Mental Health

                It began as a routine yearly follow-up with my cardiologist. I had been referred originally by my family doctor ten years ago because my heart would race periodically even when I wasn’t exercising. The problem was eventually diagnosed as a heart rhythm problem called tachycardia.

                I had always thought of my heart as a pump to get the blood sent through my body. I learned that the pump relies on electrical pulses generated by a small area of tissue called the sinoatrial node that controls they heart’s rhythm. Like the wiring in our house, with age problems can occur. Over time, I was able to learn how to get the rhythm to return to normal on its own.

                However, with this visit, my doctor heard something that causes some concern and further tests showed that I had a more serious problem that if not treated could be dangerous, including sudden death. I was surprised since I didn’t have any symptoms.

                “It’s not an emergency that we need to hospitalize you right away, but I highly recommend you have a pacemaker put in as soon as possible,”

                my cardiologist told me.

                He referred me to a specialist who did these kinds of procedures. The doctor explained it was relatively simple. I would go to the local hospital. The procedure would take about an hour and would be done under local anesthesia. The small devise would be implanted through a small incision in my upper chest under my collar bone, and two small leads would be threaded through a vein into the two chambers of my heart. I would need someone to drive me but could go home the same day.

                Although the news was shocking at first, the decision to have it done was clearly a no-brainer. Over the last three years Carlin has had her own health problems and I’ve become her major caregiver. Dying suddenly from something that could be corrected was not an option.

                It has now been five days since the surgery and things are going OK. I’m still sore but everything is looking good. I must be careful what I do — no heavy lifting, etc. for three to four weeks until things heal. I will go back to the hospital in three weeks to be sure everything is working OK. Life goes on.

Living and Loving as We Move Into the Next Phase of Life

                I will be 83 this year and Carlin will 88. We’ve been married for 46 years. For those who visit my website, MenAlive, you see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice Divorced Marriage Counselor.” Third time really was the charm for us. We feel very blessed to be alive and together and able to be there for each other as we continue to enjoy the mysteries of life as we recognize that our earthly journey is moving toward the end.

                In earlier years it never occurred to me that life would be so challenging as we got older. It also never occurred to me that love would be so very sweet and joyful at this time of life. As our physical capacities have become more limited, we take great comfort from waking up each morning, giving each other a “high-five, we’re alive,” and seeing what adventures we have in store for ourselves today.

                We spend more time enjoying simple things:

• Sitting in the garden
• Walking in the neighborhood
• Watching T.V. and seeing David Attenborough share his discoveries about life on planet Earth.
• Connecting with friends and family.

                Carlin is mostly retired from her work as a counselor. I still see a few clients, write regular articles that I post weekly at MenAlive and The Good Men Project. I often interview other experts working in the field of Gender-Specific Healing and Men’s Mental, Emotional, and Relational Health and share their work in my articles. I maintain a few partnerships and collaborations with colleagues.

                Our 6 grown children, 17 grandchildren, and 6 great grandchildren are also a source of joy, as are the many friends we’ve been blessed with over the years.

Opening Our Hearts to the World

                We all have personal challenges in our lives that we must attend to as we move from birth to death. But we all must deal with the realities of world we live in. As I get older, it becomes increasingly clear to me that all life is connected. We survive and thrive, live and die, within an intricate web of life.

                Just as my new pacemaker will help me return to a safe and healthy heart rhythm, I believe that humans need to reconnect with the rhythms of the natural world.

                It is also clear to me that for some time now humans have become disconnected from the community of life and if we are to survive as a species, we must find our way home again. Thomas Berry was a priest, a “geologian,” and a historian of religions. He spoke eloquently about our connection to the Earth and the consequences of our failure to remember we are one member in the community of life.

                He reminds us:

                “We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”

                David Attenborough is the world’s best-known natural history filmmaker. He recently turned 100 and is still working. In a recent book, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and Vision for the Future, he says,

                “For life to truly thrive on this planet, there must be immense biodiversity. Only when billions of different individual organisms make the most of every resource and opportunity they encounter, and millions of species lead lives that interlock so that they sustain each other, can the planet run efficiently.”

                Attenborough concludes with this call to action:

                “The natural world is fading. The evidence is all around. It has happened during my lifetime. I have seen it with my own eyes. It will lead to our destruction. Yet there is still time to put things right.”

                Harville Hendrix and his wife Helen LaKelly Hunt have been helping men, women, and couples to learn to listen to each other and communicate more effectively for more than forty years. In an article I wrote about their work, “Healing The Wounded Angry Men of the World Using The Revolutionary Tools of Safe Conversations,” I shared their vision for teaching the skills they have used with couples to the whole world. At their website, Safe Conversations/Quantum Connections,  you can learn about how they intend to teach 2.4 billion people, in the next twenty-five years, the simple practices that can literally save humanity.

My Six Practices for Staying Balanced and Sane in a World Out of Balance

                Here are six practices that I use every day to help me navigate these challenging times:

                1. Do the Next Right Thing and Think the Next Right Thought

                In times of challenge I have found it is easy to become overwhelmed. I have found that asking, “What is the next right thing?” focuses me on the one thing I need to do next. Asking, “What is the next right thought?” keeps my mind free of thoughts if disaster.

                2. Take It Slow and Easy

                When I feel afraid, I tend to speed up and usually make mistakes that slows me down and relaxes me. Taking three deep breaths before I act grounds me.

                3. Let go and let God.

                When I feel I must do everything myself, this thought helps me recognize that I am not alone. There are resources all around me ready to help.

                4. Be kind and patient with myself and others.

                When I feel overwhelmed and inadequate I tend to berate myself or see others as letting me down or actively trying to undermine me. We’re all doing the best we can.

                5. Let them be and let me be.

                In The Let Them Theory Mel Robbins reminds us we can’t make “them” change, we can only change ourselves and that small, consistent action changes everything.

                6. How are things now?

                Most of my pain, worry and panic is about the past or the future. When I ask myself, how things are right now, usually I can say they are OK.

                These are challenging times, but also times of hope, renewal, and transformation. There is still time to do the next right thing. What will you do?

                I look forward to your own experiences, thoughts and feelings. Come visit me at MenAlive and subscribe to my free weekly newsletter.

The post Getting to the Heart of the Matter: Living and Loving After Getting a Pacemaker appeared first on MenAlive.

                No one forgets the birth of their first child. For me the blessed event occurred on November 21, 1969. I had done my best to coach my wife through the Lamaze breathing techniques that we had learned in our birthing classes. It was now time for her to move to the delivery room to complete the birth process and welcome our newborn child into the world.

