What Men Don’t Talk About

Emotionally, it is more difficult for men to live in this world than for women: there are too many social prohibitions and attitudes. Men do not cry — men are upset, as the hero of the film «Aty-bats, there were soldiers» said. They can’t ask for help. You can’t suffer from unrequited love. You can’t be offended. Of the socially approved emotions, only anger remains for them, when it is allowed to get angry and splash out aggression.

“Men are brought up with more restrictions and demands than women,” says family therapist Maria Dyachkova. “They don’t have the option to ask for support. It is not written in their DNA that someone can help them, listen, not judge, accept their different feelings, will not laugh at their tears.”

As a rule, the main source of conflicts is the family. And what kind of understanding can be found in the family, if there are interested parties?

“Home members cannot give support in the way that it is now important for him to receive it. For example, he needs to express his anger, but for his family it can look like a disaster.”

The office of a psychologist for a representative of the stronger sex is often the only island of safety. But here, for a man, everything is not so simple. Often he is not ready to trust right away and lay out his problem directly. And he comes in from around the corner.

«Make sure your son studies well»

It is not uncommon for men to explore first through group therapy or training. To begin with, the least painful, socially permitted topics are selected: money, success. How to earn more, how to become more powerful, how to turn into an alpha male and get numerous fans? That is, how to become an even greater conqueror, without weaknesses and problems.

If they are revealed to the group, then not at the first session, but towards the end. Or they don’t open up at all and, having looked closely at the leader and “this psychology”, they decide on personal therapy, where they bring what they cannot share with anyone else. And even in personal therapy, a man is rarely ready to immediately admit his own problems.

There are two main options for a male approach from around the corner. In the first variant, he brings to the reception relatives who, in his opinion, have difficulties in life (“I am here for the sake of my son or wife, help her, but everything is fine with me.”) But it often happens that relatives end up staying behind. board, and the man himself begins to work actively, discovering and realizing a lot of new things about himself.

In the second option, a man brings a topic that lies on the surface, and then, in the process of competent therapy, goes to deep requests.

“One of my clients came with a request to inspire his son to study. It was a junior schoolboy who, according to his father, had fallen into bad grades — fours. My task was to turn the situation to him «face» and help to understand where this tough demand came from.

It turned out that he himself was set a high standard in childhood: you must study well, then we love you, we accept you. He became an adult, moreover, a loving father of many children. And the only thing he could pass on to his children was the ability to be the first in everything, to be strong and successful, otherwise this world would not accept you.

People are prone to projections — this is a protective mechanism of the psyche, when the internal is mistakenly perceived as external. It is easier for them not to see the beam in their own eye, but to notice the specks in others. Quite quickly, the client realized that he was “healing” in his son what he was struggling with in himself.

“When the boy approached the moment of a turning point, the father had to choose: either let him play out in childhood, or ahead of time make an “adult responsible man” out of the child. At that moment, something in his heart skipped a beat, and he went to a psychologist because he didn’t know how to deal with it.”

And no one in his environment could help him then: neither his wife, who calmly treated the four children, nor the mother who raised him in the setting “the most important thing is social achievements.”

In working with a psychologist, the man managed to find out what was so “font” to him from his own childhood, and began to show love for children in a different way.

Get out of the triangle and find yourself

Among client stories, there are often so-called “triangulated relationships” — triangles where someone else is drawn in: a couple plus a lover or lover, a conflicting couple plus a child who “sticks them together” with good behavior and success or illness.

“You can hear from them:“ I will send my mistress to you, she needs it more. But if you find a competent approach and build the right strategy, then it is precisely such a contingent that begins to work well, and they no longer have time for wives and mistresses — they save themselves and their lives. They stay for the second and subsequent sessions and make many interesting discoveries about themselves.”

One day, a desperate husband came to Maria Dyachkova, whose request sounded like this: “My wife has a lover. Help her figure it out and choose me.» He even managed to bring his wife for a consultation twice.

“But the longer we worked with him, the more it became clear that the couple had no future. There are betrayals aimed, oddly enough, at strengthening relations — there is betrayal as a signal “SOS!”. And there are betrayals, the purpose of which is to provoke and catalyze the separation.

