Being told to talk isn’t the same as being heard.

In this conversation, consultant clinical psychologist Martin Seager returns to The Lonely Chapter for episode 121.

We explore masculinity, emotional wellbeing and the difference between encouraging someone to talk and helping them feel understood.

From boys’ experiences at school to men’s groups and male-friendly therapy, we discuss listening, loneliness and belonging. I also ask whether the pressure to provide can leave men tying their self-worth to what they do for others, and why male victims of domestic abuse can struggle to be heard.

Listen to our first conversation:

Why Men Struggle in Silence | Martin Seager on Men’s Mental Health.

Explore Martin’s work through The Centre for Male Psychology and his article, Making better connections with men and boys.

If this brings someone to mind, share it with them.

Martin, since our last conversation, which is about a year and a half ago now, there have been two big TV releases around topic of men and boys.

One being adolescents, which is just after our conversation.

And since then we've also had Louis Theroux inside the manosphere.

Yeah, how have you seen those releases change the conversation around men and boys?

That's a good question.

I made a point of not really watching these things because I knew sort of, I kind of already anticipated the bias within those particular films and also the reaction that would be because if you've got a bias against men that's sort of systemic in the system, we call it gamma bias, which means you just magnify all the bad stuff a few men do and minimize all the good stuff loads of men do.

So basically that's gamma bias.

Once you have a lens, that lens operating in society really, then the films are going to come in a way that minimizes the good of men and maximizes the bad and the opposite for women.

It kind of plays down any bad stuff women do and sort of puts the spotlight on any good stuff.

But obviously having not watched those things, I can't comment.

I won't claim to be an expert on what they're saying, but just in the general issue.

But I saw a lot of the reaction, a lot of the conversation to it.

And also it's picking on a particular demographic of boys as well.

It seemed to be more about young white boys.

You know, maybe it wasn't even because people are obsessed with intersectionality these days and all the different races and demographics and.

But it didn't seem to be, it seemed to pick a particular demographic, it seemed to be knocking white boys.

And you see that they're the most disadvantaged boys in many ways working class boys doing worse at school.

So you know, but at the end of the day there's this whole culture now of going into schools.

We're teaching boys to.

Going in with a plan to teach boys to respect girls now.

So to teach one gender.

Is that in the curriculum now?

There was anti misogyny lessons coming in, wasn't there?

It's looking like it's becoming a formal thing, but you know, again, I'm almost in a. I'm in a conflict.

I'm interested in the subject.

Obviously I'm one of the people who's come up with some original ideas on it.

But equally I'm sort of so not traumatized but so sort of worn out with the constant prejudice against boys that I almost don't read everything now.

I think it's almost.

It is psychologically damaging to just keep reading the same stuff.

But of course, I'm a bit older now and I'm semi retired, but I most definitely feel that adolescence, the Louis Threw thing, I don't know so much.

The manosphere is basically a much smaller thing than the femosphere.

The femosphere is actually the whole of Western media.

Right.

So all western countries have adopted a feminist friendly perspective on men and boys.

So the whole lens through which politicians, the media and our institutions, the courts, the police look at men and boys are that they are a risk.

Boys and men are somehow a risk.

They're a danger.

They can go, you know, they're going to be a problem.

They haven't got their own issues.

So much to be protected from.

They should be.

And all of this comes from the fact that the male archetype is we expect men and boys to do protection.

A few men are dodgy, if you want to call it that, and do awful things, but they're the minority.

But the majority of men never gets the publicity.

So the manosphere is basically, again, the same thing.

You've got to couple of dodgy people probably, who are very.

They pick on.

Because if you want to knock something, you pick the worst example.

So there's the Andrew Tate stuff, isn't there?

Everyone mentions Andrew Tate.

Yeah.

Every time there's a conversation around, never.

A quote about anybody else.

So if it's one person, that's not really an argument.

The manosphere, if it means anything, is just a load of people and some of them women doing good material on men's and boys issues and much needed as a reaction to the femosphere.

Because the whole of culture and politics is now a femosphere.

Schools are a femosphere.

They're going into schools now teaching boys to respect girls.

They're not expecting girls to need any teaching.

But, you know, having had kids myself and observed schools and looked at the literature and, you know, girls can be pretty nasty at schools.

They can bully boys, they can bully other girls, they can be quite unpleasant online.

So the idea that respect is just one gender needs to learn about it, that's a massive prejudice, isn't it?

The idea that one whole gender needs education and the other gender is a victim of that, that's such a, you know, a lot of feminists wouldn't subscribe to that extremity.

But it's become.

The feminist culture has been unchecked and feminism was a good thing to start with, I think it's just gone far too far now.

Yeah, well feminism, yeah is obviously originally a movement to find equality.

But it's like you say, it's potentially gone too far to the other side and now we need to start bringing it back into the middle and find that middle space.

Absolutely.

Because there are issues where men have disadvantages, but they've never come into the equation.

No one's assuming that 50%, you know, we should have 50, 50.

And all the dangerous things men do in the military or civilian jobs, which are mainly men doing them, including the fire service, there are some women doing it.

And of course you've got to meet a standard to do if you want to save someone's life in a dangerous situation.

Should be equal opportunity for anyone to do that job.

But they need to meet that standard.

The standard should not be changed because of the demographic, because of the identity of the person.

But we are increasingly in our society putting the identity of the job applicant before the actual criteria needed to fulfill the role.

And that's not about gender prejudice, that's just about getting a job done.

When we look at like the school level, and obviously we've spoken there about potentially these anti misogyny classes and teaching boys to respect women, the other thing when we look at schools is the stats of boys are behind girls at every level of education.

When we look at the grades and how involved they are with the actual learning, how do you think, I mean this is only going to make it worse.

You can imagine by telling all the boys in a class that they, they need to respect and they're potentially something wrong with them.

What, what's the long term effect of this?

Where boys are behind.

But we're not addressing that, instead we're addressing the problem that they are.

Well, the long term effect is that, well, boys are in a culture where they're more likely to have female teachers, more likely in a single parent household to have a female lead.

So they're being socialized mainly by women.

So everyone who argues that boys are learning to be badly behaved, well then most of the adults who teach boys are women.

So that would be a not a good argument if you're trying to sort of make it a gender warfare argument.

But the effect on boys are being told a your issues you're falling behind at school.

But that's not our priority in addressing that.

Our priority is teaching you to respect the opposite sex when actually that is an equality issue.

Equality should be.

Respect should be an equality issue.

And it's become now just a male only issue.

So the combined effect of being given a negative message and not having your own needs addressed will be twofold.

It'll make boys lower in self esteem in their general sense of their identity, because identity is important.

We live in a world of identity politics now, just gone way too far.

But there was a kind of truth in some of it.

The idea that there was racism, there is racism towards people in minorities.

Every culture will do that because they're different and people who are different, it's like kids in the playground, someone's a bit different, they tend to pick on them more.

You know, that's just a human thing.

But the whole thing has gone so far now that actually we're dealing with, you know, we've kind of lost the perspective that males and females are part of human nature and equality is important.

But now we are making identity the key thing and we're making minority identity.

But we include women in a min.

We're sort of protecting minorities and we're protecting women as if they were a minority when they're not a minority.

So the whole effect on boys is to lower self esteem and at the same time that will drive some into a more depressive state, a withdrawn sort of state.