                We were both ready for the final stage of the journey. The nurse turned to me with a smile saying,

                “OK, Mr. Diamond, your job is done now. You can go to the waiting room and we’ll let you know when your child arrives.”

                I felt a mixture of relief and disappointment. On the one hand we had done this far together and I wanted to be with my wife for the birth. On the other, I was afraid I might freak out and pass out. I didn’t want to screw things up.

                I kissed my wife and told her she would do fine. She attempted a smile but was overcome with the next contraction. As they wheeled her to the left towards the delivery room, I went the other direction. But as I started to go through the waiting room doors, something stopped me. I felt the calling of my soon-to-be born child saying,

                “I don’t want a waiting room father. Your place is here with us.”

                I turned around and walked back the other way and pushed through the doors into the delivery room. I didn’t ask permission and there was no question of my leaving, if asked. I didn’t care what the rules were, my child needed me, and I answered the call. It wasn’t long until our beautiful baby boy was born. As Jemal was handed to me, amid tears of relief and joy, I made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where fathers were fully involved with their children throughout their lives.

                After we brought him home from the hospital, I took three weeks off from work to spend time being the supportive parent for my wife and continue bonding with our son. The event of Jemal’s birth and the aftermath changed my life forever. A year after Jemal’s birth, my wife announced that she needed a break from 24/7 child rearing. She acknowledged that I was a great help, but she needed a break from being the primary caregiver. A girlfriend had invited her to go on a road trip, maybe for a few weeks, and asked if I could take a few weeks off from work again and be with Jemal.

                I quickly agreed, wanting to be a good, new-age, liberated father. But inside I was terrified. It was one thing to be the supportive parent knowing that I had the mother of our child to step in at any time. I believed that mothers had an inherent understanding of babies and knew what to do, a special something I felt men lacked. I felt I had learned a lot about taking care of our baby boy, but what did I know really. I was just a man. What would I do if he needed something that I couldn’t give him? We didn’t have mothers in the area that could help us out, but my wife assured me I could call her anytime if I needed advice.

                The first few days were scary, but Jemal and I figured things out together. I found I had abilities I didn’t know I had. We played together, father and son. I fed him, changed his diapers, slept with one ear open listening to any cries in the night. My wife phoned a few times and I told her honestly that things were going fine. We both missed her, but father and son were surviving and thriving.

                We did more than survive and thrive. We formed a bond together that has lasted through time. We’re connected in a way that most fathers and sons are not. I feel confident as a father and as a man that I never imagined I would feel.

                Jemal will be fifty-six in November. My wife and I now have six grown children, seventeen grandchildren, and four great grandchildren. I continue to love and learn. I recently heard about a new book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by world renowned evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. It helped me understand my own experiences as a father and the importance of fathers throughout evolutionary history.

                I recently had the good fortune of interviewing Dr. Hrdy, which you can watch here.  After a full career studying the lives of mothers and writing iconic books including The Woman That Never Evolved, Mother Nature, she began to recognize the importance of fathering that had been mostly neglected by experts in Darwinian science and evolutionary psychology.

                “It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things,” says Dr. Hrdy. “Hasn’t it always been so? When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of labor: mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors’ offspring.”

                Yet experiences Dr. Hrdy was having in her own family watched men nurture babies, led her explore the evolutionary roots of male nurture of young babies and has helped us recognize a much more expanded reality of what it means to be a man. What she discovered will forever change our views of manhood.

                I learned this more than fifty years ago when Jemal was born. More and more men have experienced this expanded reality.

                “Men caring for babies undergo the same neurological transformations, the same increase in prolactin levels and oxytocin-induced sensual pleasure as mothers do,”

                says Dr. Hrdy. I didn’t understand the biological changes I went through at the time, but that was certainly my experience as I spent significant time physically in touch with Jemal.

                “If their brains undergo shape-shifting similar to that in mothers, wouldn’t men’s psychological preferences change as well?” asks Dr. Hrdy. “Might men’s priorities come to more nearly resemble the more prosocial ones mothers are assumed to have? Might such men also be more likely to opt for safer and more sustainable courses of action?”

                I would take it another step further. Would men with this kind of changed brains, brains that are not only tuned to children, but to humans and other living things, be the kind of men who can join with women to create a healthier, more sustainable world? It doesn’t take experts to alert us to the reality that humanity is out of balance with the laws of nature and that we need to change our ways if we are going to survive and thrive as a species.

                Thomas Berry was a priest, a “geologian,” and a historian of religions. He spoke eloquently to our connection to the Earth and the consequences of our failure to remember we are one member in the community of life.

                “We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”

                At a time when mothers are feeling overwhelmed by trying to take care of infants and many are seeking child care from strangers or even looking to AI robots to raise our children, the answer may be to support more hands-on, and  hearts-connected fathers and their babies. What do you think?

                You can learn more about Dr. Hrdy and her work by visiting her website. You can watch my in-depth interview with her here.

                If you appreciate articles like these, I invite you to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter here.  

The post Why Fathers and Their Babies Are Key to Humanity’s Survival appeared first on MenAlive.

                Heated disagreements about sexuality and gender are everywhere these days. As an evolutionary-trained clinician who specializes in gender-specific medicine and men’s health, I have been helping individuals and couples improve their love lives for more than fifty years. I recently interviewed Dr. Nathan L. Lents about his latest book, The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships. I found the book to be enlightening, engaging, and downright fun to read.

                I have often found resistance in some circles when I talk about the biological and evolutionary roots of who we are as males and females. Some people fear that differences will be used, as they have in the past, to restrict people’s freedom and to keep some locked into boxes that are rigid and unchanging. That does not have to be the case as Dr. Lents points out so effectively.    

                Joan Roughgarden, Professor emerita of biology at Stanford University, and author of Evolution’s Rainbow had this to say about The Sexual Evolution:

                “A lot of people seem to think they know what science says when it comes to sex. Well, Nathan Lents has news for them. Read this book — it’s fascinating, charming, and eye-opening, with lovely ink drawings that bring the animals in its pages to life. It dispels misconceptions about life in the animal kingdom and our place in it, but most important, it shows clearly that nature’s beautiful sexual diversity extends to all living things — especially humans.”

