Breaking Barriers in Counseling Men

Insights and Innovations

Aaron B. Rochlen, Fredric E. Rabinowitz, Aaron B. Rochlen, Fredric E. Rabinowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415839341
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136291623
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Breaking Barriers in Counseling Men is a unique collection of personal and engaging contributions from nationally recognized scholars and clinicians with expertise in treating men. The editors have selected men's clinicians who address areas as diverse as sexual dysfunction, male bonding over sports, father-son relationships, and counseling men in the military. Featuring a mix of clinical tips, personal anecdotes, and theoretical reframing, this book takes clinicians invested in these issues to the next level, breaking down barriers to connecting with men and getting them the help that is so often needed.

Part I

Approaches

Working Therapeutically With Men in Ways that Connect Experience and Language

Chapter 1

Pushing Haystacks and Cracking Steel Balls

Using Metaphors With Men

Ryan A. McKelley

When a contemporary man looks down into his psyche, he may, if conditions are right, find under the water of his soul, lying in an area no one has visited for a long time, an ancient hairy man.

Robert Bly, Iron John (1990)

As a therapist, the above quote says more about how I think about working with men than any one clinical experience or theoretical perspective. For me, water of the soul conveys a sense of fluidity of feeling, and a crushing pressure and darkness in the depths of my own psyche. It also feels like a place that many are afraid to wander. Interpreting the powerful symbolic language embodied by Bly’s quote can often be the key to uncovering meaning and self-understanding in ourselves and our male clients.

Before written language, humans sat in circles around fire and food, passing on wisdom through poems, fables, and songs (Parry & Doan, 1994). Over time these stories and symbols became metaphors, defined by psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp “as a way of speaking in which one thing is expressed in terms of another” (as cited in Gordon, 1978, p. 9).

In this chapter I’ll argue that since the therapy room is one based on sharing through language, metaphors can be an important way for clients to talk about their concerns, problems, and goals. Metaphors have long been part of therapeutic approaches, from Freud’s sexual symbolism for understanding dreams to Jung’s archetypes to Perls’ top dog and under dog (Gordon, 1978). They are useful tools for therapists to apply theory to practice and can be even more powerful when they come directly from clients themselves. Below, I will share examples from my own clinical practice while emphasizing why metaphors can be good for men, and how clinicians from various theoretical perspectives can use them effectively.

Temporarily Losing the Path

The idea of using metaphors with men in therapy is not new. In their book Deepening Psychotherapy With Men, Rabinowitz and Cochran (2002) stressed that, “the metaphor is a powerful way that men connect with their emotions” (p. 81). However, metaphor as a therapeutic tool wasn’t discussed in my formal clinical training. In fact, I had the opposite experience. During my second year of practicum, my clinical supervisor and I were reviewing video clips of one of my sessions. She paused the clip and said, “Listen to how Darin is using metaphors to distance himself from his experience. He’s intellectualizing, and he’s pulling you into it. You need to break him out of that pattern and get him to speak directly about his feelings.” Like a good supervisee I returned to my sessions with a new vigilance and commitment to call out my clients’ metaphors.

I followed my supervisor’s advice. I changed my behavior in session and expected my client to make progress and follow suit. It wasn’t happening. With Darin, it was like that moment at a club when the record scratches (back when records were still played): the music stops and everyone looks at the DJ in confused silence. This was, in fact, the metaphor I used with him to describe the sudden shift in our therapeutic relationship. We both sensed it. I told Darin about my discussion in supervision, and how I was trying to help him use more direct language to describe his feelings. He patiently replied, “But that’s what I know. That is the best way I can tell you how I’m feeling.” From that moment on I swore I would honor the language that clients used in sessions and find ways to integrate metaphors in my work with men.

Pushing Haystacks

Before getting into recommended guidelines for using metaphors, I want to share a second critical lesson in my own training and interest in this area. Steve was in his late 30s and in therapy for the first time despite a lifetime of significant trauma. Some of his first words in session were, “I swear to you, if I saw my ex-wife’s new husband outside that window right now there is nothing you could do to stop me from going outside and killing him.” Not surprisingly, this comment scared me. I noticed myself tensing up. I found him abrasive, controlling, and unlikeable. Fast forward one year later, he ended up one of the most endearing, genuine, and likeable clients I’ve had. After giving Steve time and space to share his stories, I learned to relate to his material and experiences. Although our choice of words may have differed, I recognized similar fears (e.g., failure), disappointments (e.g., paths not taken), and joys (e.g., fatherhood) I held as well.

