258: Working with Men in Couples Therapy with Shane Birkel
Welcome back to The Couples Therapist Couch! This podcast is about the practice of Couples Therapy. Each week, Shane Birkel interviews an expert in the field of Couples Therapy to explore all about the world of relationships and how to be an amazing therapist.
In this solo episode, Shane talks working with men in couples therapy. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots, and watch it on YouTube – follow and leave a 5-star review.
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- Show Notes
- The Couples Therapist Couch Summary
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The Couples Therapist Couch 258: Working with Men in Couples Therapy with Shane Birkel
This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP to learn more
Get the Couples Therapy 101 course: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/
Join the Couples Therapist Inner Circle: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/inner-circle-new
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In this solo episode, Shane talks working with men in couples therapy. Hear the perks of 1-day intensives, the common differences between men & women when it comes to couples therapy, how to help men truly listen in their relationship, how to identify moments to slow down and do some deeper work, and when it’s okay to not say anything as a couples therapist. Here's a small sample of what you'll hear in this episode:
- Balancing feedback without triggering shame spirals
- The power of one-day couple intensives vs. weekly sessions
- Male socialization and emotional patterns
- The listening vs. fixing dynamic
- Addressing male shame while teaching new skills
Show Notes
- 258: Working with Men in Couples Therapy with Shane Birkel
- This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP to learn more
- [0:38] Welcome to The Couples Therapist Couch
- [1:35] The power of one-day couple intensives vs. weekly sessions
- [5:55] Creating momentum and clear post-intensive plans
- [7:24] Strategies for effective 50-minute sessions
- [9:49] Gender dynamics in relationships
- [12:44] Male socialization and emotional patterns
- [14:11] The listening vs. fixing dynamic
- [16:38] The cycle of emotional disconnection
- [19:04] Addressing male shame while teaching new skills
- [21:14] This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP to learn more
- [22:11] The mechanics of learning new relationship "languages"
- [26:02] Working with resistance and emotional flooding
- [28:22] An example of breakthrough in intensive therapy
- [33:06] Balancing feedback without triggering shame spirals
- This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP to learn more
What is The Couples Therapist Couch?
This podcast is about the practice of Couples Therapy. Many of the episodes are interviews with leaders in the field of Relationships. The show is meant to help Therapists and Coaches learn how to help people to deepen their connection, but in the process it explores what is most needed for each of us to love, heal, and grow. Each week, Shane Birkel interviews an expert in the field of Couples Therapy to explore all about the world of relationships and how to be an amazing therapist.
Learn more about the Couples Therapy 101 course: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/
Find out more about the Couples Therapist Inner Circle: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/inner-circle-new
Transcript
Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
00:00
Until we help the male partner figure out the receptivity piece and the listening piece, we can't move to the next part of the communication, the next part of the therapy, the next part of building a wonderful relationship with each other.
00:21
Welcome to The Couples Therapist Couch, the podcast for couples therapists, marriage counselors, and relationship coaches to explore the practice of couples therapy. And now, your host, Shane Birkel.
00:38
Hey everybody. Welcome back to The Couples Therapist Couch. This is Shane Birkel, and this is the podcast that's all about the practice of couples therapy. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, and the goal of this podcast is to help you learn how to more effectively work with couples and possibly even learn how to have a better relationship. The episode this week is brought to you by Alma. They make it easy to get credentialed with major insurance plans at enhanced reimbursement rates.
01:07
Alma handles all of the paperwork and guarantees payment within two weeks. Visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP or click on the link in the show notes to learn more. All right, I just want to say thank you once again to all you listeners out there. If any of you ever have a topic or a guest that you think would be great, a great fit for the show, I always love hearing from you. Go to the website. You can use the form to reach out to me.
01:35
And I'll write you back as well. I'm happy to connect. But if you have any feedback or if you have any topics or guests that you would love to hear on the show, I would uh be grateful to hear from you. So I'm excited this week. As many of you know, I work with couples a lot in the form of doing intensives. And a lot of times I'll do like a uh one day, one full day intensive.