                “In just two generations, the sexual landscape has completely changed throughout most of the developed world, and so it is no surprise that many people find all of this terribly unsettling,” says Dr. Lents. “What is surprising to me however, is how little the biology and natural history of sex has factored into the public conversation. I assert that this moment of sexual turmoil is actually a rediscovery of the much more expansive relationship with sex that our ancestors once had and that other animals enjoy today.”

                I grew up in southern California and spent endless hours wandering in nature. I was a biology major in college and found the world of plants and animals fascinating. As a marriage and family counselor I have found that my understanding of biology and evolution is invaluable in helping me support my client’s desire to have a wonderfully passionate sex and love life.

                In a recent article, “This Truth About Males and Females Will Change Your View of Sex, Love, and Life Forever,” I described the work of my colleague, Michael Gurian, who has been reporting on male/female differences in brain function for decades. In a  video blog, he shared the research that has been going on for more than 40 years and the evidence from a new study that shows brain differences, in utero, long before the effects of gender socialization.

                If there was one thing Dr. Lents wanted people to take away from reading his book, it is the value of diversity in the lives of all living things.

                He said that in the modern world, much of how we express our sexuality, and how we form our sexual relationships, stems from cultural constructions, not innate biological wiring. Even a cursory glimpse of the sex lives of other animals demolishes any notion that sexual activity is narrowly purposed toward procreation. Biologists have discovered an ever-expanding list of reasons that animals have sex with each other. Animals use sex for bonding, social cohesion and alliance building. They use sex deceptively, competitively and financially. They even have sex for the same reason that we most often do it: just for the fun of it.

                Moreover, in no other species but humans is sex rigidly restricted by broad constructions such as heterosexuality and sexual monogamy, nor was it so restricted for most of the history of our own species. As humans explore this supposedly new sexual territory, we can look to our animal cousins for guidance on how to manage this minefield of social upheaval.

                Not only will an understanding of our evolutionary diversity help improve our love lives, it may very well be the key to our survival. You don’t have to be a trained scientist to recognize that our human species is out of touch with the laws of nature. The burning hot temperatures we are experiencing all over the world is one reminder of the risk we are facing as humans continue to undermine our connections to the Gaia and all her diverse life forms.

                As Thomas Berry warned us:

                “We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”

                There is still time to listen and learn. If you would like to get more information about Nathan H. Lents, you can do so here: https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/. He told me he’s interested in hearing from people and he reads all emails people send.

                If you are interested in my own work, please visit me at https://menalive.com/.

The post The Sexual Evolution: What 500 Million Years of Life Tells Us About Sex, Gender, and Mating appeared first on MenAlive.

                I have been a marriage and family therapist for more than fifty years and have written seventeen books including best-sellers like Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places and The Enlightened Marriage. I have helped thousands of individuals and couples find the love of their lives and have the relationship they’ve always wanted. Yet, my own love life was a disaster. If you come to my website, MenAlive, you will see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.”

                You will learn about my first two marriages and how they ended in divorce. All relationship breakups are confusing and painful, but even more so when you have been making your living helping other men and women find real lasting love. The good news is that I discovered the secret for finding the right partner and having a great marriage. My wife, Carlin, and I have been happily married for 46 wonderful years.

                It took me a long time to realize that the key to having a successful love life was a hidden wound I didn’t even know I had. Millions of men and women suffer from a father wound, a wound that has become so pervasive in our society that most people don’t even know they have it or that they need to heal it in order to have relationships that are truly satisfying and successful.

                You can learn about our healing journey in our book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why The Best is Still to Come and take your own self-paced journey to success in my on-line course, “Navigating the 5 Stages of Love.”

                My business card reads, “Jed Diamond, PhD, Healing Men and the Women Who Love Them since 1969.” That was the year after I completed my initial graduate training and began working as a mental health professional. 1969 was also the year our first son was born. When I held him in my arms shorty after his birth, I made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where men were fully healed and engaged with their families throughout their lives.

Discovering and Healing the Family Father Wound

                Although I have written 17 books, it took me a long time to deal with my father wound. My Distant Dad: Healing the Family was my 15^th published book. The book began with the following two epigraphs:

                “A father may be physically present, but absent in spirit. His absence may be literal through death, divorce or dysfunction, but more often it is a symbolic absence through silence and the inability to transmit what he may not have acquired.”

–Dr. James Hollis

                “Kids have a hole in their soul in the shape of their dad. And if a father is unwilling or unable to fill that role, it can leave a wound that is not easily healed.”

–Roland Warren

                The first chapter began with the following memory:

                I was five years old when my uncle drove me to the mental hospital. I was confused and afraid.

                “Why do I have to go?” I asked my Uncle Harry.

                He looked at me with his round face and kind eyes. “Your father needs you.”

                “What’s the matter with him?” I was beginning to cry and I clamped my throat tight to stop the tears.

                He turned away and looked back at the road. In our family, we didn’t talk about difficult issues.

                It took me a long time to understand what happened to my father and to overcome the silence and denial that clouded my life for many years beginning at age five.

                I went with my uncle to visit my father every Sunday for a year. It took me most of that time to realize he was not in an ordinary hospital but was in a mental hospital. It took many years to learn that my father had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. He had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t support his family doing the work he loved.

                I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and I could do to prevent it from happening to other men and their families. It isn’t just males who have “a hole in their soul in the shape of their father.”

                I knew that my mother grew up without a father in the home. Like my own father wound, it took years before I learned about the nature of my mother’s early life. She and her younger sister were born in Toledo, Ohio. When my mother was five years old, her father died suddenly. My grandmother and her two small children were forced to move to Savanah, Georgia with my grandmother’s father and stepmother. That family wound was denied and hidden, but impacted all aspects of my mother’s life, including her four dysfunctional marriages.

Healing the Family Father Wound

                Here are some of the things that indicate that the family father wound may be undermining your relationships:

• Your present relationship is not working well.

            You may be having constant fights that never seem to get anywhere or there may be angry silences that can last for days, weeks, or months. Your relationship may be wonderful one moment than turn bad the next. As the Eagles song,  “Victim of Love,” says:

                “You’re walkin’ the wire, pain and desire, looking for love in between.”

• Looking back on past relationships, you recognize a similar pattern.

            This isn’t the first time a relationship has started out well but eventually went south.  We often think we had just picked the wrong partner, but now realize there is something deeper, something more hidden.

• Reflecting on your family of origin, you feel a certain resonance.

                Your parents’ relationship may not be the same as the ones you have experienced, but there definitely are similarities.

• Your father was absent physically or emotionally.

