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Tag: emotional expression

  • The Garbled Handbook

    What boys are actually given, and what men are left holding

    A watercolour cartoon of a young red-haired boy sitting on the floor with building blocks, asking 'Who should I be, what should I do?' while a group of bewildered adult men look on unable to answer.

    After several sessions with a man I’ve been working with, I found myself thinking it’s like talking with a seven-year-old boy who just wants to do his best but doesn’t know how he’s supposed to be or what he’s supposed to do. He didn’t fail. He was never taught.

    That thought has stayed with me. Because it’s not just him. I see that boy in almost every man I work with.

    They come in presenting as failures. Failing in their relationships, with their children, in their work. And what I actually see is something quite different. I see men who are trying their best with the equipment they were given. Men who are lost not because they’re broken, but because the map they were handed was unreadable.

    The handbook no one mentions

    Every boy receives a handbook on how to be a man. Nobody passes it over formally. It arrives through a thousand small moments, in what gets praised and what gets shamed, in who cries and who doesn’t, what fathers do with their anger, what they do with their tenderness.

    The trouble is that the handbook is garbled. Pages are missing. Others are coffee-stained and half-legible. Some are in the wrong order entirely.

    I once heard a man in a group describe his father with genuine love. The fishing trips. The football matches. The sense of being chosen, being included, being seen. And then, in the same breath, the unpredictable rage. The physical violence that arrived without warning.

    He couldn’t reject that father. There was too much love in him for that. But he couldn’t follow him either, because the model didn’t hold together. So, he was left, as so many men are left, holding a document that couldn’t be read straight through, trying to assemble something coherent from contradictory instructions.

    That’s not absence of love. It’s the presence of love alongside something that makes the love impossible to build on.

    What the handbook actually says

    The pages that are legible tend to say the same things. Don’t show weakness. Produce. Perform. Be useful. There’s a consistency to that message across most of the male role models boys encounter, whatever else might vary.

    The cruel twist is that most of the role models boys actually witness are men failing to meet that standard. Because the standard is unachievable. So what boys learn, in practice, is not how to be the thing the handbook describes. They learn what it looks like when men fall short of it. They learn the shame that follows.

    The missing pages, or those obscured by coffee stains, are the ones about vulnerability, emotional expression and tenderness. The instructions on how to be warm without it being reframed as weakness or something worse. They’re difficult to find, written in the margins.

    When the instinct itself gets pathologised

    It isn’t only that boys aren’t taught how to handle warmth and closeness. It’s that the instinct itself gets taught out of them.

    I remember being a boy, perhaps seven or eight, with female cousins I adored, a decade or so older than me, who lived next door. I loved being around them. I was physically affectionate, naturally so, because that’s how I was with people I felt close to.

    One day I overheard a conversation between one of my cousins and my mother. The way I was with my hands was being discussed. Not with cruelty, exactly, but with a kind of discomfort, a suggestion that it was too much, that it crossed a line into something that needed reining in. The implication was faintly sexual, though I had no framework for that at the time. I just felt the shame of it.

    What I’d lost wasn’t knowledge I’d never had. It was trust in something I’d already known how to do. That feeling, of not knowing how to be around women whose company I enjoyed, of second-guessing warmth, of keeping my hands to myself in ways that felt like self-betrayal, followed me for years. It took a long time in therapy to find my way back to it.

    That’s what the garbling does. It doesn’t just leave gaps. It plants doubt in the places where you were most naturally yourself.

    The boy is still in the room

    The men I work with are carrying that boy with them. The one who wanted to do his best and couldn’t work out how. The one who felt the love and couldn’t make sense of it alongside everything else. The one whose natural expressiveness got redirected or shamed before he had the language to defend it.

    By the time they reach a therapy room, these men often experience themselves as failures. In their relationships, with their children, at work. What I see instead is someone still trying to follow instructions that were never coherent to begin with, still measuring themselves against a standard that was always going to be out of reach.

    The shame sits right at the centre of it. Not the shame of having done something specific, but the ambient shame of not knowing how to be. Of sensing, somewhere deep down, that everyone else received a readable copy and yours was the damaged one.