02:04
And the way I set it up is, and sometimes I'm flexible, sometimes if somebody's coming from out of town, I can do, you know, I can make it two days or a day and a half just so they can make the most of their time. But a lot of times I'll set it up as one day and we'll go from usually nine o'clock in the morning till three o'clock in the afternoon and we'll take a lunch break in the middle. So we'll really have, you know, a good five, six hours to get into things.
02:34
and to, you know, I find that it's a really helpful way to make a lot of progress in a short amount of time. Because it's not just like, you know, if you think about the typical therapy setup, which is every week for 50 minutes or something like that, you know, the equivalent timeframe would take five weeks. You know, you'd be meeting for 50 minutes every week, and after five weeks, you'd have about
03:02
five hours, or six weeks, six hours, whatever. But the thing is, when you're doing that every week, it's almost like a reintroduction every time you come back. And I don't know if any of you have been to couples therapy, or if you are a couples therapist, you probably know what I'm talking about, that there's this feeling, uh part of it's just normal human experience of we gotta catch the therapist up on
03:31
what's been happening this week and eventually probably get back to the work. I always find when I'm working with people on a weekly basis, we always sort of end up focusing on the same themes. They may be coming up in different ways on a different week, which is good, right? Because most people have certain core themes that they're struggling with.
04:01
no matter what shape that's taking during a particular week, oftentimes it's kind of the same work that needs to happen for that person. And that's one of the, I think there is a good place for weekly therapy and that's one of the things that I think can be really helpful is, know, once you've been to therapy for a while, just having that ability to connect with your therapist, someone who knows you really well, really deeply.
04:28
and somebody who can help you continue to connect back to the work that you need to grow and to heal and to make changes in your life. particularly starting off, I think that the intensive can be so helpful because when we have five or six hours at once, we're not going through that sort of introductory phase every single week, right?
04:56
So we have five or six hours, but it's actually more, probably more like equivalent to 10 to 12 hours of weekly therapy. I'm not just saying that. I honestly think because we have the ability to start getting deep and to stay with it and to stick with certain themes, that it really has the effect of, let's say 12 weeks of therapy, which could be like three months if you're meeting
05:26
for 50 minutes every week. And so, I'm just a huge advocate for being able to work this way. And I know it's hard and it's not always uh easy for a lot of couples financially. That's a big part of it. But at the same time, if you're struggling and you're suffering in your life, and sometimes when I work with couples, it's almost like hard to get momentum.
05:55
and couples don't even stick with it for 12 weeks, that intensive is such a huge opportunity that can be life-changing, that I've seen be life-changing for some people. And then at that point, sometimes it makes sense to sort of say, all right, let's check in every two weeks and make sure we're on the right track. But one of the things I always try to do is make sure the couple has a lot of clarity uh and a clear sense of the plan going forward from that intensive.
06:24
so that they both know what their responsibilities are. And we have time to do that and to get into that. And then it's obviously helpful to keep the momentum going week over week after that. But even then, I try to encourage couples oftentimes to meet for double sessions, so basically two hours in the follow-up meetings because I just feel like we have the time to get more deeply.
