward. Marc recommends starting with the people already around you, identifying who in your life would accept you regardless of what you did or didn’t do.

Dr. Ryan McKelley talked about it in a recent episode and has a tool called a sociogram, a bullseye where you map everyone you have regular contact with by frequency. I use a castle metaphor to help guys see who helps them hold their world together. Find the frame that works for you, it’s OK to need help seeing your social capital.

Marc found his in CrossFit. He wasn’t an athletic guy growing up, so he avoided masculine spaces because bullying had convinced him that if he wasn’t at the top it wasn’t worth showing up. He was bad at being bad at things. CrossFit is where he decided to change that. He shows up at the bottom and has stayed in the bottom half. But for the first time in a male space he feels like he belongs and has earned respect. Not because he was winning but because he is there, moving up, earning a higher place in the hierarchy. He didn’t have to be the best to help others and move up. That’s the model. Find somewhere with a hierarchy you have to earn your place in and earn it. The goal isn’t people who will go easy on you. It’s people who will let you in and help you do it better.

Most men, when they actually look, have fewer people in the inner rings than they’d like. That’s not a character flaw. It’s just where life goes without intention. The answer is to build, imperfectly, in whatever direction is available. Club, sport, church, school, community group, whatever lets you in and gives you room to grow.

Women can’t save us from ourselves. That’s not a criticism, it’s a structural reality. No single person can be a man’s entire community, and asking a partner to carry that weight is how good relationships become exhausted ones. The guys who pull off something real with their partners have other men in their corner. Not because their partner isn’t enough. Because no one person is a community.

Go build yours.

References

Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A book about men. Addison-Wesley. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/robert-bly/iron-john/9780306824265/

Høglend, P. (1999). Psychotherapy research: New findings and implications for training and practice. Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, 8(4), 257–263. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3330564/

Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. https://www.amazon.com/Aion-Researches-Phenomenology-Collected-Works/dp/069101826X

Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2023). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change and grow (4th ed.). Guilford Press. https://www.guilford.com/books/Motivational-Interviewing/Miller-Rollnick/9781462552795

Plato. (2000). The republic (T. Griffith, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/classical-studies/classical-studies-general/republic

Seidler, Z. E., Rice, S. M., Ogrodniczuk, J. S., Oliffe, J. L., & Dhillon, H. M. (2018). Engaging men in psychological treatment: A scoping review. American Journal of Men’s Health, 12(6), 1882–1900. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6199457/

Sharpless, B. A., & Barber, J. P. (2012). Some limitations on the external validity of psychotherapy efficacy studies and suggestions for future research. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 66(3), 227–244. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.2012.66.3.227

Treacy, A., Triantafyllou, K., & Bhatt, M. (2023). Men’s experiences of using mental health support groups. Health & Social Care in the Community. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10078724/

Guest & Resource Links

American Masculinity Episode Links:

Marc Azoulay: Why Therapy Fails Men: The Truth About “Artificial” Therapy

Dr. Ryan McKelley: Why Men Struggle to Talk About Emotions and What Actually Helps

Dr. McKelley’s work: https://drmckelley.com/

Marc Azoulay’s work: https://menstherapy.online/

Nobody warns you about month four.

The first few weeks after the baby comes home have their own chaos, but an expected chaos. People bring food. Family checks in. There’s a shared understanding that everything is hard right now. He just watched her body get wrecked, need care, and be completely focused on the thing that will die without attention. Then somewhere around week six to eight, the meals stop, the calls thin out, and the exhaustion settles in. The world quietly assumes everyone has found their footing.

They haven’t.

The Screening Gap

We know 10 to 25 percent of new fathers struggle with postpartum depression or anxiety, and despite that knowledge almost nobody is screening for it. Pediatricians are the primary point of contact for new families in the first year, they see the baby, they see the mom, and most of them aren’t giving the Edinburgh screening to Dad. Dr. Lincoln’s husband does. She said he’s been consistently surprised by how many fathers screen positive. With most practices not doing it at all, most of these guys are going unidentified at the exact moment they need the most support. I see it come through the door as a quiet hopelessness. They feel isolated, failing, and oscillating between shame and anger about their feelings stopping them from doing the job.

The Bill Comes Due

The timing matters. Paternal postpartum peaks around three to six months, later than it does for mothers. By then the newness has worn off, the congratulations have stopped, and the reality has started to settle in. She’s still struggling. Intimacy may not have returned. The thing relied on most to feel connected to her, the bedroom, is disrupted. It’s such a trope, the death of intimacy after a baby, that every hack comic trades on it. He was holding it together during the pregnancy, he was running on adrenaline for the first few months, now the bill is past due and no one is left to pay it.

They’re not fine. He just doesn’t have anywhere to say so.

The Bench

This is where the bench matters most and where most guys face down the cost of having never built one. The emotional support that was concentrated inside the relationship before the baby is now divided three ways, and the smallest and loudest person in the room is winning. The guys who leaned on her as their entire emotional infrastructure are now watching that infrastructure care for someone else around the clock. They resent the feeling of having lost her, and they can’t say that out loud because it sounds insane.

Does anyone else remember when SNL did the bit on the husband park? It made the news because so many people felt the reality of the joke. We’ve named the loneliness, we’ve accepted it’s happening, yet we keep expecting wives to clean it up for guys. This is one of the whys. When two parents are expected to be everything to a child, they stop being anything to each other or anyone else. We have to stop pretending that two people can do it alone.

Side to Side

Men bond side to side. The things they used to do to connect are now harder to access and usually come with bad coping attached. Beers with the buddies leaves an exhausted guy hungover with a mad wife. The game isn’t as important as getting meal prep done. The sport they used to play is harder when you’re this tired. Add to that the friends without kids who quietly fade out. That’s not an indictment of the folks without kids, it’s just a thing that happens without real and dedicated effort on both sides. As the single guy without kids, I get some interesting looks showing up to the five year old’s birthday party.