    On crisis lines and culture change

    There’s a lot of conversation at the moment about men’s mental health, about male suicide rates, about what the NHS should be doing. The funding question is real. But even fully funded crisis intervention addresses the problem at the wrong end.

    What produces a man in crisis at forty is usually something that began at seven. An education system that pointed boys towards compliance, performance, and emotional suppression rather than curiosity, creativity, and genuine self-expression didn’t help. A culture that handed boys an unachievable model of manhood and then expressed disappointment when they couldn’t meet it did real damage.

    What might actually help is something much slower and less measurable: men who’ve done their own work being honest about it, in front of boys. Not performing vulnerability as a technique, but actually modelling what it looks like when a man doesn’t know something and says so. When he gets it wrong and acknowledges it. When he’s moved by something and doesn’t cover it over.

    What the work actually is

    When I’m working with a man who’s carrying that seven-year-old, I’m not trying to teach him what the handbook should have said. I’m trying to help him locate what he already knew before the handbook arrived and started doing its damage.

    That’s usually still in there. The warmth. The expressiveness. The instinct towards closeness. It got covered over or redirected, but it didn’t disappear.

    If you recognise the boy in yourself or the garbled handbook you’ve been trying to follow, that recognition is usually the beginning of something. Not a fix. Not a solution. Just the start of being able to read what’s actually there, rather than what you were told should be.

  • Why Are So Many Men Dying by Suicide?

    Middle-aged man sitting alone at a kitchen table looking out at rain, untouched cup of tea beside him — male isolation and mental health

    I work with a lot of men, both individually and in couples. It’s not unusual, often several weeks in, for a man to describe either a suicide attempt, a threat he’s made to take his own life, or a period of days, weeks or months when suicidal thoughts have been running around in his head. Often, he’s never shared this with anyone else before sharing it with me. It’s as if there’s nowhere for these thoughts to go. And even coming to therapy wasn’t specifically about suicide. It was much more about relationships, about how to be a man, about how to fit into the world that Western society has created for men.

    In the UK, men account for around three-quarters of all suicide deaths. Middle-aged men are consistently the highest risk group. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK. Around 15 men die every day, taking their own lives. Those numbers are shocking, but they don’t tell you what it actually feels like to be that man. This piece is about that.

    What the culture teaches men

    In white Western culture, men are discouraged from emotional language, particularly in connection with themselves. They’re permitted emotional expression around football, or in the currency of male banter, but the deeper register is closed off early. This does not mean they have no capacity for emotional language, just that they have not been encouraged to use it.

    I turned eighteen, and my father invited me to the pub. Before we went in, he said: No sex, religion or politics. He went to the pub most nights and rarely talked about anything emotional. He’d raise his glass and say, ” Don’t let the bastards get you down”. It seemed he didn’t begin to have an emotional life he could actually talk about until he was retired, tending his garden, and several years sober. That was his generation, but I don’t think it’s as different now as we’d like to believe.

    What that cultural shaping produces is something I see clearly in the men who sit across from me. It no longer surprises me that when a man begins talking about his relationships, the patterns, the reason he’s turned to alcohol or something else to numb the pain, we quickly arrive somewhere unexpected.

    It’s like I’m talking with a seven-year-old boy who just wants to do his best but doesn’t know how he’s supposed to be or what he’s supposed to do. Without good guidance, he made some poor decisions, and those decisions are now making his life miserable. He didn’t fail. He was never taught.

    When the performance becomes unsustainable

    Male friendships and networks often function only while everyone’s performing a version of okayness. The pub, the workplace, the football: all of it is conditional on not needing anything real from each other. The moment genuine vulnerability appears, the network has nowhere to put it.

    This became unsustainable for me in my twenties. I was drinking too much, driving cars too fast, writing one off, making poor choices in relationships, feeling like life was driving me somewhere I didn’t want to go, rather than me being in the driving seat. By great good fortune, I met my lifelong partner and moved away from the city. But it’s noticeable that I retained no friendships, no connections from that time. No one checked in on me once I’d moved away. Not one person.

    That’s not unusual. It’s the ordinary texture of male isolation.