06:54
into things. so anyway, that I kind of got off on a tangent there. I'm a huge proponent of doing intensives if that's possible. I know that it's not always possible. There are other things you can do if you need to. If you're using insurance, for example, oftentimes insurance will only cover one hour of therapy on a particular day. So you might need, if you need to
07:24
only meet for 50 minutes once a week, there are definitely ways that you can make the most of it. And there are definitely ways that you can still be very effective as a therapist. And I don't want to downplay that. I think part of it is staying focused on the conversations you need to have, right? Like I have, you know, individuals and couples, human beings who come into my office, like some,
07:53
there are people who
07:58
it takes me, it feels like it takes like half an hour to get to the point where, you know, and again, like everybody has different personalities. I think, you know, sometimes they're talking about things that are in the peripheral of what's actually important. And I think as a therapist, part of what we can do to be more effective is to help couples, right? So when they come into the office, don't just,
08:27
say how is your week and then they talk for 30 minutes about whatever comes to mind. I think it's a lot more helpful to or sometimes that's fine. It depends on the person but sometimes it's helpful to say, hey listen, last time we were talking about this, this and this, let's dive right back in. How has that been going for you? And you're sort of managing the session and controlling the session and making sure
08:56
that you're focusing on what needs to be focused on. And you can check in with them. You can say, this feel still feel relevant? Does this feel like what we need to be talking about again? But we really had a good session last time. We were getting into some really important themes. want to, you know, here's what they were. Here's what I heard you say last time. Is this still the most important thing for us to talk about today? And really guiding the session so that
09:22
If you say that in the first five minutes, then you really have the rest of the time to focus in and to get deep with it. So I think there are lot of ways to make the most of those 50 minute sessions when that's what the setup is going to look like. But the topic today that I wanted to talk a little bit about is that there are, there tend to be in general,
09:49
some differences between males and females. And I've talked about this before, and I wanna be really clear. uh This isn't always the case, and this is changing a lot in our society. And I don't think this is related to biological differences for the most part. I think this is related to how we're socialized. And I think the more that we can move away from the way we've been socialized, the better. I think that's what therapy can be really helpful with.
10:19
But what I will say, I do work with a lot of couples where one partner is male, one partner is female. I also work with lot of couples who are LGBTQ +, but the most of the couples I work with, there's one male and one female partner. um there are some characteristics of these relationships that tend to be true a lot of the time. Not always.
10:48
But I'm going to speak in a little bit in general, generally speaking, some of these things are true. I do want to make sure you understand it's not always true. Sometimes it's flipped, right? Sometimes ah the things I'm saying about male partners might be true of the female partner in that dynamic. And that's actually really common, right? Or sometimes these dynamics can exist in
11:17
same-sex partners and one person's taking a certain role and one person's taking the other role. So it doesn't always fit in a box, but that being said, there's a huge amount of time where it's the female part, if it's a male-female partnership, the female partner is the one who reaches out to me and who's looking for help and says, something has to change here. This relationship isn't working for me.
11:46
And there's a huge amount of the time where the male partner is sort of like dragging their feet and saying, I don't really want to go to therapy. I don't understand what the problem is. I don't understand why we need to do this, which is probably a huge part of the problem in and of itself or indicative of what the problem might be. And again, I'm not saying that there's something uh
12:14
specifically wrong with women or something specifically wrong with men or anything like that. But there is this dynamic that tends to happen quite a bit. And if you are a therapist, you know what I'm talking about. ah And I do believe, again, men have been socialized to disconnect from their emotions oftentimes. And there are women who do this as well. But a lot of men are sort of peacekeepers. They want peace. want m
12:44
harmony. They want everyone to be happy, right? They want to be a good provider. They want to be a good protector of their family. They want to, so, you know, they go to work as their role as a provider. They come home. They just want to feel appreciated. They want to feel like things are good. Everybody's happy. And when there is a problem that comes up, it could be with their kids, with their partner, with whoever, there's often
13:13
this feeling of I'm being blamed for doing something wrong or no matter how much I try, it's never good enough. These are phrases I hear a lot from the men I work with. And this leads to more emotional shutting down or more emotional blocking where it's like, okay, what do I just need to do to fix the problem? And you would think that could be helpful. Sometimes it is.