It would draw them more into mental health coping mechanisms like escape things with like online stuff or maybe more likely to sort of try and take some substance just to feel better about themselves.

Or it will turn them into a more aggressive sort of reaction, rebellion, you know, an anti.

Which will reinforce the theory that men are bad.

Because if men stop reacting to being the victims of prejudice in an aggressive way, in any way, verbally or non verbally or whatever, people will say, look, I told you certain men are.

Told you men were bad.

Yeah, you said the word gender warfare in there and that was like something you're alluding to.

But it does feel a lot of the time that when we start talking about issues facing one gender or the other, it becomes like a warfare thing and it becomes, well, we have these problems and it's, it's never.

It doesn't feel like we come together to actually listen.

It's.

It's like a comparison of problems.

Yes.

How do we move forward and try and get rid of that.

That zero sum idea of if we're looking at one person's issues, it takes away from someone else's.

It.

It obviously doesn't.

No, because if you attack a man, you're attacking women.

Because men and women have to share the planet together.

They have to.

You have to have male and female elements in Family life, to create a family.

And even if you're not a straight man or a straight woman, you're still a masculine and a feminine aspect to all of creativity.

So you can't get away from masculinity and femininity.

They're parts of humanity.

If you demonize one part of humanity, you damage the other.

Because humanity is a system.

The male and female aspects of life are meant to be yin yang, complementary.

If you're like, so, yeah, if you damage any part of a system, you damage everything.

It's not actually a healthy place to be in, to be taking any identity equally sort of.

The people are trying to elevate demographics that were previously suffering more prejudice.

That doesn't work either because you're just treating people according to their identity.

Basically, you want equality.

Everyone should be equally able to have the opportunity to do things.

Once you do that in a society, in the most developed societies with the most equal opportunity, gender differences become even bigger.

Because when people are freely choosing what they want to do, boys and girls on average end up doing different kinds of jobs.

I mean, girls are more interested in.

Is that what they found in like the Scandinavian countries?

Scandinavian countries and other Western countries where you've got more equal opportunity?

The women choose freely to do more childcare type roles, nurturing roles.

Not because they're being forced to, obviously, but because that's an art.

And that comes back to our theory, which isn't a big, you know, it's not a new theory.

The idea of archetypes that differences of gender between men and women are not purely down to socialization.

We don't teach a boy to want to play with a toy sword and play fighting games.

There's an archetype in there, fighting, protecting.

That kind of behavior has evolved in the male of the species more, on average, more than the female.

There are some females who are like that, and these are average differences.

Every female or male should be equally free to do whatever they want as long as they're behaving in a moral way.

But on average, boys would choose more mechanical jobs, more jobs that involve more physical strength, because they've evolved to be stronger.

And fighting is part of that.

So you can't teach boys not to fight.

That would be crazy.

And of course, girls fight in different ways.

And so on average, boys and girls are different.

And that's because we're biologically different.

So once you get into a culture that's trying to deny biology, you're lost.

Really.

This happened to feminism.

It's one of the Sort of things that has come back to bite feminists is the idea that there's no real difference between boys and girls.

We can do any women can do anything a man can do.

And then you've got the trans issue now, which, of course, if that were true, that there's no difference between men and women biologically, then there'd be no problem with trans women.

But there are problems with trans women.

And I have every sympathy because for me, a trans woman is a trans woman, not a woman, and.

But also not a man either, because there are genuine trans women and I've met and worked with many.

Yeah.

Not that there were loads of them, but, you know.

But they're not women.

Yeah, they're trans women and they're not men either.

So the feminists are tending to argue that trans women are men pretending.

And then the woke people, if you like, trying to pretend trans women are the same as women.

Both of those arguments are really obviously wrong, but people get caught up in ideology.

A trans woman is a minority, but they are genuine.

But probably if you had to have an explanation for why someone is trans, you'd find there's a hormonal basis, because there are studies showing now that gay men have less male hormone than, you know, than straight men.

Did you come back to that thing that you were saying before, where you've got masculine and the feminine are in everyone?

It's almost like a spectrum between the two, potentially.

Absolutely.

So genetics obviously is X, Y.

You can't really do much about that.

There are some conditions which vary that, but not much.

Basically, genetics is genetics, but hormones, there's quite a spectrum.

And people get hit with hormones in birth and in puberty.

And if you don't get the same levels of hormones, your identity can be different.

Because hormones, I mean, that's what they give trans people to help their transition.

They pump them with more hormones.

So if that's working, then that might be part of the original cause, why they feel that way in the first place.

So hormones are underrated as a basis for.

Yeah, for these things.

And it's biology.

Again, I don't think people.

I've never met anyone who chose to be gay or chose to be trans.

There may be some people who use it for mental health reasons or for political reasons, but if you're genuine, and there are many genuine cases, that's who you are.

Yeah, I realized I was different.

I couldn't really put my finger on it.

And then it sort of works out over time.

That, of course, needs to be, you need to find that out, you know, not in early childhood, because that's far too early to start saying someone is trans.

So I have a problem with people wanting to, you know, transition kids.

Really, really wrong, dangerous.

Because trans isn't something your identity isn't something you fully really work out till into your.

Well into your teens.

Then you can start thinking about someone having some real choice in that to recognize who they are.

But that again, is a minority of people.

Most people are clearly male or female.

And that is another species too.

And we get hung up on trying to make a much bigger issue of it.

And again, it all comes back to trying to.

I think underneath there's a devaluation of masculinity in the Western world.

And that's the problem because masculinity is what's, you know, help to build everything and protect it.

What is.

So we, we obviously hear the term toxic masculinity a lot and I know we spoke about it in the last conversation we had, but what does positive masculinity look like?

What is actually the masculinity that we want to see look like?

I know it'll be different for different people.

Yeah, I mean, obviously masculinity is a spectrum.

You know, you can be a tremendously brilliant father.

Fathering is a bit different from mothering on average.

It just means you tend to rough play, isn't it?

I mean, fathers chuck their kids around, do all kinds of siddy things with them, which on average mothers don't do so much of.

That's positive, isn't it?

I mean, kids need that sort of parenting.

Also, obviously positive masculinity is.

Well, we come back to those archetypes.

So fighting and winning, okay, fighting can be a bad thing.

It can be a very good thing because it protects.

Positive masculinity is protecting your culture or your tribe or your country or your community from danger.

And always we look to protect.

You can't really have it both ways.

If people say, look, you need to protect women and children, who's going to do that?

Who else is there except women and children?

There's only men.

So we're really, even now as a culture still saying men should be protecting women, children, while screaming for equality.

You can't have equality and expect men to protect women and children.

Children maybe, but not women.

But actually, yeah, we still expect men to protect women and that's because of the archetype.

So positive masculinity is protection.

We get up every day and we find, you know, the lights are on and this is, you know, obviously there's arguments politically now about our country being less safe, and I won't get into that, but the sort of.

The numbers of people that will be doing any protection that's going on.

More men than women.

Yeah.

You get some great women in the military, you get some great women in the lifeboat service and all that, but on average it's more men.

So the protection going on in our society is more male than positive.

Masculinity is also providing, you know, taking risks, going out, providing there's still, you know, figures that show people go on about equal pay and everything.

Forget that argument for the moment.

There's not equal provision.

You know, it could maybe when work longer hours, because women obviously, the biologically.

Again, it comes back to biology.

Women have children and takes.

They can't have the same career pattern.