    What happens in the body

    When a man has spent decades learning it’s not safe to be seen as he really is, the people around him feel they don’t know him. They can’t predict his reactions. They sense a coldness or distance, even if they can’t name it.

    I spent many years with what I can only describe as a limiter: something that stopped me from being fully seen. What that meant in practice was staying in jobs where I wasn’t fulfilled, resenting what I was doing, rather than speaking out and moving on to something better suited to me. I see versions of this constantly: men who can’t make decisions, men who feel like a disappointment to everyone, men who carry a secret conviction that something is broken about them that nobody must discover, or they’ll use it against them.

    In the body, this shows up as tightness and reactivity. When those feelings become overwhelming, some survival action is taken: withdrawing, disappearing, or self-medicating. Sometimes something more final.

    Why men don’t come to therapy

    The cultural script says that need equals weakness. Asking for help is a confession of failure.

    Many men arrive in therapy only when crisis forces them: a relationship ending, a breakdown, a moment that couldn’t be hidden any longer.

    Some arrive earlier, if the framing feels right. What tends to work is an approach that’s practical and non-pathologising, that’s curious about experience rather than focused on diagnosis, that doesn’t require a man to already have the language for what he’s feeling before he walks through the door.

    Therapy isn’t another set of rules or requirements to stick to. It’s a space where a man can begin to recognise his actual wants and desires, how to regulate his own emotions, and how to choose connection rather than push the people around him away. That connection begins with connecting with yourself. And in my experience, that’s what gives life its purpose and meaning.

    If you’re reading this

    If you’ve been holding something alone for a long time, it’s worth a conversation. You don’t need to know what to say or how to say it. You can make contact, and we can take it from there.

    The Garbled Handbook
    A Question Deck for Men: Start the Conversation That Matters

    If you’re affected by anything in this article

    If you’re struggling right now, you don’t have to manage it alone.

    In the UK, you can contact the Samaritans any time, day or night, on 116 123 — calls are free.

    CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) runs a helpline for men at 0800 58 58 58, open 5pm to midnight every day, and also offers a webchat if calling feels like too much.

  • The manosphere didn’t come from nowhere. We helped build it.

    A Guardian report this week shows misogynistic abuse of female teachers rising sharply. The response from the Department for Education is more guidance.

    Misogyny in schools is getting worse. A union survey of 5,000 teachers found that misogynistic abuse of female staff has climbed from 17.4% in 2023 to 23.4% this year. Nearly a quarter of female teachers, in a profession that is over 70% female, report being targeted. Called “love.” Told to “calm down.” Sexualised. Mocked. One teacher had nude AI images made of her by a student. This week, The Guardian reported on the crisis, and the Department for Education responded with more guidance. That’s not going to be enough

    The Department for Education’s response was to say that misogynistic views are not innate, they’re learned, and to point toward updated relationships and health education guidance. They’re not wrong that these views are learned. But they’re looking in the wrong place for where the learning happens.

    The school created the problem it’s now trying to solve

    I was a boy who didn’t fit in. In the 1960s, that was very clearly defined. Boys did woodwork and science, girls did cooking and needlework. I was more interested in music and art and was, quite literally, not permitted to pursue them. So I stopped trying to comply. I found my sense of belonging elsewhere, in pop culture, in rock music, in the Woodstock generation. Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and a culture grounded in the language of peace and connection.

    The culture boys are swimming in online today is very different from what it was. But the school experience that drives them toward it isn’t.

    OFSTED, the national curriculum, and the relentless pressure of assessment-driven learning all create a culture where personal passion, creative expression, and emotional authenticity are, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, a distraction. Emotional support, where it exists at all in schools, is frequently used as a tool to return pupils to compliance with the system rather than to genuinely meet them where they are.

    You can’t squeeze out everything that makes a boy feel like himself, offer him nothing real in its place, and then be surprised when someone else steps in to fill the vacuum.