                You may have lost him through death, divorce, or dysfunction. His absence impacts your mother, yourself, and other members of your family. You begin to suspect that you have been, “looking for love in all the wrong places,” (the title of my second book).

• There is a longing, a hunger that you feel.

                Falling in love feels like you have finally filled an inner void, that you have found that magical partner that will make everything all right, but it never seems to work.

                I share my father’s and my own healing journey in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound. I also developed an on-line course that anyone can take to explore your own father wound, how it may be impacting your life now, and what you can do to heal. You can learn more about the course, “Healing the Family Father Wound” here.

                If you would like to read more articles about life and love, please consider subscribing to my free weekly newsletter:  https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/

The post Healing the Father Wound You Never Knew You Had appeared first on MenAlive.

                I grew up believing the famous author James Michener might be my “real” father. I am sure I’m not the only person to believe our true-family origins are different from what we’ve been told. I was born on December 21,1943 in New York City to Morris (Muni) Diamond and Edith Kohn Diamond. My father was born on December 17,1906 in Jacksonville, Florida. My mother was born on October 6,1908 in Toledo, Ohio. James A. Michener was born on February 3, 1907, in New York City.

                My mom and dad met in 1927 at a Jewish youth league meeting in Jacksonville. They moved to New York in 1929–He to pursue an acting career. She to pursue adventure. Her motto:

                “Bring it on. I’ll try anything once.”

                I grew up hearing romantic stories about their life in Greenwich Village, their political activism, and being poor but in love.

                The official story was that they met, fell in love, and were married in 1934. They tried to conceive but were unsuccessful until an experimental procedure of injecting my father’s sperm into my mother’s womb was successful, and created the new life that is me. Over the years I heard stories from my mother’s younger sister, Florence, that suggested my “origin story” may be different than the one my parents told me. I learned that there was another young man, a young writer living in New York, who was competing with my father for my mother’s affections.

                James A. Michener is one of the world’s most popular writers. He won the Pulitizer in Prize in 1948 for his book Tales of the South Pacific and wrote more than 40 epic best-selling novels including Hawaii, Centennial, Texas, and Alaska. Although there is a great deal of mystery about James Michener’s early life, we do know that he left New York in 1943, the year I was born, to join the navy.

James A. Michener

                In his memoir, The World is My Home, published when Michener was 85 years old, he begins with a childhood memory.

                “I have been impelled to attempt this project because of an experience that occurred eighty years ago when I was a country lad of five, and was of such powerful import that the memory has never left me.”

                “The farmer living at the end of the lane had an aging apple tree that had once been abundantly productive but had now lost its energy and ability to bear any fruit at all. The farmer, on an early spring day I still remember, hammered eight nails, long and rusty, into the trunk of the tree.”

                “That autumn a miracle happened. The tired old tree, having been goaded back to life, produced a bumper crop of juicy red apples, bigger and better than we had seen before. When I asked how this had happened, the farmer explained: ‘Hammerin’ in the rusty nails gave it shock to remind it that its job is to produce apples.’”

                “In the 1980s, when I was nearly eighty years old, I had some fairly large rusty nails hammered into my trunk — a quintuple bypass heart surgery, a new left hip, a dental rebuilding, an attack of permanent vertigo — and like the sensible apple tree, I resolved to resume bearing fruit.”

                “Between the years 1986 and 1991 I would write eleven books, publish seven of them, including two very long ones, and have the other three completed in their third revisions and awaiting publication. It was an almost indecent display of frenzied industry, but it was carried out slowly, carefully, each morning at the typewriter and each afternoon at research or quiet reflection.”

                James Michener died October 16, 1997 at the age of 90.

Morris (Muni) Diamond

                My father died April 26, 1996 at the age of 89. He never became famous though he fulfilled his dream of becoming an actor in New York and later playwright in Hollywood. He was part of the generation of artists whose commitment to social justice and the working class ultimately made them targets during the McCarthy era and the Red Scare. Later in life, he was best known as a street puppeteer in Los Angeles and later in San Francisco under his stage name, “Tommy Roberts, the Puppet Man.”

                On May 22, 1996 an article in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined “Requiem for S.F. Puppet Man.”

                “The Tenderloin said goodbye to Tommy Roberts, the puppet man, with tears in its eyes and cookies in its mouth. The puppets were there, sitting on a small table. There was a king, a dog, a scarecrow and a bunch of little men. All were silent, an unusual condition for a Tommy Roberts puppet, which worked harder than any other marionettes in history.”

                “If they could have talked without him, they would have recited the poet about Union Square, or the one about the public library. Over the past thirty years, Roberts had a way of showing up on college campuses and in city parks with paper bags full of ragged homemade hand puppets. The puppets, only slightly smaller than their 4 foot-8 master, would share Roberts’ poetry without being asked.”

                “The puppet man died last month, at the age of 89. ‘By the standards of society my father was not a success,’ said his son, Jed Diamond, at his memorial service. ‘He didn’t make a lot of money. He was labeled as mentally ill. He liked to live among people that society pretends do not exist.

“A month before he died, he asked his son to walk with him to the new San Francisco library still under construction. ‘It took us nearly an hour to get there,’ Jed said.  ‘He loved books and wanted to leave his poem, The Public Library, for the workers. After a short rest he told me it’s time to go home. The first paragraph of the poem captures my father’s spirit:

The Public Library-

Here is my cathedral, my castle, my hallowed halls.

Here I am gallant knight, victorious leader,

Gypsy Wild — dreamer, artist, poet, wide-eyed child.

Here I’ve been nurtured and fed on spirit bread.

Here I’ve grown from crawling provincial bigot

To standing, seeking, universal man.

Finding truth and light to brighten mind’s night.

From dreamers molded out of our native clay.’

Jed Diamond

                I will be 83 later this year and for more than fifty years I have been a leader in the field of Gender-Specific Medicine and men’s mental, emotional, and relational health. I have written 17 books including international best-sellers Surviving Male Menopause and The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression.

                I feel I’ve got at least another ten years of productive life and have had my own health challenges including being diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. James Michener may not be my biological father, but he certainly has been a life-long mentor and guide for me.  

                My work as a healer began early when my mid-life father took an overdose of sleeping pills when I was five years old. He had become increasingly depressed when he couldn’t make a living to support his family doing the work that he loved.

                Fortunately, he didn’t die but was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to keep other families from experiencing the pain and suffering our family went through.

