Coaching · mostly talking
Yourself, and other people
Self-judgement, confidence, closeness, and what love actually is.
Most of what comes up in this half is one thing wearing different clothes: at some point you stopped trusting your own judgement about yourself, and everything downstream of that got harder.
Some of what men bring me
- Fear of starting a conversation with a stranger — so he stays in, and the evening ends on a porn site instead
- Not loving himself, and no clear idea what love actually is
- Judging himself constantly, and expecting things of himself that nobody could meet
- Feeling not understood — by his partner, by his friends, by his family
- Sex is easy to find and closeness is not. One hookup after another, and empty afterwards
- Never having been touched by anybody who was not trying to get something
- Being able to give, and not able to receive
- Sex as the only way he knows how to be close to another man
- Shame about his body — not good enough to be seen, let alone touched
- Getting older, and feeling invisible in a scene that only looks at younger men
- Shame from how he grew up — religion, family, coming out late, a marriage before this one
- Living with HIV, and what it has done to how wanted he feels
More on any of these — open the one that is yours.
This is not shyness in general and it is not fear of a room full of people. It is the specific moment of opening a conversation with somebody you do not know, and for some men it is close to a phobia.
Underneath it, almost always, is the fear of rejection — not of the conversation but of the answer to it. He has heard the no in his own head so many times before he has even walked over that in the end he stops walking over at all.
So he does not go out. Or he goes out, stands there, and comes home. The evening goes on the phone instead, and that becomes the habit rather than the exception.
When I tell a man in that position to go and talk to people, the resistance that comes back is enormous — and the resistance is worth more than the advice, because it is not really about the stranger. It is about what he is expecting of himself in front of the stranger, and about a judgement he passed on himself a long time ago and has never taken back.
That is why this one is not solved by tips on how to open a conversation. It is solved further back.
Almost everybody wants to experience love, and almost nobody has ever been asked to say what it is. So when it does arrive, there is no way of telling whether it is that or something else.
When I ask a man whether he loves himself, most say no, or not much, or a little. Usually that is not modesty. It is that he has no clear idea what he is being asked, so there is no honest answer available to him.
The order I work in is always the same:
- Clear out the self-judgement and the expectations nobody could meet
- Get clear about what love, intimacy and a relationship actually are
- Practical exercises — how to feel it for yourself, not as an idea
- You practise them, on your own, and the confidence follows
And the confidence does not come from encouragement. Nothing I say about you will do it. It comes from knowing what is real and what is not — once a man is standing on that instead of on what he assumed about himself, he stops needing to be reassured.
The fear itself is still his to walk through. I cannot do that part and I will not pretend otherwise. What he leaves with is the understanding and the practices, and those are enough to start.
Two men together. One of them feels more, notices more, and wants to go deeper — into the relationship, into himself, into what else might be possible. The other is practical, successful and sceptical, and the scepticism works like a handbrake.
So the first one stops asking. He gives things up to keep the peace, or to keep the relationship. He stays, and it costs him quietly, for years.
It is almost always the first one who writes to me, and he comes alone. Working with both men happens rarely. That is fine — the session is for whoever walks in.
What he leaves with is the dynamic explained, something to do about the position he is in, and one thing that matters more than either: there is nothing wrong with him. Feeling more than the people around you is not a fault. Most men who hear that said plainly describe the same thing afterwards, and the word they use is relief.
If the other man is willing too, there are practices for the two of you to deepen the connection. In my experience that is rare, and the work does not depend on it.
Not the partner, not the friends, not the family. It is the most common sentence I hear, and it does not need a relationship to be true — men living alone say it as often as men living with somebody.
What usually sits under it is this. A man is more sensitive than the people around him, or notices things they do not, or wants something from his life that nobody near him is asking for. The rules he grew up inside have no room for that, so instead of concluding that the rules are narrow, he concludes that he is faulty.
Then he starts questioning himself. The doubt produces stress, the stress produces more doubt, and men in that loop suffer — genuinely, and usually in private, because the whole problem is that there is nobody to say it to.
I will say the plain version. To me these men are not strange and they are not broken. They are the people I most want to work with, and there is nothing about them that needs correcting.
