In this episode, Howard shares his personal journey from a stoic British upbringing to becoming a therapist who specialises in men’s emotional health.
He reflects on:
- His early emotional struggles
- The impact of cultural norms on his mental health
- His path to self-discovery and emotional wellbeing
Howard delves into his therapeutic practices and how they helped him become more authentic and self-compassionate.
The conversation also explores:
- The importance of finding a therapist who resonates on a human level
- How therapy can serve as a safe space for emotional exploration and growth
This episode is a candid and insightful look into the personal and professional journey of a therapist, offering a compelling case for the transformative power of therapy.
If this episode raises a need to get some counselling support Howard is available for consultations.
Check out his private practice:
Men and Relationships Counselling
Or reach out to a professional in your area.
Do you want to learn more ways to improve your relationship skills?
Check out our Online Mini Course:
‘From Shut Down to Communication – 4 Relationship Boosting Strategies for Men’
Follow us + Join the Conversation
www.menandrelationships.com.au
Contact us – howard@menandrelationships.com.au
Download Your Free Guide – Better Conversations for Blokes – Quick and Simple Ways to Communicate With Your Partner
Transcript
SPEAKER_02: 0:00
What can a bloke who grew up steeped in that classic British not quite stiff upper lip stoicism, pragmatic, reserved, and totally clueless about emotions and relationships, really offer when it comes to men’s emotional well-being and building a successful business that supports men and relationships? Believe me, I’ve often asked myself the same questions. Why did things change for me and how did I end up here?
This episode is not just about my story, it’s about the journey that many of us take. I’ll share a little bit of my background in the hope that it resonates with you and help you to find new ways to transform your life to be more meaningful and authentic.
My name is Howard Todd Collins. I’m the director of Men and Relationships Counseling. Welcome to Man Talk, a podcast of real conversations about life, your life, our life, and the emotional well-being of men. Thank you for being there. Sit back and relax and join me for this latest episode of Man Talk.
This is a conversation that Ryan and I had recently. He said to me a while ago, why don’t we do um an episode all about you? And I thought, ooh, okay, that could be somewhat confronting, if not a little challenging. So this conversation really uh is a bit about my own backstory and how I come to do the work that I do with men and with relationships. It’s a bit of my own personal journey.
It’s not um designed to do anything but help you, hopefully, to resonate with some of the themes around transformation, personal development, understanding how the mind can change when you put in the work and do some of the personal development work that’s so important.
I think for all of us, the conversation goes into all sorts of nooks and crannies. Um, it’s the first time I’ve shared my own story uh publicly in any real sense. So this is a bit of a um an experiment. Hopefully it works. If you enjoy the conversation, hopefully you’ll get something out of it. But if you enjoy the conversation, please let me know and let some other mates know that there’s a podcast here talking in real terms about men’s lives, and this is the first time that I’ve shared my own story.
SPEAKER_01: 2:54
I’m really happy to be here with you, and I’m just enjoying these conversations, and I really hope that the listener is enjoying them as well. Good. Something that struck me while we’ve been talking, and also from listening to some of your episodes, yeah, is that I think it would be really interesting for people to know a little bit about you and about your work as a therapist. Sure. And about what the things were that kind of led you to work in the way that you do.SPEAKER_02: 3:19
How did I get here? Most of my work is with men. My kind of focus is on men and men’s health, but I do work with women and couples, so that’s part of my practice. I was driven to a kind of interest in people generally growing up. I think I was always someone that had a curiosity about people’s lives. But as a young boy and as a young man growing up, in a a fairly middle class family where we never spoke about what we were feeling much as a British UK family, fairly stoic, fairly pragmatic.
SPEAKER_01: 3:55
So that’s a fairly like traditional culture for British culture, where there is you know that you’re loved, you can feel that sense of love, but it’s not articulated too much. Everything’s maybe a little bit repressed.SPEAKER_02: 4:06
Exactly. We were given everything we needed, we had good schooling, good education, and so on. But in terms of any kind of understanding of emotions, it was not particularly obvious and present. And I was probably, when I look back at myself, a fairly sensitive kid. I was fairly emotional. I’m one of a twin. So I have a twin brother who is five minutes younger than I am, and that was always a big deal growing up, and I have an older sister. As a family, we were not overly expressive emotionally, and I didn’t think anything different about that. That was fairly normal, that was fairly okay.