                Following my graduation from U.C. Santa Barbara, I went to medical school. I wanted to become a psychiatrist and help prevent the feelings of hopelessness that leads too many men to want to end their lives. I soon found medical school too elitist and limiting for the kind of healing I knew was necessary.  

                I transferred to U.C. Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare where I earned a master’s degree and developed a full-time practice helping men, women, and families.  At age sixty, I returned to school and got a PhD in International Health. My dissertation study was published as a book, Male vs Female Depression: Why Men Act Out and Women Act In.

                My book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound explored the healing journey that has spanned multiple generations. I have an online course for those who want to explore their own father wound.

                I post new articles each week for those who subscribe to my free weekly newsletter. I invite you to subscribe and look forward to your comments.

The post James Michener, My Father, and Me: Finding Our Place in the World and Embracing The Mysteries of Life appeared first on MenAlive.

                I have been a psychotherapist and marriage and family counselor for more than fifty years. I feel blessed to have a career where I can help men and women to live more fully authentic lives, to love deeply, and to make a positive difference in the world. Yet, the truth is much more personal and complicated.

                I was born in deception, a story I never learned until I was an adult and had gone through two divorces and written a book about my conflicted love life — Looking For Love in All the Wrong Places: Overcoming Romantic and Sexual Addictions.

                My mother and father met in 1928 in New York’s Greenwich Village. He was twenty-two and an aspiring actor.  She had just turned twenty and longed to write the great American novel.  

                They told me stories of The Village when they arrived as a hub for artists, writers, and musicians. The area was alive with progressive ideas and radical politics, attracting artists and intellectuals of all kinds. Like my own growing up in San Francisco in the 1960s, experimental lifestyles and free love was in the air.

                My mother told me there was another man in her life back then, a young newspaper reporter working for the New York Times. Long after my father and she were divorced, she admitted she had a number of lovers that she kept secret.

                When people visit me at MenAlive they see my welcome video, “Confession of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.” In my book, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, I share the ways in which deception and addictions have impacted my love life. In my book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come, I share my healing journey.

The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World

                I recently had the opportunity to interview Christian B. Miller, author of the book The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. I asked him to give me a little background about himself and his work. Here’s what he told me:

                “I live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with my amazing wife and three children. I have been incredibly fortunate to spend the last twenty years at Wake Forest University, where I am now the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy. My research primarily has to do with virtue and moral character, and for ten years I was the leader of The Character Project and The Honesty Project, two of the largest research projects in the world on these topics.

                In addition to my academic writings, I have a new popular book forthcoming in May, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World to go along with an earlier trade book, The Character Gap: How Good Are We? I was a science contributor for Forbes, and have written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today.”

                I found the book and Christian Miller’s work to be timely and important. He says that honesty is eroding at a frightening rate in many areas of society today, as we are confronted with a number of honesty crises:

• The frequency of deepfakes has skyrocketed, now that they are simple to make and untraceable.

• In education, many students are using AI to complete their writing assignments with little chance of detection.

• In politics, social media helps with the dissemination of fake news, and polarization reduces our tendency to condemn political dishonesty if it aligns with our own views.

• In public spaces, it is easier to become a celebrity than it has ever been in human history, and yet celebrity encourages greater dishonesty.

• In religion, religious leaders are increasingly confronted by temptations to plagiarize sermon material from the Internet and AI.

• In our relationships, with the easy availability of online pornography, anonymous chatrooms, and infidelity websites like Ashley Madison, cheating in a relationship has never been easier.

                The section on relationships was particularly relevant to the work I do with clients. Miller says,

                “If there is anything discussed in this book that has been around forever, it is infidelity, both sexual and emotional. Wherever there are exclusive romantic relationships, there is also the threat of cheating. But the rise of the Internet has changed things for the worse here.”

                People long to have relationships that last through time, but they are becoming increasingly difficult. I feel fortunate to have learned what makes relationships last and how to keep them alive and well. My wife, Carlin, and I shared what we have learned in my book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come.

                You can learn more about The Honesty Crisis and the work of Christian Miller by visiting his website: https://christianbmiller.com/the-honesty-crisis/

                You can watch my interview with Christian Miller here.

                If you would like to get more information about my own work helping men and the women who love them, come visit me at https://menalive.com/

The post Why Our Relationships Are Becoming More Dishonest and What We Can Do About It appeared first on MenAlive.

                I have been a psychotherapist specializing in men’s mental, emotional, and relational health for more than fifty years. Like many men, I have had challenges with my love life. Those who visit me at MenAlive see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.” I recently interviewed a kindred spirit, Sean Hotchkiss, author of a new book, Hating Women: A Memoir of Male Rage and Recovery.

                I was given an early copy of the book and found it resonated with my own personal and professional experiences. Like Sean, I grew up without the support of a father and became very attached to my mother who called me her “brave little man” after my father was hospitalized following a failed suicide attempt. For years I denied the impact of my early experiences on the reality that my relationship life was a disaster.

                Sean shared some of his own experiences growing up and how he came to recognize how early trauma impacted his life and how writing the book helped him come to peace with himself and eventually to share what he learned with the world. Here is what Sean says in the book about his healing journey:

                “Hating Women tells the story of my struggles in romantic relationships for two decades,” he says. “It highlights a handful of key relationships that, with some distance, all went down pretty much exactly the same way: I’d get excited about a woman, and we’d launch into an intense connection. Eventually, either that connection would start to feel too confining, and I’d run away from it. Or, occasionally, the woman I was dating would run away from me. Rinse. Repeat.

                “My apparent inability to have a healthy relationship with a woman drove me insane. I’ve always been someone who has claimed to want great love. But every time I felt like I was getting close, something blew up. I felt powerless. Many times, the pattern felt larger than me. And every breakup, every betrayal, every loss, made me even more wary about commitment.

                “Back in 2015, I began a deep dive into my past and my childhood trauma, and it started to become much clearer to me why I’d always struggled in relationships.

                “First, my father was largely missing from my childhood. He and my mother got divorced when I was 4, and I only saw him about eight days a month for the next ten years. When I was 22, he committed suicide. I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone reading this to hear that the loss I experienced in that relationship ran deep. I longed for my father and never felt I got the love I wanted from him. That left an imprint. And for years after his death, I mainly focused on him in my healing. His absence was just so big and obvious, and I had a lot of unresolved grief and rage towards him for the way he lived and left.