    The manosphere borrowed its language from us

    In the 1990s I got involved in the mythopoetic men’s movement. Robert Bly had published Iron John, and something in it resonated. Men and women gathering in fields, sitting around fires, drumming, singing in four-part harmony, finding what Bly called the wild man, the deep self that modern life had buried. It wasn’t macho. It wasn’t about dominance. It was about recovering something authentic that the world kept asking you to suppress. I recognised that hunger immediately.

    Later, I drifted into the business coaching and self-development world. Same language, different destination. Boundaries, accountability, inner work, potential, healing: all of it is still there, but now in service of personal success, financial freedom, and breaking through your limitations to get what you want. I never quite bought it. There was always something hollow at the centre of it. But I watched a lot of men buy it completely, and I understood why. It sounded like the real thing. It used all the same words.

    What the manosphere did was take that already-drifting language and push it further still. The message became clear. The therapy world, the self-development world, the whole culture of emotional intelligence and healthy relationships, all of it has been lying to you. We’re telling you the truth. The truth being that dominance is natural, that women respect power, that your softness has been manufactured to serve someone else’s agenda.

    It’s a con, but an effective one. I can see the path that leads a young man toward it, because I walked a version of that path myself. If no one’s ever offered you something genuine, the counterfeit is harder to spot.

    I know what boys actually need, because I’ve seen it work

    In the 1980s, I worked in a residential therapeutic community for fifty boys who had nowhere else to go. These were boys whom the system had completely failed. What they responded to wasn’t more structure, more targets, more guidance. It was space.

    I remember one twelve-year-old who couldn’t manage relationships with his parents or foster carers, who sat in his seat staring out of the window each day. One day, he started drawing the tree outside the window. It was very accomplished. Then I let him take his sketchpad outside. Then to the farm, to draw the buildings and the animals. He began to engage with education for the first time in his life. By the time he was sixteen, he’d found pottery, done it entirely on his own terms, and got a GCSE in it. It was the only one he got. It was his.

    That’s what genuine support for boys and men looks like. Not forcing them into a role. Not offering them a different version of the same compliance. Seeing them for who they actually are, and allowing them to develop, from the inside out, a real sense of themselves and their responsibility to the people around them.

    Boys don’t need to be told to earn more, dominate more, or control more. They don’t need a better curriculum on healthy relationships delivered by a teacher who’s been given half a day of training. They need someone to sit with them in their actual experience and take it seriously.

    So what now

    I married at nineteen with no real model for intimacy or a relationship. I had no idea what it meant to actually be present with another person. It took years, therapy, a different kind of culture, and a great deal of my own work to begin to understand it. I was lucky. I found people and spaces that offered something real.

    Most boys today aren’t finding those spaces in schools. They’re not finding them anywhere that matters. They’re finding Andrew Tate.

    If we want to change what boys are learning about masculinity, we need to look honestly at what we’ve failed to offer them: creative expression, emotional authenticity, genuine belonging, and the experience of being seen as an individual rather than a compliance problem.

    More guidance from the Department for Education won’t touch it. Less government pressure on schools to perform arbitrary assessment targets might begin to. Adults, parents, educators and practitioners who are willing to be genuinely present with boys rather than managing them. That’s where the real work is.

    The manosphere is filling a vacuum. The question is who created it.

  • What Counts as Emotion? The Cultural and Gendered Limits of Psychotherapy

    Understanding feelings beyond Western psychological models

    “Circle of diverse hands forming a protective ring around a glowing, energetic centre, symbolising shared humanity, connection, and collective psychological space.”

    When I first met my in-laws, I encountered what looked like a real-life example of familiar gender stereotypes around emotional expression. My wife had prepared me to meet her mum, a Relate counsellor, and her dad, a retired farmer. She told me she spoke easily with her mum about emotional matters and had very little conversation with her dad. The picture was clear: Mum was emotionally expressive, Dad was quiet and did not show his feelings.

    When I actually met them, my experience was different. I felt an immediate connection with my father-in-law. He was practical and economical with words, yet clearly emotionally alive, closely connected to his grandchildren, and engaged in making sculptures and artwork. He did not talk much, but his emotional presence was unmistakable. With my mother-in-law, conversation flowed more readily, but it took me longer to feel the same sense of connection.

