Men in Psychotherapy

This week we are joined by St. Louis Professional Counselor, Michelle Steeg. Michelle, Brett, and. I discuss men in psychotherapy.   Contact Michelle https://michellesteeg.com/   What kind of issues do men face? https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/issues/men-issues   Transcript: you're listening to psych with mike for more episodes or to connect with the show with comments ideas or to be a 0:06 guest go to www.cyclicmike.com follow the show on twitter at psych with 0:13 mike or like the facebook page at psych with mike now here's psych with mike 0:19 [Music] welcome into the psych with mike library this is dr michael mahon and i am 0:25 actually here with mr brett newcomb hello and mystery guest would you like to 0:30 introduce yourself yeah i thought you were going to do my intro i can no it's all right my name is 0:37 michelle stieg i am a former student of both of yours but i'm a licensed professional 0:43 counselor here in st louis as well and i'm here to put my two cents in today and i think that anybody who heard you 0:50 say that should not hold that against you right 0:56 because if the therapy sucks you'll train me right survival here we go i know 1:01 now anybody who's ever been in therapy with michelle says oh well that explains it makes sense now now i get it it all 1:06 checks out so uh we wanted to get together because my 1:13 understanding is michelle that you had had a conversation with brett about 1:18 some epiphanies that you had had and so why don't you tell us a little bit about that and 1:24 how that happened for you sure so i was you know by volume i've seen more women 1:30 in my career but i also think that's just because more women seek out counseling services but i would really 1:36 say that i do uh specialize in working with men and adolescent boys um and that's i mean 1:42 that's been typically from the very beginning of my career and so 1:47 i've seen quite a few more men over the past few years and i would say about 70 1:52 of my practice at this point has been men and what i had reached out to him about for 1:59 a potential topic with you guys was just some patterns that uh that i've been seeing and it and it 2:04 really goes kind of across the board with all of the men whom i see and so 2:10 then i was just also kind of observing the men in my life and seeing some of the similar patterns and so 2:17 um you know a consistent theme that i see with men who come into my office is a 2:23 genuine lack of self-awareness people not just men will come to 2:30 counseling and say i want you know i'm coming to you for this issue and here's what i want to get out of therapy and we 2:35 all know that that's you know what the presenting issue is is never the issue it's never the issue right 2:41 but i tell people all the time men and women alike that i cannot offer you 2:46 anything you are seeking without the awareness 2:51 if you don't have the awareness of the patterns and the things that you're doing in your life i can't offer you anything that 2:58 you've come here seeking so what you're saying is they have to be self-aware correct 3:04 but i would suggest that you can facilitate that if they don't have it absolutely open to the process yes they 3:12 have to essentially surrender to the process and surrender to the fact that they 3:17 aren't self-aware so yeah um i want to lay this on the table 3:22 i have also seen michelle in therapy as my therapist i uh practiced 3:28 therapy as a clinician for 35 years yeah and then i retired and in retirement decided it was time to 3:35 do something that people told me for 35 years i needed to do which is go to therapy and i thought the hell i know 3:40 everything why did i do that amen and i had also read a book which i think 3:46 is seminal for me the book was maybe you should speak to someone about a therapist who went to therapy 3:52 so i went to michelle and i 3:59 was worried about that because of the dynamics of our history student 4:05 friend therapist and all the corruption of those relationships but i was more worried about that 4:11 because of what i knew about myself yeah in that i can be very competitive and very gamey 4:17 and play lots of head games and i had to be and i ask you as a way to insulate you 4:24 from having to be real yes and to protect me and some people in power position and control the 4:30 circumstances yeah the one things that i asked michelle to do i said i am going to make an honest effort not to play 4:35 those games and not to be the professor the knowing therapist the mentor or whatever but be 4:42 me and look in the mirror for me and you wanted her to point it out whenever she saw me 4:47 not doing it and also to compound that issue my wife was sitting there because she went with me so these two women who 4:54 know me very well i asked them if i'm doing the thing please point 4:59 that out they were more than happy to do that [Laughter] 5:06 she and i were great co-therapists oh you