Jay Krenek, LPC Texas

Counseling for Men in Denton, Texas and Telehealth across Texas

There’s a version of this man I see fairly often. He runs a team, manages a portfolio, leads a department, and maybe all three. He’s calm in a crisis. He reads rooms accurately. He makes decisions fast. When something goes wrong at work, he knows exactly what to do with the adrenaline. He metabolizes pressure into output. His partner watches him do this and can’t understand why, when she asks how he’s actually doing, the lights go out behind his eyes.

He doesn’t go quiet because he doesn’t care. He goes quiet because he was trained to.

That training, where it comes from, what it costs, and what it actually takes to change it, is what this post is about.

What Men are Taught

Terry Real, one of the most influential relational therapists working today, made an appearance on the Huberman Lab podcast in December 2025 that cut to the heart of something most men have never had language for. Under patriarchy, Real argues, boys were systematically conditioned out of their full humanity. They were taught to be invulnerable — to deny their needs, swallow their pain, and perform an unshakeable competence regardless of what was actually happening inside. This wasn’t a character flaw. It was a survival strategy. A boy who cried got targeted. A boy who showed fear invited contempt. A boy who asked for help learned, quickly, that the cost of doing so was too high.

So he stopped.

And then that boy became a man who no longer needed to be told. The lesson had already been absorbed into his nervous system, his self-concept, his identity. Achievement became safety. Competence became the whole person. The part of him that had needs, that felt afraid, that longed for real connection, that part got quarantined, because letting it out had never once felt safe.

What Real emphasizes, and what I find crucial in my own clinical work, is that this wasn’t pathology. It was adaptation. A boy who learned to stay composed in chaotic environments was doing exactly what his circumstances required of him. The tragedy isn’t that he learned the lesson. It’s that nobody ever told him there would come a time when the lesson would need to be unlearned.

Real calls this the cost of patriarchal conditioning, and he doesn’t soften the consequences. Invulnerability, in his framing, is “a recipe for loneliness, failed relationships, and health consequences.” That’s not rhetoric. The data bears it out.

According to Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man, one in seven men reports having no close friends. Men account for three out of every four deaths of despair in America. These aren’t fringe numbers. They describe a population of men who were taught to need nothing from anyone and are now living, and dying, with the consequences of that lesson.

Worth naming here, because it rarely gets named: Real has written extensively about what he calls covert depression in men. It doesn’t look like what most people picture when they hear the word depression.What It Costs at Work vs. What It Costs at Home It doesn’t look like sadness, or crying, or an inability to get out of bed. In men, it looks like irritability, the short fuse that seems to come from nowhere. It looks like workaholism and its close relative, emotional unavailability. It looks like contempt, the low-grade disdain that keeps others at a distance and calls itself standards. It looks like drinking more than he probably should, or the screen that’s always on. These aren’t signs of a bad man. They’re defenses, ways the nervous system learned to manage psychic pain that was never allowed to be acknowledged as pain in the first place. Most men don’t recognize any of this as depression because it doesn’t match what they were told depression looks like. And what they were told, that depression is weakness, that it looks a certain way, that it happens to other people, is itself part of the conditioning.

What It Costs at Work vs. What It Costs at Home

Here’s the thing about invulnerability training: in the right context, it works. It works remarkably well.

The man who can stay composed when the deal falls apart, who doesn’t visibly panic when his team is watching, who can deprioritize his own emotional state long enough to solve the problem in front of him — that man gets promoted. He gets trusted with more. His capacity to not fall apart under pressure is, in high-demand professional environments, genuinely valuable. It reads as composure. Decisiveness. Strength.

The problem isn’t that this skill exists. The problem is that it doesn’t know when to stop.

Stan Tatkin, the developer of PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy), has written and spoken extensively about what occupational conditioning does to the nervous system. The man who has spent eight, ten, twelve hours a day in a state of professional vigilance, scanning for threats, managing outcomes, staying one step ahead, doesn’t clock out when he walks through the door. His nervous system doesn’t recognize the commute home as a signal to downshift. So when his partner turns toward him and says, “Can we talk tonight?” something in him registers it the way he would register any other demand on his resources. He prepares to perform. He tries to solve. Or he shuts down entirely, because there’s nothing left.

Connection doesn’t require performance. It requires presence. And presence, the willingness to be affected, to not have it handled, to sit with someone else’s experience without immediately trying to fix it, is the exact opposite of what invulnerability training prepares a man to do.

The research on what this gap produces is striking. A 2023 study in the Journal of Primary Care and Community Health, cited in Psychology Today, found that among white-collar men experiencing emotional distress, 10 out of 11 had never tried therapy. Not once. These aren’t men who are unaware that they’re struggling. Many of them know something is wrong. But the same identity that makes them effective at work, self-sufficient, high-functioning, capable of handling it, is precisely the identity that makes reaching out feel like a contradiction.

When Guys Give Counseling a Change

When a high-achieving man first sits down in couples therapy, he often expects it to be a performance review. He’s going to get the feedback, he’s going to take notes, and he’s going to implement the changes. He brings the same orientation he brings to everything else that matters to him.