13:40
If your partner says, well, you're always coming home late from work and you say, what do I, you what can I do to fix the problem? Come home on time. And you start coming home on time and everything feels better. Then that's great. Like sometimes there is a direct, you know, line from this is the problem. This is a solution. You can make an effort to work toward the solution and it works and that's great. But a lot of the time,
14:11
What I've that women are asking for is more of a capacity for their partner to listen, to take in their perspective. And this is where the emotional intelligence or emotional competency comes in. A lot of times, let's say a man comes home late from work and his female partner says,
14:38
I'm so frustrated that you're late. I've had such a long day. I've been dealing with the kids. I've been waiting for you to get here. I'm trying to do 10 different things. And what happens sometimes is that the male partner will start to become defensive or minimizing of the female partner's reality or trying to fix it in the moment. Again, some of that could be helpful. But what I'm talking about is in avoidance, what really needs
15:08
to happen is for the male partner to create space for their female partner's experience. I should say, often times what really needs to happen is that there's an acceptance and a sense of compassion and understanding for the female partner's experience as they're talking about what happened. The male partner can also jump in and be helpful, but there's often... um
15:38
something that feels very invalidating for the female partner that happens. The male partner says, well, don't you understand how busy I was at work? And don't you know how much I'm doing for this family? And I'm exhausted too. And I'm doing just as much for the kids. so there's this sort of feeling that the female partner's emotional reality doesn't matter. And this is a really challenging
16:08
think to teach people sometimes, and it could be males or females, that just because there's a problem doesn't mean that it needs to be fixed, right? The goal of that kind of specific conversation might just be to give the other person acceptance and compassion and understanding for what they're feeling, right? So a lot of times I'll have couples who come into therapy and the female partner has
16:38
felt like this has been going on for years, right? And because of that, they feel like they've been sort of shut out emotionally for years. That no matter how much they try to have a voice about their experience and their authentic reality and what's going on for them, that the male partner
17:07
continues to not see them, right? Like as a human being so much, so many of us just wanna feel seen and heard and connected with and understood. And what happens is that every time the female partner makes a bid for connection, a bid to have an authentic voice, to say something like, I am having a hard day, the male partner jumps in,
17:36
to either try to fix it or be defensive about it or minimize it or something like that, everybody's different. And when that happens, it's like one more incident for the female partner where I'm kind of left out. My reality isn't important. I don't have a voice in this relationship. I don't have a partner who...
18:05
wants to understand me or connect with me. part of the reason for this, and I've talked about this before, but I think it's always helpful. Part of the reason is the shame that the male partner feels about their wife's or their partner's suffering. Right?
18:35
If their partner is feeling bad or suffering in their life, of course the male partner isn't a good person. Almost every guy I work with is a good person and has a good heart. The ones who don't probably aren't in couples therapy or aren't willing to try anything or aren't willing to listen at all. So it's a big step.
19:04
you know, they're willing to come into this environment where we're starting to talk about feelings, where a lot of times what happens in the initial, and again, this is why I like doing intensives. Like what happens in the initial couple hours is there's a lot of shame for the man who, who feels like I've been doing everything wrong. As I'm trying to explain this dynamic as a therapist, I'm trying to explain, look,
19:33
you are a really good person and you're making really huge mistakes in your relationship. you know, oftentimes the male partner will say, well, what about the things that she's doing wrong? She's doing this, this, this, and this. And all of that is true. But usually the first step
19:58
needs to be understanding the dynamic that I was just talking about and teaching the male partner how do you create space for your partner to have a voice? How do you listen without being defensive, without fixing? How do you uh create a feeling of receptivity? Because if the communication can't flow back and forth,
20:29
All of those things you just listed off that you think are the problem, we can't even talk about. Because your partner doesn't feel like there's a warm person on the other side who's willing to listen and connect with them.
20:45
And so I don't want to dismiss the truth that obviously the female partner has a lot of things they're doing wrong as well. I mean, it's almost always the case. But what I do want to say is that until we help the male partner figure out the receptivity piece and the listening piece, we can't move to the next part of the communication, the next part of the therapy, the next part of
21:14
building a wonderful relationship with each other. Building a private practice can be challenging. Filing all of the right paperwork is time consuming and tedious. And even after you're done, it can take months to get credentialed and start seeing clients. That's why Alma makes it easy and financially rewarding to accept insurance. When you join Alma, you can get credentialed within 45 days and access enhanced reimbursement rates with major payers.
