Men In Therapy: Overcoming Avoidance

Men In Therapy: Overcoming Avoidance

Most people can relate with an urge at some point in life to want to break free, sail away on a boat, abruptly drive away and move to a new city or just find a way to leave our life behind and start fresh. This whim doesn’t last long because we soon realize two things: we would be leaving the connections we have behind and our life may be largely the same wherever we are.

We all have defenses, which help us avoid emotional pain

What many don’t realize is that we have learned to mentally or emotionally escape on a small scale every day. We all have developed defenses against emotional pain. Like a suit of armor, our emotional defenses protect us from being exposed and vulnerable to emotional harm. Anna Freud, a psychoanalyst, described many defense mechanisms in detail, such as denial, repression, displacement and intellectualization. The defense mechanisms that we use represent the ways in which we’ve consciously or unconsciously learned how to cope with difficult emotions. We also have experiences throughout our childhoods and beyond, which teach us lessons about ourselves or about what is and what is not acceptable. Our defenses help us keep what is unacceptable out of plain sight.

One of the tasks, although it may not be a specific goal, in psychotherapy is to learn about how we defend ourselves and what effect our defenses have on another person. One defense that I experience often with my male clients in particular is repression, or disavowing their own emotional experiences, which stems from messages they received during childhood from parents, teachers, coaches, peers and society as a whole. This phenomenon can be intensified when an individual has grown up in an invalidating household and has one or both parents that “parentify” the child, meaning that the parent or parents behave like a child and treat their child like the parent. This results in the parent being not attuned to the child’s emotional experience or being overly reliant on him for emotional support.  It is also important to note that this phenomenon can apply equally to both heterosexual and gay men.

Disconnection from emotions can foster relationship difficulties

As adults, these men are often professionally successful, but they may be overly reliant on their intellect and disconnected from their emotions. Alternatively, they may only experience a single emotion frequently, like anger or shame. It is likely that they will come to therapy with kind of an emotional numbness or detachment, a low level of chronic dissatisfaction and/or difficulties in their relationships.

When we cut ourselves off from unpleasant emotions, we also cut ourselves off from the more palatable emotions. The science of love and attachment teaches us that the way we connect with others is through emotions, and so naturally, a person who is disconnected from their emotional experience will have difficulty in romantic relationships as well as other types of relationships. In their relationships, these men can be overly responsible and do their best (to their own detriment) to avoid disappointing their partners. They may not be aware of their own needs or expectations or they may minimize them in order to avoid a potential conflict. As conflict is inevitable in relationships, they ultimately will disappoint their partners, which will frustrate them and also leave them feeling inadequate, which will lead to acting out in anger or their withdrawal.

Therapy can help men lead more authentic lives and improve relationships

The work in therapy is to identify anger, sadness and shameful feelings as they arise and learn to accept these feelings, but also to recognize that they are part of a pattern that was created a long time ago. Once the pattern is acknowledged, one can begin to accept feedback from his partner and sit in the discomfort of not living up to his own expectations. From there, a man can reconnect with his own desires and learn how to express his relationship expectations from moment-to-moment. This is a process that can be uncomfortable.  It can also take some time; however, I have seen dramatic changes in my clients over the course of only a few months.

This seems to be a worthy investment for something that will ultimately result in more satisfying and meaningful relationships. If you are a male that lives in the Nashville area and you would like to engage in such a process, please contact us at clientcare@nashvillepsych.com or 615-582-2882.

Take good care,

Dan