are you are is always helpful 5:12 so that's all i want to put all that on the table before we got into this conversation about awareness because i think it's critical the critical 5:17 conditions so in response to what you were saying michelle as far as the idea of being 5:24 more aware i only can come at that from my own 5:30 experience as a man but also as somebody who's been in therapy done a lot of therapy over 5:36 the years and i remember when i first started in the process of recovery 5:44 there was a christmas and my wife had put the tree up and had strung the 5:49 lights on it and after she had done that she had asked me do you want to help me 5:54 put the ornaments on the tree and i said oh i got your ornaments right 5:59 here and i was taking these glass ornaments and i was flinging them up against the fireplace yeah and so i and 6:06 i i was just thinking about a four step for people who don't know a fourth step is where you do it fearless and 6:12 searching moral inventory and uh the first thing that i put on my fourth 6:17 step was people make me angry and so that was my first i thought you said you 6:23 were going to buy her some christmas ornaments no well somebody had to go buy some new produces 6:29 because she was like you're you're insane you're crazy and i was like oh well see here's the problem is people make me angry you make me angry 6:37 and then after a while when i was able to sit with that and think about it then i realized oh no i get angry right and 6:46 then i realized oh i get angry because i'm insecure because christmas in my house growing up was a time of fear not 6:53 a time of joy and so what i want to make sure that people understand is that 6:59 level of awareness is a process and you don't have to get to a point of complete 7:04 nakedness in the first session you should go through a process because 7:11 that's the only way that you're going to allow yourself to be real and genuine and that's my job 7:16 yeah that's my job to walk you through that process because if you could do it on your own we wouldn't be here but i 7:22 also want to state like for the record on records somewhere here in your psych 7:29 with mike library that it was the privilege of my career to work with you so i need that stated 7:35 now with that said um that'll get edited out no it won't okay 7:43 i would say yeah that's my my job is to get you to that level of awareness and 7:48 that it's a bit of an arduous process because i think as we were talking before 7:53 so much of a man's experience you know from 7:59 their childhood on has to be performative right so we're constantly competing with 8:05 one another trying to keep up with each other trying to not look weak trying to not look vulnerable 8:11 trying to look strong so everything up into a certain point in a man's life 8:16 has really been performative so it would make sense that men struggle to have 8:24 a lot of that self-awareness and we think yeah people make me angry when it's actually 8:30 so much deeper than that and i say it all the time like that's why men are so beautifully complicated 8:37 because it's not that they're being obstinate in not having the self-awareness they often just truly 8:45 don't ever see this just to play the game yeah and that's what they learn i'm interested in as you're saying this 8:52 are you framing that in terms of men's interactions and relationships with other men 8:58 or also with women i think it's all relative i think it starts with others yeah so i 9:05 think it starts with with other men you know i 9:11 the last when i was in education the last building i worked in was with 600 teenage boys all day every day so it was 9:18 i mean what i saw was just this highly competitive um 9:24 constant flexing constant roasting i would have kids come in the seniors would come in and they would be balling 9:29 saying like i don't know what i'm gonna do you know brett looks like he knows exactly where he's going he wants to be 9:35 an engineer he's going to ralla that's how it is i'd get him packaged up out the door and brett would walk right in and brett 9:42 would be crying going everybody thinks i should be an engineer and i don't want to do it but it looks like mike knows 9:48 exactly what he's doing so it was this constant cycle of performing that i then saw carry over like in my 9:56 practice like with females but they weren't even necessarily aware 10:01 that they were doing it but they did with females have the ability to soften 10:07 and the females were able their girlfriends or their partners were able to um kind of pull out of them more of that 10:14 sensitive intimate layer yeah and it would approach it from that 10:19 perspective though i want that piece from you i want that i want to know more about you and often men will look at themselves on 10:25 what you're talking about i don't have that people right why are you asking me for that one of my favorite things with 10:30 men and this one client who had so my