Men’s Issues in Therapy: Why Depth Work Matters

"I don't really need therapy. I just need to figure out how to not feel so angry all the time."

This is how it starts. The reluctant phone call. The half-hearted admission that something isn't working. The hope that therapy might be like going to a mechanic - drop off the broken part, get it fixed, drive away unchanged.

But anger isn't the engine problem. It's the warning light.

The Emotional Exile

Most men arrive in therapy carrying decades of emotional exile. Not because they lack feelings, but because they learned early that certain feelings were incompatible with being a guy.

Sadness became weakness.

Fear became cowardice.

Tenderness became vulnerability that others could exploit.

The full spectrum of human emotion got compressed into a narrow band of acceptable responses: anger, achievement, humor, withdrawal.

This isn't pathology. It's adaptation.

Boys learn to survive boyhood by becoming legible to a culture that has very specific ideas about what masculinity should look like.

But survival strategies that work at eight don't serve at thirty-eight.

The Performance of Strength

Traditional masculinity operates on a simple premise: strength is everything, and strength means never needing anything from anyone.

So men learn to perform competence even when they feel lost. To project confidence even when they're terrified. To solve everyone else's problems while denying they have any of their own.

This performance becomes so automatic that many men lose touch with what lies beneath it. They mistake the mask for their face. The role for their identity.

Until something breaks. A relationship ends. A career implodes. The body rebels. Depression settles in like fog that won't lift.

And suddenly, the strategies that once felt like power reveal themselves as prisons.

The Intimacy Paradox

Men often struggle with a cruel contradiction: they crave deep connection while being systematically trained to avoid the vulnerability that makes connection possible.

They want to be known but have spent years making themselves unknowable - even to themselves. They want to be loved for who they are but aren't sure who they are beneath what they do.

This shows up in relationships as emotional distance disguised as strength. As the inability to name what they're feeling. As the tendency to intellectualize rather than feel, to fix rather than witness, to withdraw rather than engage.

Their partners often describe feeling like they're in relationship with a performance rather than a person. Like they're getting the resume version instead of the human one.

The Father Wound

Many men carry what Robert Bly called "the father wound" - not necessarily because their fathers were absent or abusive, but because they received an incomplete transmission of what it means to be a man.

They learned to be providers but not partners. Protectors but not participants. Strong but not sensitive. Successful but not satisfied.

The father wound shows up as the voice that says:

• "Real men don't cry."

• "Asking for help is giving up."

• "Your worth is what you produce."

• "Love is something you earn, not something you are."

These messages weren't delivered with malice. They were passed down from fathers who received the same incomplete instructions, who were doing their best with tools that had been handed to them by men who also learned to survive by cutting themselves off from their own depth.

The Addiction to Fixing

Men are often socialized to be problem-solvers. When something's wrong, you identify the issue and fix it. This approach works well for broken appliances, and project management.

It works terribly for emotional life.

Feelings aren't problems to be solved. They're information to be felt. Relationships aren't projects to be completed. They're ongoing dances of intimacy and autonomy.

But many men enter therapy hoping for a more sophisticated version of the same approach: "Tell me what's wrong with me, and how to fix it."

The invitation of depth work is different: "Let's explore what it's like to be you. What it costs to maintain the version of yourself you think you're supposed to be. What you've had to exile in order to belong."

The Underground Life

Beneath the performance of strength lives what James Hollis calls "the underground life" - all the parts of a man that don't fit the acceptable masculine template.

The part that feels overwhelmed by responsibility. The part that wants to be taken care of sometimes. The part that grieves what was lost in the process of becoming acceptable.

The part that's tired of being strong. The part that wants permission to not know. The part that longs to be seen for his tenderness, not just his competence.

This underground life doesn't disappear because it's ignored. It finds expression through symptoms: the affairs that sabotage good marriages, the rage that feels disproportionate to the trigger, the numbness that alcohol temporarily relieves, the depression that arrives like a visitation from nowhere.

The Descent: Why Surface Solutions Don't Work

Most approaches to men's mental health focus on symptom management: anger management for rage, communication skills for relationship problems, stress reduction for anxiety.

These interventions can be helpful. But they often address the branches while leaving the root system intact.

Depth work asks a different question: not "How do we fix this behavior?" but "What is this behavior trying to communicate? What unmet need is it attempting to serve? What part of you has been exiled that's trying to return?"

This requires descent. Moving below the level of conscious strategy and rational explanation into the emotional underground where the real architecture of a life gets revealed.

The Therapeutic Relationship as Practice Ground

For many men, the therapeutic relationship becomes the first place they've ever been invited to bring their whole selves - the competent parts and the confused parts, the strong parts and the scared parts.

This can feel terrifying initially. Men often experience early therapy sessions as foreign territory where the usual rules don't apply. Where not knowing is acceptable. Where feelings are treated as valuable information rather than problems to be eliminated.

The therapist becomes a witness to parts of the man that may have never been witnessed before. The part that feels like a fraud despite external success. The part that's angry at having to carry so much responsibility. The part that's grieving the father who was physically present but emotionally absent.

Reclaiming the Exiled Parts

The work isn't about becoming less masculine. It's about expanding what masculinity can include.

It's about reclaiming the capacity for tenderness without losing strength. Developing the ability to be vulnerable without becoming passive. Learning to receive care without feeling diminished.

This requires grieving what was sacrificed in the name of becoming acceptable. The boy who was told his emotions were too much. The teenager who learned that expressing fear was social suicide. The young man who discovered that needing support was interpreted as weakness.

The grief is necessary. You can't reclaim what you won't mourn.

The Integration: Strength and Softness

The goal isn't to replace traditional masculine qualities with their opposites. It's to integrate them with the full spectrum of human experience.

Strength that can hold both power and vulnerability. Leadership that includes the wisdom to not know. Protectiveness that doesn't require emotional armor. Competence that can coexist with the acknowledgment of limits.

This integrated masculinity doesn't diminish men. It enlarges them. It allows them to be human rather than heroic. Present rather than performing. Connected rather than isolated.

The Ripple Effect

When men do this work, the impact extends far beyond their individual healing. Their relationships deepen. Their children receive a different template of what it means to be human. Their friendships move beyond competition and performance toward genuine intimacy.

They become models of a different kind of strength - one that includes rather than excludes, that holds space rather than taking up space, that can be both powerful and tender.

This isn't just personal transformation. It's cultural healing. Because the culture that teaches boys to exile their emotions is the same culture that struggles with epidemic levels of male suicide, domestic violence, and emotional isolation.

The Courage to Descend

The invitation isn't comfortable. Depth work asks men to abandon the strategies that have kept them safe and successful. To risk being seen as weak by exploring their vulnerability. To question the very definitions of strength they've organized their lives around.

But the alternative - continuing to live in emotional exile, maintaining relationships from behind a performance, achieving success while feeling empty - is a different kind of death.

The courage to descend is also the courage to ascend. To emerge from the underground life with more of themselves intact. To discover that their deepest strength comes not from what they can endure alone, but from what they can share in connection.

Because the world doesn't need more men who can suffer in silence. It needs more men who can feel deeply, love openly, and lead from a place of integrated wholeness.

The work is hard. The rewards are revolutionary.

Not just for the men who do it, but for everyone whose life they touch.