THE RELUCTANT MAN’S GUIDE TO STARTING THERAPY
1 Open Your Mind to the Possibility…
BY NOW, YOU KNOW it’s okay—healthy!—to talk about your feelings. But do you know it’s okay—and encouraged, by us, in these pages—to pay someone to listen to a weekly (or twice-monthly or thrice-weekly) spelunking through your psyche? Probably not, if the numbers are any indication: Men are half as likely as women to seek help for their mental well-being. That’s true not just here in ’Murica—that’s true around the globe, across races and ethnicities and ages. We’re emotional escape artists, masters at avoiding our inner discomfort. Some of us hoover drugs and alcohol, seek thrills through bad behavior, withdraw from the world. But the common narrative leaves out a few crucial details. The research shows that men do want to heal, we do accept help, and we do share our fears and doubts and moments of darkness. We just prefer to do it on our own terms, and—here’s where it gets tricky—we often don’t know how to articulate what those terms are. (More about that on page 105.) So, to all you therapy skeptics, you on-the-fencers, and you true believers alike: Join us as we knuckle-drag our way on this fifteen-step tour across the therapeutic landscape.
2…And Not Only When THERE’S A CRISIS
BY DREW MAGARY
I DIDN’T KNOW HOW badly I needed therapy until I got therapy. I thought I was good. If I yelled at my kids at the dinner table, well, that’s because they were ungrateful for the meal that my wife and I had prepared for them. If I raged out in my car after spending more time than I wanted to in line inside a cramped U-Haul office, that’s because fuck U-Haul and fuck those other customers. And if I smashed a pasta bowl because it wouldn’t easily fit into the lower dishwasher rack, that was because of shoddy design on the part of Big Pasta Bowl. All that anger, I thought, was justified. The world was wronging me at every turn, when it should have had more compassion for a guy who had just suffered a catastrophic and inexplicable brain hemorrhage that had left him comatose for two weeks and deaf in one ear forever.* Everyone else was the problem, not me.
That sounds ludicrous in retrospect, because it is. But I couldn’t hear that in my mind at the time. All I could hear were grievances that, in reality, were just nattily attired excuses. I also figured that if I had mental-health problems, I—a man with clinically diagnosed brain damage—would be able to recognize and address those concerns on my own. Just about the most tired, American Guy attitude you could have toward mental health, especially