The Therapy Room

I see it in the therapy room in a specific way. I have to fight guys to keep at least a monthly session in the first six months after bringing a baby home. They’re struggling to keep their head above water, so the money, time, and hassle of me asking them how they’re doing is a lot. If they stay, the fourth month it starts: the process of naming the fundamental changes to the most important relationship of their life, the drives that make it happen, the relational systems, how our biology and neurochemistry works. We’re not changing any of it, but having it named feels less crazy than loving someone so much you’re willing to break yourself, and having animosity toward them for it.

If they drop out, it’s about six to nine months later they call. They’re hurting, scared, and wondering if they’re going to lose everything. The scramble becomes the triage of getting their actions lined up with their values again, setting the boundaries they can with who they can, and the acknowledgment that their pain is also real.

The System Has Moved On

Dr. Lincoln put it plainly from the obstetric side: once the six week postpartum visit is done, the system has largely moved on. There’s no equivalent visit for him at any point. No one is calling to check on the guy. No one is asking how he’s sleeping, whether he’s eating, whether he’s thought about hurting himself. The Surgeon General’s data on male isolation shows a steady decline in the number of men who have someone they’d call at two in the morning. The postpartum period is exactly when that call needs to happen and exactly when most men feel the weight of having nobody to make it to. With around 35 guys on my caseload, my phone is off after 7:00 PM. A therapist can’t be their village.

The community question that started the day the test came back positive isn’t an abstraction, it’s a two AM reality.

It Takes a Village

Dr. Lincoln and I talked for over an hour. What I keep coming back to is something she said early and didn’t need to qualify. Births go better when the partner is informed and present. Not slightly better. Measurably better. For the mother, for the baby, and for the family that walks out of that hospital together.

That’s not a high bar. It’s the minimum.

Being prepared, supportive, and present through all of it, the pregnancy, the birth room, the fourth trimester, and holding on to the Dad, partner, and man you hope to be. That’s what you’re after. And you cannot get there alone. The support needs support. That’s the structural reality of what it takes to bring a human being into the world and not lose yourself or your relationship in the process.

But individual effort only goes so far. This is a cultural problem that requires a cultural answer. We need seasoned parents to say out loud that it was hard, that it can’t keep being this way, and to muscle up for the next batch coming through. We need to rebuild the programs, the groups, and the basic norm of having people in your life who give a shit. Not as a lifestyle upgrade. Two people can’t be a village. That doesn’t happen one person at a time, that happens when enough people stop thinking others have to go through what they did, and fix what isn’t working.

My Dad found out he had a son hours after the fact, hanging blinds on another floor. He accepted that as his reality and cleared the bar society put in front of him. The bar is higher now, and we’re not going to accept that anymore. No father I work with doesn’t want to be a Dad. All of us, men, women, and others want the new bar. It comes down to the rest of us spotting them when they make the biggest lift of their lives. Mom can’t spot him while she’s doing the same. If we’re going to put that weight on parents, we have to spot them. They can’t do it alone.

Citations:

Paternal postpartum depression and anxiety, 10 to 25 percent, peaking at three to six months:

Paulson, J. F., & Bazemore, S. D. (2010). Prenatal and postpartum depression in fathers and its association with maternal depression: A meta-analysis. JAMA, 303(19), 1961–1969. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/185847

Smythe, K. L., Petersen, I., & Schartau, P. (2022). Prevalence of perinatal depression and anxiety in both parents: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Network Open, 5(6), e2218969. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9233234/

Tokumitsu, K., Sugawara, N., Maruo, K., Suzuki, T., Shimoda, K., & Yasui-Furukori, N. (2020). Prevalence of perinatal depression among Japanese men: A meta-analysis. Annals of General Psychiatry, 19, 65. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7677771/

Post-natal screening is not given to fathers:

Edmondson, O. J. H., Psychogiou, L., Vlachos, H., Netsi, E., & Ramchandani, P. G. (2010). Depression in fathers in the postnatal period: Assessment of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale as a screening measure. Journal of Affective Disorders, 125(1–3), 365–368. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2927780/

Singal, D., Konrad, G., Lix, L., & Brownell, M. (2023). Screening fathers for postpartum depression in a maternal-child health clinic: A program evaluation in a Midwest urban academic medical center. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10508033/

Surgeon General data on male isolation:

Office of the Surgeon General. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

Men bond side to side:

Wright, P. H. (1982). Men’s friendships, women’s friendships and the alleged inferiority of the latter. Sex Roles, 8(1), 1–20. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00287670

Greif, G. L. (2009). Buddy system: Understanding male friendships. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/buddy-system-9780195325010

In Part 1 we talked about the pregnancy: the isolation that starts in the first trimester, the intimacy disruption nobody talks about, the work pressure, and the community question that starts the day the test comes back positive. If you haven’t read it, start there. This piece is about what happens when you walk into that room, what it takes to show up for the person on that table, and what gets in the way.

Tend the Person, Not the Checklist

The checklist version of being in the delivery room looks like this: have a go bag, know the bag, pack snacks, stay calm, know where you’re going, and be supportive. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. A lot of guys think they can map things out like organizing a trip to a difficult location. It’s usually not... Things go wrong, plans meet reality. Whatever he rehearsed in his head is usually the first thing to go.

Mothers need an advocate. There’s a difference between managing a situation for someone and advocating for someone so they can manage. Dr. Lincoln made this distinction clearly. She wants the partner asking questions, tracking what’s being said, making sure the person on the table is being heard when she can’t advocate for herself. That’s a different job than standing in the corner trying not to pass out. A lot of times the medical staff is tending to the patient. He needs to tend to the person. It’s not his job to get the baby out and breathing. It’s his job to brace the person doing the heavy lifting.

Read a book before packing your go bag. Dr. Lincoln’s is good because it’s indexed and exceedingly well organized so you don’t have to pretend to memorize it. Don’t believe the reviews, she got doxed, I promise it’s solid. If not hers, pick one. You need enough of a framework that when things move fast, you’re not starting from zero.

When a woman is six centimeters dilated and trying to get through a contraction, she may not be in a position to ask the question she needs answered, push back on something that doesn’t feel right, or tell the nurse that something changed in the last hour. That’s where a prepared, present partner does real work. Not delivering the baby. Not knowing the stages of labor by heart. Just being the person who pays attention so they can speak up when it matters.

