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The Garbled Handbook

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

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.

May 7, 2026
Why Are So Many Men Dying by Suicide?

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.

May 5, 2026
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.

April 6, 2026
Men’s Mental Health Matters. But Whose Version of Men Are We Talking About?

Iron John and the Inner Warrior

I read Iron John when it came out in 1990. I was 36, working as a performing storyteller, and it made immediate sense. Robert Bly’s book sold millions and launched what became known as the mythopoetic men’s movement: a widespread cultural moment in which men gathered in groups, retreated into nature, beat drums, and tried to reclaim what modern industrial life had supposedly stripped from them.

Bly reached into Norse and European mythology and said: something has been lost, and it matters. Around the same time, I was going to men’s groups, sitting in sweat lodges borrowed from Native American tradition, doing vision quests, exploring tantric sex. As a young man who had recently become a father, making compromises and sacrifices I hadn’t anticipated, I found something genuinely useful in all of it.

But something was missing, and it took me a while to name it.

Those groups weren’t only men. Women were there too, and we were all seeking the same thing: the inner warrior, the deep fierce purposeful self. At the time that felt inclusive. Looking back, what I notice is that a particular version of masculinity, Western, traditional, warrior-shaped, was being held up as the template for human wholeness. Not just for men. For everyone. And nobody was questioning the template itself.

A Body That Didn’t Fit

I grew up with five brothers, most of them emphatically on the masculine side of things physically. One was covered in hair at sixteen. I was in my thirties when I grew my first chest hair. It took real effort to grow a moustache. Even in my sixties, the beard comes in patchy. So doing those masculine things in my thirties was genuinely affirmative. I’m not dismissing that. But what I was actually doing, though I couldn’t have said it then, was finding a version of masculinity that could include me, not becoming the template.

Because the template never quite fits. And I don’t think it fits most people, if we’re honest.

Recently I watched a woman describe her experience of being intersex. Her body developed testes but couldn’t assimilate testosterone, and so developed externally as female. A coherent biological variation, one of many that occur naturally across the human population. The medical profession, confronted with something that didn’t fit the category, removed the testes without her consent when she was a teenager. The anomaly had to go. The category had to be preserved.

That’s not medicine responding to a problem. That’s a template being enforced on a body that didn’t conform to it.

What’s Already There

I’m a psychotherapist now, working relationally, in what is an almost entirely female profession. I’m not uncomfortable with that. My feminine qualities sit alongside my masculine ones, and always have. I think that’s true for most people. Western culture has pushed those qualities apart, named them opposites, and planted people at one end of the spectrum yearning for what’s at the other end, without recognising that what they’re looking for is already in them. It’s somewhere between the two. It doesn’t need to be created. It needs to be uncovered.

The Handbooks Arrive

Which brings me to a pattern I’ve been noticing on social media: a steady stream of book promotions, one after another, all circling the same territory. The books have titles like Ideal Man: Reviving Masculinity and The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health. They are promoted as landmark, ground-breaking, comprehensive. Some of them do important work: male suicide rates are real, help-seeking barriers are real, the way Western psychotherapy has historically ignored or pathologised male distress is real. These are legitimate concerns and they deserve serious attention.

But the subject of these books, the man whose psychology is being mapped and whose masculinity is being revived, is quietly assumed rather than examined. He is straight, cisgender, and Western.

Gay men, bisexual men, trans men, and men from cultures that have always held gender more fluidly appear occasionally in a subordinate clause about intersectionality, then disappear. The template is back. Just wearing a research methodology.

The WEIRD Problem

This isn’t new. It’s the same move that Western psychology has always made, constructing a baseline from a narrow demographic slice and then universalising it. Researchers have a name for it: the WEIRD problem, shorthand for the tendency to build psychological models almost entirely on Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic populations, and then treat the results as universal human truths.

The male psychology movement hasn’t escaped this. In some ways, it has doubled down on it because its political energy depends on “men” being a coherent, legible category with shared interests and a recoverable identity.

The Binary Was Imposed

The colonial parallel is worth exploring. Many indigenous cultures around the world recognised more than two genders long before European contact. Two-Spirit identities in numerous Native American traditions, Hijra in South Asia, Fa’afafine in Samoa: these are not modern inventions or Western imports. They are ways of holding human variation that existed for centuries.

Colonisation actively suppressed them, through missionary activity, through legal systems that criminalised gender nonconformity, through the imposition of European binary categories onto bodies and communities that had never organised themselves that way. The binary wasn’t discovered. It was enforced.

And now, apparently, it is being revived and sold as a return to health.

It Isn’t Consensus

I’m not trying to make an argument. I’m just noticing the volume of noise, and noticing that it doesn’t match my experience of being human, or the experience of most people I sit with in the therapy room. It’s a loud, well-resourced, self-referential ecosystem that has learned to sound like consensus.

It isn’t.

March 18, 2026