The idea that you should have the same career pattern is denying that.

Denying biology.

Yeah.

So men do provide more, into the pot, as it were, to look after kids on average, because you can say, because they're able to whatever.

But providing and protecting are big parts of the male archetype.

And also there are things that are more massive.

We were talking earlier, before we started the interview, about keeping your emotions cool in dangerous situations.

So, example, if you're.

The male emotional pattern is often knocked for being, oh, we should open up the emotional crime or.

But you flip that round.

If you're in a plane that's about to crash and you want someone to try and land it safely, if you're in a war and you need to take out the enemy and not get killed, if you're in a firestruck building and you need to get people out safely, the last thing you want is emotions is that you want cool focus on the task.

And that's what is different to men.

There's any singular big difference between male and female.

That would be a big one for me.

Focus in a dangerous situation, keeping your emotions down and just focusing on the task.

Yes.

Be emotional afterwards, but in that task you want that masculine quality.

And even female sports stars and athletes learn that.

Because if you want to be a great female footballer and you're going to take a penalty, you don't want to get in touch with all your feelings.

What you want to do is put the ball in the net.

Yeah.

Is that something that's been studied, the focus aspect of it?

I think there must be studies on it, but I can't claim to have any great knowledge of the research literature on that, but it's just to Me an obvious pattern that if men and women are emotionally different, what we're doing in society now is knocking the differences and saying the male emotional style is bad and the female good.

We're trying to feminize emotions.

Anyone's got to be sympathetic, empathic, and of course, all those things are important, but you also need to get things done in dangerous situations where emotions will get in the way and that doesn't get looked at enough.

You know, all sorts of jobs men do in sort of mechanical jobs, dangerous jobs where you gotta keep your mind on the job and not think about the feelings.

The fact is there probably are differences emotionally between men and women, and they're valuable.

When we.

I worked with the Samaritans, we did training for the Samaritans volunteers to learn to listen to men in different ways because they're so expecting men to sort of talk about their feelings all the time and almost criticizing the men when they didn't open up.

And there's still society still doing that.

So we taught the Samaritans volunteers to think more about.

Don't teach the men to open up, just open up to them, listen to what they're saying.

If they talk about Arsenal Football Club or something, listen, because Arsenal Football Club A may mean something to them and you're connecting with what means something to them and then all the feelings will follow from that.

If you want a man to show their feelings, listen to what matters to them.

It's the same with any human being.

But a lot of the counseling culture now, voluntary and statutory, is based on the premise that somehow men need to be more emotional.

Well, that's not entirely right.

I'm a psychologist.

I worked in the NHS for 30 years, in the charity sector for another more 10, 15 years.

Been working with men and women.

And you just adapt how you listen to the person.

I mean, the same with any aspect of your identity, you should always listen to that person.

If a man.

It's a complete myth that men don't have feelings.

Men have such passionate feelings for their families and their partners.

They want to protect and they care.

That's why they do the things they do.

Sometimes male compassion is misunderstood.

Men often show their love through action.

Yeah, absolutely.

Not always through saying I love you or whatever.

But they do that as well more these days.

And culture does change things.

I mean, I'm sure men these days say I love you more than they used to, but even in the old films they did.

So it's not like love is a foreign thing to men, even in the ancient past.

Where's the balance for men being open with their emotions?

Obviously, in those emergency situations, you don't want them cropping up then.

But when we do look at the work, the areas of work where men are majority workers, so say firefighters, military.

Construction is a massive one, isn't it, in terms of suicide rates across those three.

There are obviously men struggling in there.

Yeah.

Who need to talk or do something to have that outlet.

Yeah.

But obviously it's not.

It's not useful doing it in the moment.

So where do we find that balance?

What's the best way to approach those men?

I think.

I think this has gone out of society quite a bit now, but I think they used to be like, when you work somewhere, you'd always have a social aspect, you know, like a pub or a.

You know, like if a building company had a social place where their employees all met up and had a chat.

And also, you know, just the availability.

It's not all about talking, it's just about people checking in with each other and having each other's backs, which men like.

Men need to know that.

So it's more not just, you know, as you say, it's in the moment, you don't want to do it, but after the moment, you can do things like debriefing.

It's a model which we use in the NHS and in emergency services.

You know, if you've been in a terribly horrible, traumatic situation where you've had to keep your mind focused on the job afterwards, it's important not to go through every emotion, but to have the opportunity to have your reactions understood.

Some people cut off from it, some people get overwhelmed by it, some just whatever your reaction.

So I think we need to help men by having things around, supporting the jobs they do that are dangerous.

Not in the moment, but afterwards.

Like if you're on a bombing mission, you don't want someone dealing with your emotions in the plane, but when you get back, who's there to sort of debrief?

I think a lot of that did happen informally, you know, with drinks and just kind of chilling out.

And no one's exactly the same as anyone else, everyone.

But on average, I think we don't acknowledge that men need emotional help in a different sort of climate.

They don't want to sit down with a counselor necessarily.

But that doesn't mean to say they can't process their feelings.

I mean, things that help young men who are troubled emotionally, just take a boxing club as an example.

Why does that help a young man emotionally?

Who's troubled because a.

The boxing club has a father figure.

He's like a dad that cares about you.

Where have you been?

You know, a bit of discipline and love and then someone who sort of has your back but doesn't sit down and counsel you, but he's with you alongside you sort of is a man, is a role model and also gives you a chance to process your feelings.

And the boxing itself gives you a chance to kind of express stuff through, you know, get your feelings processed through action.

So we've just got to be a bit more creative with men and boys and we're just so bad at it.

I mean, at schools now, the whole idea of just sitting down in a room for hours and listening to people talking, that suits.

Doesn't even suit all girls.

But it's much more suited for girls than boys.

Boys like to move around, do stuff.

If we taught boys more on the move, did more physical stuff, you could probably teach boys physics in 20 minutes in a skate park.

More physics in that 20 minutes than if you just sat down and put it in a textbook.

There's a number of different learning types as well, isn't there?

Like visual doing, audio, all of those things.

Yeah.

So it's offering as many options as possible within one area, I suppose, because yeah, like you say, sitting down in, in a classroom is.

Is rough for most people.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I, I go to the thing who I am.

I do go to conferences and lectures now and then.

You dig us a bit bored off, you know, even if it's good, you know, you can't focus on it for.

And that's why films are about one and a half hours long because I don't think people can sustain.

Some of them are about double that now.

I know, I think you used to have intermissions.

They don't do that.

So there's all sorts of things.

We're breaking the rules of psychology.

But boys, yeah, boys just need to be.

We call it male friendly approaches.

So like in therapy, what's a male friendly therapy?

You might not even be sitting down with someone.

You might go for a walk and just talk as you go.

I've done a lot of work with guys.

Well, I don't ask some stuff or press for their feelings.

I'm just there and the conversation turns to things.

If things are important in your mind, they'll come to you, but you've got to do it in a male friendly way.

But we're seeing the male gender as a problem in our society now.

We've seen it as unemotional, not caring, toxic, aggressive, this, that and the other.

And that whole culture is actually part of the reason why boys, if they are struggling, are struggling.

They probably wouldn't struggle if they were just respected.

But it's sad that we're trying to get boys to respect girls when what we're actually teaching them is they're not respected by doing that.

We are not respecting boys when we.

Look at the conversations we're having in those.

Like those debrief areas.

So for me, at the fire station, we have the mess table.

