We were midway through a session this winter when my patient paused. He is a young man, a recent college graduate who moved from Michigan to New York last summer for a tech job.
“I have something I need to talk about and I’m afraid you’re going to judge me,” he said. He told me that he had been thinking about women he had slept with and that he felt terrible about some of the encounters.
“I didn’t rape anyone or anything like that, but I think I made them pretty uncomfortable.”
I’m a psychotherapist who works largely with men in New York City. Before last fall, I can’t remember hearing a statement like that — a voluntary admission of coercive or manipulative behavior with women. The #MeToo era has changed my work. If therapy has a reputation for navel gazing, this powerful moment has joined men in the room, forcing them to engage with topics that they would have earlier avoided.
As the #MeToo movement has unfolded, I’ve been disappointed at the lack of public male engagement with this moment, outside of witnessing men offer weak apologies and temporarily disappear from the public eye. As a man, I’ve had the curious experience of tracking my own occasional defensiveness at female rage and wrestling with uncomfortable self-reflection.
But I am also heartened by the private work that men are doing in therapy and how it can help us understand the relationship between what has been called “toxic masculinity” and the reservoirs of shame that fuel these behaviors.
I began to feel the effect in my work not long after the stories about Harvey Weinstein broke, with a noticeable uptick after a report on the comedian Aziz Ansari. Though the accusations against famous men were in one sense far from the people I saw, they were relevant to the questions they often brought to therapy. Why did they so misunderstand the women in their lives? Why were they often being accused of hurting them?
One man, a third-year medical resident, told me he saw himself in Mr. Ansari. Friendly but shy, he yearned to find a meaningful relationship but struggled to connect with women. He’d been experimenting with approaching women in a more “dominant” and assertive way, since he’d heard that’s what women wanted. He had made an aggressive move on a prospective date and was told that his approach was creepy.
Sitting on my couch, he could barely look me in the eyes. He confessed that he’d spent much of the weekend just lying in bed. He eventually acknowledged that he had been so focused on performing for dates that he wasn’t really connecting to them, unable to accurately read his date’s reactions. He was focused on tuning out his own discomfort and was unaware of the feelings of the woman in front of him.
The majority of men who enter my office appear either flat and emotionless or superficially engaged but hiding behind impenetrable niceness. When I ask a man, for example, how he feels when his girlfriend says, “I’m so upset, I can’t even be around you right now,” I usually get an answer like “It’s frustrating.” That’s a word that is used a lot yet conveys essentially nothing. Most men have spent little time with their feelings and have very limited vocabulary to describe what is going on in their hearts.
A newly single photographer has done such a good job of disconnecting from his feelings that he can’t ever really tell if he’s had a good time on a date. An investment banker in his 40s offers a weak shrug when I ask him how he feels when his wife lays into him.
Early in therapy, I try to help men notice what is happening not just in their heads but also in their bodies. The style of therapy I practice is called accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy, and in this work we focus a good deal on the physical experience of our emotions.
Our bodies hold so many of our emotional reactions that we learn a lot just by noticing our physiological responses. Almost always, the men I work with notice a tight tension in their chests and stomachs — anxiety. They often admit that they feel this tension most of the time. Many have developed habits — the gym, masturbating, video games, drinking — to cope.
I have found that for many men, underneath the anxiety that is always humming along are layers of shame. Shame at having feelings at all, shame because they believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, shame that they are not men, they are just boys.
Shame is the emotional weapon that allows patriarchal behaviors to flourish. The fear of being emasculated leads men to rationalize awful behavior. This kind of toxic shame is in direct contradiction with the healthy shame that we all need to feel in order to acknowledge mistakes and take responsibility.
Very often, I have found, men’s difficulties with women are rooted in their boyhood. With the medical resident, for example, underneath the constant pursuit of women were painful memories that led him to believe that he was unacceptable in his father’s eyes. A 42-year-old entrepreneur who came to see me because of his serial cheating and lying described his motivations as if he were still a 15-year-old boy craving the approval of his peers: “I actually don’t even like the sex that much, but there’s something satisfying about adding a notch in the belt. I imagine other guys would be impressed if they knew.”
In their efforts to manage the feeling of shame, some men numb themselves. Others sink under it and slip into depression or chronic underachievement. And others take the pain that they feel and project it back out into the world with violent words and deeds. These are the issues that lead them to seek therapy in the first place.
And yet, despite this bleak picture, men heal. They begin to heal when we can both embrace them and hold them accountable.
The young man who told me a few months ago that he was afraid I was going to judge him asked me this question after his initial disclosure:
“Am I the same as Harvey Weinstein? Am I a monster?”
He grew quiet and stared into space. I asked: “Can you look at me? Am I looking at you like you’re a monster?”
His eyes shifted back toward me, and I met his gaze with openness.
“I want you to know that I respect the courage it takes to acknowledge something like that and to share it with me, but I also don’t want you to numb yourself out, because then you’ll just forget about this and move on,” I said.
He began to cry and then sob. Waves of sadness emerged as he imagined the hurt that he caused these women. As the tears subsided and we began to process it, more tears came, this time tears of relief — that he’s not a monster, that he’s capable of remorse and empathy. He had been desperate to boost his self-esteem through sexual conquests. He ultimately put his own pleasure before someone else’s discomfort, behavior that was forged in moments in which he had felt worthless. He seemed to be crying for that person, tears that seemed years overdue.
In our next session, he shared something that surprised me with its simplicity and clarity. He had been thinking about one of the women he had told me about. He reached out, they met for coffee and he apologized.
Avi Klein is a psychotherapist.