Learning about Steve’s early years helped explain how he had become so angry and defensive. After his parents divorced when he was three, his father remarried an abusive woman. Steve’s father was often away on business for months at a time. His stepmother beat him so severely that he would sometimes be out of school for up to several weeks. The bruises always healed before his father’s return. At age nine he was forced to walk up and down the sidewalk wearing a sandwich board reading, “I am 9 years old and still wet the bed.”

While there isn’t room in this chapter to discuss the details of Steve’s life, it was marked by drug addiction, abuse of his own first child, and several bankruptcies. Eventually, things turned around. By the time he came to therapy he had remarried, returned to college, and began raising another family. His presenting concern was his quickness to anger, and he wanted to learn how to deal with people without losing his temper. Although these were his initial explicit problems, I quickly learned there were many other concerns that could benefit from therapeutic work.

Six weeks into therapy Steve began a session in his typical fashion by retelling a story of a personal slight from the week. I noticed our sessions followed the same pattern of him working through frustration for 40 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of deeper material that could be captured by the infamous “doorknob comments.” He left the most powerful material for me to struggle with as he was on his way out of the room.

He said therapy wasn’t working, and that maybe it was a mistake. I felt the same. But I will never forget what Steve said next: “It feels like all we are doing each week is pushing haystacks. You know those giant ones you see spread out over fields? I feel like each week we take one and push it a few inches, and then move to another one the next session. I’m looking at the field and don’t really see that anything has changed.”

He was absolutely right. I had gotten caught up in his pattern of avoidance each week. He burned through the anger leaving a few minutes of vulnerability at the end. We explored the haystacks metaphor and immediately created a new, shared language for our work. Steve acknowledged that he had many concerns (haystacks of different sizes), all of which could be useful to work through in treatment. However, he wanted to “take one stack and push it all the way across the field” before beginning a new one.

This haystack metaphor became a playful way to “call him out” during times he might be avoiding working on issues. By pointing out that he changed haystacks he could make the conscious decision to change goals if needed. Alternatively, I could use his words to remind him that we switched issues again. We even learned over time that by moving one haystack, in his case breaking a 16-year fear and avoidance of crying, he could move several others forward more efficiently. When we became stuck in our communication, I became more intentional in my use of metaphors.

Why Metaphors can be Good for Men

It goes without saying that metaphors aren’t for men only. It’s not that women can’t benefit from this approach. However, it’s my perception that due to years of socialization, using direct language to describe their thoughts and feelings is often a struggle for men. Levant (1995) summarized several decades of research on gender-differentiated development of language for emotions with two key findings. First, parents were more likely to discourage sons from expressing vulnerable and caring emotions while encouraging it in their daughters. Second, mothers often use more emotion words when talking with daughters than sons. Over time it is easy to see how many men struggle to find the words to express what is going on inside, or that people assume men don’t feel those vulnerable and caring emotions. Losing the ability to put feelings into words is called normative male alexithymia. Metaphors can help.

From its Greek roots, alexithymia translates to “without words for emotions.” Levant (2001) argued that some men who experience this have greater difficulty in identifying and/or expressing emotion. I won’t argue whether men are more alexithymic than women, or whether men cannot express their emotions. Countless therapy clients have shattered that stereotype. I will argue that many male clients struggle with putting their internal experiences into neat little terms and categories, and it doesn’t make it easy for therapists to check off boxes of symptoms on a structured clinical interview form.

I find it comical to complete mood and affect lists on intake forms because many of the words are rarely expressed directly during initial sessions. When was the last time a client told you he felt labile? I’ve had a client describe his daily emotions “like one of those machines they hook you up to in the ER. One minute my line is climbing up steadily, the next minute I am coding and alarms are going off all around.” I learned several things from that metaphor: (1) my client was aware that his emotions change, (2) there was some mystery about why they change, and (3) he experienced some distress during numbness. That one metaphor opened up several important lines of inquiry in his therapy.

Meaningful Metaphors in Therapy

If you take the time to carefully listen, I suspect you will begin to see this kind of symbolic language everywhere. Below are examples of how other metaphors unfolded in my own experiences with male clients. These are offered not to provide an exhaustive list. Rather, they illustrate different ways metaphors can become therapeutic tools and opportunities.

The Loose Grip

To relieve stress, “Haystacks Steve” liked to race motorcycles in the desert. Many times he came to session and told me about a particular race and the way he felt when the pavement would rush past his knees on a sharp turn. Although I didn’t race motorcycles, I rode recreationally and loved to hear these stories.

