Men in Therapy: Dismantling the Myth That Asking for Help Is Weakness
Men are significantly less likely than women to seek mental health support, and the reasons for this disparity are not mysterious: most men have absorbed, at a very young age, a set of messages about what strength looks like and what weakness is. Asking for help falls on the wrong side of that line. Talking about emotional experience, particularly with a stranger whose job is to be curious about it, can feel not only unfamiliar but actively threatening to the self-concept that has been built over a lifetime. And so many men carry their difficulties privately, managing them through work, through physical exertion, through humor, through alcohol, or through a gradual emotional withdrawal from the people closest to them. They do not go to therapy. They adjust their expectations of themselves and of life, and they get quieter. As a therapist in Hidden Hills and Calabasas who has worked with men across all stages of life for over forty years, I want to speak directly to that pattern and to what lies on the other side of it.
What Men Are Actually Carrying
The men I work with in therapy are not, in any meaningful sense, less emotionally complex than the women I work with. They feel grief, fear, shame, loneliness, and love with the same depth and intensity. What is different is the degree to which they have been trained, consistently and from an early age, to neither express nor in some cases even consciously acknowledge those experiences. The emotional vocabulary is often smaller, not because the emotion is absent but because the language for it was never developed. And the consequences of that suppression accumulate over time in ways that the person often does not fully connect to their emotional life: physical tension, difficulty sleeping, chronic low-grade irritability, distance in relationships, a sense of purposelessness that cannot quite be named.
Many men who come to therapy come because of external pressure: a partner who has said clearly that something has to change, a professional crisis that cannot be attributed to external circumstances alone, or a health scare that has forced an honest confrontation with how they have been living. Others come because something has worn through the habits of containment that have served them for years, a loss that cannot be managed around, a relationship they cannot afford to lose, a recognition that the person they are presenting to the world is increasingly different from whatever is happening inside. Both routes are legitimate. Both can be the beginning of meaningful change.
What Therapy Actually Looks Like for Men
A persistent misconception about therapy is that it consists primarily of lying on a couch and talking about feelings in abstract terms for years on end. This is not what most effective therapy looks like, and it is not what therapy with me looks like. The work tends to be direct, practical, and anchored in the specific circumstances of a person’s actual life. We talk about what is not working and why. We examine the patterns that keep producing the same outcomes. We develop concrete understanding and, where relevant, concrete strategies. Insight without application is not particularly useful, and most of the men I work with have no patience for it.
What does develop over time, usually without being the explicit focus, is a richer and more tolerable relationship with the interior life. Men who come in unable to identify what they are feeling beyond “fine” or “stressed” gradually develop more precision and more range. Not because they have become more sentimental, but because they have built more capacity, and that capacity turns out to be useful in the situations that matter most: their partnerships, their parenting, their ability to navigate difficulty without it dismantling them.
The Reframe That Changes Things
The men who do the best work in therapy are often the ones who eventually arrive at a particular reframe: that seeking support is not a capitulation to weakness but an extension of the same problem-solving orientation that has made them effective in other domains. When something is not working in a business, you do not simply push harder and hope. You get information, you consult people with relevant expertise, you adjust your approach based on what you learn. The internal and relational dimensions of life are not different in their logic. They simply require a different kind of expertise and a different kind of attention.
Asking for help is not the admission of failure. In the men I have worked with over four decades, it is almost always the beginning of a more honest and more functional life. The strength it takes to walk through that door, to be willing to look clearly at what is not working and to genuinely engage with changing it, is not small. It is, in fact, the kind of strength that most of the cultural messaging about masculinity has never given men credit for possessing.
Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with over forty years of experience providing therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, and across the Greater Los Angeles area, in person and via secure telehealth for California residents.
Ready to Begin?
Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, offers compassionate therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Malibu, Agoura Hills, and throughout the Greater Los Angeles area, with secure telehealth available for all California residents.
📞 (818) 618-4762
✉️ Susie@susierome.com
📍 24933 Kit Carson Rd, Hidden Hills, CA 91302
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