That's always been a sort of informal debrief place to go and have a cup of tea, sit around, talk about what we just sort of went through.

And you're obviously checking on people there and you're saying about.

Even the pub could be that for some people, places just getting out and going for a walk with someone.

Do we need to do more to educate those people on, around that table in that pub, on that walk, to notice signs of people?

Because you could probably go to that and people have that mask up that just blocks off all of their problems they might be going through and someone might not spot anything, but if they had a little bit more awareness, potentially might spot something or notice they're a bit different.

Is there an element of that as well?

There might be, but equally, I wouldn't want to turn those into clinical sessions.

It's a balance there.

Yeah, I think it does help.

I mean, there was various charities probably still going, which teach hairdressers, you know, to be more aware of mental health and have a chat.

Because you talk to your hairdresser, you're a barber.

So there are various good initiatives where they are teaching barbers, but equally, if you overdo that, it just becomes another counseling session.

And also those people aren't trained.

So it's like the Samaritans, in my view, made a slight mistake by sort of thinking that they've got this training now.

Actually, the only reason the Samaritans are any good was the original founder, Chad Vara, realized it was just about.

Yeah, you give a little bit of training to people who are just good at listening and care about other people.

It's the fact that you're listening and caring about them.

If you genuinely care about someone and you're listening to them, that's 90% of mental health improvement.

If you think you're trained to ask the right question or notice someone's mask or something, and you're not really any good at that, or you Sort of just making that the focus rather than being natural.

Yeah, that's true.

You lose the person.

So Samaritans only works because it's a natural conversation.

And I was a little bit concerned that they were going down the idea of having a model of counseling.

They're not trained.

That's the beauty of the Samaritans.

It's not counseling.

You're actually just going talking to someone who befriends you and supports and listens to you.

And there are brilliant people who do that in everyday life, probably a lot of them, like in the mess of the fire, you know.

So what I would say is, let's support natural conversations, but let's just remember why those natural conversations are useful.

And the five great mental health needs of the human condition, which we came up with when we looked at this 20 years ago, and I looked at it with the last, the labor government at the time, I was involved as an advisor for a while.

But the key thing, if you want your mental health to improve, whether you're a man or woman, whatever your ethnicity or whatever your culture, you want to feel that someone loves you and someone cares about you.

Doesn't have to be sort of gushing love, just, you know, comradeship.

But there is a love that men can have for each other.

In warfare, for example, it's probably deeper than something a lot of people will ever know.

And probably that's true if you're in a burning building as a fireman as well, you're all depending on each other to get out of there alive.

There's a kind of.

It's not because love is such a loose word, there's so many forms of it, but that sort of love for your fellow comrade in a dangerous situation, that's important.

So if you feel someone actually cares about you, it doesn't matter how skilled they are, if they can genuinely show they care about you, because they do, your mental health goes up.

And obviously you need to be able to give that to someone else as well to feel good as a human being.

You don't want to just be the recipient of love, you want to give it.

So that's the first thing.

The second thing is being heard.

If someone feels they're being heard, their mental health immediately improves.

But if you go in there saying, I'm going to ask all the right questions to get your mental health assessed, you're going to lose the person.

So even in the health service, I didn't go in and go through a questionnaire.

I just listened to what that person's mind was on their mind will show you what's the priority.

You just let it come out and then you put your figures on it.

Afterwards.

You can say, well, this was the issue.

You can match it to some questionnaire afterwards, but you don't ask questions so to be heard.

So if you feel someone cares about you, is listening to you as you're listening to me now, that helps me to feel motivated to keep speaking.

That will improve the mental health of anybody.

And that's why Samaritans were so good, because it was listening and befriending.

It wasn't.

We're doing mental health therapy here.

And the third thing is to belong.

So if your mental health, if you don't really belong to anything, a family, a community, some kind of something that matters to you and you're not part of it, you will feel alienated.

And that's what's happening to boys a bit more now.

So that's why they will form certain groups, because they're trying to be part.

That's why people form gangs.

Gangs are mainly made out of boys and some girls who didn't belong, so they formed their own family.

A gang is just like an unhealthy family.

So what we want is more healthy gangs, things where people belong.

And the fourth thing is to make a difference.

Anyone who feels they're making a difference to something, and that could be bad, sadly.

So people who go out and do damage because they feel they're making a difference to the world, even if it's some political protest and they've just.

They might be mistaken, but they believe that they're making a difference, then that gives them a sense of worth, purpose or something like that.

And then.

Purpose.

Yeah, a sense of purpose and belief, whether it's religious, whether it's, you know, whether it's just belief in your job, when you're.

So those are the five things.

When I'm trying to help someone's mental health now, I think, am I helping someone feel cared about?

Am I helping them feel heard?

Am I helping them feel they belong?

Am I helping them feel they're making a difference?

Am I helping them feel they've got some purpose?

And it's not always me?

If I'm talking to someone, I might help them find someone else who can give them that.

Or maybe you could do this or try that.

Something that will make them belong might not be me.

So as a therapist, it's much better to think that you're helping meet someone's needs and treating their Illness, you know.

Yeah.

The idea that there's mental illnesses and you need a psychologist, psychiatrist to treat them.

That's a very unscientific concept for me.

Yeah.

I'm thinking back about.

I obviously did Samaritans volunteering for a year.

Yeah.

And I'm thinking the phone calls I took.

And all you are doing is listening and you might jot down a couple of notes.

If they say something, maybe they.

It's the anniversary of their father's passing and maybe they've got something going on at work.

Yeah.

And then you just dig into those things over and over, and you've not really done anything other than just listen and ask questions about what they've said.

And at the end of the call, more.

More often than not, they'll say, thanks so much.

Feels so much better now.

And in your mind, you're like, I don't think I really did anything.

I just.

You did.

I just let you speak.

And that's obviously such an important thing.

And such an important thing.

Yeah.

And in fact, think we've lost the art of that.

I think listening lost the art of tuning into other people.

And that is something.

On average, there is a difference there between men and women, that women sort of.

That's why they're more into counseling.

And if you look at psychology, counseling professions, 80% women.

And that's not because men are.

You know, obviously, if it was the other way around, I'm sure there'd be a kind of a feminist argument.

But the fact is, men aren't choosing that so much because they're more interested in a different kind of way of using their skills.

Women do tune in.

That's because of the evolved capacity to nurture babies and children.

Women have that empathic tuning in thing, which can be a good thing.

You can take that too far.

There are people now arguing that because there's so much feminized political leadership now, we're becoming so empathic, we're not actually setting any boundaries or protecting ourselves.

So.

Well.

But the point is that, yeah, tuning in is a feminine skill.

And that's something that I suppose as a psychologist, I must have.

But it's not.

On average, it's more of a feminine thing than a male thing.

But as I said, tuning into men and women isn't just listening to.

It's kind of.

You can show empathy for people by what you do with them.

If someone is.

Someone once said to me, well, it's simple.

If someone's hungry, the most empathic thing you can do is feed Them talking to them about how hungry they feel, they'd probably hit you.

Yeah.

Make it worse.

If someone's hungry, you feed them.

If they're, you know, you do what they need, where their needs are, you meet those needs.

And that is the most therapeutic thing you can do.

And Samaritans, the most important thing people need is to be heard.

That's why Samaritan's so good.

Yeah.

Because it's the actual volunteers, not the organization that makes it.