A guy who’s ready doesn’t need to know every medical term. He needs to know her: what she’s afraid of, what she’s asked for, what she said she didn’t want. He needs to be calm enough to notice when something has changed and present enough to say something about it. That’s not a high bar. It’s just not the bar most guys are preparing for.

Things may or may not go smoothly. But forewarned and forearmed men come through better. Whatever happens, they and their partner can say they did it together. He can say he was the man he hoped to be that day. That’s more than the pride of a father. That’s the impact of a partner. It’s what most of our fathers never got to do. Show up, make it better, and be Dad before the baby takes their first breath.

Second and third time fathers walk in thinking they know what to expect. Sometimes they do. When they don’t, that overconfidence gets them blindsided. The pain is worse for the surprise.

Fear is the Mind Killer

The controlling version of that is what I see most often when men haven’t processed their fear somewhere else first. Fear that doesn’t have anywhere to go comes out sideways. In the delivery room it looks like hovering, overriding her, or correcting medical staff with AI. That’s not advocacy. That’s anxiety running the show.

By the time delivery day arrives I’m out of the picture. If I haven’t done my job in the months before, he’s not ready. If I have, I don’t hear anything until it’s over. That’s the only measure that matters.

Between Dr. Lincoln’s work at the bedside and mine in the therapy room, we see it on both ends. To be a good advocate, you have to have someone to complain, process, and celebrate with who isn’t carrying your kid. Before you walk into that room, you need somewhere to put the rough version of your fears so you can show up with shared concerns instead of anxieties. A men’s group. A friend who’s already been through it. A therapist, priest, or family member... Someone who can hold things with you without worrying about what’s happening to them. Processing your experience of her labor on her while she’s in labor is trash behavior.

Managing the Village

Dr. Lincoln also flagged something practical that doesn’t make most checklists: take over communications. The village isn’t often there for support, but you better believe they’ll bombard the couple for minute by minute updates. During a long induction or a complicated delivery, her phone is going off. Everyone from her mother to the neighbor wants updates. They’re anxious and well-meaning, but completely unhelpful. The partner who steps up and takes over, fielding every update request so she doesn’t have to, removes a real load. I take it a step further. Tap a bouncer. I encourage Dad to tag in someone to body block everyone while they’re doing the business of bringing a life into the world. If you’ve got family members who desperately want to help, let them be your defensive line. The mother-in-law who wants to be in the room is a much better asset as the person managing inbound communication than as someone you’re trying to contain.

The Stakes

These things aren’t just the good thing to do, they protect your family. Dr. Lincoln cited data showing that between one in four and one in two people experience birth as psychologically traumatic, not medically, psychologically. Those numbers are in the same range we see after cardiac surgery and emergency cardiac procedures. This isn’t subjective discomfort, it’s a measurable outcome the medical system already takes seriously in other settings, just not this one. Feeling out of control and uninformed are the primary drivers. A partner who is prepared doesn’t just feel more useful. He actively reduces the conditions that lead to birth trauma, for both the mother and himself.

When a delivery goes badly, couples can carry it for a long time. The guys I see who weren’t there, weren’t ready, or made things worse by losing it, often feel it for years. Not just into postpartum or into the first year, sometimes until the kid is in grade school and they have the space to repair. A rough birth can be the worst day in a woman’s life, but with the right support, post traumatic growth is a known thing. The couple that goes through that together, supported and whole, can come out stronger for it.

Next

Like many comics have pointed out, they’ll let anyone go home with a baby. Who’s going with you?

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Taking a baby home is a terrifying and proud moment for most parents. How you walk out of the birth room sets up what comes next.

In Part 3 we’ll get into the fourth trimester: what happens when everyone stops checking in, the data on paternal postpartum that almost nobody is screening for, and why the bench you built or didn’t build comes due right around month four.

Citations:

Birth trauma prevalence:

Dekel, S., Stuebe, C., & Dishy, G. (2017). Childbirth induced posttraumatic stress syndrome: A systematic review of prevalence and risk factors. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 560. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00560/full

Birth trauma rates comparable to cardiac surgery:

Kok, L., Sep, M. S., Veldhuijzen, D. S., Cornelisse, S., van Westerloo, D. J., Dieleman, J. M., & van Dijk, D. (2021). Stress-related psychopathology after cardiac surgery and intensive care treatment. Journal of Affective Disorders Reports, 5, 100126. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666915321001256

Caristia, S., Pistarini, C., & Calcagno, A. (2023). Posttraumatic stress disorder as a consequence of acute cardiovascular disease. Current Cardiology Reports, 25, 559–572. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11886-023-01870-1

Feeling out of control and uninformed are primary drivers:

Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance. (2024). Birth trauma and maternal mental health fact sheet. https://www.mmhla.org/articles/birth-trauma-and-maternal-mental-health-fact-sheet

Ayers, S., & others. (2024). Childbirth-related posttraumatic stress disorder: Definition, risk factors, pathophysiology, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, 230(2), 117–130. https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(23)00713-5/fulltext

Post traumatic growth after difficult birth:

Sawyer, A., & Ayers, S. (2009). Post-traumatic growth in women after childbirth. Psychology and Health, 24(4), 457–471. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20205005/

Beck, C. T., & Watson, S. (2016). Posttraumatic growth after birth trauma: “I was broken, now I am unbreakable.” MCN: The American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing, 41(5), 264–271. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27276105/

The Long Long Ago

My Dad was in the hospital when I was born, but not in the room. I came a month early. He was a tradesman who happened to be working in the hospital that day, hanging blinds in another wing. No cell phones in the 70s and no one knew where he was hour to hour, that was one of a few jobs around town that rainy Thursday. He didn’t find out I was here until hours after the fact. Four and a half years later, my brother showed up early and the exact same thing happened. I met my brother hours before my Dad got to.

The stories from my grandfathers didn’t really exist in my world either. They never talked about the day their kids were born or what their wives’ pregnancies were like.

Expectations and No Map

That’s not the way it goes anymore. A modern father goes to every appointment. He builds the crib, downloads the app, tracks her symptoms, takes the birthing class with the fever of the information age, trying to know everything to soothe his anxieties. The research caught up with what common wisdom has known for time immemorial. The Lancet just published data showing that a father’s influence on pregnancy outcomes, including his own childhood experiences, his health history, his choices, can be stronger than the mother’s for certain outcomes. Not background noise. A primary variable.