    In my psychotherapy work, I often find myself returning to this early encounter. When I hear the familiar description of men as emotionally repressed and women as emotionally expressive, it does not sit easily with my clinical experience. I am left wondering whether this is simply an individual bias that therapists sometimes hold, or whether it reflects something more deeply embedded in the foundations of psychotherapy itself.

    How psychology emerged

    Western psychology developed within nineteenth-century European society, where gendered assumptions about emotional life were already well established. Men were culturally associated with rationality, restraint, and stoicism, while women were linked with emotional expressiveness, vulnerability, and relational sensitivity.

    Early psychological theory did not invent these distinctions, but it did formalise them, translating prevailing social understandings into explanatory models of the mind. In doing so, particular ways of organising and expressing emotion became woven into the foundations of psychological thinking. Although social conditions have changed significantly since then, elements of those original assumptions continue to shape how emotional health and maturity are implicitly defined within psychotherapy.

    More recently, while attending a psychotherapy training focused on relationships, I was struck by how readily gendered assumptions about emotional expression surfaced in discussion. Several participants spoke of emotionally expressive women and emotionally restricted men as if these were near-universal clinical truths. When I questioned this, some colleagues explained that they were simply describing what they observed in their therapy rooms.

    What stayed with me was the contrast between that confidence and my own experience. This is not a pattern I consistently recognise in my practice. That difference left me wondering whether we are sometimes seeing through the lens we have been trained to use.

    If particular ideas about emotional expression are repeated within training, supervision, and theory, they can begin to feel self-evident. Over time, what may have started as a cultural assumption risks becoming a clinical expectation, shaping not only how we interpret clients but what we notice in the first place.

    Why This Model No Longer Holds

    When the early architects of psychological theory were developing their models, they were working within a society organised around very rigid gender roles. Economic and relational dependency structures were tightly defined. Norms around sexuality and identity were restrictive, and expectations about how emotion should be expressed were narrow and highly regulated.

    Contemporary Western society looks very different. Women’s roles have expanded far beyond domestic and emotional labour. Many men now participate more actively in family life and express masculinity in a wider range of ways. Emotional expression among men is more visible than in previous generations. Greater recognition of gender diversity and non-binary identities reflects a broader questioning of earlier binary frameworks that did not capture the full range of human experience.

    At the same time, public conversation around mental health, vulnerability, and sexuality has opened considerably. These developments signal a shift in how emotional life is lived and understood. The social scaffolding that once supported earlier assumptions about gendered emotional roles is no longer stable.

    Culture has changed, and emotional life has shifted with it. The question for psychotherapy is whether its underlying models have evolved at the same pace, or whether aspects of the field still carry assumptions shaped within a very different social landscape.

    The global perspective

    Victorian European emotional norms were never universal to begin with. From a global perspective, they represented one cultural pattern among many, shaped by particular social, economic, and moral structures. Yet during periods of colonial expansion, European relational and emotional frameworks were carried across the world, where they often came to be treated as standards rather than as culturally specific ways of organising human life.

    Many societies organised family and community life differently. Identity was often located more collectively than individually. Emotional regulation could be embedded in roles, rituals, and communal practices rather than centred on verbal self-disclosure. Ways of understanding and expressing emotional life did not always follow the same gender divisions assumed within European models.

    Psychotherapy emerged from within this historically and culturally specific context. Over time, elements of that emotional template travelled widely and, in some settings, came to be regarded as psychologically universal rather than culturally situated. Recognising this history does not invalidate Western psychology, but it does remind us that it represents one model among many.

    For practitioners today, this invites a broader stance: openness to multiple forms of emotional organisation and expression across cultures, genders, and generations, and a willingness to question whether inherited frameworks fully capture the diversity of human emotional life.

    When Therapy Recognises Only One Emotional Language

    These questions are not abstract for me. They have been pressed into my work by the clients who come into my room.

    I think of an autistic young person I have worked with who finds verbal emotional expression extremely difficult. In ordinary conversation, he appears silent, withdrawn, or unresponsive. In school, this silence is often interpreted as refusal, resistance, or poor behaviour. When he becomes overwhelmed, his distress can look like destructiveness, when in fact it is an attempt to regulate an internal state that has become unmanageable.

