I recently attended a workshop intended for women therapists who are interested in learning more about working with men. At one point, the female workshop leader asked the group of mostly women to raise their hands if they liked men. About one-third of those in attendance immediately and enthusiastically raised their hands. In conversation afterward, most of these women said they were very close to their fathers, their brothers, or other men in their lives. Another third of the workshop participants slowly and hesitantly raised their hands while simultaneously glancing around the room to see what others were doing. Lastly, about a third of the women in the room never raised their hands. Keep in mind that the people attending were presumably there because they are interested in doing psychotherapy with men.
I wondered what the group’s reaction would have been if the workshop leader had asked if they like African-American people or if she had asked if they like GLBTQ+ people. How many workshop participants would openly acknowledge not liking either of these groups of people? More importantly, would those therapists who were aware of their biases towards either group still feel OK about continuing to work with groups of people they acknowledged not liking?
This experience reminded me of working with a morbidly obese patient who told me that she was regularly accosted by a complete stranger on the street who called her names and said horribly mean and cruel things to her about being overweight. She taught me that being overweight is the only socially acceptable prejudice. Still, my experience in recent years suggests there is another socially acceptable prejudice in our culture, and that is our biases about men.
The same misandry is readily visible in the culture’s current negative fixation on the subject of narcissism. Any casual perusal of social media will quickly reveal a plethora of articles cautioning people about narcissists, how to avoid them, and how to get away from them. The articles most often are addressed to women, with the assumption that the narcissist is a man. Sadly, the advice dispensed to women is almost always about how to protect themselves, with the underlying assumption being that narcissism is inherently toxic and untreatable.
Disappointingly, similar articles also appear in the professional literature for therapists. Whereas 50 years ago, the professional literature was replete with articles about the therapeutic treatment of narcissistic personality disorder, current professional literature tends to focus more on cautionary guidelines for therapists to protect themselves from patients with narcissistic personality disorder. We seem to have gone from being more concerned about the patients to be more concerned about the therapists.
These same biases about men can also be seen in some of the literature on working with men in psychotherapy, which sometimes conceptualizes men as less emotionally capable than women and prescribes a series of techniques and strategies for therapists to “dumb down” the therapeutic process to make it more palatable and accessible for men. One author suggests that “Instead of asking these men to focus on their feelings, which only made them more anxious or irritable, I should have given them some techniques to resolve their problem.” This directly contradicts my decades of experience in psychotherapy with men and that of many of my colleagues, both men and women, who find men quite capable of doing in-depth emotional work in psychotherapy and not in need of any specialized treatment or precautions.
The same author also wrote “I noticed that when I jumped right into interpretive psychotherapy with male clients, they frequently became anxious or defensive.” In my training, I was taught that one of the hallmarks of a premature interpretation is the client becoming anxious or defensive. It seems to me that this author is blaming the patient’s gender for her own clinical errors. Again, I wonder if we would tolerate this kind of projection with any category of patient other than men.
I hope these examples stimulate some thinking among those of you reading this. Perhaps you will start by asking the question, “Do I like men?” and take it from there. You are welcome to contact me if you are interested in a conversation about this.
Excerpted, in part, from Hidden in Plain Sight: How Men’s Fears of Women Shape Their Intimate Relationships. (Lasting Impact Press)
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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