The system knows to include him. What we haven’t figured out is how to support him. That’s not a him or her problem, it’s a structural failure of generations. Somewhere along the way white culture bought hard into the idea that the nuclear family is sufficient on its own. That’s a concept unique to our time and destructive to our nature. Multigenerational families, communities, and simply other adults who give a shit have always been needed to raise healthy, strong, and functional humans. We assumed removing labor with machines and services, and a floor plan with a two car garage progressed us past our basic human need for others. Now one or two overwhelmed parents are expected to do alone what whole communities struggle to do well. The nuclear family is a pillar most need. It just doesn’t hold up the roof on its own.

Needed and Alone

When I asked Dr. Lincoln whether what she sees at the bedside matches the research, she didn’t blink. Births where the partner is informed and genuinely present go better. Not slightly better. Measurably better, for the mother, for the baby, and for the family that walks out of that hospital. She said the ones where the partner is absent, checked out, or scared and controlling break her heart a little because she can already see where that family is headed.

I’ve been working with men through major life transitions for over a decade, and fatherhood, specifically the stretch from pregnancy through the first year, is one of the least supported transitions a man can go through. He’s expected to be present, informed, emotionally regulated, practically useful, and professionally undeterred. All of that, simultaneously, while his own world is restructuring underneath him. We talk about guys being fathers. Most want to be Dads, but most don’t get to take their foot off the gas to make room for it. His finances, his identity, his relationship, his sleep, his sense of what the next twenty years look like, all of it is in motion. Nobody’s asking him about it.

He belongs there. What nobody talks about is what it costs, and how much of what used to take a village now falls on an overwhelmed couple. Often one man, and one woman whose body and soul has been through the wringer.

The Nine Months

And that couple’s pregnancy is all their own. From couples struggling to conceive and carry to term, to people caught off guard and coping with an incoming reality, without context, it feels like uncontrolled chaos. Whether it’s your first or your fourth, the structural problems don’t go away. They just wear different clothes.

The First Trimester

That first trimester is often the most isolating stretch of the whole thing. There’s a reason many cultures consider it bad luck to share a pregnancy before the second trimester. Between 10 and 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and more than 80 percent of those happen in the first trimester. It’s a brutal and terrifying window, especially for couples who have already lived through one. So they stay quiet. They carry it alone. Even the folks who have friends and family in similar moments and are doing well themselves don’t share, in part because they want to be kind to those who’ve lost pregnancies. And for a lot of guys, that’s where the pattern gets set. Three months of doing it without support, without community, without telling anyone what’s actually happening. By the time the second trimester arrives and it’s safe to say something, they’ve already practiced isolation into a habit.

No Breaks

The rest of the pregnancy doesn’t let up. Her body is doing something he has no reference point for. I rarely find a guy in my caseload who does a yearly check-in, and the data backs that up — only about half of men engage in any kind of preventative care. For most guys this is their first sustained encounter with medical systems, terminology, and a process they can observe but not experience. For guys on their second or third, the familiarity can breed a dangerous confidence. They think they know what’s coming. They’re often wrong about what it costs them this time.

He goes to the appointments. He hears the words. He tries to track what matters and what doesn’t. Meanwhile her capacity shifts trimester to trimester in ways his opinion is most unwelcome. The first trimester she may be exhausted and nauseated in ways that look like withdrawal. The third trimester she’s physically limited, emotionally raw, and running out of bandwidth for anything that isn’t the immediate reality of what her body is doing. He’s supposed to pick up what she puts down, stay employed, stay present, and not make it about him.

I always think back to peewee football. Take a big hit, shake your head, look to the adults and hear “Good hit!” Ignoring your hurts and needs starts early. And now that it’s for the most important people in your life in one body, it makes all the sense in the world.

The Drift

Another challenge is how dependent a lot of guys are on their sexual relationship to express comfort and connection with their partners. Her body, drives, and capacity are changing. His desire and comfort with intimacy are changing. And no one is talking to them about how to meet through the chaos of it, because it tends to change dramatically trimester to trimester and it’s taboo. This leaves inexperienced couples lost a lot of the time. For a lot of my guys, they can’t share the words of their affection anywhere near as well as they can in the bedroom. That’s not always a deficiency; for a lot of people, it’s a beautiful part of their reality. The disruption of that without bracing adds to the isolation and fear, especially with the common knowledge that having a baby in the house will also limit intimacy. The drift that starts in the first trimester doesn’t resolve at the delivery room door. For most couples it stays disrupted into grade school.

Men Work

Most guys don’t get paternity leave that amounts to anything, and even where it exists, plenty of men don’t take it for fear of what it signals. The provider pressure doesn’t pause for pregnancy, it tightens. The stakes are higher and the financial math has changed. There’s a cruel irony buried in the research here; fatherhood actually comes with roughly a 6 percent bump in income for men, through raises or finding new work, what researchers call the fatherhood bonus. Employers rate expectant fathers as more committed, more stable, more deserving. The workplace rewards him for becoming a father while doing almost nothing to help him actually be a Dad. He’s doing the emotional labor of becoming a father while making sure nobody at work notices he’s distracted.

And before you speak to the professional cliff women fall off of when they become mothers, remember that the data is consistent, 35 percent of women say they prefer a partner who earns more than they do, and research on dating preferences across millions of profiles shows women prioritize financial stability in a long-term partner at significantly higher rates than men. That’s not dependency. That’s the math of a society that still hasn’t figured out how to share the career and parental sacrifice equitably. Financial security buys women the choice to work or stay home. For women it’s a hard and shitty choice. For most men, it’s not even a discussion.

In my experience, most guys lean harder into work during this time. Work is the one place their fathers and grandfathers taught them to put their stress and their worth, it’s where everyone else expects the most from them, and they already know how to excel there. A new Dad is lost without a map, the path of our fathers and grandfathers is no longer sufficient. Almost every new Dad I work with is rebuilding what a Dad means in real time, so the surety of their work is a balm to the discomfort.