It was only when I got into my late teens, early twenties that I began to realize to some degree I wasn’t okay. I knew I wasn’t particularly happy. I was fairly a combination of quite shy in terms of my temperament, not particularly outgoing, but I had a lot of friends, I was quite social. I went through school, I was the head boy, I was captain of the sports teams, so I was popular, I guess, but and I was quite social, but I never quite felt completely comfortable in myself.
SPEAKER_01: 5:14
So on the surface you ticked all the boxes, like popular, successful. Yeah, everyone would have thought, oh Howard, he’s going really well, but like beneath all that you felt. Wasn’t sure. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: 5:24
I was probably the cool kid, but not like outwardly overly confident, really. People saw a lot in me more than I saw in myself. That’s a good way of describing my late teens, twenties. I was much more internal emotionally. Now I look back now, what I know today. Very active inner world, inner thoughts, inner emotions, but also I was probably a pleaser. So I didn’t give much away.
I was there for others. I was a good friend, loyal friend, loyal partner growing up, often giving to others, which was seen in some ways as a real leadership quality, I think.
But I began to realize in my late twenties how unhappy I was in myself as much as anything else. And my story in terms of the work began when I first met my now partner. But at that point in my late 20s, I began to realize how unhappy I was in myself. And she was someone who came from a psychological background. My mother-in-law is a retired psychologist, and talking about mental health, emotional well-being, relationships, communication unfolded through that early part of my relationship with her.
SPEAKER_01: 6:35
And just coming in there, like I think what you’ve described, that mismatch between how you appear on the surface and then how you’re feeling inside. I think most men can relate to that to some degree. Yes. Like for some people it might be quite extreme. Yeah. But it’s very hard to get that stuff aligned. Yes. And sometimes it’s easy to just go along with how you appear, where you almost act the way people want you to act. Yes. And you’re almost playing a role, like you’re saying, dutiful, loyal, exactly, successful, doing all the right things, but beneath that there’s this whole kind of unresolved or unexpressed path.
SPEAKER_02: 7:14
And of course, there was no place for that expression. It was repressed or pushed down. And another part of my early life, I used to wear the mask, but I used to escape the way I was feeling. So I got very involved to some degree in soft drug use, marijuana mainly. I was a big drinker back in the UK.
We’re currying a beer every weekend or two. But the drinking and the smoking were socially part of my crowd. And then it moved from recreational, social to what we now know as self-medicating, really, where it was a way of coping with stress and strain and feeling unhappy in the world. But look back at my younger self in my twenties, I was depressed, if not anxious, but certainly depressed.
And I found all these ways of coping, which was the masking, like you were saying before, because fitting in, everything’s okay, nothing to see here, kind of thing. And yet I knew I was struggling. And it was only when I met my partner, who’s my wife, when I began to realize that she was really good for me to start to begin looking at my own self-reflection.SPEAKER_01: 8:20
Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: 8:21
She could see it in me.
SPEAKER_01: 8:23
How did that actually happen? Like how did she reflect that back to you, or how did she help create space for you to start to explore that?
SPEAKER_02: 8:30
That’s a good question. Our conversations were very much what I call now in the realm of sharing vulnerability. She would ask me questions about how I was feeling. She could see that I wasn’t good and she could see my mood changing. So I would go very internal if I wasn’t happy. I’d go quiet or I’d be short. I wouldn’t be as expressive as compared to when I was happy.
And she was just really good at noticing it and allowing me to talk a bit more about what I was feeling, even though I wasn’t always sure exactly what I was feeling. Lisa was great at drawing it out of me. And she’s a woman that’s done a lot of her own therapy. She has a huge degree of insight in terms of emotional wisdom. And I found myself opening up to her like I’d never opened up to anyone before.
SPEAKER_01: 9:16
It’s such a relief when you meet someone who you don’t have to put on an act. In fact, that’s the last thing that they want. Yeah. And send the message that actually how you are is okay. If you’re imperfect, if you’re working through stuff, there’s actually a space to express that, and that’s welcomed
.SPEAKER_02: 10:48
There is a lot to a lot of that safety that was created early on with her. It wasn’t easy. I there was part of me that was resistant to being that vulnerable and still trying to work out what’s going on here. But I knew that I felt safe with her. She was great in terms of seeing me and allowing me to be that vulnerable and to understand what some of my what now I call them patterns of internalizing and coping, and saying to me clearly, you need to work through this stuff.SPEAKER_01: 11:20
That’s a good point that you made about it not being easy because sometimes in relationships, and I think I experienced it with my wife, is it’s partly an invitation, but it’s also partly a challenge, and in some ways it’s a demand of like you need to step up.
