Therapy for Men
For the man who has done everything right and still feels like something is missing.
You’ve built a life. A career, maybe a marriage, maybe kids. From the outside, it works. But lately there’s a restlessness you can’t name, or an anger that shows up faster than it used to, or a flatness where the drive used to be. You’ve tried to fix it the way you fix everything else, and it hasn’t moved.
That isn’t failure. For a lot of men, it’s the first honest signal that the strategies that built the first half of your life won’t carry you through the second.
Two halves of a life
Most men are handed a script early: perform, provide, protect, don’t need anything. It works, for a while. It gets you through school, into a career, and into a relationship. Then, somewhere in your thirties, forties, or fifties, it stops working, usually through something you didn’t choose. A marriage that goes quiet. A job that ends. A father who dies. A faith that stops holding. A body that won’t do what it used to.
An old idea, found in nearly every wisdom tradition, says a man’s life has two halves. The first is about building the container: identity, career, family, reputation. The second is about discovering what the container was for. The trouble is that nobody tells men the second half exists. So we keep trying to win a game that’s already over, and we call the restlessness a midlife crisis instead of what it is: an invitation.
This is the work I do with men. Not symptom management, though we’ll build practical skills along the way. The deeper work of figuring out who you are apart from what you produce, and what you’re actually here for.
What depth work looks like
My training is in marriage and family therapy, and my approach draws on Jungian depth psychology. In practice, that means we pay attention to what’s underneath:
The shadow. Every man carries parts of himself he learned to hide: the tenderness that got mocked, the anger that got punished, the ambition, grief, or need that didn’t fit the script. Those parts don’t disappear. They leak out sideways, as irritability, as numbness, as the thing you do at 11 pm that you’d never tell anyone about. Shadow work means bringing them into the room, not to be ashamed of them, but to integrate them. Men who do this become less reactive and more whole.
The father wound. Almost every man I work with has unfinished business with his father, whether that father was absent, harsh, distant, or simply never initiated him into manhood because no one did. We look at what you inherited and what you’re passing on, so you can choose rather than repeat.
The inner structure. Neo-Jungian writers describe four energies every mature man needs access to: the King who blesses and orders, the Warrior who acts with discipline and boundaries, the Magician who sees clearly and knows, and the Lover who feels and connects. Most of us are overdeveloped in one or two and starved in the others. Naming which is which turns a vague sense of being “off” into something you can actually work on.
Dreams, symbols, and story. Some of this work happens through talking, and some of it happens through image: a recurring dream, a sand tray, a song you can’t stop writing. Men are often surprised by how much they already know once they stop trying to think their way through it.
For teen boys: initiation, not just coping skills
Traditional cultures understood something we’ve forgotten: boys don’t become men by accident. They need to be initiated — taken through a threshold by older men who tell them the truth about life and welcome them into adulthood on the other side. Without that, boys initiate themselves, usually through risk, through screens, through whatever the peer group rewards, and they arrive at twenty-five with a man’s responsibilities and a boy’s inner life.
I work with teen boys and their families with this in mind. Sessions address the immediate concerns — anxiety, anger, withdrawal, school, identity, the pull of the online world — but they’re framed as something larger: helping a young man cross into adulthood with a clear sense of who he is, what he values, and what kind of man he intends to become. Where it fits, I work with fathers and other trusted men in a boy’s life, because initiation was never meant to happen in a therapist’s office alone.
Who this is for
Men in a major transition: divorce, career change, new fatherhood, retirement, loss of a parent
Men whose anger, shutdown, or restlessness is costing them their relationships
Men navigating faith deconstruction or leaving a religious community that shaped their identity
Fathers who want to break a generational pattern rather than hand it down
Creative men, artists, and entrepreneurs facing burnout or a crisis of meaning
Teen boys (and their parents) looking for more than symptom management
Men who have never been to therapy and aren’t sure it’s for them
What to expect
This work is direct. I’m not going to nod and ask how that makes you feel for fifty minutes. I’ll ask real questions, tell you what I’m noticing, and expect you to do the same. It’s also patient: the second half of life isn’t a project you complete in six sessions. Most men find the first conversation is the hardest part, and that what follows is more relief than they expected.
I see men and teens in person in Spokane and online across Washington. Individual sessions are often covered by insurance; see the FAQ for details.