Beyond the Crisis of Masculinity

Book excerpt: In Beyond the Crisis of Masculinity, Gary Brooks explores the psychopathology of mens everyday livesthe maladaptive strategies that men use to maintain a traditional male role that has increasingly come under assault. He then delves into the related question of why men overwhelmingly reject psychotherapy at a time when they need it the most. The key to engaging men in therapy, Brooks argues, is devising a male-friendly therapy, involving flexibility, consciousness-raising in mens groups and other out-of-office settings, and the therapists emphasis on an authentic empathetic bond with the troubled male client to discover meaning in the clients relational pressures and problems at work, with loved ones, and, most of all, with himself. Standard therapeutic models dont work for men, Brooks argues, so therapists must be eclectictranstheoreticalin negotiating therapeutic goals and tasks with their troubled male clients. The central tenets of multicultural counseling and therapy figure prominently in the transtheoretical model, as they allow the therapist to separate out and tackle peculiarly male problems that span different cultural and socioeconomic contexts. Inclusive cultural empathy and the transtheoretical models stages-of-change framework can sustain mens initial interest in the therapeutic option and, beyond that, in a transformative relationship. In such a way, Brooks concludes, the transtheoretical model advances a hesitant male client from the level of consciousness-raising and awareness of gender role strain to the level of action and change, as the locus of therapeutic agency shifts from the therapist to the client himself.