The Truth About Men and Couples Therapy

It’s becoming more and more normal for men to go to therapy. Take celebs like Michael B. Jordan, Michael Phelps, Jay-Z,or Brett Eldredge, who have all spoken out about the positive impact of therapy on their lives. While the most recent nationwide data from 2020 found that only 15% of men reported receiving therapy or psychotropic medication in the past year, compared to 26% of women, that number has been slowly but steadily climbing.

Are guys also warming up to couples therapy? While we don’t have hard stats, anecdotally, it seems they still have a lot of reservations. “In my experience, it's the woman who reaches out for couples therapy the vast majority of the time,” says Shane Birkel, LMFT, host of The Couples Therapist Couch podcast.

Reddit threads are helpful for revealing the thinking behind this skepticism. Take this post that compares being in couples therapy as a man with trying to keep up with a conversation in a foreign language:

Obviously, that’s far from an ideal experience. How can we make couples therapy more appealing to and satisfying for men?

We scheduled a Q&A with Birkel to find out. Below, he shares insights into why couples therapy can be daunting, how a skilled therapist can dispel fears that therapy is biased against men, and the rewards that guys stand to gain if they decide to give couples therapy (with a well-trained and experienced clinician) a try.

Because of the way we're socialized in this patriarchal society, women often have more of a capacity than men to feel strong emotions, to connect with their own emotional experience, and to express those emotions.

Men, on the other hand, can sometimes find emotional conversations overwhelming and stressful—they may perceive them as a form of conflict—so they prefer to avoid them. Of course, this is a generalization. There are men who are emotionally intelligent and won’t relate to this perspective at all.

On the whole, people who were raised to be “masculine” are typically encouraged to disconnect from their emotions. This happens in different ways from a young age. There are a lot of influences that convey to boys that they're not allowed to feel hurt or afraid or vulnerable.

Often, it’s not something that parents even realize that they're communicating to their children. If a boy gets bullied at school and he comes home and the parents are like, don't worry, just tough it out, you'll be fine. They have good intentions, but the message is that “If you have emotions, you should just keep that to yourself or learn how to deal with it.”

So one of the biggest things that boys learn is that if there's a problem, don’t talk about it, just fix it. This is a huge problem when they grow up and are in relationships, when their partner wants to have an emotional conversation or go to therapy, and they just want to jump to a solution.

Right, often a male partner will go into a self-protective mode very quickly. So if their partner says, “I'm feeling hurt about what happened yesterday,” they might try to correct you by saying “You shouldn't feel hurt because I didn't mean to make you feel bad,” or they might defend themselves by saying “Don't you understand how busy I was? I didn't have time to take the trash out,” or even say something like, “I don't like the way you're talking to me,” to turn things around on their partner.

Well, another aspect of this that’s worth talking about is that men's self-esteem is often based on their performance. This is also something that's socialized. They are taught to believe “I'm enough and I matter in the world as long as I can play sports well, or as long as I'm getting good grades, or as long as I'm successful, or as long as I'm making enough money, or as long as I'm making my partner happy.”

So if my partner says, “Hey, you forgot to take the trash out,” that can lead to a man getting defensive and protective because they're feeling ashamed of their performance. “What's wrong with me as a person? What's wrong with me as a husband, as a partner, as a father, perhaps, that my partner is communicating that I'm not living up to what they need as a partner?” That shame, and the reluctance to face it head on, is often at the heart of male defensiveness.

One positive outcome of therapy for men is discovering what they authentically want. This goes back to the fact that many men have been socialized to disconnect from their emotions from a young age. Our emotions are part of our identity. We have our physical self, we have our emotional self, we have our sexual self, we have our psychological self. And so when you are disconnected from this huge part of who you are, your emotional self, you can have a hard time knowing what you authentically want.

Men are often sold a lie—especially if they're very influenced by society—that if you get good grades, if you get a good job, if you make good money, if you are successful, maybe even if you're nice to other people, then you will be happy. You’ll get the white picket fence and the wife that loves you and the kids and the dog and whatever else.

And I think what happens is that men follow the rules and then they find themselves in the situation that they created, that they thought they wanted, and they don't know why they're incredibly depressed and unhappy.

Coming to therapy, one of the things that we can do is reconnect men to their authentic emotional self. And help them figure out what they authentically want vs. doing what they have learned they are supposed to do.

As therapists, I think we can connect with each partner's experience equally. Typically, one person is saying, “Here's my perspective,” and the other person is saying “Here's mine.” And then it's almost like they want the therapist to make a choice — who's right or who's wrong here? Therapists know that there is no right or wrong. Each perspective is valid and important.

