I get it. I really do. Not in the way that people say it to fill silence, or because they’re supposed to. I mean I genuinely understand what it’s like to be a man who is carrying something heavy and saying nothing about it. I understand the particular kind of discipline it takes to hold yourself together in public — at work, at home, in front of the kids, with your mates — and then sit alone at the end of the day with something you still can’t quite put a name to.

I work with men. Every week, in my practice in Goodwood, I sit with men who are functioning. Men who, by every external measure, are fine. And what I see — underneath the competence, underneath the composure, underneath the version of themselves they’ve decided the world is allowed to see — is something I have enormous respect for. Not because suffering is admirable, but because what men carry, and the sheer quiet determination with which they carry it, is genuinely remarkable.

I see you. I hear you. Even the things you haven’t said yet. This isn’t an article that’s going to lecture you about getting help. It’s an honest conversation — between me, a male therapist, and you, a man who is probably more tired than you’re letting on. That’s all. Read it however you need to.

It Probably Doesn’t Look the Way You Think It Does

Here’s something I want to say early, because it matters: depression in men often looks nothing like depression.

It doesn’t look like crying. It doesn’t look like staying in bed. It doesn’t look like falling apart. In fact, one of the reasons so many men go years without anyone noticing — without even noticing themselves — is that what they’re experiencing looks, from the outside, a lot like getting on with things.

It looks like being a bit short with people you love. It looks like working harder than the situation actually requires. It looks like training to the point of punishment, or drinking a bit more than you used to, or being at a dinner with people who care about you and feeling like you’re watching it through glass. It looks like exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. It looks like a flatness — not dramatic, not collapse — just a grey, low-level sense that something has gone quiet inside you that used to make noise.

Clinician and researcher Terrence Real spent decades working with men and named this specifically — what he called “covert” depression, a form of depression that hides in behaviour rather than feeling (Real, 1997). You’re not sitting with the pain. You’re outrunning it. And you’ve probably gotten very, very good at that.

I’m not saying that to criticise you. I’m saying it because I see it so often, and because one of the most disorienting things about being a man in that state is that nothing looks wrong from the outside. People around you see competence. You feel like you’re barely holding it together. And the gap between those two things — between how you appear and how you actually are — is one of the loneliest places a person can live (Rochlen et al., 2010).

I know that gap. I’ve sat with men inside it for a long time. You are not alone in it, even when it feels like you are.

When Being the Strong One Becomes the Only Setting You Have

I want to talk about strength for a moment. Real strength — not the performed kind.

Because here’s what I notice: the men who come through my door with the heaviest loads are almost always the ones who look the most capable from the outside. The ones who hold families together. Who show up reliably for everyone around them. Who have, somewhere along the way, absorbed the unspoken agreement that their job is to be steady, and that steadiness means not needing anything themselves.

I see you in that. The man who waits until everyone else has gone to bed. Who doesn’t want to add to anyone’s load. Who has been so outward-facing for so long — reading rooms, managing reactions, making sure nothing spills — that he’s genuinely lost track of what’s happening on the inside.

That’s not weakness. I want to be very clear about that. For most men I see, that capacity was built from something real. Often something that happened early — an environment where vulnerability wasn’t safe, where showing need cost you something, where you learned fast that the right move was to pull it together and keep going. The strength was real. It served you. It may have protected people you love.

But something happens over time when you live entirely on that setting. It starts to hollow things out.

Keeping the mask on is hard work. It takes constant, low-grade energy — monitoring every response, calibrating what you let out, making sure nothing leaks at the wrong moment. And that energy comes from somewhere. It comes out of your presence, out of your capacity for connection, out of your ability to be genuinely in the room with the people who matter to you (Linder, 2023).

And underneath all of that management — this is what I find, in session after session — underneath it is something that has been waiting, for a very long time, to be seen. Not fixed. Not analysed. Just seen.