Motivated Mad Men

My favorite guys to work with are new fathers. Nobody is more hungry for direction and ready to move. Most guys aren’t motivated for themselves, and honestly I worry a lot more for guys who consistently value themselves over their important people.

Dr. Lincoln sees this on her end as well. She pointed out that pregnancy is one of the strongest motivators for behavior change men ever encounter. The research backs it up, studies show expectant fathers actively seek out ways to improve their own health during pregnancy, and fathers who are engaged and present are associated with measurable reductions in their partner’s smoking and substance use. His behavior change isn’t just about him. It ripples directly into outcomes for her and the baby. Guys who have been meaning to cut back on drinking, get healthier, get their finances in order, suddenly have a reason that’s bigger than themselves. That’s real and it matters. But motivation without support is just pressure with better intentions.

Build the Bench

The guy who white-knuckles his way through nine months of pregnancy without building a bench of folks to back him up is the same guy who falls apart quietly at month four postpartum. Everyone has stopped checking in, she’s not getting better on her own, and he’s been running on empty since the second trimester. That’s just as true on the second and third kid. The bench doesn’t build itself between pregnancies.

The community question doesn’t start after the baby arrives. It starts the day the test comes back positive. Who does he call? Who does he process with? Who knows what he’s actually carrying through those nine months? If the answer is nobody, or only her, that’s the problem the rest of this article is about.

Next

The research, the bedside observations, the therapy room... they all point to the same place. The nine months before delivery are not a waiting room. They are the job. How he comes out of them determines a lot about who walks into that delivery room and who comes home after.

In Part 2 we’ll get into what actually happens in the birth room, what it takes to be useful to mother and child, what gets in the way, and why the prep work we’ve been talking about is the only thing that makes any of it possible.

Citations:

The Lancet paternal influence data:

Huang, J., Godfrey, K. M., Schoenaker, D., & collaborators. (2026). More equitable preconception health: Paternal lifecourse opportunities for better pregnancy, child, and family outcomes. The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(26)00148-0

Miscarriage Rates:

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (2018). ACOG Practice Bulletin No. 200: Early pregnancy loss. Obstetrics & Gynecology. https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/practice-bulletin/articles/2018/11/early-pregnancy-loss

Ellison, P. T. (2018). Miscarriage. In StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30422585/

Gender gap in preventive care visits:

Hing, E., & Albert, M. (2016). Preventive care visits to office-based physicians: United States, 2012 (NCHS Data Brief No. 234). National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db234.htm

Healthgrades. (2023). Men’s health 2023: Healthcare behaviors and attitudes. https://b2b.healthgrades.com/insights/blog/mens-health-2023-healthcare-behaviors-and-attitudes/

Fatherhood bonus:

Budig, M. J. (2014). The fatherhood bonus and the motherhood penalty: Parenthood and the gender gap in pay. Third Way. https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-fatherhood-bonus-and-the-motherhood-penalty-parenthood-and-the-gender-gap-in-pay

Glauber, R. (2018). Trends in the motherhood wage penalty and fatherhood wage premium for low, middle, and high earners. Demography, 56(5), 2017–2040. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-018-0712-5

Yu, W., & Hara, Y. (2021). Motherhood penalties and fatherhood premiums: Effects of parenthood on earnings growth within and across firms. Demography, 58(1), 247–272. https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-8917608

Women prefer a partner who earns more & Women prioritize financial stability

Schulz, M. (2026, February 10). Love meets money: Nearly half of Americans say the economy has raised the stakes in romance. LendingTree. https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/love-or-money-study/

Jonason, P. K., & Thomas, A. (2022). Being more educated and earning more increases romantic interest: Data from 1.8 million online daters from 24 nations. Human Nature, 33(3), 330–347. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41809-022-00098-3

Expectant fathers actively seek health improvements:

Mini, F. N., Saltzman, J. A., Simione, M., Luo, M., Perkins, M. E., Roche, B., Blake-Lamb, T., Kotelchuck, M., Arauz-Boudreau, A., Davison, K., & Taveras, E. M. (2020). Expectant fathers’ social determinants of health in early pregnancy. Academic Pediatrics, 21(3), 499–506. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7705787/

Khanal, S., Miani, C., Finne, E., Zielke, J., & Boeckmann, M. (2023). Effectiveness of behavior change interventions for smoking cessation among expectant and new fathers: Findings from a systematic review. BMC Public Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10506219/

Surgeon General data on male isolation:

Office of the Surgeon General. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

I’ve been doing sexual assault prevention work since 2009. Three years as a victim advocate and bystander intervention trainer in the Air Force. Two years as a civilian violence prevention educator and advocate before I began my clinical work. As a licensed clinician I have over a decade of experience working with men, veterans, and first responders. I’ve sat across from survivors. I’ve sat across from perpetrators. I’ve read enough research to know this problem is bigger, more organized, and closer to home than most people want to believe.

So when CNN published this, I am not shocked. I am tired and furious.

A monthslong investigation into online communities where men share tips on how to drug and rape their sleeping wives. Forums with tens of thousands of videos. Livestreams of unconscious women, monetized with cryptocurrency. A man in Poland who spoke openly with journalists for months about what he was doing to his wife, who had no idea. He was one case in a global network the investigation spent months mapping and was arrested in early April.

I’m not going to go into details beyond that. You can read the piece. WI am talking about what men do with information like this. Most disengage; partly because it doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with them, and partly because they don’t know what to do with it.

If you think this has nothing to do with you, you’re not alone. There’s a reason to take a closer look.

Depending on how it’s measured, surveys consistently estimate that roughly 1 in 4 men report experiencing unwanted sexual contact in their lifetime. Half of women. Substantially higher rates among transgender and non-binary people. If you think those numbers are soft, that’s understandable. Sitting with the reality that this many people in your life have been impacted is a lot. Most men need a minute with it, because without the capacity to stay present, the default move is to shut it down or push it away.

The Distance Men Keep

There’s a predictable sequence when stories like this break. Men read it, feel disgust, maybe share it, and then move on. The disgust is real. The distance is also real. Because the move most men make, consciously or not, is to locate the perpetrators as far from themselves as possible. Those guys. That world. Not mine.