                “Second, following my parent’s divorce and the disappearance of my father, I became an emotional support and a sort of surrogate partner for my mother, as many boys do. In the years she was single, and even when she had a boyfriend or husband, she and I had a connection that felt equal parts comforting and strange. She confided in me about her problems, asked me for advice, and put me on a pedestal. And I did the same with her. There were very few boundaries between us. And because our bond seemed close on the surface, it took me much longer to see the shadow of it and how it was affecting all my relationships with women.

                “That combination of feeling abandoned by my father, and overwhelmed and under-nurtured by my mother created a very particular belief system in my mind and body: Intimacy was not safe. Surely, I’d either be left, or be smothered. I’m not a big fan of attachment labels, but therapists would have called me a fearful avoidant. As in: Please love me, but not too much!

                “Because these beliefs — and the unprocessed grief and rage attached to them — went untouched for many years, I found myself always recreating these conditions in relationships. (This is how our psyche works: it wants us to heal, so it puts us in familiar (family) dynamics so the buried feelings emerge and we have a chance to heal). But, like so many of us, instead of facing those feelings head-on and attempting to work on my relationships, I often just ran to the next woman hoping for a different result.

                “Things finally came to a head over the last several years: First, I was in a relationship with a woman who always seemed out of reach, just like my dad. And then I rebounded into a relationship with a woman where there was a lot of love between us, but also a lot of codependency just like with my mom. Thanks to these relationships, I came out of denial: I was dating women like my parents. And in order to cease this pattern, I would have to stop getting into one relationship after the next, and sort out the feelings that emerged when I was alone.

                “I see that the coaching work I’ve been doing with men the last six years all connects back to the same root trauma of childhood, and that most, if not all, of the men who have come into my practice through the years experienced the same set up I did: emotionally or physically absent father, enmeshed mother.

                “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. As a society, we’re now between eight and eleven generations removed from the Industrial Revolution — a time that is largely credited by Men’s Movement authors like Robert Bly and James Hillman as the time when fathers began spending less time in the home. And it’s become clear to me that this gradual and expanding absence of fathers (and of male presence) has led to an increasing dependency on mothers through the formative years. In boys, this dependency on our mothers often becomes enmeshed: with mothers leaning on sons to make up for the lack of male presence in the home, and sons clinging to mothers as the only source of love they’re receiving.”

                You can pre-order Sean’s important book on Amazon. It will be out in July. After that you can order it wherever books are sold. Pre-orders help the author and the publisher. They also help us all to get books about important topics that may be controversial.

                When I wrote my first book, Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man, in 1983, I was told that women buy most books and men weren’t interested in a men’s memoir about love, loss, and healing. I believed in the book and so did many others. The psychologist, Dr. Herb Goldberg said,

                “For me this is the best kind of ‘Men’s Liberation’ book — a personal, honest, expressive account of the inner life of a man in the process of search and change.”

                Natalie Rogers said,

                “We know the personal is political — feminists have proved that point — yet few, (if any) men have had the courage to be as vulnerable at Jed Diamond. Women and men will find this book provocative and illuminating.”

                I believe these quotes also apply to Sean Hotchkiss and his book, Hating Women: A Memoir of Male Rage and Recovery.

                You can order the book here. You can learn more about Sean by visiting his Substack, One Man’s Heart, here.  

                You can watch and listen to my interview with Sean here.

The post Looking For Love in All the Right Places: Healing the Wounds That Undermine Our Relationships appeared first on MenAlive.

                As I said in a previous article, “The Future of US”, I have been interested in ways we can survive and thrive during these challenging times since 1993 when I was given a vision in a sweat lodge ceremony and saw the sinking of the ship of civilization and the launching of lifeboats to a more sustainable world.

                From a new book by Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History of Societal Collapse, I learned about the latest findings that can help us understand our lives, our world, and find hope for the future of humankind. Kemp is a senior research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

                Kemp says,

                “With the threat of nuclear war ever present, the world getting hotter and hotter, and the rapid creation of dangerous algorithms, one can’t be blamed for asking: Will we make it?” Kemp goes on to say, “The problem is that most of us are uncomfortable in recognizing the most common element of civilization is rule through domination. A more apt label for these systems of violence is ‘Goliath.’ A Goliath is a collection of hierarchies in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labor.”

                In her groundbreaking book, The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future, internationally acclaimed scholar, futurist, and activist, Riane Eisler wrote,

                “We are all familiar with legends about an earlier, more harmonious and peaceful age. The Bible tells of a garden where woman and man lived in harmony with each other and nature — before a male god decreed that woman henceforth be subservient to man.”

                Eisler goes on to describe two competing systems that continue to influence our lives today.

                “The first, which I call the dominator model, is what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy — the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The second, in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking rather than ranking, may be described as the partnership model.” Eisler concludes by saying, “In this model — beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female — diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority.”

                Eisler developed these ideas most recently in her book Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shame Our Brains, Lives, and Future written with anthropologist Douglas P. Fry. They say,

                “There is a new urgency to our wish for a more humane world. Every day we are bombarded by news of barbaric human rights abuses, terrorist attacks, proliferation of nuclear weapons, and a drift to strongman rule. New technologies, from artificial intelligence to biological engineering, could have catastrophic results if guided by cultural values of greed, megalomania, and disregard for human rights.”

MenAlive: Helping Men and the Women Who Love Them Since 1972

                MenAlive began in 1969 when I held Jemal, my newborn son, in my arms and made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where men were fully healed and involved with their families and communities throughout their lives. I launched MenAlive as my window to the world to share what I was learning about love, life, survival, and transformation.

                In June, I will be offering exciting new and expanded services at MenAlive. I’m looking for men and women who recognize the world is changing and who want to receive the best guidance and support available to help them to live fully, love deeply, and make a positive difference in the world. If this sounds like you, read on.

                When our daughter, Angela, was born in 1972, it became clear that boys and men’s health and girls and women’s health were forever intertwined and we could not improve one without improving the other. My wife Carlin and I now have six grown children, seventeen grandchildren, and six great grandchildren. We are committed to helping to transform our lives for the good of all and for future generations. 

                I’m sure I don’t have to convince you that humans are living in ways that are out of balance with the laws of nature. We recognize this imbalance as our climate crisis, endless conflicts, and loss of ecological diversity. As “geologian” and historian Thomas Berry warned:

                “We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”

                Many people have given up on humanity and imagine that the world would be better off without us. Others hope that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will save us. I was given a different vision during a sweat lodge ceremony at a Men’s Leadership Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1993.

                The vision allowed me to see the sinking ship of domination-civilization and the emergence of lifeboats to a new way of living.  According to Václav Havel, Czech statesman, author, playwright, and dissident,

                “Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.”

