AndroTherapy SF

One of Graham Jackson 's typical pairings of men is the Yellow and the Green men, the men who live with their heads in the clouds and the men who live with their feet on the ground, men of sky and men of earth. Jackson gets most of his examples from art and literature. I see them showing up in less elevated realms. Despite the gay-victim theme in them, I like the Donald Strachey Mysteries largely because Chad Allen plays the title role so well. He and his partner Tim are a good Yellow and Green comrades-in-arms partnership. Tim is the Yellow Man, the idealist, the civilized man of thought and visions, concerned with the Great Issues. He's a senatorial assistant. Don is definitely a Guy, the Green Man, the earthling, practical, dealing in concretes and things-as-they-are. A private eye. Great complementarity. In male-female couples, each partner knows that because of their gender oppositions they are bound to be very different, often in quite predictable ways. A man can sometim...

One of the things depth psychotherapy tries to do is to discover and face the truth, --particularly the truths we like to hide from ourselves-- so I am going to talk about one of these differences. Because feminism has come to dominate any discussions about gender, it is uncommonly difficult to talk about male and female differences without people blowing up. You can find these differences played out all over the place, especially in comedy, but in "serious" discussions, there is more heat than light. Doing pro-male psychotherapy and counseling in this atmosphere sometimes requires boiling things down to simple starting points. One of mine: whatever a man is, he is not a boy, he is not God, and he is not a woman. So the differences between men and women are important. Humans are not just generic "persons". They are specific. And one of the most basic specifics is gender. By the way, although gay men have a relationship both to actual women and to The Fe...

One of the realities forgotten in discussions of manhood is the life cycle. This Hindu image, illustrating the passage from birth to death (and for Hindus, to reincarnation), provides a quick reminder that masculinity is organic, that it takes on different aspects depending on a male's age. What is right for one era in life is often not a good fit for another. We need different things from a father and from a grandfather, from a young man facing the challenge of becoming adult and from a mature man starting to see the approach of sundown. The tasks, virtues and pitfalls for males shift and evolve through life. There is not just one static state. That is one of the reasons why I like the image of the constellation to illustrate what manhood is: at differing moments in our growth and development, we need to be guided by different stars within it. It is all a man's life and work, but not every stage is the same. Moving ahead too fast can be as problematic as staying stuck in one p...

One of the frames I find quite useful in working with men is typology. Typology gives a basic map of different character and personality styles of people and of relationships. I use three of these maps. They can help people accept the way they are and try to change things in their lives based on reality rather than some impossible goal. And since couples often come together on the basis of opposites that first attract and later repel, typology can help make clear that partners are not setting out to be difficult or oppositional; they are just build differently. I encourage people to make use of them as far they find them to be of help. The first is the well-known Jungian-based Myers-Briggs typology. The simplest and quickest way to get a handle on this is by taking an online test. But very often you can discover how someone fits into the MB structure just by careful listening and observation. The MB looks for four sets of character biases, on a scale, whether someone is more: ...