His wife quickly left him for a new relationship. When he was left alone, he met with his own vacuum. It turned out that his partner filled the holes in his soul and compensated for the lack of fulfillment of her husband and the emptiness in his life.

The most important fruit of his work was in creating and maintaining afloat their relationship. This woman was bright, «starry». She seemed to live for two and eventually got tired of the overwhelming load. In working with a psychotherapist, the priority task was to help the client realize this and find himself, filling his life with his own meaning and joy.

Sometimes men «bring» into a new relationship a third extra from a previous marriage or their life in the parental family.

“There is such a thing as reactive marriage (a reaction to suffering). When a partner has not yet experienced the drama in a past relationship and urgently marries to replace difficult experiences. Let’s say his wife left him. Or he had a hard time with his mother, father or stepfather. Often in such a situation, a person rushes into a new relationship and expects that the partner will save him from long-standing pain or resentment.

Or he marries out of spite, without love, and often takes revenge on his second wife: he rejects her love, makes him earn his good disposition, thereby taking out his anger on the first. As a rule, such an alliance is doomed.

What’s with the mother?

Often men do not see the connection between the events of their adult life and those that happened to them in childhood (women in this sense draw parallels more easily). They consider the current drama separately, as an isolated case, not noticing and even displacing the previous experience.

“They will never connect the recent strong love shock, lack of money, depression, oncology, infertility with childhood traumas. But the psychological process does not have a break, and it is important for us in our work to discover this connection and analyze a case from the past in order to reduce its consequences in the present and future.”

How can a man understand that there is a “splinter” in his life from the past that still hurts?

If there are situations and reactions that repeat from time to time, then it is worth dealing with the root cause, Maria Dyachkova believes. One of her clients, being handsome and successful at work, admitted that he was afraid to stay in bed with women.

“In the work, we found out that he grew up in a large family. There were few sleeping places in the house, and one had to sleep in twos or even threes. When he was in infancy, his parents put him with them. And when a child happened to wet the bed, he was punished. After 20 years, he is still afraid of not holding on and lives all this time on the hook of shame. For him, the bed is a place of punishment.”

To admit this, not only to friends and relatives, but even to himself, the man was ashamed and hurt. He did not connect the first event with the second and did not admit that punishment for an absolutely natural process for early childhood could affect his relationship in the future. For him it was a revelation.

Psychotherapy helped to highlight a dark spot in the past, work with childhood trauma and gradually remove fear in the present.

There are many such examples when an adult man forces out shame, despair, powerlessness, loss from childhood. But there are very few who dare to seek help from specialists.

One of Maria Dyachkova’s clients came to her with a food addiction. His usual lunch or dinner consisted of at least four courses, and for dessert there was cake: whole, not even cut into pieces.

It turned out that the mother, who was often absent from home, did not cook at all and fed the boy literally what she had to: sometimes he was forced to eat leftovers and slops. The only «ray of light» in his childhood was the cake that his mother brought once a year for the child’s birthday.

And now the cake brought him back to the feeling that his mother was there, the same mother who had ignored her son and his needs all through childhood, who had never been there for him.

Parents often dictate rules to us even when we are already growing up. One of the clients wanted to earn more, as he was sorely lacking money for himself and his desires. At the training, he received tools that he quickly applied, earning an impressive amount. But how did he manage it?

He bought an expensive car and gave it to his mother, who had been sad for many years after her divorce from his father. He didn’t have any money for himself.

“In fact, he has become a donor for an adult: he revives, entertains the mother, does not allow her to meet her feelings and be responsible for herself. He is still a good boy for her, deserving of love. In order for money to appear in his life for himself, he, oddly enough, must sort out his relationship with his mother.

It is difficult for men to come to terms with the fact that they can experience feelings that are considered feminine in society: vulnerability, sensitivity, sentimentality, amorousness, softness.

That they can, like women, experience “bad” emotions and express them. And it is not at all necessary to hide behind brutality and logic.

The task of a psychotherapist is to help a man open up, first of all to himself, to accept all his feelings and honestly admit his imperfection, the right to be an imperfect husband, father, son.