21:42
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22:11
or click the link in the show notes to learn more. There's the purely logistical part of that, the communication skills that are necessary, that can be taught sort of like learning a new language, you know, where as males we've been socialized our whole life to look at the world in a certain way and to have the values that we have and to define success in a certain way. And
22:40
part of what we're doing is rewiring all of that and teaching a new language, a new way of seeing the world that if you've ever tried to learn a new language, you feel like you're stumbling through it. It feels completely like you don't understand anything at first. ah It takes a lot of practice and it takes a lot of time. And you're not gonna be good at it at first and that's okay.
23:09
The most important thing in couples therapy is if you have two people who start to understand the issues, who have some consciousness around what's happening and have a willingness to make the change, right? If people have a willingness to create changes in their relationship, then it can go a long way towards helping them follow through
23:37
on learning the new language, so to speak, when the going gets tough. So there's that whole aspect. So let me give you an example. When people are trying to communicate, I can teach someone in a matter of 10 minutes, like, okay, partner A is going to say, hey, I was really upset that you were late yesterday. Partner B, here's what you're going to say back to them.
24:06
I hear what you're saying. I understand how that was frustrating for you. And then I'll help the speaker too. I'll say, listen, as a speaker, it's really helpful if you speak from the first person. If you talk about your experience, you talk about your emotions, this is why it was hard for you. You can make a request about what you want to be different. But you're speaking from the first person. There's no blame, no judgment, no criticism. Okay, great. All right, now as a listener, you're just
24:36
mirroring back what they're saying, you're validating their experience, right? You're not trying to fix it, you're not trying to be defensive. You're saying, what I hear you saying is that that was really hard for you and I was late yesterday, you were having a really hard day and you were really overwhelmed. And then partner A said, yeah, yeah, that's what I was feeling. And if you can validate that, that would be great, right? If partner B can say, well, yeah, it makes sense that
25:04
you were feeling overwhelmed. If you can be accountable, that would be great. Like, yeah, I was late. I totally get it. Like how frustrating that is for you. You've told me that before, and I'm really sorry about that. um And then you can, once you do that, if partner A is feeling heard and seen and understood, you can move to some problem solving. A lot of people skip to the problem solving too quickly. They haven't, each person hasn't felt heard and understood.
25:35
And they're already starting to do the problem solving piece. And it feels rushed. It just feels like we're missing the point here. So anyway, so I can teach couples, basically tell them, here's what you say, here's how you do it. Now, one of the really beneficial things about therapy is, what do we do with the parts of you that doesn't want to use the skills?
26:02
Right? So as I'm teaching you how to communicate like this, there have been a lot of situations where the listener is trying to do what I'm saying and they start having a ton of, lot of emotions coming up and they start flooding or freezing or shutting down or feeling like, you know, misunderstood, feeling like, don't you understand, but don't you understand my side of it? You know, and
26:31
So that becomes very difficult. that is part of the work of therapy. That takes a skilled therapist to be able to see when that is happening and to try to recognize the choice moments where we can perhaps do some deeper inner child work, family of origin work, trauma work.
26:58
trying to figure out, because each of us has our own stuff, so to speak. And I'm always looking for those opportunities. Like if someone's trying to be a listener, if they're having a hard time, if they're feeling really defensive, you know, they're feeling a lack of safety at that point. And it's really important to kind of slow down with that and to give...
27:25
give that person a lot of compassion and understanding. When I'm talking about this dynamic, I'm talking about the way the male partner has a hard time listening. Most of the time, it's not because they have bad intentions. They're actually feeling a huge sense of struggle or frustration or feeling misunderstood. The emotional safety isn't strong enough. They're putting their defenses up, I would say.
