As host of the Revealing Men podcast, Randy Flood usually engages a guest in conversation about the issues men face in working through their own and society’s expectations of what constitutes masculinity in the 21st century. This time, there is no guest. They fell ill. Instead of canceling, Flood uses the time to talk about a question he often encounters from listeners and others who are trying to learn about male psychology: “Why is it difficult for men to seek therapy and to ask for help?”
You can listen to the entire podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. Excerpts follow below (edited for length and clarity).
The Externalization Trap
When Flood, a psychotherapist, founded the Men’s Resource Center in 2000, he wanted to develop a practice that specializes in working with men. “Some people thought that was a crazy business model,” he says, “when it’s difficult for men to ask for directions, let alone to ask for help when they’re lost in their life.”
Why is that?
“What I see men struggle with oftentimes,” he explains, “is the ‘externalization trap.’ Men’s rigid adherence to externalization leads them to reject the interior work necessary to extricate themselves from the destructive externalization cycle.
“The way in which men are taught and socialized to think about solving problems is to fix things outside of themselves,” he continues. “That’s a beautiful, masculine energy that helps us fix engines, organizations, Excel spreadsheets, … All of that is the outside world, the externalized world. That energy is productive and constructive in the right context.
But when it comes to changing our lives and being able to effectively transform our lives; that is more of an inside job.” A job that men aren’t accustomed to undertake.”
“When things change inside you, things change around you.”
– attributed to Lewis Carroll
The Courage to Look Inside
When men come to his office seeking help, Flood explains, they’re often asked to consider that to change their life, they’ll have to do something that feels counterintuitive; something they feel rather incompetent to do. “That is to get connected to feelings, get connected to emotions, especially emotions that maybe they buried and suppressed because they’ve deemed them unmasculine: feelings such as sadness, shame, grief, powerlessness, helplessness, insecurity, and anguish.”
Flood encourages men to look at therapy as a new and different frontier to be explored; not unlike the frontiers of the old west and outer space. “…it [took] courage for men to go out west, put their family in a covered wagon, and not know what exactly was ahead of them, what kind of barriers, what kind of tragedies, what kind of losses they might experience along the way.
“Similarly, when men go to the deep sea or go to the moon. It’s this external journey of discovery. Going through new phases and stages and getting to different places. And that takes courage. It takes strength.”
Exploring the Inner World
The way in which the muscular and neural psychological structures of the body interact was brought home to Flood when he visited the “Bodies Revealed” exhibit in Chicago several years ago. “It’s amazing how the brain and the neural chemistry is wired throughout our bodies….There’s quite an inner life, an inner world to be discovered, a new frontier for men to explore. And it takes courage to sit in a chair—especially to sit in a circle with other men— and begin to explore that inner world, that inner life.”
“You know,” Flood says, “sometimes you’ve got to follow the pain or follow the anxiety or the insecurity because that’ll take you to places where there is healing available to you. And so, that becomes a challenge. That becomes an adventure that requires strength and courage to be able to endure, and sit and feel feelings that we’ve suppressed for a long time.”
Consequences of Holding it All In
Flood reads a poignant passage from Patrick Conroy’s book Beach Music. The main character, who has lost his wife to suicide, finds himself unable to grieve; and is trying to figure out why he can’t connect to his pain, and his grief, and his sadness:
‘I tried to come up with a theory that would explain my extreme stoicism in the face of my wife’s suicide. …I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always, I thought, at birth. American men are allotted just as many tears as American women, but because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising, or our livers eaten away by alcohol. Because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We men died because our faces were not watered enough.’
“Patrick Conroy very eloquently speaks to the consequences of the externalization trap,” says Flood, “in that, we turn away from our inner life in this socialized belief that a real man just sucks it up, just goes along in life and tries to fix it. Goes it alone. And if he can’t figure out what’s wrong with him, and he can’t figure out how to fix his life, then that’s a sign of his incompetence or weakness.”
There’s a Better Way
“I always find it a privilege to see courageous men come in and do this work of journeying into their inner life and getting reacquainted with the tears of grief that they’ve suppressed. Being honest about loss and grief. Being honest about insecurities. And in doing so they develop a more robust, more grounded inner life which then, ironically, helps them journey the external world in a more grounded way, in a more purposeful way. Less reactive. Better able to regulate strong emotions and difficult conflicts. And that becomes a way in which they navigate their life with more joy, more love, and more connection.”
Escaping the Trap
The Men’s Resource Center provides in-person and online counseling, therapy, and coaching. Men can participate in men’s support groups as well as in individual sessions. Flood hopes that men who take up the challenge of self-discovery and work to extricate themselves from the externalization trap will “find that they’re able to journey in life with more purpose and meaning, more openness, and a greater love and connection with others and themselves.”
For more information about services offered by the Men’s Resource Center, visit the “services” page on this website, call us at (616) 456-1178 or contact us online.
Leave A Comment