David Dean Schwartz, L.S.W.
Men in our culture are just not raised to talk about feelings. Women are. Subsequently, most people in therapy—and most therapists—are female. Women find the process soothing and empowering, while men can sometimes find it awkward.
In my practice, I specialize in working with men, and that makes a huge difference. As men, our emotions are still central to our mental health, but we don’t come to therapy with a background that makes talking about it easy. I don’t expect men to come to therapy thinking, feeling, experiencing the world, or expressing themselves the way women do. I approach therapy with men on their own terms. Men’s emotional lives are deep and powerful—but asking men to begin exploring the same way women do is sometimes missing the mark. Instead, I begin with concrete, logical, problem solving approaches, and educate men about how their emotional lives (and those of people close to them) are linked to their own strategies and solutions.
In couples work, this approach can be unusually effective because it seeks to have each party understand the other on his or her own terms: Men can learn to hear and appreciate their partner’s feelings, and women can come to understand how engaged and caring their partners actually are—even when they don’t always express that in the way we expect them to. The result is that the couple begins to work from the same page, and they can approach their issues as a team, rather than as adversaries.
Men work differently...
...Therapy with men should too.
