In the tentative hope that it is still OK to have a letter that is not about regulation, I want to express delight at having my appetite whetted by the cover headline, The Widening Gender Gap, of June’s edition. This was ably followed up by the editor’s appetising introduction. The main course, however, left me hungry. You can’t knock John Hilton’s article, The Trouble with Men, for veracity, but as an entrée to the topic there was little meat on it. I think this is such an important field that we risk doing ourselves and our readers injustice to leave it there. Twenty-two years of focussing on this issue, in myself as well as in my clients, has convinced me of its importance and complexity.
 
Men’s issues cannot be reduced, as this article seems to suggest, to their difficulty at asking for help, though this is, of course, a basic lead-in symptom to the problem. Nor is the only issue depression; nor are the only conditions that affect men changing social roles or the job market; nor are the problems with men exclusive to any generation, though, of course, there are shifting cultural parameters. Men’s difficulties in identity, in relationships and in the world of sex and emotions are universal and endemic, as is the fallout on women, children and other men, when these unaddressed issues are acted out. So much is well known.
 
Men do, however, have the capacity to transform themselves, and this is the chief omission in Hilton’s piece with its focus on mental health. In my experience, such transformation happens much less in individual counselling – I don’t think it is always a particularly useful modality for men – than in gendered therapeutic groupwork and couple counselling. The former seems to have the creative leverage men need (crucially provided by other men who themselves are seekers), and the latter the threat of urgency (provided by partners who desperately want them to change) that can motivate men.
 
But motivate them to what? Sometimes it is to get the pluck to ask for more help, but mostly it is to examine their behaviour in the light of who they have learned to become, and get fresh courage to open their fearful hearts. This step is critical, and over the years I have repeatedly seen that when men learn to incorporate open-heartedness in their relationships, their self expression and their identity, they can go beyond the currently prevailing narrative of masculinity.
 
The problem is that solutions like therapeutic menswork are even less well known than individual therapy. But when men get it, they tend to like it and stick at it – according to evidence 
I see: we have had waiting lists for some time for our quarterly men’s groups, and searching on the internet reveals very few possibilities. Why not use these pages to encourage more workers to offer such facilities for men? I think we could do more good here – for men, women and children – and in a shorter time, than by endless pleas about how our profession should be policed.
 

 

Nick Duffell
The Centre for Gender Psychology