Something else worth understanding: most men don’t arrive in therapy saying “I’m struggling emotionally.” Research by psychologist Michael Addis, PhD, shows that men come in through the side door, through behavioral complaints. Sleep is off. The anger has started to get noticed. The relationship strain has finally reached some threshold that can’t be ignored. That’s not evasion. That’s how the presenting problem gets translated into language that feels acceptable to say out loud. The barrier to getting here isn’t awareness, most of the time. It’s the identity threat embedded in admitting need.

What I actually see, once a man is in the room, is someone who has no idea how to be in his body when his partner is hurting. Not because he doesn’t love her. Not because he doesn’t want to help. But because the moment she expresses pain or disappointment, something shuts off. He goes flat. He goes logical. He goes somewhere else entirely.

Part of what’s happening in those moments has a name, alexithymia, and it’s worth understanding because it explains something that can otherwise look like stubbornness or indifference. Alexithymia is a subclinical difficulty identifying and describing your own emotional states. It shows up in men at significantly higher rates than in women, not because men are less capable, but because of how male gender-role socialization works. The wiring between internal experience and language was simply never built the same way. When someone asks “how does that make you feel?” and a man stares back blankly, he is not refusing to answer. He genuinely cannot locate the answer. The felt sense is there, the body knows something is happening, but there’s no clear pathway from that signal to words. This should feel like relief, not diagnosis. It explains why “just open up” lands like asking someone to read a book in a language they were never taught.

This is what therapists call the pursue-withdraw cycle, and it is one of the most common and most damaging patterns I work with in couples. One partner reaches for connection, usually through emotion. The other partner, threatened by the intensity or the implicit expectation, withdraws. The pursuing partner reaches harder, reads the withdrawal as rejection, escalates. The withdrawing partner experiences the escalation as confirmation that emotion is dangerous, and retreats further. Both people are now alone together.

The man in this pattern isn’t cold. He isn’t indifferent. He is, in many cases, someone who tries hard at everything, who provides well, who shows up in all the practical ways that were modeled for him as evidence of love. He genuinely believes he is being a good partner. He cannot understand why that isn’t enough. And his partner, who may love him deeply, who may see every genuinely good thing about him, is sitting across the table from someone who, in the moments that matter most to her, is simply not there.

I’ve sat with that particular grief, on both sides of it, more times than I can count. Neither of them is wrong about what they’re experiencing. They are both living the downstream effects of something that started long before either of them walked into that room.

This is not a failure of character. It is a predictable outcome of decades of training. The nervous system that learned, somewhere around age eight or nine, that emotional exposure was dangerous, that nervous system doesn’t distinguish between the boardroom and the bedroom. It knows one move: contain and manage. And you cannot think your way into feeling safe with vulnerability. That shift requires something different. It requires practice, guidance, and usually another person who knows the terrain.

The Thing About Asking for Help

Most high-performing men have coaches. Financial advisors. Mentors. People they pay specifically to give them an outside perspective, to identify the blind spots they can’t see from inside their own position. They don’t experience this as weakness. They experience it as what smart, serious people do.

Therapy is the same tool applied to a different domain.

Terry Real’s concept of “relationality,” the skills of genuine connection, of attunement, of being able to stay present with another person’s emotional reality, is not a trait you either have or don’t have. It is a learnable skill. It can be developed, practiced, and strengthened, the same way any other competency can. The difference is that it requires a specific kind of environment to learn it: one where emotional honesty is expected, where there are no wrong answers, and where the goal is not performance but actual contact.

It also helps to know what good therapy for men actually looks like, because the cultural image of it (lying on a couch, being asked about your mother) is so far from the reality that it keeps a lot of people from ever finding out. A systematic review of the research on therapeutic alliance with men, covering APA guidelines studies from 2005 through 2021, found that three approaches consistently produced the strongest engagement: therapy that is goal-oriented and action-focused, therapy that is strengths-based, and therapy that includes psychoeducation, meaning the therapist helps you understand why the patterns developed, not just that they exist. Tatkin’s nervous system framing is a good example of what that looks like in practice. When a man understands that his shutdown in the middle of a hard conversation isn’t moral failure, it’s a threat response, a nervous system trained to protect him through a specific kind of containment, something changes. The behavior becomes legible. And behavior you understand is behavior you can work with.

The ADAA reports that nearly one in ten men experience depression or anxiety — but less than half of them ever receive treatment. According to NAMI, men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. I don’t say that to be grim. I say it because those numbers are the downstream consequence of a culture that taught an entire population of people that needing help was a sign of failure, and that the only acceptable response to pain was to push through it alone.

The men who get to the other side of this, who do the work, who learn to show up in their relationships differently, do not describe it as becoming weaker. They describe it as becoming more themselves. More available. More alive. The stoic performance they’d been maintaining hadn’t been making them stronger. It had just been making them harder to reach.

I’ve worked with incredible fathers, husbands, son, and professionals for fifteen years. If you or a man in your life is interested in a therapist who is for men improving their lives and the lives of their loved ones, reach out.