favorite clients to work with are 10:35 men who think therapy is it's my favorite i love it like they set my world on fire so i have a guy i'm 10:40 working with who thinks therapy is of course and he says i asked him something i said how did it 10:46 make you feel and he goes frustrated because that's all that's typically the first thing i hear from men they're angry or frustrated i've also never met 10:53 a man who wasn't completely terrified of his anger on some level but he says i'm 10:59 it makes me really frustrated it's okay say more about that tell me more and he goes 11:07 i don't know how and we both started laughing because it's true and it wasn't that i was laughing because i was making 11:13 fun of me it's true they don't know how and part of that is vocabulary correct and being 11:20 able to say i'm frustrated instead of i'm angry right big step right i mean it's a breakthrough yes and and then you 11:25 you try to teach them other words for different layers of intensity i'm 11:31 i'm pissed off i'm miffed i'm irritated right i'm mad i'm angry i'm rageful 11:37 those levels are things that they were not taught no to distinguish no they might 11:44 be taught to read them in observation of another man how correct what's the temperature here uh 11:50 is he going to hit me right go to go to fist city uh but in terms of looking in the mirror 11:55 and seeing that no yeah well i always started off especially with men by saying 12:02 that big boys don't cry fear is a sign of weakness and so i did 12:08 he does this to me and i won't answer he won't answer really i know this is my first time i'll i'll let him hang there i'm gonna 12:14 do whatever you want i'll let him hang next time but i've been asking those questions for 12:20 close to 40 years and so thousands and thousands and thousands of times never gotten a different answer 12:26 and i would implore someone to tell me where these things are written down that's 50 of the 12:33 human emotional spectrum that we tell men they don't have the right to feel 12:39 and there's a lot of shame that goes into feeling those things and that to me is 12:45 the big hurdle that we go into therapy with men fighting against is how do we 12:52 make it okay for these guys to allow themselves even to contemplate that it's 12:59 okay to experience the complete spectrum of human emotions you're a human being 13:06 biologically andro chronology wise you are going to have these experiences what 13:12 do you do with that when you have this experience and then this shame message 13:17 tells you that you shouldn't have it you're going to sublimate that emotion you're going to take that energy you're going to dump it into something else and 13:23 usually that's anger and so these guys present as horribly horribly angry and 13:29 it's only because they're taking all of the energy for every emotion they've ever felt in their life and they're 13:34 dumping it into being mad because they don't know what else to do yes and then again like i said i've never met a man though who was not acutely afraid 13:42 of his anger but the shame that men carry is profound 13:49 like the the insecurity and shame that runs through their veins just 13:56 existing is it's i don't know i just have a lot of empathy in working with men because 14:03 underneath that anger is so much softness that 14:09 the world has kind of shamed out of them so a question from you 14:16 how as a woman and a therapist how aware are you of being able to sit in a 14:23 room with a rageful male and not having your own echoes in response to 14:29 that of anxiety or fear or submission yeah 14:36 because when i taught for 35 years people to be clinicians that was a real issue for 14:43 women wanting to be therapists uh how do you get out of your own way with your own passion your own history 14:50 of responding to angry men because the critical point i believe and i've said throughout all these podcasts 14:57 that we've done is you have to create the safe holding environment he has to be able to be there 15:02 and be present with those feelings and you have to be able to hold that and not come with your own issues 15:09 before you answer that question we're going to go to our break and then we'll have you answer that question on the other side okay 15:16 wow we've already done half of this traveler that'll get edited out 15:22 one hopes hey everybody dr michael mahoney here from psych with mike and i couldn't be 15:27 more excited to talk to you about athletic greens which is a new sponsor we have here on the show i started 15:33 taking athletic greens watching some youtube videos and doing my own 15:38 research i wanted to add something to my daily workout program to give me some energy and to support gut health and 15:46 that was the one thing that kept coming up again and again with athletic greens is the guy who started the company 15:52 did a bunch of research because he was having some gut health issues that he couldn't get any resolution