Therapy for men in California
Space to talk about our desires and difficulties
What men tend to arrive with
You are performing fine and you have gone flat. Work you used to care about has become something you execute.
You are irritable in a way that does not match the situation, and the people at home get whatever version of you is left over.
You hit the thing you were aiming at and it did not land the way it was supposed to.
You have been told you are distant. You do not experience yourself as distant. You have no idea how to close the gap between those two facts.
Something needs to change, but may not be able to say what that something is. It may feel like an unfamiliar and unwelcome position for those used to fixing or solving things.
On finding a male therapist
About one in five men would prefer to work with a man, and roughly one in five therapists are one. That share has been falling for decades. It is a real bottleneck and a common reason men give up partway through looking.
I am not going to claim a man can only be helped by a man. Plenty of the best therapy happens across that line. But if it matters to you, it is a legitimate preference and you should not have to justify it.
How I work
Warm, yet direct. I will tell you what I am noticing rather than waiting for you to get there, and I will say when something is not working. Most men who tried therapy and quit describe the same thing: it was pleasant, nothing happened, and they could not tell what they were paying for.
The early sessions are concrete. What is actually going on, what you want to be different, what has been in the way. You should have a working theory of your own problem within the first few weeks. Not a full answer. A real hypothesis you can test.
From there it moves between practical and slower depending on what is useful. Some of it is structure and strategy. Some of it is examining a pattern that has been running far longer than the current job or the current relationship, because that is usually where the leverage is.
You do not have to be interested in your childhood. You do have to be willing to look at why the same thing keeps happening.
Common reasons men seek therapy
Work that stopped meaning anything
Including after a promotion, which is more common than people expect.
ADHD, often identified late
Years of masking and compensation have led to a normalizing of irritability and frustration. We often feel like we are missing something or have a fear of being in trouble. ADHD and neurodivergence
Burnout
The kind of trapped feeling that rest does not fix. Burnout and anxiety
Your relationship
If that is the main event, it is often better addressed with both of you in the room. Individual work in tandem with couples therapy can help outcomes. Couples therapy
Anger, distance, or numbness
It is important for us to get curious with the underlying resentment or regret that we might have with others or ourselves. We drill down to understand these feelings; building towards healthy ways of addressing and expressing them.