You are listening to Take Out Therapy, speedy sessions for everyday problems. This is your host, Rebecca Hunter. In my role as a private practice therapist, I don't really just tell people what to do, but in this podcast, I'm doing things differently.
In the next few minutes, I'm just going to be straight up with you about what to do in certain situations. Keep listening for awesome tips on how to live a more intentional and less reactive life. Clearly, this is not a substitute for therapy, but I guarantee it might help you.
Listen up. Hello, my friends. Thank you for joining me again today as I dig into part two of a series on men's mental health.
I think it's important that we start to recognize that mental health is not a women's issue. It's a human issue. The world that we're living in is not set up for what we have to handle right now for women or for men.
Men have an entirely different set of problems than women do, and also their problems are the same. You know, we're humans. We're all trying to connect, so whether you're a man or a woman, that's what you want.
You want to be able to be yourself with other people, with other humans, with the people that you love. So today, let's take a deeper dive into men and how they deal with things differently than women do, and what we can do as women to better connect and heal with each other. Because here's the deal.
Women get super pissed off at guys when they don't engage in connection. And please understand that part of connection is conflict the same way that we do. And this complete lack of understanding leads to disconnection, which I'll just tell you, no one wants disconnection.
Men are conditioned by our culture and taught totally different ways to connect. They're taught appropriately different ways to connect. And I think, you know, I like to think that some of these stereotypes are going away, as is much of the gender roles that we hold in society.
But it's not gone yet. And so I think kind of bringing men and women together into this conversation will be really helpful in order to dissolve some of this BS about how men are and how women are. Like, let's try to understand each other.
I have to say, I'm a 47-year-old married woman. I was raised in the 1970s, as was my husband. And in the 1970s, and I think this is true for the 1980s as well, we were raised with very strict gender stereotypes.
And yes, our society is pulling out of some of those gender stereotypes. It's slow and steady. I'm really hoping that my men, my boys that I have raised, don't have to put up with some of the garbage that my husband has had to put up with as a man.
And I'm hoping that today's young men aren't going to have to carry all of the emotional burden for everyone in their life. Because a lot of men were taught to just deal with it. And they stuff emotion, and they leave stuff in.
And I'll tell you, like, life is really hard, and everybody has emotion. And so if you don't express it, here's the deal. It stays in you.
It's not going anywhere. It's just all stuck up in there. And that's what a lot of men are faced with.
And I have to tell you that that is incredibly heavy. It is incredibly burdensome and difficult and unfair. So, you know, the role of man in terms of, like, a person's identity, I tell you, I wouldn't want it.
It's heavy. It's hard. It's a lot of responsibility.
And frankly, it's a lot of BS. So yeah, let's start talking about this. One thing I wanted to talk about today is conflict.
Men and women do not behave the same way in conflict. Have you noticed? There's a beautiful book out on, well, it's not on conflict. It's on relationships in general that I highly recommend to any person who wants to be in a functional relationship and understand relationships.
But it's called Hold Me Tight, and it's by Sue Johnson. It's one of the most classic books on relationship that's ever been written. And the book is basically about the dances that we do as partners and how we fulfill these kind of classic roles.
And she actually doesn't always talk about them in terms of gender, but these dances that we do do oftentimes follow gender lines in stereotypical heterosexual relationships. Basically, like if we have a conflict, men tend to withdraw and shut down, which makes women come after them with the vengeance. They tend to attack, right? They tend to try to get that connection back through interaction.
And men are kind of like, I don't want to interact because you're not being nice. So the dance begins. Do you have this dynamic in your house where we have a conflict and then one person totally withdraws and the other person tries to get the other person to engage in the conflict? Men leave, they shut down, they bail out, right? Because just like women, they have feelings about things.
And the feelings are incredibly tender and difficult and hard to express. And men aren't always super versed on how to do that. And so when they're not really well versed on how to do that, they just kind of bail, right? How do we have a productive argument, you might ask? Well, first of all, it's really important for both genders to listen to the other person without being defensive, without kind of planning their response in advance of somebody stopping the sentence, right? But rather just listen and try to have understanding and compassion and empathy for how the other person feels.
Even if it's like a totally foreign concept, like you're like, I have no, you know, sort of idea why you would feel that way or why you would even think that. Just taking another person at their word is so incredibly validating. That is a nice way to have a productive argument.
So if you have an argument with a man who tends to shut down, the worst possible way you can handle it is trying to get him to come out of his shell. The best possible way you can handle it is in multiple conversations that are not passive, aggressive or aggressive, but rather you have to try to create a safe space for each other. And I think, you know, I am talking about men and I'm trying to pave a little bit of a way for men to be able to have their own mental health journey.
And so I know like I'm having a conversation that's very gender biased. And so I just want to acknowledge that for you and help you to understand that I'm kind of doing that on purpose for a specific reason. But please know that some of this feedback and information will span the genders, right? Because I know plenty of women who are the person that shut down and the man is the person who's chasing.
And so, yeah, just, you know, the way to have a productive argument is just to slow everything down, to be reflective and to help people express themselves, meaning asking open-ended questions. Is there anything else you want to say about that, right? Before you respond with what you think and what you feel and what you'd really appreciate the other person thinking and feeling, it's very nice to listen and reflect and ask further questions. You know, one thing that I hear a lot from women in the therapy office is men are very defensive.
And that's true. People are really defensive, not just men, but people are very defensive because we generally don't like, this is what John always tells me, people don't like being told what to do. Like adults don't like being bossed around or told what to do.
And I agree with him. I accidentally do that sometimes. Sorry.
