this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Naturally. We were beaten up and ostracized if we showed weakness when we were kids. You CAN'T be sharing your feelings like that to another human.
a lot of therapists and psychs are also useless for helping men. because they are women and they are basically only trained to deal with women's issues and only see women's emotional processes and processing as 'valid'. there is this default bias that men's emotional processing is 'flawed'.
imo with mental health professionals all my 'issues' were blow way out of proportion. i only had one therapist who actaully helped me was a man and that person helped me understand that 'not everything is your fault'. when all the other therapists/friends/family always 100% told me everything that happens to me is entirely my fault. they also told me it was normal/healthy to vent my feelings by doing productive things (like writing, exercising, relaxing), rather than viewing that as 'not addressing the problem'.
the issue with so much of this crap is that not only does nobody want to talk to men, it's that they don't want to listen and/or the tell us we are 'talking wrong'. even when we do talk to people, there is only a tiny window of acceptable things we an talk about and way we can talk about them or how selfish it is of him to vent/indulge his legitimate emotions.
a woman can burst into tears over any little thing and everyone wants to help her. a man bursts into tears over his father dying of cancer and all the sudden everyone wants to tell him his reaction is too intense and he should be thinking of how he is making other people feel.
Pretty much every guy has had someone in his life try to get him to 'open up' and then we he does he's met with nothing but hostility, disappointment, and eventually rejection. We are told to shut up and never talk about it again. Never, ever is he met with acceptance or love.
Therapy is just littered with bad therapists, that do more harm than good and give the practice a bad name.
For every 1 good therapist, there are probably 10+ bad ones.
It can be a fucking ordeal to navigate, financially and emotionally, to try and find the one good one.
My worst experience was a therapist which charged me 300 dollars a session to do nothing but talk about how amazing they were, and that I need to just suck it up and be amazing like they are, afterall, it was so easy for them.
I am on my fifth therapist. The first one I was seeing I kinda stopped going and then he retired, then I had a GF cheat on me and that was super brutal so I started going again.
First therapist was the stereotypical "feelings are okay!" kind of therapist, second one she just automatically assumed it was my fault and was basically telling me that cause I'm a man I should have done better, and the third just immediately jumped to medication like halfway through my first session.
Ended up with my current therapist and she's great. I really like her because she regularly tells me that I'm just straight up being stupid or ridiculous and just need to handle my shit. Which works amazing for me.
Amen.
There is a boatload of bad therapists and bad therapy out there. And sadly it gets a lot more traction and popularity because well... it's simplistic and easy. It's the fast food of therapy.
Good therapy is hard and long and complex. And most people simple don't want to deal with that. They want the diet pill version of therapy. Just make the bad feelings go away, and give me more good feelings.
I don't think enough analogies are drawn between physical vs mental health. Anyone knows that legit physical health is a long and boring process that takes a lot of discipline and time. Mental health and wellness really isn't any different. Therapists should also be more like physical trainers... you need to have a specific goal in mind and work towards that goal and really and the endgame should be to no longer need the physical trainer/therapist
Sadly in our economic system the incentive for a lot of people is the opposite and many bad therapist/trainers just want to generate dependency of their clients on themselves and as such they will indulge their clients worse habits to keep them hooked.
Yeah.
and there needs to be more oversight and punishment for objectively bad therapists. and I dont mean bad as in their program didnt work for you, i mean bad, like ones that spend an entire session fellating themselves over how awesome they are, or tell you that they arent here to listen to you bitch and moan about your problems (someone I knew had a therapist say that to them) or whatever other objectively awful things bad therapists too.
and there needs to be more education about therapy, and how there are many different styles and approaches.. and not all work for everyone, The system should incentivize people being able to tell their therapist they appreciate their time, but it doesnt feel like their approach is working, and get refered to a different one with a different approach without drama, extra cost, extra paperwork, or headache.
yes, there is an incredibly amount of ignorance, and a lack of oversight about the entire thing.
and so many internet jackasses who think they are experts about it, constantly pushing endless misinformation about every aspect of the process. esp the armchair diagnosing.
'oh you had a bad day at work? you must have autism/adhd/depression/personality disorder'. or the fact anyone who was ever mean to you once in your life is a 'narcissist' or 'gas lighting' you.
the bias confirmation is out of hand. even in this very comment thread... soooo many people just banging on their bias confirmation drum and screaming 'no no no no, men are bad and should just go away and solve their own problems without bothering anyone at all ever!' as if that attitude isn't the biggest reason men, especially young men, feel so trapped about their lives.
From the commenter above talking about negative experiences with talking to women and female therapists, I think the real solution is that men need to be proactive about supporting each other. Ranting and raving about how women are terrible and don't know how to help men with an undercurrent of expectations that women (especially a romantic partner) should fix everything is simply not a tenable mindset.
As a woman who works in the medical field, I am keenly aware of my limitations when it comes to helping men with mental health issues. I think the real, effective solution is for men to start opening up to each other and supporting each other the way that women tend to do among themselves. I don't mean this as "oh, men are terrible and they need to fuck off somewhere else with their problems", I mean it as a sincere belief that the best people to help a man through emotional or psychological problems are probably other men given the shared socialization and perspective.
we need more male therapists and teachers. that's what we need.
we have systematically removed male teachers from the school system due to the pedophilia panic.
I think the pay issue is a big contributor. Women are more likely to accept lower paying jobs, particularly ones like caring professions or teaching, whereas men have a tendency towards higher paying jobs (in part due to the lack of support for pregnancy, parental leave, and childcare expenses).
Nonsense. The idea that all psychological issues are defined by gender is just the perspective of someone who's never made any meaningful progress through therapy and/or counseling. Mental health is not a gendered issue and the repetition of this misconception just leads more people to give up without even trying. Yes, the lens of sexual identity comes into play, mainly in terms of cultural gender roles experienced in your part of the world. But, a well trained, experienced therapist will have these considerations while exploring issues you present with. I would argue, that psychiatrists (which is a much more male dominated field) are much more of an issue, because their objective is not to help you come to conclusions about yourself. It is to medicate your symptoms away to allow you to function. I am sorry you did not have a good experience yourself, but that is not reflective of therapy, or counseling as a whole and your characterisation of men vs women in therapy is sexist and sounds more like male influencer talking points than lived experience.
how many well trained therapists are there out there who are totally objective, compared to poorly trained ones who will often perpetual their harmful biases?
does anyone know? how do we even measure that? do we just assume people who have a certain degree from a certain program are inherently 'objective'?
You can share them to fellow humans here now /c/reprieve@lemmy.zip