I remember once in my counsellor training, many years ago, sitting in a group in which we were engaged in some particularly challenging self-awareness kind of thing. You know the sort – you’re in a big group and you know that at some point, as inevitably as night follows day, the piercing and therapy-hungry eyes of the tutor will find you in the group to encourage you to ‘explore’. The very thought of it sends shivers down my spine. It’s not that I’m against such things – I am a counsellor after all – but I’ve always found ‘exploring’ on demand, and in such a public way, particularly difficult. I think it is perhaps the emotional equivalent of shy bladder syndrome – it just doesn’t quite happen when you want it to.

I did my best, had a go, and mumbled about remembering how my toy car was put on a tip when I was four and I didn’t want it to be. There were other things too, but you had to be there. At the end of this ‘session’ which I had found quite difficult, a couple of the female members of the group said that they were disappointed that I hadn’t cried – and that perhaps I was defending myself, not allowing myself to be really open. I remember feeling really irritated; that my contribution was being judged against a particular benchmark of emotional articulacy that I wasn’t privy to.

It has often made me reflect on how much was about me, how much was about them, and how much was about differences between us, such as gender. There is no doubt – not at least from my own experience – that by virtue of being male, the emotional doors were slammed shut in my face over many years. Weakness was unforgivable, vulnerability intolerable,  and crying… well… the words almost fail me. I appreciate that there are real dangers of generalisations here: all women are floridly emotional, all men are pathologically uptight. Of course, such statements are ridiculous. But I do think that in general terms, boys and men are powerfully and insidiously conditioned out of expressing feelings; the subsequent cost to their mental health is profound.

This is evident in my work too. As I work within a university setting, on the whole the men I see fall into the 18 to 21 age group. Getting them through the door in the first place is a task of gargantuan proportions. Once in the room, then what do you do with them? Only about one third of our clients are male, yet it is the very age/gender group that presents with the highest suicide risk. It is a poignant and alarming paradox.

In a workshop recently about working with men, I asked the facilitator for some hints and tips. I was encouraged to be ‘blokey’ in my work with men. Well, I must admit that did fascinate me. I drifted off into a world where my counselling room was filled to the rafters with the latest gadgets, there was a fridge in the corner quietly and seductively chilling some beer, and relational depth was achieved via an online gaming console – playing Football Manager, Destroy All Aliens or Empathy Annihilator – something of that ilk. I do own my fantasies here.

I have learnt to adapt my practice en route. For example, I rarely ask a male client how he feels, because I have found that it is a bit like asking him to swallow eight times in succession – it is really hard to do when you think about it (try it). But when I ask him how he thinks about something, he invariably tells me how he feels. His language might be different to that which would have been acceptable in my training group therapy circle, but it is his language, his voice, and his truth – as it was my voice, my language, and my truth.

Obviously we need large-scale societal change – where male role models no longer have to be invincible, all conquering super heroes… but they can also be those things if they wish. We need to ensure that we don’t inadvertently impose benchmarks of good emotional articulacy, and thus miss the voiced hurt when it is laid out in front of us. But in the meantime, we must continue to reflect on how we can be multilingual around emotions in the counselling room.

Andrew Reeves is a counsellor at the University of Liverpool Counselling Service and editor of Counselling and Psychotherapy Research (CPR).