Welcoming Men into Couple Therapy

for therapists Jan 20, 2026

By Hans Stahlschmidt, PhD
PACT Dean of Students and Faculty, Senior Core Faculty

Over the last few weeks, I’ve caught myself thinking — again and again — about men. Partly it’s because I’m preparing for an upcoming workshop, and partly it’s because of the version of masculinity that’s been loud in our public conversation: the hardened, certain, unempathetic caricature — dominance replacing connection, and emotional restriction sold as strength.

When many men arrive in therapy, we can feel that training in their bodies: shoulders slightly raised, jaw set, eyes scanning for danger or judgment; a careful politeness that can flip to irritation when the conversation turns inward; a quick pivot to facts, solutions, logic, or generalizations.

Whether we’re looking at political theater, “manosphere messaging,” or the everyday micro-lessons boys absorb (“Don’t cry.” “Don’t be soft.” “Don’t be needy.”), the cultural instruction is remarkably consistent: vulnerability is risky — and often humiliating. Many men learn early that tender emotion isn’t simply private; it can be punishable. If you’ve spent a lifetime equating sadness with weakness, fear with shame, and longing with dependence, the therapy office can feel like a bright room with no exits.

And yet,men keep coming. Sometimes at a partner’s urging or in the wake of a crisis. Sometimes propelled by a quiet internal collapse. Sometimes showing up with genuine hope, but little vocabulary for what they feel. In couple therapy, we often see a familiar bind: one partner longs for emotional presence; the other feels accused, flooded, or that they’re never enough.

The room fills with protest, withdrawal, contempt, or pleading. Underneath it all is an old question:

Is it safe to be seen?

This column is both reflection and practical invitation: how we, as PACT clinicians, can make therapy safer and more effective for men across a wider spectrum — straight and gay, bisexual and queer, cis and trans, men of color navigating layered expectations, men shaped by military service, faith, class, immigration, and trauma histories. Each carry a different version of “how to be a man,” and each are vulnerable to being misread through narrow categories. Everyone wants to be welcomed, invited, and seen. In a therapy room, that welcome is not sentimentality. It is part of the intervention.

The “weakness taboo” and the cost of emotional illiteracy

Many men aren’t against emotion. They’re against the social consequences of emotion. A boy learns quickly what gets rewarded: competence, performance, humor, control, winning, indifference. And what gets punished: tears, softness, uncertainty, dependency, tenderness — especially in public and in front of other men. In adulthood, that training doesn’t disappear. It becomes a reflex. The nervous system learns that closeness may cost you status; tenderness may cost you respect.

So when a partner says, “I need you to be more emotionally available,” many men don’t hear an invitation. They hear a threat:

You’re failing.
You’re defective.
You’re about to be shamed.

Some of this threat is not imagined. Many couples do carry contempt. Some men have learned that the moment they reveal need, it will be stored and used as a weapon later. Therapy can inadvertently reenact that experience if we, as clinicians, aren’t careful.

The shame–anger doorway

If I had to name two emotional forces that frequently organize male presentation in therapy, I would choose shame and anger. Terry Real has been one of the most influential voices in naming how male shame often converts into anger, grandiosity, defensiveness, or shutdown — and how clinicians can engage men without colluding with harmful behavior.

From a PACT lens, we might say:

Shame is a rapid drop in self-state: I am bad/weak/unlovable/exposed.
Anger is often the upshift: I will not be made small. I will regain power.

Anger can be protective, regulating, even stabilizing, that is until it becomes weaponized and ultimately self-destructive. Many men have never learned a third option: to stay present in the vulnerable state without collapsing into shame or counterattacking with anger. And when we go deeper, this is often what a partner truly wants: presence — full attention without defensiveness.

So when anger shows up in the room, the clinical question isn’t simply “How do I stop it?” It’s “What is this anger preventing him from feeling, and how do we build enough safety to feel it without humiliation?”

There are, of course, situations in which anger is so threatening or dysregulated that it must be interrupted. Safety does not mean permissiveness. In PACT we care about secure functioning, and secure functioning requires both care and accountability. The art is to confront behavior without shaming the person: support the self and challenge the defense.