And sometimes that can be the best thing, but it’s not oh it’s such a relief, I can finally express myself. In some ways it’s overwhelming, and my experience is like in I wanted to escape from that because it was too challenging. So you entered therapy, yeah, and I think that would be really interesting for the listener to hear a little bit about that because I think there might be some people listening who haven’t done therapy before, or some who’ve done therapy, but obviously there’s different types and different approaches. So it’d be interesting to hear what it actually involved for you, like what happened.
SPEAKER_02: 12:14
Yes, so I started off with a guy who it was, I think, recommended to me. He was more classic Freudian psychodynamic. Freudian stuff is a much more free association because talk. He was listening, not saying much, not very active, writing lots of notes. And I didn’t know quite where to start, to be fair, when I think back at it now. But it was really about I’m not happy, I’m not sure why I’m not happy.
I need to understand these thoughts I have about myself, partly where it comes from. But I was very unconfident to even know where to start. And he was quietly supportive because he didn’t give me a lot of feedback. I was just free associating.
So I would go every second week, I think, to see him, and I would just track back on the two weeks or so that I’d had, what I was thinking, what I was feeling, how I was going in my relationship. A big part of it was that I was away from the UK, I was missing my family a lot, and began to realize how much grief I was carrying. Grief around certainly missing my family, obviously, and my old friends, but also the amount of emotional pain that I was in in relationship to losing my family. And it wasn’t literal then, that was back in the day, before both my parents have now since passed away.
But I began to realize that I was needing to understand grief and sadness and a sense of loss. And I wouldn’t have had a language for that before I met him. Because he would feed back to me, You’re you’re grieving. And I was thinking, but I haven’t lost anybody, no one’s died, and began to unpack all that.
SPEAKER_01: 13:54
So it was a pretty good space to get stuff off your chest and then to have that reflected back to you. And it sounds like it was also a good space to learn to communicate in a new way because you had trained yourself to make sure that you were saying the right thing and pleasing people, and like you mentioned, you weren’t getting a lot of feedback, which in some cases was really challenging because you, in your previous kind of interactions with people, liked to communicate and then look for reassurance. Yeah. And then he was giving you the opportunity to like have a bit more of a risk by expressing yourself without that reassurance and start to back yourself more.
SPEAKER_02: 14:30
He was, yes, exactly. You described it very well, because I would often, when I look back in my early life, my sense of self was measured externally by other people, either by my friendships or my relationships, or by these external factors like the way I looked and what I how I dressed and where I was living, where I was working, how people saw me. And yet I had no real sense of how I saw myself.
That’s how I began to realize that through my early conversations. I was not my own friend internally. I was struggling with liking who I was. I had this imposter syndrome, despite doing really well socially in my childhood. Academically, I wasn’t so smart, really, but I was socially very active.
A lot of people saw me as a lovely, I was a good boy, I was a good man. And which is of course really important, but I didn’t feel like a good man. And I began to discover through therapy that my internal narrative was not healthy. It was very critical, very self-critical. And I would hide all that from people. I wanted to please people to be liked, even though clearly I didn’t like myself.
SPEAKER_01: 15:42
And so going through therapy helped you to have these realizations. Yeah. That’s very powerful.
SPEAKER_02: 15:49
I think the most powerful part was realizing that I could speak about this without being judged by anybody else, by my therapist, obviously. And people that were close to me began to understand how much I was struggling with, and realizing I could begin to let go of some of these beliefs that I had about myself, or at least to look out for the internal critic that was floating around in their head. And that’s still the case today. My internal critic is not as powerful and not as strong, but he’s still around. And I’ve learned over time how to diffuse the stories of our own mind.
SPEAKER_01: 16:24
So when you’re in therapy and you start to have these realizations, like you mentioned, you realized you weren’t such a good friend to yourself. It’s one thing to realize it, which is very powerful. Yeah. But then how do you actually work with it and address it and start to become a better friend to yourself?
SPEAKER_02: 16:44
There was a few other things that I did. I was doing group work, it was an encounter group. I began to discover other people had the same dilemmas in their own way. Their internal voices that we could share in the group were very similar to mine, and vice versa.