The actual volunteers on the whole are great people who listen.

Yes.

It's quite often just people who are lonely.

People often think the Samaritans are taking calls from suicidal people.

And obviously that's part of it, but it's a.

Probably a minority part of it.

Most people that call just.

It stems from loneliness.

They've got no one else to talk to, no one else to hear them.

Absolutely.

And those are connected because if you're that lonely, you will kill yourself eventually.

Loneliness is ultimately a big factor in suicide.

So it's suicide prevention by listening to lonely people.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And the Samaritans hopefully still remembers that, because that is so important.

That also the other thing with Samaritans is you're not there.

You can't be responsible for keeping someone alive.

But.

And even if someone.

You can help someone's life be more bearable.

You might not make everyone's life great, but you can make it more bearable.

Or you can help them just be less unhappy.

There are degrees of unhappiness.

So all these things are worthwhile.

And it's not always about, you know, we have this image that we must save and rescue people and make their lives wonderful.

But if you work in any kind of caring profession, you have to learn you can't always help everyone, but you still do your best.

And you can make a bad life a bit less bad just by trying to help someone that's worth doing.

And you don't want to feel less about yourself because you just gotta do your best.

But, yeah, the gender issues are important because we found when we trained the Samaritans volunteers to listen to men differently, we didn't teach them, we just exposed them to blues music.

And we said, why has this man written this song?

What is blues music's all about?

Male suffering.

And then we did something where the Shakespearean actors tried the male roles.

What is it like trying to be Julius Caesar?

And the women actors think, yeah, actually, that's quite a bit of a pain.

That responsibility was quite horrible.

And then you start to kind of.

Then you go back to the calls.

And we found that calls, male callers.

After the Samaritan volunteers had that training, they just lasted longer.

Men were speaking to them for longer because they felt more better listened to.

Yeah.

We didn't change the men.

We didn't know who's going to ring up.

So you can actually change the way men talk by listening better.

And that's science.

Yeah.

I think it's such an important thing to take away for anyone listening as well.

Just that idea of listening to what the person is saying.

If you think of the best conversations and the worst conversations you've had in your life, the best ones are probably ones where people have asked you questions on stuff you're saying and you feel like, wow, this person's really interested in me and they really want to know more about me.

And you feel great for it.

Yeah.

And the worst ones are when you say something and someone else just goes, oh, yeah, this time I did that.

And they relate it back to themselves.

And you sort of feel autistic.

They don't really care for me.

They don't really listen to what I'm saying.

So that's just a everyday scenario that most people can relate to and just how to listen a little bit better.

Yes.

And that is a human need.

So you imagine how listen to boys feel now.

It must be so hard being a boy in this culture who's listening to you, who's really listening because you're going to school and you're assumed to be a problem and you've got to learn respect.

You're falling behind academically.

But that's not the focus.

All the teaching style is more female friendly and more of the teachers are women.

You're not going to feel particularly loved as a boy or listened to.

And yet that is the thing we need to do for everybody.

Girls too.

You need to.

So my recipe for helping men and boys is to listen to them better.

But how much of it is.

It's a lot of preaching, isn't there?

There's a lot of preaching about what boys should do.

They're all toxic if they're not.

In Australia, there was something which actually said, had some advert about how do we stop this?

Just a picture of an ordinary boy.

Stop him becoming a monster.

This is the idea that boys are potential predators.

There's this idea that men are potentially all sexual predators if they're not sort of trained not to be.

The default man is a loving, protective human being.

And of course there are sexual predators and Other kinds of predators.

Uh, and there are different cultural aspects to that.

Yeah.

Suddenly culture isn't thought about when you think about that.

But culture is a big issue.

Issue there.

There's probably a lot of reasons behind why people end up that way in terms of upbringing, childhood and beyond.

And we don't really look at that.

We just look at their gender and.

Well, yes, in our culture, in our, you know, Western cultures, those boys who end up being predators sexually or whatever, or rapists or whatever, nearly always abused doesn't justify what they do.

They have to be stopped and they have to be, you know, they need to be dealt with.

But they're abused.

They're not just boys who decided to be a predator because they didn't go to the right lesson at school.

That'd be ridiculous.

You can't teach someone not to be a predator.

They're damaged and they're a tiny minority.

They're not the norm.

So we're kind of tarnishing the whole male gender with what the worst of them do.

When actually you look at vast numbers of men lay down their lives for women and children.

But we don't say protective, heroic masculinity.

If we're going to start going around talking about toxic masculinity.

Heroic masculinity is way bigger, but we don't use that phrase.

So the very phrase toxic masculinity is in itself enacting a prejudice against men.

You wouldn't put the word toxic with any other demographic.

Can you imagine any other demographic group that was.

You could put the word toxic with and get away with that?

Yeah, I can't think of it.

Toxic old people or toxic children or toxic women or toxic ethnicities or he'd be, you know, lynched.

But toxic masculinity, well, that's all right.

Which shows that men are the 1 demographic.

We take it on the chin, you know, that we are the.

The punch bag, if you like, because we're expected to protect, we're expected to provide, and to.

Men are.

And all the evidence shows that research.

And there's common things like just anything involving, like the Titanic disaster, wasn't it?

I mean, 80% of the women survived that and 80% of the men didn't because they were trying to save the women.

And you could say that's even evolutionary terms.

That's correct.

Because if.

In evolutionary terms, if you want to survive as a species, you need to keep the women alive so you can have more children.

Don't need all the men to survive.

And of course, the Men are bigger and stronger, so they're better at doing the protecting.

So let's just be real about it.

If we can be.

When you said about your recipe for helping like boys to listen better, is there an aspect of also helping them take the action as well?

Because we can listen.

Listening better obviously helps them feel more understood and more heard, which is super important.

But they also need to potentially take an action beyond that to actually change the position they're in.

Is that something we would need to get involved in, or is it simply that listening better will lead to them finding their own answer?

I think if you really listen to someone and respect them, they will find healthy actions.

If you don't listen to someone and respect them, you can't expect their actions ever to become healthy.

They might become depressive and withdraw.

They might get aggressive.

If you don't respect someone, they're going to get aggressive or withdraw.

So if you respect men and boys and you respect kids at school who are boys.

Yeah.

You deal with bad behavior, but you generally start from a position of respect.

Yeah.

And everyone needs love and discipline.

I mean, parenting research shows quite clearly the best combination for healthy children is love and discipline.

Discipline without love is the worst because you're controlling someone without loving them.

That creates the most damaged kids.

But love without discipline is not good either, because they don't learn any boundaries.

They don't learn and they don't learn to respect.

If you don't discipline a child, they won't learn to respect you.

So I just think it's all about them.

So same with boys and girls.

But we've got to teach boys and girls to respect each other.

I mean, obviously respect's a key part of education, but how do you teach respect?

You show it.

How would you teach a boy to have respect if you don't show that boy respect?

If you're an adult saying to a child, I want you to be respectful, but you're just lecturing them as if there's something wrong with them.

You're disrespecting them.

So you're actually a bad role model.

So the only way you need to teach kids is to be a good role model.

Be what you want them to be.

If you want them to be respectful, respect them.

Yeah.

It's a simple thing, isn't it?

You think of, like managers at work.

Again, I'm trying to relate it to anyone listening who might understand it, but that feeling of when you've got a good manager who just acts in a way that you sort of look at and go, I want to be like that.

