Psychotherapy and healthy masculinity: Exploring our values, and what stops us thinking about them, when working psychotherapeutically with increasingly unstable notions of masculinity

Abstract

A client exclaimed ‘Does masculinity always have to be toxic?’ This person said that when he was 11 or 12 he was very taken by the story of Billy Elliot and really enjoyed dancing. However, members of his family had said to him then that it was perfectly okay with them if he was homosexual. This client is now twice that age and is wanting to explore issues arising from what was then said to him and there is a question of where we might come from in responding therapeutically. Among many possibilities there may be those psychotherapists who consider coming from such a liberal family could imply a freedom for this client to be who he is. Yet, there may be other psychotherapists who might consider this family‘s intervention more a form of violence potentially stunting this person developmentally. So, do our responses as psychotherapists depend on our own values, and are such values becoming increasingly unexplored? It would be hoped that such aspects as ‘What is healthy masculinity?’ which may be particularly difficult to talk about in a society also increasingly beset by culture wars, could be explored within the consulting room. Yet as with an increasing number of areas, therapists are also caught up in potentially threatening trip wires disabling them from exploring their uncensored thoughts and feelings. This may in part be due to the ever decreasing amount of individual training therapy required by our professional bodies; but, to what extent are we as therapists and supervisors ourselves, free to allow thoughts to come to us? Does all this mean that most therapists are not really in a position to explore issues such as masculinity with their clients? Indeed, is for us to suggest as psychotherapists that we are in such a position disingenuous, a form of fake news? To give one further example of a change in our culture: I recently had to renew my membership of our local football club. After confirming my name and address the next question asked was whether I was trans. (Just answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’). Again this might be seen as a wonderful leap forward enabling popular culture to operationalise Freud’s assertion that we are all ‘polymorphous and perverse’. However, is this always helpful where explicit sexual orientation identities are called for from young people? Are such EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY & COUNSELLING 2022, VOL. 24, NO. 2, 155–161 https://doi.org/10.1080/13642537.2022.2089961