I understand the impulse. I’ve felt it, and still feel it despite all my work. But years of direct advocacy work taught me that compartmentalization is exactly how this problem stays intact. The men in those forums didn’t start there. They moved along a continuum: jokes, entitlement, small boundary violations, normalization, until something that should have been unthinkable became routine. The research on this is consistent. Men who commit serious sexual harm rarely experience it as an isolated decision. It’s the end of a long road that other people, at earlier points, could have interrupted.

Most of us weren’t on that road. But here’s something worth sitting with: the older you are, the more likely it is that some of what passed for normal in your dating years wouldn’t survive much scrutiny today. I grew up in the eighties when the cultural script around pursuit and consent was almost non-existent. By the time I started dating in the nineties I thought I was one of the good ones because I kept asking. The bar was so low, it was hard to trip on. Most of us learned in a culture that never acknowledged it, which gave most of us permission to not look too hard at the blind spots we likely never examined. Taking that on hurts, and with all the outrage, accountability can be terrifying.

That’s the gap. Not between good men and monsters. Between men who are paying attention and men who aren’t. Most men don’t disengage because they don’t care. They disengage because they were never given the capacity to stay present with it. Most of us need help learning how to pay attention without getting overwhelmed, lost, or so triggered that we reject the need to act entirely, turning the outrage being expressed into a personal insult.

Where to Go From Here

If you have women in your life right now, they’re probably not okay. They’re watching this story break and thinking about every time they were told it was getting better, every conviction that didn’t happen, every powerful man who walked away clean. The fury is legitimate. So is the exhaustion.

And if you’re like most men, at some point in that conversation you’ll feel the pull toward not me or not all men. You’re half right. It’s not most men committing these acts. But most men don’t do much to stop them either. We were never taught how to intervene and default to silence. The continuum of harm goes largely unchecked by the men around them. The jokes. The entitlement. The silence. The women in your life know that. That’s part of what the fury is about.

The question isn’t whether you’re one of the monsters. It’s whether you’re a guy willing to stop them.

If you’re reading this trying to do better, good. Don’t let that drive stall. There’s a way to learn it. A few months ago I released an episode specifically on how men can support #MeToo. It breaks down into three phases: what to do for yourself first, what to do for the people in your life, and what to do in your broader community. Because you can’t show up for anyone else if you haven’t done the internal work first, and you can’t show up in your community if you haven’t done it with the people closest to you.

Episode: How Men Can Support #MeToo

To get that traction, you must accept that as you take this on you’ll be uncomfortable, angry, and often feel helpless. Tend to that, ideally with other guys trying. No one can live in this pain all the time, and doing it alone is a path to suffering. But don’t stop there until the next big story breaks. Use what you know. Challenge the people around you. Stand up for something where people can see.

Women are disillusioned and exhausted by our silence. Learning how to say something will mean more than you know. This has never been their problem to solve. It’s ours. If you’re a grown man, it’s time to stop looking for help and start becoming it.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2023 summary report. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nisvs

National Sexual Violence Resource Center. (2024). Statistics — Sexual violence in the United States. https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics

Vandoorne, S., Fox, K., Kennedy, N., Stubbs, E., & Chacon, M. (2026, March 26). Exposing a global ‘rape academy.’ CNN. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl/index.html

Full show notes and resources for the Episode: How Men Can Support #MeToo: https://americanmasculinity.com/amp30-metoo2-allyship

I’m not here to argue with the documentary, litigate red pill ideology, or cancel anyone in it. I’m a clinician. I’ve spent a decade working with the men that documentary films — men who found these spaces before they found anything else. And there’s a layer underneath what the camera captured that is worth getting into.

One moment in particular crystallized it. A young man approaches one of these influencers, thanks him, tells him he was in a dark place and that this man’s content saved him. The influencer accepts it. Tells him he loves him, that he can do anything. Louie finds the young man again later and gets the full story — no man in his life growing up, the loss of a brother, deep hurt, and how desperately he needed the guidance these influencers gave him. He followed the advice. Picked up, moved, and restructured his entire life around what they told him to do. Despite bouts of homelessness, employment struggles, and a consistent lack of success achieving the requirements for manhood he was handed. Yet he holds to the advice that brought him, as no one else has shown him another way.

That scene tells you everything about what these spaces do and everything they can’t.

A Partial Solution

The instinct in a lot of therapy circles is to write these influencers off as predatory. That’s an incomplete diagnosis, and the oversimplification loses the men we’re trying to reach before we even get started.

What that scene shows clinically isn’t predation. It’s a partial solution landing on a real problem. These spaces found a genuine developmental need — identity, status, someone telling you what a man is supposed to be — and offered something to hold onto. That’s not pathology on the young man’s part. He wasn’t naive. He wasn’t weak. He was reading the landscape accurately. The jobs available to young men without advanced credentials don’t produce what they did for their grandfathers. Society still grades men on provider status, and the math stopped working. So when someone looks into a camera and says I love you, there’s nothing you can’t do. Here’s how I did it. That’s not a sales pitch landing on a fool. That’s a father figure’s guidance landing on a fatherless kid who’s already done the math and knows the traditional path washed out years ago. These men are providing what they didn’t have, creating a funhouse mirror of male mentorship.

The manosphere didn’t manufacture that hunger. It just knew where to find it.

The Ceiling

These influencers got their first hit of status from being the guys willing to say the unsayable. That’s a real neurological reward, and the business model locked in around it. When your income depends on performing an identity, evolution gets expensive. Every nuanced thought costs you audience. That’s not a simple character flaw. That’s a trap with real financial loss.

The content machine consumes the exact hours where real mentorship would have to live. The absence of genuine connection in these spaces isn’t accidental. You can’t manufacture the relationship that makes it real. So it doesn’t exist there, not because these men are villains, but because the architecture won’t support it.

And the framework these spaces offer reflects that ceiling. These are the external answers unguided boys found on their own. Status. Dominance. The market. Bunker up, perform, never show weakness. That’s not a philosophy. That’s a trauma response that learned to market itself as strength. Isolation that feels like protection is one of the oldest maladaptive patterns we see clinically. The bunker keeps the threat out but keeps the man locked in.