I want to be like, have that.

And you do.

And if someone's just stood there telling you what to do as a manager, you turn off the bleed off.

Same in politics.

Say, this is our policy we're doing.

Even if you've got an electoral sort of majority and mandate and the people are behind you, you've still got to take them with you when you make decisions.

You can't.

So management and leadership are all about respect and listening.

And that's true of governments.

It's true of anything, any human thing.

But yeah, if you want people to improve their respect, if you show them respect and respect doesn't mean, say, giving them their own way, discipline, you know, you have to be the kind of person you want them to be.

If you are genuine, people will.

If you're a genuine teacher, people will be.

Your kids will get better, they'll get more respectful because you're a respectful teacher.

It doesn't mean not having discipline.

I mean, the best teachers have great discipline, but they don't have to sort of.

It's like referees in football, you know, the worst ones are throwing yellow cards all around, aren't they?

The good ones, they just command respect and, you know, they're genuine because they're trying to be fair to you.

Yeah, I think fairness is important.

Yeah, Fair.

And I think we stop being fair to boys.

Yeah.

And if you actually look at things like research on marking in marking homework, the research shows that when the markers know the gender, they mark boys down.

When they're blind to the gender, they get a better mark.

So we actually.

Is there something during COVID that made that more prominent when they were.

I don't know, when they were doing the predicted grades for students.

I can't remember, so I'm not going to make something up.

But I don't know.

I think I heard something like that.

I mean, the key thing is that when you're blind to.

When you know it's a boy's paper and a girl's paper, the same gray, you sort of.

For the same level of work, the boy's mark goes down if you know it's a boy, whereas if you're blind to it, the boy's mark doesn't go down.

So there's a kind of prejudice.

And you call it conscious bias really, at that point.

Yeah, yeah.

So bias is ultimately conscious biases are the worst ones, aren't they?

We go on about these unconscious biases, but got enough conscious bias to worry about the conscious Bias that's the biggest, is a bias against boys and men.

It's obvious and particularly in our culture, in Western culture, white, because we're very actively protective of minorities and women and therefore white boys get it worse because they're in the majority and they're boys.

So that's the worst combination for the, in Western societies, the white male is the target of the biggest amount of prejudice.

When we, when you mention about what positive masculinity looks like and masculinity that we would want in society, mentioning things like providing and protecting, is there part of that where if that's what a man values himself on, he, he values himself too much on stuff that he does for other people, external stuff.

It's a good, really good question.

I really like that question.

I think you can get to an extreme of an archetype.

It's like the extreme female archetype is glamour, isn't it?

So if you see women else are completely.

Everything's Botox and everything's uber female, it looks too far.

Same with the male.

You know, you can get overly, you know, feel, you've got to be overly this that or strong or possibly overly.

Over the top alpha pretend sort of thing.

Yeah, that becomes, that's the caricature that people label as masculinity.

Well, that's a caricature of it.

But yes, if it goes anything to the extreme, but at the same time it doesn't devalue what's behind that, which is the idea of providing and protecting.

So yes, you don't want an extreme form of masculine, you don't want an extreme form of anything.

But at the end of the day, the best way we've found, John Barry and myself and other people found is to try and just replay those archetypes.

So like with strength and weakness, you can say like help seeking often find men don't seek help in the same, you know, partly because the help, as we've said, isn't male friendly.

But if it, even if it was, men don't seek help as easily.

But if you said to a man, if you seek help, you're taking action and it makes you a stronger person.

More men are going to seek help.

So it's the way we frame it.

We've got to use those archetypes.

So seeking help is actually strong because actually you're taking action.

If you're not seeking help, you're avoiding.

So you can actually use the masculinity archetype in a good way.

You don't have to make it less masculine, you just reframe it.

So I always say to guys who are, when they're seeking help, I say, well, you've done a brave and strong thing there.

Because actually it's not easy to seek help.

And also another way to help men seek help is to say by seeking help you're helping others because other people depend on you.

Yeah.

And it might be someone seeing you seek that help that makes them go, it's okay to do that.

And to.

It's like a knock on effect of more people going forward to seek.

Absolutely seek their help.

And that's why men's groups work so well, because it kind of validates.

Guys can validate each other and also they can help each other in a male friendly way.

Because when I ran a men's therapy group with a colleague years ago, we found that the group could get into massive banter, you know, which wouldn't be like classic Tavistock clinic group therapy.

But you were bantering, making a joke, sometimes a crude joke, but it's just blokish behavior, which is great.

And everyone's bonding and then suddenly a guy starts crying about something.

You have to move between banter and tears and just, you have to go into these different spaces just having an open mind.

And most therapists aren't trained to do that.

And they think, oh God, these guys are bantering.

They're not using the therapy.

So I would.

I think one thing we're thinking about now is doing more training of therapists to do male friendly therapy.

Yeah.

And group.

But groups work for men for that reason because you see other men doing it so you think that's okay.

And also men are really good at helping each other.

I mean, men are used to working in units.

I mean, as soldiers and military, as, you know, fire services, they used to work it in teams.

Yeah.

That's why men are.

Sport is such a male thing as well, isn't it?

That's why all the women in team sports, they do similar stuff.

Women's sort of physical sports are evolving in a similar way to the male pattern because that's how you get the best out of it.

It's aggressive.

You start to work together as a team and you pull together and you create a camaraderie, which is very valuable.

Which is a whole of our world is based as built by that guys were working in teams, building things and doing stuff together.

Yeah.

I think that idea of having an open mind on what therapy actually looks like and zooming out from the idea of sitting across from someone Looking in the eyes.

And I think again, to put on not my own experience, but experiences of people who I work with.

I know we have counseling team within the fire service that we're in.

And when people have spoken to them, sometimes they say something, firefighters quite matter of fact about what they're talking about, what they've seen.

And it might come across to a general member of the public as like quite brutal potentially.

But there was a point where I think maybe they got some training and they were way more open to allowing firefighters to just talk about it in their own way.

Yes.

Which might sound like not great from the outside, but it might, it didn't.

Just letting them say it in their own way, let it go back to what we were saying about being heard and being understood properly.

If someone doesn't let you speak in your own way, how are they going to help you?

Yeah, they're actually controlling you.

If they don't do.

If they, if they're trying to get you to speak in their way, that's.

That's actually harming you, we're certainly not helping you much.

I was just, I was just going.

To jump back to actually, because the question I asked before about our value and could it become too reliant on the things we do externally, Those things, just as you were talking, it came into my mind, like the things of protection and providing it.

You can, you can provide and protect yourself.

Like it starts with you.

So I think that's a good way of putting it.

I think if you're, if you're laying in bed all day long, you're not really providing yourself with anything.

Whereas if you can get up and even getting dressed as a first step, but going out for a small walk, you're starting to provide something for yourself and showing yourself a little bit of care and love.

I think that's right.

And so you don't necessarily need to do external actions to start with, to, to feel that value.

You can feel it in yourself.

I think that's right.

I think that we are.

And if you want to look at the basic model of parenting and personality development, human psychological development, we internalize the external care we get.

So if you're a baby and no one's listening to you, you're screaming and you're not fed, or you're not put to bed at the right time when you're tired, you'd learn a mismatch between your feelings and the outside world.

And then you internalize something a bit crazier, which is where mental health comes from.

It's not.

No one's doing that deliberately.

But at the end, some people obviously abuse kids deliberately.