27:55
And that's part of, if we can really slow that down, and one of the things I try to do as a therapist is if their partner isn't able to do it, I try to give that male partner a ton of compassion and love and understanding and let them know that it makes sense that they're feeling what they're feeling and try to start giving them permission to feel emotions. But again, if we only have 50 minutes, sometimes, you know,
28:22
that can happen in the first session. Usually it takes a little bit more time than that. But when I have an intensive, I remember one recently, it was probably three hours in, where finally we're able to create some safety, we were able to do some of that coaching about how to communicate with each other. We're able to emphasize that both partners' perspectives are important. And there was a moment
28:52
where the wife was saying something like, you never let me in. You never show me what's really going on. And finally he sort of leaned forward and said, the truth is I feel like I can never get it right with you. No matter how hard I try, it's never good enough or it's never right. And there was this pause and he got really quiet and his eyes started to water.
29:21
and you could almost feel the whole energy in the room change. His partner kind of softened at that moment. As a therapist, I think it's really good to not say anything, either not say anything or just coach them to slow, like, let's slow down here for a second. This feels really important. Just try to stay with it, whatever you do to try to stay with it.
29:51
And you could see his wife really soften. And before that, there had been a lot of anger and criticism and it just started feeling more tender. And she reflected later on that she hadn't seen that vulnerable part of him for many years. And so at that point, like when I'm talking about couples therapy, I'm not talking about
30:21
like teaching better communication skills. Like that's part of it. But there's so often something like this that happens, some moment like that that can be transformational for couples. So the communication skills are important, but the therapy is there to create these transformational moments, right? Where now this male partner was able to have an experience where they were vulnerable.
30:51
where they showed emotions, connected with their emotions authentically, and their partner was able to create safety for them. In fact, their partner was able to give them more compassion than they had felt in years. And now there's this new association with emotions, right? And I'm not saying that that person's personality just changed overnight, but what I'm saying is like,
31:19
It's a window into a world of opportunity going forward from there. Like both partners.
31:29
said, well, in that example, both partners said that they felt a sense of connection that they hadn't felt for years.
31:38
And what's healthy for one partner is often healthy for... It's like the mindset that couples often have coming into therapy is that, if my partner gets their way, then I'm the doormat, right? Or vice versa. And what happens is when your partner starts getting their way, you're going to start feeling a lot better about things too. They're going to want to do nice things for you too, right? There's going to be this mutual feeling of...
32:07
wanting to care for each other that can be part of that transformation. Right? And there's a sort of like previously this feeling that everything would snowball in a negative way that transitions into, you know, once we go through the intensive, once we have this transformational, these transformational moments, this connection, now like we're assuming the best of each other.
32:37
Now, things are snowballing in a positive way. And I've seen this happen many times before. And so, just to reemphasize, one of the challenges of this is to basically tell men what they're doing wrong without making them go into a shame spiral and do the thing
33:06
that's creating the problem in the whole relationship in the first place, which is be defensive or avoidant. And I think that's part of the art form of being a couples therapist. And, you know, I could spend a lot of time talking about other issues that people bring in and other, you know, but, this is often a big part of what's going on in any couple dynamic. Not again, not always.
33:36
But if you can be mindful of this, if you're a therapist, if you work with couples, or even if you're a couple, if you can be mindful of this, try to be more conscious of this, hopefully there were some things that I said today that will help you learn and improve and uh be able to start being more aware of as you work with couples. So I thank you, thank you all so much again for listening.
34:06
And I hope this was helpful for you. Like I said at the beginning, if you have any questions for me, definitely reach out. If you have any guests or topics that you'd like to see, I'd love to hear from you. I hope all of you have a great week and I will see you next time. The episode this week is brought to you by Alma. They make it easy to get credentialed with major insurance plans at enhanced reimbursement rates. Alma handles all of the paperwork and guarantees payment within two weeks.
34:36
visit HelloAlma.com/ATPP or click on the link in the show notes to learn more. And thank you again, everybody. This is Shane Birkel and this is The Couples Therapist Couch podcast. It's all about the practice of couples therapy. I hope you have a great week and we'll see you next time. Bye, everybody!