Counselling for Men in Milton Keynes

Men tend to hold their emotions back more than women do. That is not a stereotype, it is what happens, and most of it is cultural. Angry is allowed. Cheerful is allowed. Anything softer or sadder or more complicated than those two gets trained out early, because somewhere along the line you were told it made you a sissy.

So men find it difficult to articulate how they feel. Not unwilling. Out of practice.

Where It Comes From

Usually a household. Parents who did not encourage anyone to be emotional, too happy or too sad or too angry, everything moderated, and quite possibly not showing much themselves either.

Sometimes it is louder than that. If you grew up in a house where things got frightening, you learned to keep quiet very fast, because your emotions got you into trouble.

And sometimes it is quieter. Several children, one or two of them loud and taking all the attention, and you were the one who got on with it and did not ruffle any feathers. That is still learning to put your own needs on the back burner, it is just harder to notice, because nothing bad appeared to be happening.

Either way you end up trained not to express emotions rather than trained not to have them. You definitely have them. They are just not validated, and after long enough everybody else's seem more valid than yours.

What Holding It In Actually Does

It stacks. Something happens and you let it go, because it is not worth it. Then the next thing, and you let that go too. They stack and stack, and eventually something small lands on top of the pile and the whole lot comes out at once.

The people around you cannot see the pile. All they can see is the last thing and a reaction that does not match it. Then there is a calm afterwards, and because nothing has changed about how you say things in the first place, it starts stacking again.

It turns into a belief about yourself. Blame you never said out loud grows. You start carrying the reason for most things that go wrong, and after enough repetitions it stops being a thought and becomes a fact about who you are.

It goes inward where nobody can see it. Without anyone to say it to, you cannot get a second opinion on your own thinking, and it is very easy to spiral without a single person knowing that is what is happening. For a lot of men the next step is finding something that switches the feeling off for an evening. Drink is the common one. Gambling and work will do the same job.

It gets into the relationship. When I say intimacy I am not only talking about sex. I mean being able to feel close to someone. If you are not being emotionally honest with your partner, they will know something is being held back, and they will fill in the blanks themselves, usually with something worse than the truth. Then the ordinary closeness gets awkward, and the physical side can carry on while the emotional side has quietly stopped.

And eventually you start living somebody else's life. Not people pleasing exactly, more that whatever anyone else wants is fine by you, until you look up and realise you are spending most of your week doing things you did not choose.

It Isn't Only the Hard Ones

People assume this is all about the difficult emotions. It isn't.

If you are holding back generally, you also stop showing people when you are happy. You do not say you love them. You do not give the hug they were waiting for. So nobody can tell what you are enjoying and what you are not, and they end up guessing at you all the time. You become a fairly neutral person, and neutral is hard to be close to.

Why Men Wait, and What the Research Actually Says

This is not a character flaw and you are not unusual.

A systematic review by Yousaf, Grunfeld and Hunter, pooling 41 studies and 21,787 people, looked at why men delay seeking medical and psychological help. The most prominent barriers were a disinclination to express emotions or concerns, embarrassment, anxiety and fear, and poor communication with health professionals.

Read that list again, because it is probably the reason you are still reading a web page rather than sending an email. Those are the documented barriers, they are the same ones for everyone, and none of them is a personality defect.

Mahalik, Good and Englar-Carlson make the more uncomfortable point: the same rules about how a man is supposed to behave both create the problem and stop you getting help for it. Which is a neat trap, and worth naming out loud.

What Working With Me Is Like

There is no reception, no team and no one else in the building. You email me, and I am the person who replies and the person you sit down with.

I do not have a script for this. Most of the early work is just letting you say the parts you have been editing out for everybody else, at whatever speed that takes, and I will not push you to produce feelings on demand in the first hour.

I started karate at eleven, competed for England and later coached the national squad. I mention it here because it is the part of my history that men tend to find reassuring, and because a sport where losing your temper means losing teaches you a lot about the gap between feeling something strongly and acting on it.

I have been in practice since 2013 and I tutor counselling and hypnotherapy students at RQF levels 3 to 6, which mostly means I have had to explain this material to people who are going to be assessed on it, and that keeps you honest.

If sitting in a room facing someone for an hour is the part you cannot picture, say so. Some of this work happens walking, out by the lakes, which a lot of men find easier than a chair and eye contact. There is a walk and talk page covering how that works, confidentiality included.