for he 15:59 developed athletic greens and it's just exploded from there so it's 75 16:04 superfoods vitamins minerals probiotics whole food sources that's all in one 16:11 daily scoop you put it in 8 or 12 ounces of water you shake it up and you drink it the taste is very very drinkable i 16:19 actually enjoy it and i have been using it and my energy levels have just been through the roof i 16:26 really like athletic greens because of some of the sustainability things that they do so they buy carbon 16:34 credits and you know to help protect the rainforest which is something that i really like 16:40 but if you order athletic greens in your subscription you're going to also get a 16:45 year's supply of their vitamin d supplementation and five free travel 16:51 packs and that vitamin d is so important during those winter months when we're 16:56 not getting enough sunlight we've talked about how that decreases your mood and 17:02 increases depression and that can be a real deal changer so you go to 17:07 athleticgreens.com emerging that's athleticgreens.com 17:13 e-m-e-r-g-i-n-g that's the psych with mic promo and 17:19 you're going to get that additional vitamin d support for a year and five 17:24 free travel packs so take control of your own health today and as always if 17:30 it's friday it's psych with mike okay we're back and so uh the question 17:37 is again can you yeah as a female sitting in the room with a really 17:43 intensely angry man how do you create a safe holding environment for him to experience those feelings without 17:51 having your own alarms set off for your safety yeah so 17:57 a couple things first off my vetting process in working with men like um 18:03 i do believe that i specialize in working with men but i'm also not gonna work with a man who i don't 18:08 like just off the street he's gonna have to have a referral from somebody that i know and trust 18:13 or that i've worked with in the past um because i know the relationships there and they 18:18 wouldn't send me anybody who would harm me okay so first that's um 18:24 kind of the first piece is the vetting process but 18:29 i think you have to understand too that like my entire history has been surrounded 18:36 with men my two mentors were men jerry and jerry johnson and tom michler 18:43 um you know both of them don't you mike i do so they were my mentors when i was in 18:50 school with you guys and then afterwards i had you right we stayed in contact you are 18:55 profoundly impactful in my life then i was already working with men doing therapy i'm in my own therapy 19:04 but working especially with high school adolescent males really set the foundation for me to be 19:11 able to sit with grown men in their anger because you could see the high school 19:16 boy in there absolutely like when it's crazy because when i have a grown 19:22 man and i i mean like there's i'm picturing a handful of my clients i 19:28 mean they are over six three massive massive men filled with rage in front of me 19:35 and i i see a kid yeah so when i experience male rage in front of me 19:41 there is something that happens in my system that immediately softens so you 19:46 see woundedness i do i really i really really do because anger is a emotion it's a mask 19:53 it's it's it's sadness is bodyguard you know it's it's hurts bodyguard or at least that's how i see it in most 20:01 instances so as soon as that rage comes up i'm not activated because i see harm i 20:08 see shame and i also build i feel like the relationship with the men that i work with like 20:15 they're not going to hurt me yeah they care about me yeah and i they know 20:21 that i care about them so like it's not threatening to me 20:27 so you can do the reflective listening to say i feel your rage i feel you wallowing in it but 20:34 i also know that you're not going to hurt me or yourself no in this moment correct and so 20:40 can you talk out loud about what you're feeling can you put words to it yeah 20:47 that's an invitation and an observation but it's also a message correct okay correct because they i mean you have to 20:54 think about it too like i mean the man that i work with i mean they get really protective of me too and 21:00 they are afraid to rage in front of me because they don't want to scare me and so it's this 21:06 shift of energy that happens in that moment in the relationship where i have to show them 21:11 that i'm not afraid of them yeah and there's a lot of not in a muscle up 21:17 muscle up i'm not afraid of you i can't take you out but in a i understand yeah what this is happening 21:23 inside you and i'm not afraid of it tolerate your anger and not 21:29 shy away from it or need to control you or shut it down right so can you then allow yourself to 21:36 not be afraid of it because that's right the next step is that how do you then take that and 21:42 you know for me when i work with men in that situation you know my next step is 21:49 going to be what are you mad about i