“Confiding in someone close
can be very risky.”

Armour you can’t take off even at home

A man puts on his armour in the morning and goes off to fight. Work, mortgage, results, keeping things running at home. Armour is a good thing. It carries you, protects you, you can walk into a blow in it. The trouble isn’t that you wear it. The trouble is that in the evening there’s not much of anywhere, and nobody much, to take it off in front of. Mates are for football and a beer, and there it turns into a joke within five minutes. Your partner is usually part of what you need to talk through, so you can’t tell her all of it. And you don’t say it to your parents, they’re supposed to feel that you’re doing well. It isn’t that men can’t talk. Most of them talk all day. Just about something else.

So you sleep in it. And after a few years something happens that almost nobody notices: nobody has looked inside that armour for a long time, the owner included. When someone asks how you’re doing, you answer “fine”, and it isn’t a lie. You genuinely don’t know. Men make up almost half of my paying clients and the sentence I hear from them most often is “I’ve never told anyone this”. Usually there’s no drama in it. It tends to be an ordinary thing someone has carried inside for ten years because they had nowhere to put it down. It isn’t about throwing the armour away. It’s about having a place where you can take it off for two hours and look at what has grown under it over the years.

Three things I see most often with men

1. Anger that flies out and you don’t know why

You were calm for a month and then you shout at your child over spilt milk. Or in an argument you start kicking out around you and ten minutes later you don’t understand yourself what that was. Men describe it to me as a switch: either it’s calm, or it’s out. The middle step, where you could calmly say “this annoys me and this is how it lands on me”, nobody installed. Anger in men rarely stands alone. It tends to be the one emotion with a permitted way out, so everything else gets let out through it too: fear, helplessness, disappointment, tiredness. When you look under that outburst, you’ll find something like that almost every time. And until you look, you’ll be putting it out with self-control. That lasts roughly until the next spilt milk.

2. Performance as the only measure of whether you’re enough

Ask a man what he has behind him and he’ll tell you what he’s achieved. Ask him who he is and there’ll be silence. When your worth rests on performance, you’re not allowed a weak month and above all you can’t afford to rest, because in this logic rest counts as a drop. People sit with me who have reached everything they once set out to, and it still isn’t enough. It never is. The bar moves up along with you. You can tell by one small thing: a Sunday afternoon with no task is not pleasant for you. It makes you anxious and within an hour you find something that needs doing.

3. “I want to be a different father than mine was”

I hear that sentence often. Usually from men who talk about their father briefly and matter-of-factly, and then it breaks in the middle of a sentence. It isn’t about judging him. It’s that they know exactly what they don’t want to do, and have no idea what to do instead. Nobody supplied a model for doing it better. So they improvise and hope it works out, and every time they raise their own voice their stomach tightens over whether they’re doing it just like him.

What you can do about it now

Does this sound familiar?

The more you tick, the less it’s about you and the more it’s about having had nowhere to put it down for years. It isn’t a diagnosis or a list of disorders. It’s a list of things that can be talked through out loud. And out loud they behave differently than in your head. In your head they grow, outside they shrink to their real size.

Where to next