                At MenAlive, I will be introducing my community to innovative programs that offer new ways of communicating such as, “Safe Conversations,” developed by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt. You can learn about them here: https://quantumconnections.com/.

We also need new ways of healing men’s mental, emotional, and relational wounds such as those developed by Joe Conrad at Man Therapy: https://mantherapy.org/

Becoming David: Why Men Have a Crucial Role to Play in Overcoming Goliath

                Clearly, we need everyone involved if we are going to change the world for good. This includes men, women, and children. I believe that men have a critical role to play.  The comedian Elayne Booler captured this thought when she said,

                “When women get depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It’s a whole different way of thinking.”

                In his book Goliath’s Curse, Luke Kemp says,

                “In the biblical tale, Goliath is slain by a single slingshot-toting future king by the name of David. Defeating Goliaths, in reality, is not done alone. Instead, it requires actions that leverage the people and communities around us.”

                Kemp offers the following four guiding principles:

1. Don’t Be a Dick

                “I propose a simple pledge not to be a dick. This is a pledge to not work for, invest in, or support any firm, institute, or individual that significantly contributes to global catastrophic risk.”

                “More than that, it is a pledge not to become a Goliath yourself. All of us are capable of being corrupted by power. All of us crave status to some degree. Don’t let the darker angels of your nature win.”

2. Be a Democrat.

                “Practice democracy. Democracy is not just a form of government; it is a culture and way of life. One that all of us need to recapture.”

      3. Vote Against the Apocalypse.

                “You are first and foremost a citizen not a consumer. If everyone in Australia (or the US, or the UK) began switching off their lights prudently and chose the lowest-carbon travel options, then it would barely make a dent in the national emissions.”

                “If they changed their vote to those offering the strongest decarbonization plans, then suddenly emissions could be on track to be eliminated within decades.”

                4. Don’t Be Dominated.

                “Oppose domination in your relationships, whether they be personal, family, or workplace.”

                “One of the first and most pernicious stories justifying subjugation was that of the savior leader. It is time to say ‘enough.’ It is time to realize the bright and terrifying truth: no gods, kings, heroes, or masters are going to save us. Slaying Goliath and avoiding evolutionary suicide is, like all great achievements, it is going to be a collective action. It is on us.”

                If you would like more information about MenAlive you can visit me here. If you would like information about Harville Hendrix and “Safe Conversations” you can do so here. You can learn more about Joe Conrad’s work and his new book on Man Therapy here.

                You can watch an in-depth interview with Luke Kemp, “Can Collapse Benefit Everyone” here.  

The post Stopping Authoritarian Strongmen & Returning to Our Partnership Roots appeared first on MenAlive.

                I had known about New Dimensions long before I was invited to be interviewed about my new book, Male Menopause, which was published in 1997. Michael and Justine Toms founded New Dimensions Radio in 1973 and have recorded ground-breaking conversations with visionaries including Joseph Campbell, HH the Dalai Lama, R. Buckminster Fuller, Ram Dass, Maya Angelou, Andrew Weil, Stewart Brand, Joanna Macy, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and thousands of others.

                Recently, I had the good fortune to interview Justine about how New Dimensions has evolved over the last fifty-plus years and they are doing to restore recordings that are in danger of being lost. I always ask my quests to share their “origin story” about how their work began and what their initial vision was when they started out. Here is some of what Justine shared with me:

                “I grew up in the Episcopal Church and loved it deeply — the gentle solemnity, the hymns, the cadence of familiar prayers. But in my early twenties, when I moved to Alabama, my path took a turn. I joined a spirited Southern Baptist congregation and threw myself into it wholeheartedly. I sang in the choir, taught Sunday school, and loved the lively exuberance that filled our services. Yet even then, beneath the joy, there was a subtle restlessness I couldn’t name.

                “That restlessness stayed with me when I moved west to California. There, I found myself drawn into the community of Jehovah’s Witnesses. As before, I jumped in with both feet — studying, attending meetings, and knocking on doors to spread the ‘good news.’ I wanted to serve, to share what I thought of as the truth. But beneath that devotion, a quiet question persisted: Was there more?

                “At the time, I didn’t see it as a spiritual quest. I thought of it as being faithful, obedient. Only later did I realize that what I was following wasn’t doctrine but a deep internal pull toward the broadest, most inclusive understanding of spirit possible. My soul was hungry for something vaster than any one faith could contain.

                “Then I met Michael. He wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness — far from it. But there was something in his calm, listening presence that quietly disarmed me. Still, before I could let down my guard, I needed to know where he stood on spiritual matters. So, one day I called him and said, ‘I’d like to come over and talk about spiritual things.’ He said yes.

                “We talked through the night, our conversation winding through scripture, science, myth, and mystery. Dawn came, but neither of us was ready to stop. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the conception moment for New Dimensions.”

                “What started as a weekly show on one local station grew into the longest-running independently produced interview program on public radio, carried by nearly 100 stations across the US, Canada, and New Zealand… and now available worldwide as podcasts, audiobooks, and videos on YouTube.

                “Today, our archive holds 4,639 programs. The full collection covers an extraordinary range of human inquiry: consciousness, healing, physics, mythology, indigenous wisdom, the arts, politics, and the future of civilization.

                “Dr. Roberto Trujillo, of Stanford University Libraries, has called it ‘one of the most extraordinary archival collections’ he has encountered in his career as a curator. Others have termed it ‘The Alexandria Library of the 21st Century.’”

Save 692 Rare Recordings Before They’re Lost

                Justine went on to say,

                “In recent years we have devoted much of our time and limited means to digitizing and restoring many of our classic recordings. 692 have been digitized from their original tapes, but they’re not playable and can’t be made available to the public until they’ve been properly restored.

                “Each program requires approximately sixteen hours of careful, hands-on restoration to be brought back to life. It’s a monumental task, and one that goes far beyond what our everyday funding can support.”