“Men” isn’t one category: trans men and couples with two men

Trans men

Just as some trans women were socialized as men and now live as women, some trans men have lived through multiple socializations. Some were treated as girls or women earlier in life and later navigated the pressures and policing of masculinity. Others transitioned young and were steeped early in male-coded rules. Either way, many trans men know what it feels like to be judged instantly, categorized, and reduced.

Vigilance about being misgendered or stereotyped
Fear of being treated as “not really male”
Pressure to perform masculinity to be recognized
Grief about belonging, body history, family rupture, or cultural rejection

Clinically, the principle is simple: Don’t make the client educate you — and don’t treat identity as either the whole story or irrelevant. Make room for it as real context, then return to shared human questions related to safety, attachment, fear, longing, injury, repair.

Couples with two men

When both partners are men, you may see “double socialization” around emotional restriction. However, you may also see remarkable emotional fluency, depending on culture, personality, and community. Two men can also mean two shame systems colliding: fear of rejection, fear of inadequacy, fear of being controlled, fear of “being too much,” fear of “being not enough.”

From a PACT perspective, the core tasks remain the same:

Build a reliable couple bubble.
Reduce threat arousal.
Increase mutual attunement.
Create repeatable repair moves.
Stabilize secure-functioning agreements.

What changes is the content of shame and the style of defense. We do best when we stay curious rather than assuming.

What helps men feel welcomed in the therapy container

Here are a few practices I’ve found consistently useful, especially in couple therapy.

Join with dignity before you challenge

Many men expect therapy to be a courtroom. They arrive braced for the verdict. Start with dignity:

“Help me understand how you’re trying to handle this.”
“What’s the part of this you don’t usually say out loud?”
“What are you protecting — yourself, your partner, the relationship?”

This communicates “I’m not here to shame you. I’m here to understand you.”

Translate “emotion talk” into body-and-action language

Some men don’t have an emotion vocabulary, but they do have a somatic vocabulary:

Pressure in the chest
Heat in the face
Tight throat
Buzzing arms
Numbness

And, they often have an action vocabulary: fix, leave, defend, explain, prove, minimize, joke. Use that. Emotional intelligence can be built from the body outward.

Name shame carefully — and normalize it without excusing behavior

Shame hates exposure. It also hates secrecy. Try gentle, non-pathologizing language:

“I wonder if a part of you is feeling criticized right now.”
“This looks like the moment where you might decide you’re failing.”
“If shame is here, we don’t have to wrestle it — we can just notice it.”

Then add the secure-functioning anchor: “And we still need a way to stay respectful and connected when it shows up.”

Offer a path to competence in repair

Many men feel safest when they know what to do. PACT gives us repair behaviors that are learnable and repeatable:

Orient to your partner.
Soften your face and voice.
Take responsibility for impact.
Offer a specific next step.
Make an agreement you can keep.

This isn’t “performing empathy.” It’s about building a reliable relational skill set: compassionate, direct, non-shaming.

Closing thought

When men believe therapy feels like a strange and estranged world, they often arrive scanning for where humiliation might be hiding. Our job is not to “fix men,” shame masculinity, or tiptoe around harmful behavior. Our job is to create a space where vulnerability is not punished, accountability is not degrading, a man can risk emotional truth without losing dignity, and a partner can risk hope without losing safety.

When men feel understood, they often become more responsible. When they feel shamed, they become more defensive. That isn’t a moral judgment — it’s a nervous-system reality.

And perhaps that is one of the most hopeful messages we can offer. Men are not unreachable; they are overprotected by old strategies. When the room becomes safer, the armor can soften just enough for something real to come through.

Learn more effective ways to work with men in couple therapy. Register for Hans’ upcoming workshop on Vulnerable Masculinity: Overcoming the taboo of emotional expression to help men show up in couple therapy

January 30, 2026
8:00am - 10:30am Pacific Time
3 CE credit hours are available for the live workshop.