So I began to feel like it wasn’t a lot on my own. This wasn’t unusual. And it was okay to talk about it, but also really good to realize I could begin to find an inner, what I now call an inner parent, really, which came much later because I became a father. But I did some inner child work before I became a dad. And inner child work was like inner family work. There’s all sorts of aspects of ourselves that we carry, like a family system, inner child, creative child, angry child, but also an inner wisdom, like a wise parent.
And my discovery was I could find an inner parent that I could dialogue with myself over time. And I would write, I’ve got loads of journals that I found not that long ago, they’re stashed somewhere in my spare room. And the a combination of just free association, just writing all my thoughts, and in one part in response to those thoughts, it was much more of a wisdom, wiser, reassuring, encouraging, validating inner father, inner man who would look after the inner child within me. So I began to integrate these parts of myself. And a lot of that was quite creative. I did some inner child workshops, so I would draw stuff and I would write stuff. So I began to learn that I didn’t have to keep it all internal, but I could play with it externally as well.
SPEAKER_01: 18:22
And learning to give yourself the things that you would love to get from somewhere else, someone else externally that you’ve been waiting your whole life for, but you’re not getting and you’re not gonna get. Yes. And that is a really helpful framework that I can imagine would be very helpful for your clients as well, to start to practice that idea of you can actually give yourself the thing that you need. Yes. The thing that you’ve been waiting for that you’re not gonna get from outside.
SPEAKER_02: 18:51
You know, one of the most consistent themes with conversations with clients, this is my story as well, was we all experience various forms of abandonment in our lives. And to different extremes. I’ve got clients who have gone through abusive backgrounds and where it was unsafe to be a child for all sorts of reasons, as people can imagine. I look at my family, it wasn’t an abusive background, it was a fairly connected, safe environment to a large degree. I was given it everything I needed.
And my work on my own family of origin was not about blaming my parents for anything. I know my parents did the best they could in their own experience of who they were.
British, Stoic, middle class, doing the best they could, very pragmatic, very focused on good stuff, being good, being kind. Those are the values that I got from both my parents. But I also had a family that was silent emotionally, and I internalized that silence to some degree in terms of something wrong with me. And that was the work I did earlier on. And I don’t think that’s uncommon for people to go up that way, to internalize those needs that we didn’t get met when we were younger, with the best of the ability of our families.
SPEAKER_01: 20:05
I think that’s often how we make sense of things, and I think I did that as well. That when there was that gap when something didn’t make sense, then the obvious conclusion is it must be because there’s something wrong with me.
SPEAKER_02: 20:17
Yes.
SPEAKER_01: 20:18
And then you think you fill that gap and it all makes sense, and then like you say, you end up internalizing all that stuff.
SPEAKER_02: 20:24
Aaron Ross Powell And we believe the story that there’s something wrong with us. That that story also needs to be hidden. We need to hide that. Because we have to show up in a certain way. That’s the mess that we wear. And we want to show up in a certain way that we think we should. And that was a lot of my early background.
Look at myself emotionally, I think I was probably a late developer as well. I really grabbed hold of personal development in my late twenties and and 30s because I wanted to clear out a lot of this negative stuff and work on it f fairly quickly, particularly before I became a father. There was something about becoming a dad, I wanted to get my shit together, essentially. And a lot of that was emotional stuff as much as anything else. And that’s where that early work began.
SPEAKER_01: 21:05
Yeah. And so through this process, you had these realizations, you got to know yourself better, you started to practice caring for yourself, being your inner parent, and using this framework to care for yourself better. And then as you did this more, what were the things that you noticed within yourself? Like how you felt about yourself, how you related to people, how you carried yourself in the world?
SPEAKER_02: 21:28
I I found a sort of more settled place internally. I also began to meditate and learn how to sit with myself and did some extreme stuff like 10-day silent meditation retreats where you wouldn’t speak to anybody for 10 days, and learn how to practice a way of silencing if not stilling the mind. So I learned a lot about sitting with myself and being okay with who I am, and also looking out for anything that comes up that’s negative or critical, and learning the practice of being more present.
The Buddhist term is the equanimity of our mind, right? So I had a practice that I could begin to do that, noticing my thoughts and not believing my thoughts, noticing the critic and not allowing him to take over me, and somehow beginning to reframe a little bit of the way I would internalize things and encourage myself to talk, if not in my own therapy, to talk more in my own friendships or my relationships, and not hide myself so much. And the more I began to do that, the more I would enjoy my own voice.