mean what's going on here that because 21:55 anger is a part of the fight-or-flight syndrome so the only rational reason to 22:01 experience anger is if you're going to defend yourself so you have to feel that whatever the threat is is significant 22:09 enough that that would be a warranted response what's happening in this moment that would make you feel this way and 22:15 99.9 of the time the answer is nothing and so it's not really anger it's it's 22:21 covering for something else i'm fine yeah right yeah right okay cool yeah 22:26 yeah so i lost it um that's because you're old 22:32 that's what nothing because i'm old i can't that's because i don't hear um 22:40 if you can invite them oh i know what it was 22:46 as a clinician one of the skills that you have to learn is to avoid counter transference 22:52 and counter transference issues are so subtle you don't always see them coming you don't know that you have them unless 22:58 maybe you're in therapy yourself which i avoided uh but how do you 23:04 not steer away and uh redirect the conversation redirect the 23:10 emotional experience how do you just sit in the presence of intense emotions whether it's grief or rage or sadness or 23:16 loss or guilt or what shame whatever it is without 23:21 steering it from your own agendas that to me is a clinical question and three clinicians in the room how do we 23:28 learn to do that how do we do that in a way that then facilitates the client 23:33 being able to safely be held while they feel whatever they need to feel 23:39 and then help them put words to it and i'm curious what you both think about that well i would say i mean you've 23:45 experienced so i am trained to do internal family systems theory 23:51 therapy so parts work um in ifs we talk about dropping into self so 23:57 essentially what that means is i'm not i'm not blended with a bunch of parts that are trying to take me places or 24:03 protect me or whatever so essentially i've kind of trained my body to become acutely aware 24:09 of what it looks like what it feels like in my system when i have dropped into some flare when you trigger correct so i 24:16 i'm really aware of the chatter that i hear in my head i think that like you have to train yourself to be like 24:23 acutely aware of parts that step into that have an agenda or they're trying to lead 24:30 um because when i'm in self when i'm sitting with one of those 24:36 clients who's raging or just filled with grief or shame i tell people all the time and it's 24:41 something that i do hear when i'm in self is my my job is not 24:46 my job is to hear you in a way that no one in your life possibly can 24:52 yes that including yourself including absolutely and so 24:59 when i hear a lot of chatter i know i'm uh something's happening there and so i can redirect myself or i 25:05 tell my client flat out like can you keep listening right now right right i'm hearing a lot of chatter in my head 25:10 right now so that tells me something's happening here so why can we can we redirect this i don't know that's 25:16 kind of how i approach it and for me when i hear that chatter what that says 25:21 to me is there's something real going on and this chatter is specifically designed to 25:28 elicit a response from me because people are so afraid of silence and so if i the 25:35 chatter comes up and then i react to it now we're running down the rabbit hole of i'm chasing the chatter and i think 25:42 that that is the point at which silence is a profoundly powerful tool don't 25:49 respond like people experience the emotion don't touch them don't don't 25:54 talk to a clinical skill yeah just absolutely let them be with it and i say you know i'm gonna let you simmer a minute and and we're gonna see what 26:01 happens and you're going to be the next person to respond so michael garzini 26:07 yeah taught us yeah you and i identity about projective identification i really like him and 26:15 his understanding of that was that if you sit in the silence and 26:20 feel the emotions from the client then you need to ask the client 26:27 your definition of understanding what you're feeling is it possible that this is coming from you 26:35 is that a message from you that i need to hear and clients will typically go oh no no no that's not me i i would feel 26:40 that or say that but michael taught us to do that and to work with the data feedback that we were 26:47 getting yes because it's a discovery process it's an invitation to the client 26:53 that says it's really okay if these are words that we use it's really okay if these are feelings that we have we can 26:58 have those we're in here with the door closed nobody else knows and then we can process that what does 27:04 it feel like to be asked that question if i can if you can't feel the feeling can you feel what it feels like not to 27:11 be able to feel the feeling now can we discuss that i do want to say since we are weird this is specifically designed 27:17 to be targeted to