And so a good therapist can make each person feel heard, seen, and understood. One of the things that I make sure to do is give both people the sense of having a voice about their own authentic reality, even if they're afraid of hurting the other person's feelings. I want them to know that they're not doing anything wrong by expressing their true reality, provided they're doing it from a place of respect and speaking from the first person. And there are a lot of communication strategies that we can use to make sure that people are using nonviolent communication that isn't blaming or criticizing or nagging the other person.

Often, but not always, I will go into that person’s family of origin really quickly because I want to move into compassion for them, and I want them to move into compassion for themselves.

So, for example, if there’s some aspect of his behavior that’s problematic in the relationship, my goal might be to see if we can find out if and how this behavior might have been modeled for him. It’s likely to have been at an age when he didn’t have much power or control. We’ll talk about how this modelled behavior may have impacted him and how hard it might have been to deal with. And so we can start to move into a more vulnerable conversation that's no longer about what he’s doing wrong, but rather something that he went through. And now he can feel validated for what he was feeling while also realizing that, now that he’s an adult, he can choose whether he wants to continue with that behavior.

I'm not pressuring him. I'm not judging him. I’m simply asking what he wants to do and if he wants help getting there.

I'm always trying to be transparent with the people I work with. I will say, ‘“I see that you're having a lot of emotions coming up. Let's pause with this for a moment. Let's just breathe, take a deep breath. This is part of the healing process. This is part of what's going to create change for you and help you grow.” I want them to understand that there are reasons why we're doing this. Part of the problem in our society is that anytime somebody feels uncomfortable, we tell people, “You should fix it. You should take a pill to feel better or you should avoid whatever's uncomfortable.” And I think it's not always a helpful thing to do.

So before changing tactics, I might ask myself, “Will making them feel more comfortable lead them to health? Or am I making them feel comfortable by saving them from their own emotions?” Which maybe just what everyone else in their life is doing — tiptoeing around their bad behavior.

I have to ask myself as a therapist, “Am I letting someone off the hook?” If we're going into some really deep emotional stuff, do I have the capacity to sit with that if it's going to lead to something healthy? Leaning into the discomfort can be a really valuable exercise.

Here’s another generalization that's often, but not always true: Female partners may need to feel emotional connection in order to feel safe and be sexual. And male partners often want to be sexual in order to feel emotional connection. So there's this stuckness that often happens for a lot of couples. And it's not about right or wrong. The emotional connection isn’t more important than the sexual connection and vice versa. It’s more of moving into understanding and compassion, right?

I think that one thing that men often do is they externalize the problem, right? “If my partner would just have sex with me, then I'd feel okay in my life. Then I'd be happy.” But it's disempowering to be waiting for someone else to do something in order for you to feel okay. So if I'm working with a partner who wants more sex in their relationship, I'm much more interested in understanding or moving them into personal empowerment.

I might say, “Look, I'm sorry and I get it. I want you to have more sex in your relationship, too. But a good way to make your partner completely uninterested in sex is to pressure them or continue to complain about it or make them feel bad about it. That creates this psychological dynamic that makes it worse and worse.”

And so to move them into empowerment, I want to talk about the feelings that come up when they initiate sex and their partner says no — feelings of rejection, feelings of disconnection, feelings of fear. I might say, “That's perfectly valid. What I would suggest is that you learn how to take a deep breath and ask yourself ‘why am I feeling so rejected?’ Why is this so important to me? What's going on inside of me? What experiences have I had in my life that taught me that my partner needs to have sex with me in order for me to feel valuable or emotionally connected or loved? Why is that what is coming up for me?’”

When you do that, it helps to de-center the sex. Because if you haven't been in a relationship for a year and haven’t been having sex in that time, you may not be stressing about it. You may wish you were having more sex, but you’re probably not feeling rejected or hurt. So it’s not really the sex as much as it is the story you tell yourself about why it matters.

I think that goes back to the foundation of our conversation today, which is that men in particular often have a hard time understanding that there are usually deeper emotions underlying their relationship issues. And that examining those emotions and what’s at the root of them can empower them to not just change how they feel, but also to connect with and achieve what they truly, authentically want in their life.

If your relationship is generally in a good place but you want it to be better, it’s best to suggest therapy in the form of a humble request. Think along the lines of “I love you so much, but I’m struggling with something / want more in our relationship and I’m wondering if you'd be open to going to couple’s therapy. It would make me feel loved if you would do this with me.”

If you’re on the verge of leaving the relationship, it’s important to start this process from an honest and authentic place. So that might sound like “I want this relationship, but I don’t see it continuing without support. We can go to therapy or we can end it.” Reading this might make you cringe, but the truth is a gift that will allow your partner to make an informed decision about their own future.