Psychotherapy for Men

There is an old fable about a man, his son, and their donkey. They set off on a journey, and the man lets his son ride the donkey. A passerby scolds the father, telling him how lazy the boy is for making his poor father walk. So, the father rides the donkey instead. Another passerby, outraged, tells the father what a terrible man he is for making his son walk. So, they both ride the donkey. A third passerby calls them cruel for encumbering the poor donkey. So, they both walk and are later mocked for owning a donkey and not riding it. The man tried every possible configuration, he listened to everyone, and then he finally arrived somewhere absurd: carrying the donkey on his back…

I often think about that story. I think about it because it’s a great and relatable fable, but I have also lived it, and many of the men who sit across from me in my office are living it now.

I went to college in the early 2010s, and it was certainly a strange time to be a young man. At some point, I absorbed the message that being good meant becoming less of what I was. Not correcting my behaviors or changing the way I am. Just… less. Less direct. Less ambitious. Less competitive. Less sure of myself. The drives and motivations that felt like my own were reframed as things I should be suspicious of. It seemed that the only path to being a good man was to stop being too much of a man.

I was carrying the donkey. I just didn’t know it yet.

What I experienced wasn’t personal; it was cultural. An entire generation of men received the same message through a snowball that grew over decades. The economic foundation of male identity, the provider role, began eroding in the 1970s as the manufacturing economy shrank. The educational system followed in the 1990s, quietly restructuring itself around sit-still-comply-and-collaborate classrooms that unintentionally left a lot of boys behind. The social infrastructure that had given men community, the fraternal organizations, the unions, the churches, and the neighborhood institutions, collapsed through the 1980s and 1990s. And then, in the 2010s, the cultural narrative shifted. The conversation around masculinity got louder, more contentious, and less clear.

The result is a generation of men caught in a double bind. Be assertive, and you are aggressive. Be gentle, and you are weak. Be stoic, and you are emotionally unavailable. Be vulnerable, and you are being performative.

Every version gets criticized, and no version gets permission to exist. And the men who tried hardest to get it right, the ones who really listened, who really wanted to be good, are the ones who ended up the most lost. They suppressed what was natural, performed what was expected, and woke up one day unable to tell the difference between who they are and who they have been pretending to be.

Cultures across history understood something we have forgotten: masculinity is not automatic; it is forged, and it was never the boy's job to figure it out on their own. Nearly every civilization took responsibility for turning boys into men. The specifics varied — mentorship, rites of passage, coming-of-age ceremonies — but the conviction underneath was the same. A boy needs a reason to become a man, and it is the culture's job to give him one. It showed them the way, demanded they go through it, and celebrated who they became on the other side. Because they recognized that we need men.

I sit with men who are carrying the donkey and help them put it down. Not by telling them what a man should be, but by accompanying them while they figure it out for themselves. Underneath the niceness, the anger, the numbness, the performance, there is a man who was never given permission to be himself. The grief he never processed, the vulnerability he was punished for showing, the version of himself he buried a long time ago.

Therapy, done well, is the crucible the culture stopped building. Not comfort. Not validation. An intentional encounter with the parts of yourself you have been avoiding. What comes out the other side is not a fixed or perfected version of masculinity; it is an honest one. A man who can be strong and vulnerable, direct and empathic, independent and connected. It’s what a man actually looks like when he stops carrying the donkey.

The man in the fable eventually has to make a choice. He can keep listening to every voice on the road, twisting himself into shapes that satisfy no one, least of all himself.

Or he can put the donkey down, decide what he wants to do for himself, and go.