These influencers aren’t men who had it and withheld it. Most of them are the same young man in that documentary. Mapless, reading a landscape that didn’t add up. They just found a way to monetize the workaround they built to survive it. They’re not offering a ceiling. They’re offering the highest floor they ever found. That’s not just a grift — it’s the wound teaching itself forward. The framework they’re passing down is the same one that kept them isolated.

The young man in that documentary followed the directions completely. The directions just had nowhere to take him.

The Missing Variable

One adult male in that young man’s life who gave a shit. That’s it. When we look at the data on how men recover from trauma, how children navigate adverse circumstances, the research keeps landing in the same place. One engaged adult is enough to change the trajectory. Not a movement. Not a content library. One person who shows up and stays.

Real mentorship doesn’t scale the way content does. That’s the part that’s hard to sit with in a culture that wants to solve problems at volume. It compounds — through relationships, formal and informal, through the men who show up consistently long enough to matter. The algorithm cannot replicate that. That young man in the documentary can feel the difference even if he can’t name it. Despite everything, he’s still reaching. Not because the system worked. Because the thing it promised him hasn’t been found.

That’s where the bunker comes from. A young man without a map or a man to show him the way finds a framework that answers his questions. How do I stay safe in an unsafe world. What do I have to do to be valued. How do I take care of the people I love. That last one matters. He said explicitly he wanted to take care of his mother. The answers he gets are real answers to real questions. They’re just answers that keep him alone.

The Gap We Left

The uncomfortable part is that we already tried to solve this at scale. We had institutions that were supposed to fill this role. Religious organizations, and service organizations like the Shriners, VFWs, Moose Lodges, and the Boy Scouts — community organizations built around mentorship, structure, and intergenerational connection. When they worked, they were the primary mechanism for intergenerational male proximity. And in a lot of cases, they failed — sometimes quietly, sometimes catastrophically. Enough that trust broke, and people pulled back.

Those failures are real, but they don’t change the needs they were supposed to fulfill. When those systems stopped functioning the way they were meant to, we didn’t rebuild. We retreated — and then criticized the people who stepped into the gap we left behind.

That vacuum can’t be fixed by observation or criticism. It has to be filled by men willing to do the work. Women can’t cover for us, not because they’re lacking anything, but because this isn’t their role to fill. The young men in those spaces aren’t looking for more commentary or correction. They’re looking for a model. For proximity. For someone who has lived it and can show them how to move through it.

That has to come from us. For some men, it means stepping back into the structures that used to carry this — joining, rebuilding, and showing up in places like local service organizations, coaching, or community groups that still exist but need participation to function the way they once did.

For all the men reading this, the minimum is simpler than that. It’s one kid. A nephew, a neighbor, a younger guy at the gym or at work. Someone you check in on, stay consistent with, and don’t disappear on.

The young man in that documentary is one of a million young men reaching for something the algorithm promised and couldn’t deliver. If you do nothing else, be there for one of them.

This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute therapy or addiction counseling, and no professional relationship is established. For individualized support, consult a licensed provider. If you are in crisis, call or text 988. © Timothy Wienecke / American Masculinity

In part one, we talked about learning to be alone again. When the noise of a shared life disappears, the silence can feel hostile. Many people rush to escape it through substances, screens, dating apps, sexual conquest, distractions, or validation… anything that makes the quiet stop. But once you can tolerate that quiet, something important begins to happen. You can begin rebuilding your life intentionally.

This is the second phase of a second try: rebuilding a life that actually makes sense for the person you want to become. Until that life begins to take shape, it is almost impossible to choose a partner who truly fits it. More often, people end up choosing someone who simply removes their immediate pain.

After divorce, life changes in ways that are both obvious and subtle. Money, time, and identity all shift. The routines that once structured your days may disappear overnight. Sometimes you suddenly have more time than you know what to do with. Other times you feel like you are constantly scrambling to keep things together.

For a while the goal is simply survival. Stabilizing finances, legal disputes, managing custody schedules, and rebuilding some kind of rhythm to hold it all together is enough to occupy most of your attention. During that period it makes sense to focus on getting through each week without things falling apart.

Eventually, though, the question begins to change. Instead of asking: “How do I get through this?” you begin asking something deeper: “What am I building?”

Divorce has a way of exposing how much of life was being carried by momentum. When you are inside a marriage, many decisions are shared, negotiated, or simply inherited from routines that developed over time. The structure of life exists partly outside of you.

After divorce that structure often disappears overnight. The house is empty. The schedule changes. The rhythms that once organized your time are gone. For a while that absence simply feels like loss.

But eventually something else begins to show up inside that empty space: responsibility.

The routines you build now are not inherited. They are chosen. The direction your life takes is no longer negotiated around the structure of a previous relationship. You are responsible for shaping the environment your life will grow inside.

That responsibility can feel intimidating at first, but it is also where a second try really begins.

Taking inventory
of the life you’re living

That question: “What am I building?” leads to a deeper kind of inventory.

You start looking around at the life you are living and asking whether it actually aligns with the person you want to become. Your space. Your habits. Your work. Your finances. The way you spend your evenings. The way you spend your weekends.

Are these things supporting the life you want to build, or quietly degrading it?

Divorce forces people to confront realities that are easy to ignore when life’s responsibilities are shared. Work habits that once felt tolerable may suddenly feel empty. Financial decisions that were previously shared now fall squarely on your shoulders. Time that used to be filled with family activity can stretch uncomfortably long.

For many people the instinct is still survival. Just keep things functioning. Keep the bills paid. Keep moving forward. But if you stay in survival mode for too long, life begins to feel reactive and empty rather than intentional.

The shift in this phase is subtle but important. Instead of reacting to whatever happens next, you begin asking more deliberate questions. What does a healthy morning actually look like? What kind of work deserves your energy? Where does your time go when no one else is structuring it for you? What values are guiding the choices you are making?

These questions matter because relationships do not exist in isolation. They exist alongside, and eventually within, the life you are building.

The partner you choose next will fit that life—whether you build it intentionally or not.