At one point, we reached an impasse in therapy about how his need for control in his life was impacting his work and relationships. He made strong arguments about the value of maintaining control over his environment. He also noted how our culture often reinforces men’s need for and benefits of control. In theory, he was able to grasp how his need for too much control was hurting him. I tried in vain to get him to put into practice ways of exerting less maximal effort while maintaining the comfort of optimal control.

And then came the powerful metaphor that furthered our work. I asked him, “When you are taking a sharp turn on your bike, what are your arms and hands like on your handlebar grip?” He said they were holding on “loosely but firmly.” I then asked him what would happen if he muscled his arms and grip too tightly on a turn, and without pause he indicated he would tip the bike and end up with serious road rash. Almost immediately he realized where I was going. Steve’s homework that week was to pay attention to interactions he was “muscling his way through” and to report on the experience the next session. By dissecting the process of something he knew extremely well (racing) he had a structured way to explore other areas of his life. The loose grip metaphor became common language in our work. It was used as a way to identify times he worked too hard for control. It further provided him a concrete way to loosen up his grip in social interactions.

Cracking the Steel Ball

I often use the title of this section for my clinician-focused workshops on using metaphors with men. The reference to steel balls gets a few chuckles. Obviously, colleagues begin to make their own assumptions about what that might mean for male clients. I will break the suspense first by assuring you that it has more to do with the upper than lower torso.

Ben was a client in his early 40s who was referred to therapy by his wife for “intimacy problems.” Similar to “Haystacks Steve,” Ben’s early life included trauma and abuse, mostly in the form of hurtful comments from his mother. These were severe, including comments like, “I should have aborted you” and cracks from his father for being a “pussy” for crying. In late adolescence, he made a decision that he would never let anyone hurt him like that again. He described that moment almost as if he felt a sudden closing off in his body. I knew this was central, but it was about as much information as I could get about that turning point in his life.

By our third session I learned it was difficult to get any specific information about Ben’s emotional state. If I asked directly how he felt about a story or memory, he returned with a blank stare. I was losing confidence in my ability to connect with him. I questioned whether he was ready for therapy. The next session I took a risk. I shared how little I felt I knew about him. Ben said he’d heard that line often, and was neither surprised nor troubled about my disclosure. I decided to ask one more time about that “sudden closing off in his body” from high school.

Ben told me to imagine a shiny steel ball the size of a baseball in his chest. There were no seams or cracks—it was an impenetrable ball in place of where his heart should have been. He added that the ball was “filled with all of these horrible feelings that I can’t describe, and I have no idea how they got in there. I mean, there’s no way in, you know? That means there’s also no way out.” He described an incredible internal pressure that was growing steadily each year. Hearing him describe this made me feel incredibly tender and concerned. It was the first time I began to understand how much Ben was struggling. I could now picture this steel ball, and it gave me something tangible to explore with him.

I assumed that Ben wanted therapy to be a place where he could get rid of the ball. He quickly disagreed as he emphasized how the ball (not uncommon from defenses) served a protective function. It held things together that were important to his past. We went back and forth about the building pressure inside. I expressed my concerns about what would happen if the pressure continued to build. He returned the concern and I caught a glimpse of the toll it...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• The Routledge Series on Counseling and Psychotherapy with Boys and Men
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Jack, the Sun, and the Wind
• Part I Aproaches Working Therapeutically with Men in Ways that Connect Experience and Language
• Chapter 1 Pushing Haystacks and Cracking Steel Balls Using Metaphors With Men
• Chapter 2 Using Humor and Storytelling in Men's Work
• Chapter 3 Approaching the Unapproachable Therapist Self-Disclosure to De-Shame Clients
• Chapter 4 Moving With Men and Their Passions Lessons From Surfing
• Chapter 5 Going Deep Using Sports to Engage Men Therapeutically
• Part II Modalities Working with Men Utilizing Unique Therapeutic Environments and Activities
• Chapter 6 Innovative Group Therapy With Men
• Chapter 7 Adventure Therapy With Men
• Chapter 8 Creating Experiential Weekend Retreats for Men
• Chapter 9 Getting Wired Connecting With Men through Technology
• Chapter 10 Coaching Men A Direct Approach to Intimacy and Sexuality
• Part III Populations Intervening with Male Sub-Groups Who Share Identities, Perspectives, and Experiences
• Chapter 11 A Holistic Approach to Counseling Military Men
• Chapter 12 Working Outside the Box With Incarcerated Men
• Chapter 13 Making the Connection With Male Teenagers
• Chapter 14 Navigating Multiple Identities With Gay and Bisexual Men of Color
• Chapter 15 Counseling Fathers Opening the Door for Reflection and Growth
• Conclusion Breaking Barriers: Expanding the Repertoire
• Index