Men's Therapy

Most of us never got the map.

There's a particular kind of man I see in my practice. He's doing fine, by most measures. He functions. He shows up. He handles things. But somewhere underneath the handling — underneath the work, the routines, the forward motion — something has gone quiet, or heavy, or both. He can't quite name it. He just knows that the way he's been living isn't the whole story.

If that's you, this page is for you.

The thing nobody talks about

Most men I work with share something in common, and it has nothing to do with diagnosis or disorder. It has to do with what they were taught — explicitly or just by watching — about what it means to be a man.

Somewhere along the way, most of us got the same message, delivered in a hundred different ways: don't need too much, don't show too much, handle it. Anger was acceptable. Grief was not. Strength was rewarded. Uncertainty was something to hide.

And for a lot of us — maybe most of us — there wasn't a man around who modeled anything different. Not because our fathers were bad men. Often they were trying. But they were doing what they'd been taught, which was doing what they'd been taught. The chain goes back a long way.

The result, for many men, is a life that looks fine from the outside and feels hollow from the inside. A low hum of disconnection that's easy to explain away and hard to shake. A sense that something should feel more real by now.

That's not weakness. That's what happens when a person is never given the tools to actually live inside their own experience.

What brings men in

Men usually don't come to therapy because they've decided it's time to grow. They come because something has cracked — a relationship that's reached its limit, a loss that won't stay buried, a version of themselves they no longer recognize, a quiet that's gotten too loud.

Some of what I hear:

If any of that is close to true, you're in the right place.

What we do in here

I work from the premise that the symptoms aren't the problem — they're pointing at the problem. Anxiety, numbness, rage, compulsive work, the restlessness that won't settle — these are usually a man's psyche trying to get his attention. The question isn't how to make them stop. The question is what they're trying to say.

That means we don't just work on the surface. We go back. We look at what you were taught about yourself, about men, about what you were allowed to feel and what you weren't. We look at who was missing and what that cost you. We make space for the parts of you that got set aside — not because they were dangerous, but because they didn't fit the script.

This isn't about dismantling who you are. It's about recovering the parts of yourself you had to leave behind.

The work is honest. Sometimes uncomfortable. Almost always clarifying. And in my experience, men who've spent years white-knuckling through life find something unexpected in this kind of depth — not weakness, but relief. The relief of finally being seen, including by themselves.

This work is for you if...

You've tried to think your way out of something that isn't a thinking problem. You've been in therapy before and it felt like rearranging furniture. You're tired of managing symptoms without understanding what's underneath them. Something in your life — a relationship, a milestone, a loss — has made it impossible to keep moving the same way you've been moving. You're not sure what's wrong, only that something is.

A note on initiation

There's a concept that keeps showing up in the literature on men's psychology, and in my own work with clients: initiation. The idea that becoming a man — really becoming one, not just aging into the role — requires a passage. A trial. A moment of being broken open and remade.

In most of human history, cultures built those passages intentionally. Elders held them. The community witnessed them. A boy knew, after the threshold, that he was different. He had been seen.

Michael Meade, a mythologist and scholar of men's rites of passage, puts it plainly: when the fires that innately burn inside youth are not intentionally and lovingly added to the heart of the community, they will burn down the structures of culture just to feel the warmth. I've watched that play out in consulting rooms for years. The rage, the recklessness, the self-destruction — these are often not pathology. They're initiation energy with nowhere to go.

Most of us never had the passage. We aged. We accumulated responsibilities. We were handed expectations without being handed the tools to meet them. We were supposed to already know.

Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, writing from a Jungian framework, described what happens to men who never cross that threshold: they remain in what they called Boy Psychology — capable, sometimes successful, but driven by the need for approval, prone to grandiosity or collapse, never quite inhabiting the authority of their own life. Not because something is wrong with them. Because something was missing.

That gap — the absence of initiation, of real mentorship, of a man who looked us in the eye and said I see you, and you're going to be okay — leaves a mark. A lot of what happens in therapy, for men, is the belated passage. The room where something finally gets witnessed.

How I work

I draw from depth psychology — the tradition rooted in Jung that takes the inner life seriously, that treats dreams and patterns and the body as sources of information, not noise. Jung observed that what we are not aware of owns us. Most of the men I work with are being run by something they've never looked at directly — an inherited script, an old wound, a part of themselves they learned to hide so early they forgot it was there.

Part of the work is making that visible. Not as a verdict, but as information. The Jungian concept of the Shadow — the disowned parts of the self, everything that got exiled to keep the peace — is one of the most practically useful ideas I know. For men, the shadow often contains either the tender (grief, fear, need, the soft) or the fierce (anger, desire, ambition, the no) — whichever was least safe in the family they grew up in. Shadow work isn't about becoming someone different. It's about becoming more complete.

I'm also trained in EMDR, which is particularly useful for the kinds of things that happened too early or too fast to process through words alone. And I work somatically — meaning I pay attention to what the body knows that the mind hasn't caught up to yet.

But more than any technique, what I bring is time and attention. The willingness to sit with what's hard without rushing it toward resolution. A genuine interest in who you actually are, beneath the version you've been presenting to the world.

I work with men across Colorado — in person in Boulder, and online throughout the state.

The first conversation is free. No intake forms, no agenda. Just a chance to talk and find out if this feels like the right fit.

If something in what you've read is true for you — even partially, even uncomfortably — that's a reasonable place to begin.