And here am I talking to you in a podcast and done videos and I’ve been on television and I’ve done stuff that my mid-20-year-old self or young self would have thought, there’s no way I would show up in that way. So that so that it transforms into a sense of it’s confidence, but it’s really a kind of uh authentically a belief that I’m that I’m actually okay.
And even if I’m not okay, I’m still okay. I don’t have to judge that anymore. Yeah, I don’t have to hide it as much, which is why the space with myself as a counselor therapist where I provide that space for people becomes so amazing because I love the work I do, but it comes from the background of where I came where I came from, and I learned to study it. When I went to do my masters and my training, I I found myself at home with almost everything that I was learning and talking about and realizing that I’d already done a lot of my work on myself before I studied in that sense.
SPEAKER_01: 23:33
And I think it felt that way.
SPEAKER_02: 23:37
Which and to have men talking with a guy who had a background of not talking and began to shift that in my own way, I think becomes very powerful. It comes across probably in the way I work and the way I talk. But it’s amazing to see, particularly men and men’s groups that I’ve run, where even though it’s uncomfortable and it’s a bit messy at times, that I know given the right space, men will show up and talk about themselves and share what they’re struggling with a degree of acceptance and understanding eventually over time.
SPEAKER_01: 24:14
I think it’s a really important point that you’re making that not everyone, not every counsellor or psychologist or psychiatrist actually does a lot of internal work. Like it really varies.SPEAKER_02: 24:25
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: 24:26
And I think that there’s not one rule, but in general, for me, it feels reassuring knowing that if I’m seeing a psychotherapist, they have actually walked in my shoes and they have gone on this path and done this work to a greater or lesser degree.
SPEAKER_02: 24:40
Yeah. I think it’s important as well. A question that often arises in my work is how do I know you’re going to help me? And there are I’ve got qualifications and background professionally and the training that I’ve done. The research says the work in therapy or counselling is often measured by the interaction between two people in the room, who have three people in the room if it’s a couple, where you feel the connection, that therapeutic alliance or connection. And I believe that comes from my own backstory. I might not share that with clients.
Obviously, in my consultation work, I’m doing it now, and I’ve done a bit of it on social media. I think it’s a really important place to see all the authentic parts of counselors and therapists who have who know what it’s like, who’ve been there to some degree.
SPEAKER_01: 25:24
Yeah. And that’s a good question, actually. Like when people ask you, how do I know if you can help me? What do you say to them?
SPEAKER_02: 25:31
There’s no guarantee, but hopefully, over a couple of conversations you’ll get to realize you feel comfortable talking to me. You’re not going to feel judged. And I think there’s a mannerism, maybe, that I have, which probably makes things less jargonistic. It’s a bit more, it’s it’s got a kind of humanistic element to the way I talk, but I think it’s quite real. And a lot of men will say, I feel comfortable. I get what you’re saying.
If when I share what I know of what our minds can do that plays tricks on us, these internalized beliefs or the inner critic or the mask that that we wear, or that we pretend, or we escape, and these are the ways we all escape, very quickly early on, people get it. So they know they’re with somebody who I think has been through it but knows what they’re talking about. We all escape. Very quickly, we talk I talk a bit about that kind of stuff. I’m not going to give you there’s no silver bullet in counseling or therapy. There’s certainly a way of connecting and talking and learning how to process the mind, but you need to feel safe with somebody first before you even do that.
SPEAKER_01: 26:37
Sometimes it can feel a little bit intimidating to enter therapy, and that’s where it’s helpful, I think, for people to hear a conversation like this or whoever they think about going to see to actually get an experience of what they’re like, how they talk, what their ideas are, what their beliefs are. Yes. I think the best part about therapy is that in most cases when you first start the although it can feel intimidating, the stakes are actually quite low.SPEAKER_02: 27:03
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: 27:03
Because like you were talking about when you were in relationships when you were younger, there was probably that internal fear of what if I get rejected? Yeah. What if I let people down? Yeah. What if I’m not playing the right role? That kind of thing. And I think that’s the beauty of entering into therapy is that those stakes are low because there isn’t that risk of being rejected or of not getting it right. It’s actually a place where you can experiment with these quieter parts of yourself that you’ve kept hidden, knowing that it’s not going to be catastrophic if you bring them out.