But that's rare too.

Not rare enough obviously, but basically, yeah, we internalize the care.

Mental health is the self care.

So yeah.

So for a man to self care, the other message to give to them is, yeah, look after yourself and then you've got more to give others.

What can you give other people if you.

I say this to all people who are in the caring professions, men and women.

You know, if you deplete yourself, you've got nothing to give.

So.

So lying in bed's okay for a bit because it's a rest, but then, yeah, it's a balance.

But look after yourself and then you've got more to give others.

If you just try to look after others without caring for yourself, you won't go far.

But if you just care for yourself, then you're just selfish.

So the balance is both.

You've got to treat other people and yourself with respect.

It comes back to this love and respect.

Not rocket science, is it?

But it's amazing how we fall foul of that by just going into schools trying to teach kids respect rather than show them respect.

The best way to teach respect is to show it.

But yes, men don't have to be the danger for men.

Yeah, behind your question, there's the implication that if a man thinks his only worth is a provider and he's lost his job.

And of course that's when men do take their own lives, when they feel they haven't provided.

And that's obviously an important thing to recognize that there's more ways of providing than just money.

And also that you're providing your whole worth isn't based on that.

It's like a woman.

Women often get caught up in believing their whole value is based on their looks.

And that doesn't just come from men.

I know, that's the argument.

Women wouldn't care about their looks if men went.

That's actually not true.

Women very concerned about their looks as women.

That's an evolved archetype.

Females are very talk to other females about it the whole time.

The whole beauty industry is based on.

But.

So a woman can feel very depressed if her looks get damaged sometimes just by the aging process.

A lot of women I've worked with got very suicidal because they didn't look as good as they thought they used to.

And they can really get low about themselves.

So just as you say, we have to help women feel that they're not defined by their beauty Men aren't defined just by providing.

And also, a man who's lost his job is still providing, is still fighting, he's still trying to win.

He's still.

But at the end of the day, yes, people's mental health is going to go down if you get something that damages these archetypal things, we're all going to get depressed.

If you haven't got any money, so you can't be totally unrealistic about it, man or woman, if you've got no money and you don't feel you look nice and you don't feel respected, your mental health's going to go downwards.

But the way I always think about mental health these days is not treating a mental health condition, but meeting a human, the needs of the human condition.

So young girls who were worried about their looks, I would say, look, beauty isn't just one type of, there isn't just one type of beautiful female.

There's loads of different ways you can look nice because otherwise women get caught up and you get women who are struggling with their self image and an erection, all that stuff.

So mental health is always about using archetypes in a healthy way.

So looks are, it's not that they're not important, but there's many ways to look good.

You don't have to look like that other girl.

You know, you can be yourself and look good.

Yeah, And I think same with guys, you don't have to provide in the same way as that guy who's got a top job.

You can provide by doing, spending more time with your kids or this.

You can be a better, not better, but you can be, you can give more to the dimension of fatherhood, maybe.

Yeah, you may look at that person doing a top job, earning all the money, but is never with their kids because they're always traveling, they're always in meetings and they come home after their kids in bed.

So, yeah, if you, by you being there and providing actual fatherhood in that moment, that, that's arguably more worth than the money.

So you've got to have a balance because your money can become an extreme, everything can become an extreme.

And obviously the masculine thing of what people, when you hear about toxic masculinity, people say, oh, we don't mean masculinity is toxic, but it becomes such a loose phrase that it starts to rub off on the whole gender and, you know, we don't use it for anything else.

So I find that argument very poor that it's just about extreme masculinity.

But if people mean that toxic masculinity is.

When you take to the extreme, I'm going to earn a fortune and never see my kids.

But that isn't masculinity, because masculinity is being a father.

Yeah.

So that isn't.

That's just not being masculine.

Masculinity is being a dad as well as being a provider financially.

Yeah.

On obviously, the conversations that we've had around men, boys, masculinity, these are all things that over time, for me personally I'm reflecting on, it's become easier for me to talk about certain aspects.

Mental health, suicide, toxic masculinity, these, these things and bring up those conversations around people.

That might just be down to my repetition, doing com.

Having conversations like, like this, where I'm talking to people about these topics.

But the one that always I find maybe harder to bring up or gets more of a reaction, and I don't know if it's just me, maybe it's other people as well.

Is the topic of my male victims of domestic abuse.

Why is that such a difficult conversation to bring up in your opinion?

That's a good question.

I think there's a number of reasons.

One is that it's such a.

This really is a stereotype, you know, it's not an archetype.

It's a stereotype that domestic abuse is something men do to women when the figures are almost like 50, 50, really in terms of most forms of abuse.

Why is it hard to bring up?

Because I suppose at some level the male archetype is shaming, you know, shame.

If you're the victim of abuse from a female, you're less of a man.

I suppose that's partly it.

So men kind of feel ashamed to raise it.

And I think from the feminist perspective, we shouldn't.

They don't believe it exists.

You know, it's almost like domestic abuse is just female issue.

So when we have the famous case like Amber Heard, you know, even now there are people who just can't accept that.

They just can't accept that she was the victim.

There was some major sort of bias in the system.

So there's the feminist thing, which says that a man, a man can't be a victim because they're the bad guys.

Then there's the male shame archetype, which says the idea that I've been abused by a woman is just shaming.

So I won't mention it or admit it.

Then you've got all of the cultural baggage around that, which is there just aren't any services.

So if you're a man who's been massively abused, there's nowhere to go, so why would you bother?

Then there's the people who respond to you.

The police, the social services.

They tend often to be sort of not particularly sympathetic or don't even believe you.

They think you're.

I mean, I had a guy once and he's quite happy for me to talk about it and I'm not going to mention his name anyway, but he was a soldier and he was.

His wife would hit him with objects and throw things at him and the neighbors would call the police and they'd take him away because they just see domestic abuse, disturbance number whatever.

Police come in, oh, there's the guy, we'll cut him off.

They didn't ask any questions.

And then you've got policy, you've got violence against women and girls.

You don't have a violence policy.

It's a violence against women and girls policy.

And they only include boys as a subtext, like victims of crimes that are normally associated, which is such a grudging acceptance of a male.

Male victims of violence against women and girls or something like that, isn't it?

It's crazy.

Yeah, it's bizarre.

That's so sexist.

You couldn't get more sexist than that.

You know, when the research shows quite clearly sort of 50% is reciprocal domestic violence, and of the non reciprocal domestic violence, where one partner is more abusive than the other, there's more women initiating it just because men are bigger and stronger.

I mean, we have the famous story of Erin Pizzer who set up the Refuge, what became the Refuge charity.

She invented that.

She set it all up.

She got all these women in a safe house, realized they were also being aggressive and violent, started doing something for men.

She got booted out of her own charity.

She got death threats just for trying to help men.

So there's this whole thing that from the male side, we shouldn't admit you've been hit by a woman.

It makes you sort of not a man.

And there's the feminist side, which is you can't have male victims because women.

The domestic violence industry is a very feminist industry and it's all based around the idea that you've got these bad guys who are beating up women and they.

And the children need to be protected.

There are many cases of where the children have suffered because they've been left with the woman who's been, you know, violent to the children as well.

We've seen all of that.

So we just need to Take an even handed approach to domestic violence because when two women live together, the rates of domestic violence are actually higher than when two men to live together.

So lesbian women tend to have higher rates of domestic violence than gay men.