                Here is a sampling of what is in some of these iconic recordings:

• Joseph Campbell showed the world that beneath every culture runs the same deep river of story. Five of his conversations are waiting to be restored, including “The Myth of the Fool.”
• R. Buckminster Fuller coined “Spaceship Earth” and spent his life proving that human ingenuity could solve what politics couldn’t. Six of his conversations are in the archive, including “Being with Bucky.”
• Albert Hofmann, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and John Lilly sat together in 1977 for “LSD: A Generation Later,” a conversation between the pioneers of consciousness research that will never happen again.
• Jerry Brown, Frank Herbert, and Captain Edgar Mitchell came together for “Space-Age Humanity.”: a governor, the author of Dune, and an astronaut who walked on the Moon, all in one room imagining the future.
• HH the Dalai Lama, Alice Walker, Jack Kornfield, Robert Thurman, and Edward James Olmos explored what compassion actually demands of us in “Compassion in Action.”
• Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the Pentagon Papers, reflected on the world we choose to create in “A World of Our Own Making.”
• Werner Erhard, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Marilyn Ferguson, and Patricia Sun gathered in 1979 to ask one question: “The Future: What Will It Be?”
• Linus Pauling, the only person in history to receive two unshared Nobel Prizes, recorded a rare conversation at New Dimensions.

                Please help support our efforts to make this wonderful collection available to the world, now and forever.

                Justine’s information and how you can donate.

                Here is what your tax-deductible gift makes possible. All donations, no matter how large are small are helpful:

• $243 restores one complete program.
• $2,430 restores an entire series of ten programs.

                Any funds raised above our goal will go toward making sure these teachings are accessible to as many people as possible.

                Every dollar counts. Please donate what you can, and pass this along to anyone you know who would value this project…

                If you would like to see my interview with Justine Willis Toms, you can do so here.

                I write a weekly article on issues of interest to my community. You can subscribe for free here: https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/

The post Journey to New Dimensions: Wisdom From the Past and Hope for the Future appeared first on MenAlive.

                I first heard about “Man Therapy” when I read an article in 2019 and reached out to Dr. Mahogany. It took me awhile before I met Joe Conrad, the man behind ManTherapy.org, and learned about the team that developed their successful program. Joe is a creative entrepreneur and a digital health pioneer who believes in the power of innovation, creativity and technology to solve any problem. I recently interviewed Joe about his work in support of men’s mental health, how the Man Therapy program was developed, and about his new book, Man Therapy: Therapy The Way a Man Does It.

                I was interested in the “origin story” of this unique and innovative approach for helping men and their families. Here’s what Joe shared with me:

                “At some point in my life, I went from acting like a boy to behaving like a man. For me, it happened at Colorado State University sometime during my senior year. I had a job writing for the Rocky Mountain Collegian, which is where I found my voice. I wrote a series of stories about US military veterans returning from Vietnam and their difficult transition back to civilian life. I covered issues around the growing environmental movement. I was creating something, putting it out into the world, and it felt great.

                In 1990 I started Cactus, a purpose-driven ad agency focused on working with nonprofit organizations, foundations, and brands to help bring a powerful voice to their work. One day while leading a workshop for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, I was approached by the director of the Office of Suicide Prevention. He said, “Joe, do you know that there is an epidemic out there and that working-age men are killing themselves at an alarming rate?”

                I had no idea that five out of seven suicides were men from all walks of life, demographics, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Against all odd and on a shoe-string budget, my team at Cactus created our agency’s best and most impactful campaign. We treated this challenge like we do every project and gave the campaign the same love and attention to creativity, production craft and a meaningful digital experience where therapy happens.

                We explored a number of creative approaches, but one idea stood out and was the obvious choice –– Man Therapy, which was launched on July 9, 2012.  The centerpiece of the campaign is a website, ManTherapy.org, hosted by a fictional therapist named Dr. Rich Mahogany. However, Dr. Rich is not your typical therapist. He tells it like it is and uses humor to convince guys that taking care of their mental health is the manliest thing a man could do.

                Man Therapy was created by a team of suicidologists, mental health experts, marketing strategists, creatives, and technologists to destigmatize mental health through humor, straight-shooting, and practical tools. And we know it works because the results of a 4-year, $1.2 million CDC-funded study show that Man Therapy not only reduces depression, suicide risk, and bad mental health days — it also improves help-seeking behavior in working-age men.

                While we’re proud of the impact we have had to date, we believe we’re just getting started. Today, Man Therapy is the world’s leading men’s mental health brand and we believe it can be a powerful force for good in the world. Much more than helping reduce suicide, we hope to help men flourish.”

Man Therapy is Relevant to My Personal and Professional Life

                 When I was five years old my father took an overdose of sleeping pills. He had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t support his family doing the work he loved. Luckily, he didn’t die, but our lives were never again the same. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to help other men and their families to avoid the suffering our family experienced.

                 For more than fifty years I have been a leader in the emerging field of gender-specific medicine and men’s mental, emotional, and relational health. When I came across Man Therapy and Joe Conrad, I immediately knew this was a program that could help men like my father and millions of other men and their families to live fully healthy lives, to love deeply and well, and to make a personal difference in the world.

                 The publication of their new book Man Therapy: Therapy The Way a Man Does It is the next step in this important men’s health movement. Man Therapy gives men straightforward tools for dealing with real-life challenges, without the lectures, jargon, or awkward therapy speak. You can watch the book trailer here.

                The book is powered by the engaging and popular Man Therapy® brand and includes contributions from today’s leading men’s mental health experts. This guide delivers concrete strategies for managing stress, depression, anger, and the everyday pressures men face.

                Think of it as a mental health tune-up for your brain: part therapist, part drill sergeant, and part wise uncle who tells it like it is.

                In this book, you’ll find powerful strategies to:

• Manage stress, anxiety, and burnout before they take over.
• Deal with depression, low motivation, and feeling stuck.
• Control anger and emotional reactions without blowing up relationships.
• Navigate loneliness, friendships, and romantic relationships.
• Build mental resilience when life knocks you down.

                Grounded in evidence-based psychology, this guide includes the key basics of mental health, simple exercises, reflection prompts, and practical skills you can start using immediately. Whether you’re dealing with work pressure, family stress, relationship problems, or just trying to get your head on straight, these tools help you act, not just think about it.

                You don’t have to pretend everything’s fine. And you don’t have to figure it out alone. This first-of-its-kind guide helps men take charge of their mental health with grit, clarity, and maybe even a few laughs along the way. 

               This is the book I wish my father had available when he was struggling with these issues. It is the book I am excited to give to my clients, family, and friends.

                To find out more about Joe Conrad, the book, and the Man Therapy movement, you can visit him at https://mantherapy.org/.

               If you would like to read more articles about men’s mental, emotional, and relational health, come visit me at https://menalive.com/.

The post Why Men’s Mental, Emotional, and Relational Health Is Needed Now More Than Ever appeared first on MenAlive.