I can be a little bit bossy. I can be like, well, this is how you should deal with this. So this is what you should say to me.
You know, and my feedback on this is like, no, that's not okay, right? We should always look at conflict as a way to get more information from each other. So if we look at conflict as a bad thing and there's a winner and a loser, everybody loses and nobody wins and we don't really get a lot of information. So if we look at a conflict and we understand that men sometimes have a really hard time expressing emotion because they've been taught that that's not really a thing and they don't have a ton of practice at it, we're going to be disappointed.
Does that make sense? So we have to make room for a slow process of learning. The other thing I talk about a lot in the therapy office is this need that men have for physical connection, whereas women have more of a need for emotional connection. So both kinds of connection are incredibly valid.
And there's a reason that many men need physical connection because emotional connection is really, really hard for men sometimes. And physical connection is quite pleasurable, right? And if connection can be a deep conversation that's difficult or a pleasurable physical experience, what would you pick? Most women I know would say, I'd pick a deep conversation any day of the week. And that is such a result of our cultural conditioning, right? Women are conditioned to have an understanding that men want something from us.
And men are conditioned to understand that women are very emotional, right? And so we're all trying to figure out how to connect with each other in a way that makes sense for both of us. We both need both, my friends. We all need all of it.
What would be really helpful is having more conversation about both things. About physical connection, we could have conversation about that. And about emotional connection, we can have conversation about that too.
I think it's really important to point out in this discussion that men do not exhibit the same kinds of symptoms sometimes as women do around depression and anxiety. Men tend to internalize, whereas women tend to externalize. Men do not often feel, well, they're not practiced or cultured to emit emotion, meaning they're not big criers.
So men resort to anger and aggression over kind of going fetal and crying. So depression and anxiety look really different for men and women. Men tend to get very withdrawn in times of anxiety, whereas women, you know, we are very emoting.
We're snappish. We can be kind of, you know, we can be kind of irritable and expect a lot from the people around us. And we get kind of bossy, whereas men kind of just go quiet.
And many men get very angry and aggressive. And that is kind of how they get emotional space, because frankly, nobody wants to be around an angry person, right? It's a good way to kind of get into an isolated mode. So just so you know, like, we don't really experience everything the same because of how we're culturally trained to be in our gender roles.
So make room for some of that. Like, if your partner is a male and he is depressed, he's probably not going to act in a way that you always understand is kind of the point here. Men have more trouble with substance use than women do.
So that's another thing that comes up a lot, is that there's more binge drinking, there's more alcoholism and drug use in men than there is in women. Men who are depressed or anxious tend to lose interest in their work, in their family, in their usual duties and activities. You know, a lot of men are just sitting in a pressure cooker.
And so if they get depressed or anxious, like, they just kind of bail out. And that is totally understandable. But women don't make room for that.
They don't understand it. They get mad and they get frustrated and they're like scratching their heads going, what the hell's going on with you? So I tell you all of these things because I think it's important that we just take some time to understand that, frankly, like, we've all been very trained to be a certain way emotionally. And we lack understanding for each other.
And it's very frustrating that we're not the same is kind of the point. And I think it's very beautiful that we're not the same. I think that, you know, in a good relationship, we can learn a lot about different ways of handling emotion and different ways of helping each other heal.
And the way that we do that is we create an emotionally safe environment. So any man that feels emotionally safe will express emotion, frankly. But if there's not safety there, if there's judgment or impatience or anger or confusion or frustration, no one is going to put their emotion there.
That doesn't feel safe. And so if we want to have a more understanding and close and connected relationship with each other, we need to just give each other more space to be emotional human beings because we all take up emotional space. And even though it doesn't always look the same as each other, it's still really valid.
So good relationships are ones in which we're both accepting of each other, but also we hold each other accountable for like doing some personal growth work. As I talked about last week in the first episode on men and mental health, men aren't necessarily encouraged or have learned that seeking mental health help is an acceptable thing to do. And so if we can help them to understand that like we're totally wonderful with that, and that would be amazing, and we can hold space for them to do that, I think that we could open the door to richer, more connected relationships.
And hey, wouldn't that be awesome? So as usual, I'm here just trying to remind us that part of the joy of life is just being able to connect with each other, you guys in a functional, beautiful, and loving way. So I'll be here doing my work. I'll see you next week.
Before you go, let me ask you a question. Do you think about things way more than you think you should? Do you go over and over situations or conversations or conflicts in your mind to the point where it basically drives you bananas? Overthinking is a major complaint of people entering my therapy practice and my private group, actually. And it's not that complicated to get a handle on.
It's just like any other personal growth topic, guys. You got to just be willing to dig into it a little bit. When people don't get a handle on the overthinking habit, they tend to end up with an anxiety problem.
So I created a super affordable online class that will teach you about how to get rid of all that thinking. It's $37, you guys. And you know me, there will be homework.
It's way worth the investment. It's just a complaint I hear a lot that has a relatively simple path to solution. So I wanted to just share it in a simple method.
It's on my website at rebeccahuntermsw.com. It's called The Overthinking Solution because, you guys, some problems can actually be solved. I hope you found today's show helpful. It would mean a lot to me if you'd rate, review, or subscribe so that we can reach more people with this type of information.
Here's the deal. I'd like to get rid of some of the stigma around mental health, and this is how I'm doing it. We just need to have these conversations.
If you really want to dig in, join me on social media or join my private Facebook group for more tools, support, and possibilities for change. Head to the link in the show notes at rebeccahuntermsw.com. Way to show up today.