So it's not just about your gender.

Yeah, I suppose it's also the aspect of, we always think immediately of physical abuse and people will say, well men are, yeah, men are bigger and stronger on, on average.

So they can't, they, they can't be overpowered.

But it's not always physical though.

It's a lot of emotional abuse and coercion and maybe they're taking their money and they're controlling all of that aspect.

So I think when you say domestic abuse, people immediately think of physical.

They think of the classic sort of bloke sort of hitting a woman.

And you know, you think of I suppose the Godfather, you know, the guy beating up his Sicilian wife, you know.

But no, abuse can be pure.

I mean, just think of the cruel things you can say to kids or to partners to really hurt them.

Think of the wounding things you say people are being put in jail, aren't they, for words.

Now so obviously people accept that words can be painful or hurtful.

But when you say something we've just said, you need love and respect.

If you're wounding your partner with really awful words which are really just violating who they are, that can be very damaging.

You know, in my career as a mental health professional, I've seen loads of people who's sort of emotionally abused by parents or caregivers or step parents or just people who weren't adults in their lives, you know, and it's not all physical or sexual.

Obviously there's sexual and physical abuse, but there's.

Yeah, emotional and verbal abuse is massive and as you say, financial.

I mean people can control the money.

It can really coercively control people.

And women can do that as much as men.

You can be clever about the statistics, but there's a significant number of women, too many women, too much a percentage of women do that to see it as just a thing men do.

It's too big a minority, even if it is a minority.

And certain forms of abuse probably is.

The majority of women like verbal because women are more, I suppose, used to using emotion as a weapon than men who are more physical perhaps, I don't know, might be a too big a generalization.

But certainly abuse means all form for many forms of abuse.

Absolutely.

With everything we've spoken about and all the topics we've hit on, obviously we've spoken a lot about other people and maybe some common misconceptions, the biases behind how other people are acting.

Is there anything that we should be challenging ourselves on for people who are advocating for these issues from, like, advocating for men and boys, Is there anything that we need to understand when.

When we're doing that?

I think there must be.

I mean, I can't believe that my mind has reached to every corner of these subjects.

I suppose I'm not conscious of all of these issues.

It's for other people to enrich my life.

Teach me.

Talking to you raises more things in my mind because you've asked questions which I hadn't totally thought of in that way.

And so that's the beauty of these conversations.

People listening to us will probably have ideas that we haven't had, and I hope they do.

I hope they think, well, that guy said that.

But actually, that's made me think of something even more important.

And I think there will be other stuff.

But the key thing for me is just if we want boys and men to be respectful, we've got to just respect them.

It's just treat people how you want to be treated.

And I think that there must be many more ways of doing that in society.

But if you have that general approach, show people the respect you want them to learn.

That's the biggest message for me, that I think there must be many ways of applying that that I haven't thought of many ways of improving.

It's keeping an open mind in those conversations.

Isn't it just.

Yeah, open mind.

Because I'm in my 60s now, but, you know, and I only started looking at men's issues, really, in my 40s.

And to be brutally honest, I was a highly trained clinical psychologist, psychotherapist.

Wasn't even thinking men had issues much till I was in my 40s.

So that makes me look an idiot, I guess.

But I don't think people are just blind to them.

So I think just these conversations are very valuable.

I think it's just, you know, the fact that people will follow you and listen to your podcasts or watch them.

Who knows where those ripples have spread?

But that's the whole point of doing it, because we haven't got all the answers.

But if we got some of the questions and a few answers, yeah, that's enough.

No one has all the answers.

That's the beautiful thing is just asking questions and talking.

And I think when people open up these conversations for me, when I speak to people and I bring up this topic or Whichever aspect of the topic it is, there's always a moment in my mind where I'm not holding my breath, almost waiting for that.

Are they going to be receptive?

Are they going to be open to let me talk about it, or are they going to come back with an, like, almost a fight back?

And you can tell straight away whether someone's actually.

In the same way.

I'll always try and be receptive to if someone's telling me about a female experience.

I'm not a female, can't experience that.

So why am I not going to listen to someone telling me what they've been through?

Exactly.

And I've heard a load of women have been abused by men, women have been abused by their mothers.

You know, it's not just about gender.

I mean, just.

I care for everyone who comes through the door.

Yeah.

Women who've been abusive themselves, but have tried to work on it and say, look, I don't want to be like, you know, so.

But the key thing is women's experiences.

Yeah.

I've worked with more women than most people, but I still wouldn't claim I have the same degree of empathy that a woman herself has, because you have to live in that, grow up in that world.

There have been experiments, haven't they?

I think there was some woman who dressed as a man, disguised herself and tried to live in a man's world and felt suicidal by the end of it.

Yeah.

So I think if you go online, you can find all these people who've done these experiments, you know, and obviously you can.

Like those actors in the Samaritan's training who played male parts.

And they found that it wasn't as easy being a man as they thought.

I'm sure if I had to live the life of a woman, I would realize more than I do now how difficult some aspects of being a woman are.

The human condition isn't easy for anybody, has its joys.

But one thing you do know is that male and female are meant to live together and help each other.

There's no point.

They define each other.

The male means nothing without the female, and the female means nothing without the male.

There's no point.

You couldn't have.

We wouldn't exist without both.

And that's psychological and physical.

It's both.

Yeah.

The way I like to end my episodes is to ask my guests to leave a question for the listener.

I can't remember If I was doing this when we last spoke.

So, yeah, I think you did.

So I ask, yeah, I love to listen to podcasts.

Go away and have a conversation around what I've listened to.

If you could leave a question for the listener to take away now and ask a family member, a friend, or even a stranger, what question would you leave them with?

Just what, I suppose, what they might want to do in their own lives that would help the boys.

Yeah, the younger the boys and the young men in their lives feel more listened to.

What would that involve in their family, their school, their community.

That would make the boys and young men that they know feel a bit more listened to rather than preached at.

Because I think we're preaching at boys now, not listening to them.

So what would they do?

Or what could they do?

What would they like to do that would help the boys and young men in their life feel more listened to, regardless of what comes out of it?

Just that they feel more listened to, more heard.

And that one assumes psychologically that if you do feel more heard, something better will come out of it than if you don't.

But what that would be, we don't know.

That's the beauty of life.

You know, you sow seeds, you don't quite know where the fruits will come.

But I would ask that question, I think.

Yeah, good question.

Martin, thank you so much for your time today.

People want to find you, find your work online.

Where can they do that?

Well, I don't really have a website, so.

But if you just Google my name, things come up that I've done.

You know, my name tends to have interviews I've done and things come up with it.

But I'm.

And also I would recommend checking in on the Male Psychology Center.

John Barry and Louise Liddon run that.

But they produce a lot of good stuff and I've been heavily involved in helping them with that.

So a lot of the stuff that I would believe in is going on in the Male Psychology center as well.

Yeah.

Amazing.

I'll.

I'll link some stuff below.

So anyone listening, you can go down, check out some of your previous work.

But yeah, thank you again.

Really appreciate your time.

For me.

To the listener, if you have enjoyed this conversation, then please do share it with someone who you think would find some value from it.

If you haven't already, please do subscribe or follow the show wherever you're listening or watching.

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It's called between the Chapters.

And I'll link it below if you want to go and have a read of some of the thoughts that are coming into my mind over the weeks.

But for now, thank you for listening.

Stay curious, and I will see you in the next one.