SPEAKER_02: 27:37
Yeah, exactly. I remember something that I think you’ve said to me, possibly on a recent podcast, but you’ve said to me before that therapy is like a practice for intimacy, for a conversation actually that brings out a sense of feeling heard and seen and valued, which is a form of intimacy. It’s a kind of conversation you wouldn’t have with a friend necessarily. And you’re allowed to share your thoughts and your feelings and your even the darker sides of your thinking and minds safely.
SPEAKER_01: 28:05
Yeah. And you can also discuss, you can almost run like a commentary on how it’s going. Yeah. Like you can have this kind of intimate experience and you can talk about, yeah, I’m feeling this, but I’m also feeling a bit scared. Yeah. I’m feeling like I’m worried about being judged. Yeah, yeah. And you can talk through the process while you’re doing it.
SPEAKER_02: 28:23
We can carry multiple ideas and multiple thoughts in any given moment and we can share them, as opposed to getting it all right all the time. You know, that it has to be beautifully articulated, or you have to have all the insight straight away. Because we don’t have to have it straight away. It takes a bit of unpacking, and the conversations are driven by clients. It’s not a lot of the work that I do with people. Some guys will say, because tell me what to do.
We want to find your inner wisdom together, and you’ll find your way through, which is what happened to me, essentially, in my own work. That finding good people helped me to find myself. It started, this is the romantic part, it started when I met Lisa, when I fell in love with somebody where I was at my worst place emotionally. I was really unhappy. But I met my life partner at a moment where I was like, I was stuffed, and she was incredibly supportive and very patient, and I b eventually began to grow and grow through that.
SPEAKER_01: 29:22
Yeah. I feel like life gives us these invitations. It may be through someone that you meet, it might be through something that happens. Sometimes it’s a bad thing, sometimes it’s a tragedy, sometimes it’s just a gift that falls into your lap. But this feels like there’s these moments where there’s an opportunity to say, I can do something to make my life better. Yeah. I can get to m know myself better. I can go after the thing that I’ve always wanted, but I’ve been too scared to. And it’s really important to recognise those when they come along, like you did.
SPEAKER_02: 29:54
Exactly. And I think counseling’s a bit like that. People come and see me because they’re in some transition and they’re struggling. And they need to come, not always in a great place, of course, and then begin to realize that’s normal and that fork in the road or whatever that is, is important then to keep growing. Otherwise, we we keep repeating the same old patterns over and over again. And I do meet men who are struggling with that.
They’ve spent a long time avoiding conversations for years. And the relief that I see in men, and particularly men’s faces, but certainly couples and women as well, is great. They lighten in their first conversations with me. You can feel the palatable relief of just talking and letting it go a little bit more and not holding and withholding so much data, really. Which is overloaded. And that was my experience when I first began talking to somebody. I was just overloaded with data.
SPEAKER_01: 30:54
It’s nice to have a space that’s completely yours, but because like in relationship, there’s that give and take, which is really important to have the proper interaction. But there’s times when you’re struggling through things where it’s so valuable to just know that you hold the floor, like it’s all there for you. Yeah. And that you can really just concentrate on the challenge, say whatever you’re doing. You want to don’t worry too much about how it comes out.SPEAKER_02: 31:18
Yes.
SPEAKER_01: 31:19
And then you can take the stuff that you learn and feel back out into the world and into your relationships. So for people who are thinking about doing therapy, what do you find are like the things that stop them or the things that they’re worried about?
SPEAKER_02: 31:36
I think initially it’s that the sense that and this is particularly blokes, that we should know it already, that we should be able to f fix the problem or solve it on our own, or going to see somebody or seeking help means that we’re weak or we’re not manly, all that classic male stuff in particular. Some people that I’ve met have been quite surprised of how relaxed I am and that I don’t sit with a white coat and a clipboard. It’s a conversational experience for you in in a sense.
But I th there is a real classic thing of men wanting to deal with it on their own and feeling like there’s something wrong if they reach out, which is awful because it’s we know what the statistics are like in terms of men in suicide as well, where there’s so many blokes in particular who are on their own with it and that they don’t see the possibility of of seeking out help. So there is some fear attached for people.
I try and make it really comfortable, fairly welcoming. We can have laughs and f a bit of a joke and we can have fun. I’ve got guys who come in and they’ll talk about the football for a few minutes because their team lost at the weekend and they’re we have a bit of a conversation about the football, and then we go into something else. So it can be kind of normal a conversation, but most people get scared of it and worry about it or think that there’s something wrong with them.
