Working with Men in Resistance

In 1995, while leading a series of workshops for the Marriage Guidance network on "Gender Issues in the Counselling Relationship," I conducted an informal survey of how MG counselors perceived their male clients' self- presentation. The following portrait of the typical male client emerged:

Defensive and distant, emotionally shut-down or paralyzed; in pain but unwilling to admit it; task, job and solution oriented; resistant to the counselling process and resistant to change; grieving; aggressive and powerful, self-centered and domineering; rigidly defensive of his rights and authority; anxious about or afraid of loss; confusing love and intercourse and wanting more of both; angry and hurt but unwilling to accept responsibility for relationship tasks or problems; difficult to engage; seeking a "quick fix"; distrustful or even despising of women.[36]

Brooks presents a similar picture (1991, 53) of what he calls "traditional" men, identifying their main characteristics as "competitiveness, emotional stoicism, homophobia, distant fathering, emphasis on work and achievement, neglect of health needs, and distrust of women despite over-reliance on them for nurturance, emotional expressiveness, and validation of masculinity." While Brooks finds these characteristics more typical of American working-class, non-academic traditional men, we can also note their similarity to the unexamined historical construct of Pakeha masculinity.

In working with traditional males who are expressing backlash, resistance, defensiveness, and anger, psychoeducational methods are premature. The counselor may wish instead to concentrate first on a reframing of the positive side of the typically traditional male values. For example, mateship can be reframed as loyalty; risktaking as courage and the willingness to try new things (as in Kiwi ingenuity); or hard work as the way men nurture. Only when a trusting collaboration has been established between the counselor and the male client via transference will the psychoeducational method and its related variants listed above be useful.[37]

Wholeness presumes integration, as opposed to the primary defenses of splitting and dissociation. The "practical" emphasis within the construct of Pakeha masculinity will always make splitting a temptation: categories of good-bad or right-wrong seem as tangible as "a couple of fenceposts and some #8 wire," and splitting leads into the comfortable world of problem-solving. Integration, on the other hand, demands a level of comfort with ambiguity which men's life experience has not encouraged. Reframing may also be the key to helping men understand ambiguity. For example, mateship is really a delicate combination of controlled intimacy plus deadly-serious competition (see Culbertson 1994, 27-28).

Dissociation is also a constant temptation for men, in that they are already heavily conditioned toward alexythemia. Meth and Pasick believe that men have feelings, but are not adept at accessing or articulating them: "We find men's feelings are just as intense and varied as those in women. What is true for men, however, is that they are not as adept as women at recognizing and expressing their feelings" (1990, 154). I have found useful the list of feelings included in Marshall Rosenberg's A Model for Nonviolent Communication in orienting alexythemic men toward a generally unfamiliar vocabulary. Because the book is not easily available in New Zealand, I have appended a copy of that list to this article. The counselor can further assist these men by modeling emotions for them as part of the therapeutic process (see Culbertson 1994, 16).

Terry Kupers (1993, 30-31) offers an unusual perspective on men's natural resistance to therapy, one which must be held in tension with men's conditioned alexythemia:

"In contrast to women, men suffer from too little responsiveness to natural cycles-in fact, to cycles of any kind. The coping styles we have evolved in order to succeed at work-working long hours without letting up, arriving at work each day even when not feeling well, hiding our true feelings, remaining vigilant before the prospect of attack from as-yet- undisclosed enemies-all depend on our ability to override natural cycles. It is natural to cry when hurt and laugh raucously when something appears very funny; thus, our own practiced stifling of tears and modulation of laughter are just two prominent symptoms of our arrhythmicity.

There are other symptoms: an obsessional feeling one always has to be on schedule, an inability to let emotional experiences take their course, an inability to truly enjoy relationships and events that are not task-oriented, a refusal to admit when strong feelings interfere with the desire or capacity to continue what one is doing, difficulty coping with illness (one's own and those of others), an inability to rest and take time to heal, and so forth."

Dealing with arrhythmicity by means of the type of "documenting rituals" suggested earlier may afford the successful transition from reframing and modeling methodologies to a more psychoeducational one, once the therapeutic alliance is secure.

While traditional male clients who are still in the defensive or resistant stage may not function well in psychotherapeutic groups, the counselor should remain aware that no one lives in a vacuum. The rugged independence of Pakeha males may easily mask the fact that most men need to be in some committed relationship in order to maintain their masculine identity. Hence a group of feminist psychotherapists can write: "There is no self without an other, and the challenge is to integrate autonomy and connection" (Goodrich et. al., 1988, 19). With men in the company of their partners, the therapist can begin the process of explaining the determinative weight of the inherited mythic masculine. It is usually more constructive within a relationship when both partners learn that a man's interpersonal style is primarily a result of family, societal, and historical conditions than to think it is due solely to individual failures. Wives, partners, and even children may need to be included from time to time in therapy. They affect a man's changing, are affected by his change, and may even be a significant source of resistance to his change. Realizing that the differences and difficulties in the mate they are trying to change are the result of socialization-not stubborness-can be eye-opening (Meth and Pasick, 1990, 149-50).