people who may be doing therapy right that one of the things that i am very very specific 27:23 about when we get to this point especially with men is i don't want you to act in the real world the way you're 27:30 acting in this room right now i don't want you to take this and act this way because you think this is the 27:36 way you're supposed to act you know and or because you're not ready right right you can't take this show on the road exactly right so it's okay for you to 27:43 feel this here for you to behave this way here but that doesn't mean you should behave this way 27:49 everywhere maybe you will eventually but not right now it's unsafe right yes it 27:54 would be unsafe for them to do that and explaining that to them along the way 28:00 shows them that like i i want you to do this the right way 28:05 because you have power exactly you've got options you've got power and every time you do that and explain that to them 28:12 you're creating more awareness you're modeling the awareness for them like it's it's 28:18 such a journey and the safety and the safe holding right we can have these uh 28:23 you married couples going through divorce counseling or marriage counseling may lead to divorce 28:29 i would often tell them one of the common daydream night dream fantasies 28:34 that people in your situation have is they fantasize that their partner was 28:40 killed in a car wreck or that they're walking down the street and a tree falls on them or something and they die because being the widow or widower 28:48 who now is free from the constraints of this dysfunctional relationship but without any responsibility yes is what 28:54 your subconscious is telling you wouldn't that be nice right and then they look at each other and they both go like 29:00 well but what what they don't acknowledge to themselves is through their own passive 29:05 aggressive behavior they've been trying to play out that fantasy for how many years before they came to the office so 29:13 people do that and i tell people all the time your partner is engaged in a passive aggressive activity that is 29:20 designed to get you to leave so that they can then say it's not my fault exactly right well it goes back to what 29:26 michelle said initially it's not my fault i didn't do it right has the power let's see what you made me do right the 29:31 power to not make choices to force people into corners so they make the choices on your 29:37 behalf and it's just such a delusion because the only thing that any of us actually have control over is our own 29:44 behavior and our own thinking but we delude ourselves into believing that we 29:49 should have control over all of everything everybody else does and never 29:54 take responsibility for what we do it's just so backwards but it feels comfortable but 30:00 it's also a great game that clients can play in therapy if i can get you to talk 30:06 to me about why did my father do this why did he behave this way why do you treat me this way instead of me talking 30:12 about what did that feel like to me correct or how can i respond differently so that i don't become my father but i 30:18 think that also depends on the clinician that you're working with if they're able to catch that we're focusing just on your dad 30:24 instead of we're not talking about you yeah which again i think with men in particular that's an easy dance to do 30:32 and you have to be able to hear it as their therapist and pick up on it like i see what your dad has done here let's 30:38 let's talk about you and that impact on you right so it's not that the information from the family of 30:44 origin isn't important but the only way that it's important is how did that 30:50 behavior how did those situations cause you to feel and respond you used to have 30:55 a conversation with uh people with abuse histories all the time to say you are not responsible for how you got 31:02 here you are a survivor of other people's victimization what you are responsible 31:08 for is how you leave here and you can have the power and the freedom to make these choices and do 31:13 different things and live differently but you have to do that mm-hmm yeah and you if you just keep looking in your 31:20 navel and saying oh this happened this is tragic you won't ever be any different no and your relationships will 31:27 never go to the depths that you're probably seeking yeah 31:32 so that actually is a good point for us to 31:37 bring this thing to a close uh let me just say that was an incredibly clinical 31:44 discussion 31:50 you're welcome as always the music that appears inside with mike is written and performed by mr benjamin the clue and 31:57 what we are asking people to do is find us on the internet's go to 32:03 apple podcast find site with mike and give us a rating and leave us a comment that is super 32:09 beneficial but the most helpful thing for us is for everybody to go to the 32:15 youtubes find psych 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