One thing that becomes clear during this phase is that rebuilding a life is not only about structure. It’s also about behavior. The way you show up in everyday relationships starts revealing patterns that once lived mostly inside your marriage. How you respond to disagreement, how you handle frustration, whether you speak up when something matters or quietly accommodate it — those habits don’t only appear in romantic relationships. They show up everywhere. Which means everyday interactions become a kind of practice ground. The way you navigate friendships, family conversations, and professional relationships begins shaping the skills you will eventually bring into dating again.

Practicing relationship
skills before the relationship

Another mistake people often make after divorce is assuming they will simply behave differently in the next relationship without practicing anything differently beforehand.

Awareness helps. But awareness without action is worse than useless; it’s suffering.

The encouraging reality is that most of the skills required for healthy relationships are needed everywhere in life. Lower-stakes environments allow you to practice them before the emotional intensity of dating enters the picture again.

Friendships, professional relationships, and family conversations all contribute to growth.
In those everyday interactions you start noticing things that matter later in dating:

Can you set boundaries without becoming hostile?
Can you disagree without withdrawing?
Can you express interest in someone without immediately overcommitting?

These are basic relationship skills, but some were likely not working well inside your previous marriage; they will not suddenly improve simply because the next relationship begins with excitement and chemistry. Practicing them in everyday life builds the muscle memory that successful relationships depend on.

One thing that becomes obvious when working with people after divorce is how often these patterns show up elsewhere in their lives. The same reactions that created friction inside a marriage tend to show up in everyday interactions as well. Someone who struggles to set boundaries at work often struggles to set them in relationships. Someone who withdraws from conflict with friends often withdraws from conflict with a partner. These patterns rarely live in just one place. By taking on the patterns, you shift the whole of your life, including your romantic partnerships.

Over time those repetitions reshape your instincts. Instead of defaulting to withdrawal, over-accommodation, or defensiveness, you begin recognizing the moment earlier. You learn how to pause, communicate more clearly, and stay present in conversations that might have previously triggered a strong reaction.

By the time you eventually start dating again, those behaviors are no longer theoretical. They are already part of how you move through relationships in everyday life.

Choosing the
ladders worth climbing

As those skills begin to develop, another question tends to emerge: what ladders are you actually trying to climb?

For many men, identity becomes tightly connected to a few roles—provider, protector, problem-solver. Those roles matter, but when they become the only identity someone has, other parts of life can quietly erode.

Divorce often exposes that imbalance.

Some men realize they spent years pursuing status or stability in ways that quietly disconnected them from their own values. Others discover they over-invested in one role while neglecting others. Divorce forces that kind of reflection whether we want it or not, so it makes sense to use it. Until you begin choosing the life you actually want to live, choosing a partner often leads to building a life that feels misaligned later, because relationships don’t just exist between two people. They exist inside the structure of the life those two people are living.

When you become more deliberate about the ladders you’re climbing — professionally, personally, and relationally — something subtle begins to change. The choices you make start reinforcing one another instead of competing with each other. Work, friendships, health, and relationships begin pointing in the same direction instead of pulling you in different ones. One of the joys of being a therapist is seeing people get back into alignment with their values and take off like a rocket, often finding people to fly with along the way.

Dating slowly and intentionally

At some point, of course, you’re going to start dating. By every metric, a man in a healthy partnership live longer, better lives. It makes sense for most people to want connection again because it is healthy and a pillar of a good life. The issue isn’t whether you date after divorce. The issue is how you approach it.

When dating begins before any rebuilding has happened, relationships tend to form around urgency. Loneliness, validation, attraction, or the relief of finally feeling wanted again can push things forward quickly. Those forces are powerful, and they often make early chemistry feel overwhelming. The same sections of the brain light up for early lust and attraction as they do for addictive substances like cocaine. That intensity can make the early stages of a relationship feel far more certain than they actually are.

When you are rebuilding your life intentionally, the pace naturally changes. While the high still feels good, it is no longer everything.

Instead of asking Do we like each other enough to keep seeing each other?
The question slowly becomes something more useful: Does this person actually fit the life I’m building?

That shift sounds small, but it changes how relationships develop. You move a little slower and pay attention to how someone handles disagreement, stress, and boundaries. You notice whether their values align with the direction your life is moving instead of simply enjoying the excitement of attraction. Dating becomes less about filling the quiet and more about observing compatibility. Attraction moves quickly, but compatibility takes time to reveal itself.

One practical way to do this is resisting the urge to accelerate the relationship too quickly. Spend time in normal environments instead of only romantic ones. Meet friends. See how each of you handles small frustrations, schedule changes, and everyday responsibilities. Those ordinary moments reveal far more about compatibility than grand gestures or intense early chemistry.

Approaching dating this way doesn’t mean being suspicious or overly analytical. It simply means allowing enough time for the real rhythms of life to show up. How someone handles stress, schedules, family obligations, and disappointment often tells you far more about long-term compatibility than early chemistry ever will.

Direction matters more than perfection

None of this means you have to become a perfectly healed version of yourself before dating again. In fact, using the excuse of needing perfection is one of the key ways I see guys avoid dating. It is almost always out of a fear of rejection and failure. It’s always best to take on the fear, use it to aim instead of retreat.

That direction matters.

You should at least be on the road toward the person you want to become and the life you want to build. If you are moving in that direction, dating can be a huge boon to the process. But if you are hoping a relationship will fix the parts of life you have not begun addressing yet, you are asking the relationship to carry more weight than it can.

That is where many second marriages quietly repeat the same patterns as the first, not because the partner was wrong, but because the fulcrum of your life never really changed. You are the fulcrum of your life. When that fulcrum shifts, everything connected to it begins shifting as well.

When your life begins to feel more stable and intentional, something interesting happens. Dating stops feeling urgent. It stops feeling like an escape from the quiet. It becomes a choice again. And that’s the difference between carrying triggers into a new relationship and carrying lessons.

Working with people over the years has given me the chance to watch many of them rebuild after divorce and eventually find relationships that truly fit the lives they’ve hoped and fought for. Seeing that process unfold has made the daunting task of middle-aged, post-divorce dating feel far more manageable.

As my therapist said, I’m “special, just like everyone else.” If that’s true, then so are you. And if I can learn to rebuild a life that actually fits me, there’s a good chance you can too.