    Yet when we work with images, picture cards, or stories, his emotional world becomes unmistakably clear. Through metaphor, visual language, and narrative, he communicates fear, attachment, frustration, and longing with precision. His difficulty is not an absence of feeling but a mismatch between his way of organising emotional life and the narrow channels through which emotion is often expected to be expressed.

    Work with autistic children and adults has repeatedly required me to widen my understanding of what emotional communication can look like. The same has been true in my work with gender-diverse and queer clients. Here too, inherited models of identity, relationship, and emotional expression often fail to capture lived experience. Assumptions about how men, women, or partners “should” feel or relate do not always fit. Therapy then becomes less about applying a template and more about learning the particular emotional language of the person in front of me.

    These encounters have made it increasingly difficult for me to hold onto a single, standardised picture of how emotion ought to appear in therapy. They have pushed me towards a more individualised and culturally aware stance, where the task is not to measure clients against a fixed model of emotional maturity, but to recognise how emotional life is organised for this person, in this body, in this social and cultural context.

    Can Psychotherapy allow itself to evolve?

    Psychotherapy does not exist in isolation. It is embedded within large professional bodies, training institutions, regulatory frameworks, and healthcare systems. It intersects with medicine and mental health services, each with their own established practices, languages, and expectations. These structures bring important strengths: accountability, ethical guidance, and shared standards. At the same time, they can make theoretical and cultural evolution slow.

    This raises a genuine question. As our understanding of identity, culture, neurodiversity, and emotional life expands, can psychotherapy adapt from within these systems, or does meaningful change require movement at their edges? How flexible are the conceptual frameworks we have inherited, and how easily can they make space for forms of emotional organisation that do not fit older models?

    In many ways, change is already underway. A number of contemporary approaches place greater emphasis on embodiment, relational experience, and individual patterns of regulation and meaning-making. Perspectives such as Polyvagal Theory and Internal Family Systems, among others, foreground lived experience, internal diversity, and context rather than a single template of emotional development. These approaches are not abandoning earlier insights, but they do signal a shift towards recognising that emotional life is organised in multiple ways.

    Perhaps the question is not whether psychotherapy should step outside its institutional structures, but whether those structures can remain porous enough to allow new understandings to reshape practice. If psychotherapy is to remain responsive to the people it serves, it may need to hold its models more lightly, recognising them as evolving maps rather than fixed descriptions of human emotional truth.

    How Theories Reflect Their Time

    The scientific impulse to observe, categorise, and name patterns in human behaviour has brought enormous value to psychotherapy. It has helped the field develop shared language, structure, and rigour. Yet scientific understanding does not arise outside of history. What is studied, how it is measured, and how findings are interpreted are all shaped by historical context.

    A psychology examining emotional life in the early twentieth century was observing people living within very different relational structures, gender expectations, economic arrangements, and moral norms than those that shape contemporary life. When those observations became models, and those models became theory, they carried with them the imprint of their era.

    This does not make earlier psychological frameworks invalid, but it does mean they are historically situated. The emotional life of people living in today’s plural, interconnected, and rapidly changing societies cannot be assumed to organise itself in the same ways as those living in more rigidly structured social worlds a century ago. If the conditions of life change, the patterns of emotional expression and regulation change with them.

    For psychotherapy, this suggests that our theories function less like timeless laws and more like evolving maps. They are useful, but always drawn from a particular vantage point. As the terrain shifts, the map may need to be revised.

    Psychotherapy is not a fixed territory but an evolving field shaped by ongoing dialogue, experience, and social change. Within it, there are always different tendencies: some practitioners drawn towards established frameworks and shared standards, others more inclined to explore emerging understandings and to listen closely for forms of emotional expression that fall outside familiar models. Both movements play a part in the life of the profession.

    For my own part, my work has increasingly drawn me towards a stance of listening across difference, by attending to the particular ways emotional life is organised for each person, rather than assuming it will fit a pre-existing template. This is less a rejection of established models than an effort to hold them lightly, as guides rather than prescriptions.

    The language of emotion is as diverse as human language itself.