SPEAKER_01: 32:56
I think the thing that you’re saying, which is really important, is that there’s it’s not a template, it’s not a formula. Like you respond to the type of person that you’re working with, what they need. Is it the sort of person who needs to ease into it? Is it someone who’s more like me who skips the small talk and you’re adjusting your approach depending on that?
SPEAKER_02: 33:14
Aaron Ross Powell I start counselling the question of what they what people expect. What do they know about it and what do they expect? And we work through stuff around that early on. But also I have to be really clear about being led by the person sitting in my room or the people sitting in my room. Certainly at the beginning of counselling or therapy. I have ideas about life and about thinking and feelings and relationships and men and women and so on. I have my own ideas about it.
But I I don’t feel it’s useful to impose that on the people I work with. It’s there as an invitation if it comes. And very similarly to my early days of working as a client in therapy, I wanted someone that was not gonna necessarily tell me what I should be thinking and doing. I just don’t think that works. That’s not I know the fairest counselling that is advice given, like solution advice focused. I don’t think I am that kind of practitioner. It’s not that I won’t tell people what I think they should do sometimes, but most of us know. And if we don’t know, we’re going to work out what’s blocking or what’s getting in the way.
SPEAKER_01: 34:24
I really like that idea because, like you talked about from your own experience, you probably learn to stifle your own intuition and instinct and overrode that with what should I be doing? Yeah and you had to reconnect with that voice that was there all the time that you’d switched off. Yeah. But it was actually the most helpful thing for you to say that you shouldn’t also get feedback from people and try to please them and try to fit in and all that sort of thing, but you were just skewed too far the other way, and I can relate to that, and I think a lot of people can.SPEAKER_02: 34:56
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01: 34:58
But I think it’s great that you’ve shared a bit about your story because in the therapy room, I imagine that would be rare. Yes. But for people who’ve been listening to your podcast for a while, or people who may come to you for therapy, I think it’s quite nice just to have a bit of an insight about your story. And just like how you said, when you started to do men’s work and group work, it was such a relief to know that there were lots of other people who were feeling like you were and had the same experience.
SPEAKER_02: 35:26
I continue to keep learning from the people that I work with. If it’s not the familiarity of people’s inner struggle or relationship struggle or life struggle.SPEAKER_01: 35:36
You’re on the journey as well.SPEAKER_02: 35:37
Absolutely, totally.SPEAKER_01: 35:39
So as we’re getting closer to the end of this episode, is there like a message that you’d like to leave people with? Like, how would you like to sum up what we’ve talked about today?SPEAKER_02: 35:49
Good question. I guess I want people to know that really good counselors or therapists, you’ll get a sense that they’ve lived a certain degree of their life already and they have been through their own transitions. And I would encourage people to ask as many questions as you want or as you can of the practitioner that you’re working with. Ask them more about who they are as well, and see if you get a sense of their value system as well as their training and their qualifications. That is important, but there’s a human element here. So I would encourage people to ask more of those human questions.
How long have you been working for? Tell me a little bit about yourself, where have you come from? And those kind of questions could be quite useful.
SPEAKER_01: 36:32
Definitely, because actually, when you start therapy, it’s not necessarily you’re not committing to some long-term thing. Yeah. In many ways, you’re testing out to see if there’s a good alignment. Exactly. It’s like in this first session, let’s just get to know each other a bit and let’s see and feel whether this is going to be a good connection. Exactly. Let’s move into a second one and see is this working? Yeah. Do we can we lay the foundations to work together?
It’s very nice to have that positive sponsor, to have someone there in your world, in your corner, who feels very positively and supportively towards you. And like you talked about, that framework of the inner parent and that sort of thing, in some way reinforcing that idea that there’s this positive sponsor, that there’s this person there on the journey with you who just wants well for you and just wants to create a space where you can self-actualize and you can there’s a space to express stuff that you might feel too inhibited to otherwise.
SPEAKER_02: 37:27
Yes, exactly. You summed it up very well.
SPEAKER_01: 37:30
Well, this has been a great conversation.S
PEAKER_02: 37:32
Thank you. Thanks for having me. It’s been good.
SPEAKER_01: 37:36
Yeah, thank you for letting me guide the conversation. I really enjoyed it. And um yeah, just feel like I’ve got to know you better and and learnt about therapy more. Yeah, it’s been great.
SPEAKER_02: 37:46
Good. Thanks, Ryan. Good on you.