Grief, often. Loneliness, almost always. Sometimes a deep, wordless exhaustion that has nothing to do with how much sleep you’ve had. Sometimes anger — real, legitimate anger — that has been redirected inward for so long it’s started to feel like just the way things are. Men are often pressured to open up and talk about their feelings, and criticised for being emotionally walled off — yet, as Brown’s research shows, when they express too much vulnerability, they can be met with discomfort or even rejection (Brown, 2012).

That’s the bind, isn’t it. Open up — but not like that. Be more present — but don’t actually need anything. Talk about your feelings — but keep it palatable. And when you do try — when you actually lower the guard, when you let something real come out — sometimes the room changes. People don’t know what to do with it. They get uncomfortable. They make a joke. They change the subject. Or they never quite look at you the same way again.

And you noticed. Of course you noticed. Because men notice everything — they just don’t always say so.

What that experience teaches, over time, is shame. Not the explosive kind. The quiet, internalised kind that settles into the way a man holds himself. The part of him that decides, after enough experiences of being too much or not enough, that the answer is to stop trying. To manage it alone. To become, in the words of the culture he grew up in, self-sufficient. Strong. Sorted.

And here’s what I want you to understand about shame, because I think it’s the thing that keeps more men stuck than almost anything else: shame doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t say I am shame, and I am the reason you can’t ask for help. It just quietly shapes the rules. It says: don’t be needy. Don’t fall apart. Don’t let them see you struggle. Don’t be the kind of man who can’t hold it together. It shows up as that voice — hard, critical, relentless — that tells you you should be further along by now. That other men manage. That this is just weakness with a different label.

That voice is not the truth. It is a part of you that learned, in some environment, at some point, that vulnerability was dangerous — and it has been trying to protect you ever since. It is not your enemy, even when it feels like one. But it is also not something to keep running your life by.

Brené Brown’s research into shame found that it operates differently in men than in women — and that for men, the core of shame is almost always tied to being perceived as weak, inadequate, or as failing to meet some standard of toughness that was never actually achievable (Brown, 2012). The bar moves. The voice gets louder. And the more a man suppresses, the more ashamed he becomes of what he’s suppressing — which is one of the cruellest features of how this works. The very act of hiding the pain makes the pain heavier.

What I find — when the mask eventually comes off, even slightly, even just in one room, just once — is not what that shame predicted. What I find is not weakness. It is depth. It is a person who has been feeling things privately and profoundly for years, who has simply never had a space large enough to hold it honestly. I want to offer you that space.

What It’s Costing You — And the People Who Love You

I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it honestly: how present are you in your own life right now?

Not whether you’re showing up. I know you’re showing up — that’s never been the question with most men I see. I mean whether you’re actually there when you do. Whether you can sit with your partner without part of you already being somewhere else. Whether you can be in the same room as your kids and actually feel them — not manage them, not half-watch them, but genuinely feel the warmth of being their parent. Whether you can have a conversation with someone you love without the sense that there’s a pane of glass between you. Whether you feel things fully, or whether there’s a kind of managed distance over everything that you’ve quietly normalised and stopped questioning.

That distance has a name. And it isn’t just affecting you.

Your partner feels it. Maybe they’ve said something — that you seem far away, that they feel like they’re talking to a wall, that they don’t know what’s going on with you anymore. Maybe they haven’t said anything, but you can feel the quality of the silence changing. Relationships don’t usually break in a single dramatic moment. They erode. Slowly, quietly, in all the small moments of non-connection that accumulate over months and years until one day one of you looks across the room and realises you’ve become two people living parallel lives in the same house.

Research on emotional suppression in relationships consistently shows that it reduces connection and satisfaction for both people — not just the man doing the suppressing (An et al., 2022). The silence you’re holding, whatever it’s protecting, registers to the people closest to you as absence. As not caring. As something wrong they can sense but can’t quite name. And here’s the part that I find genuinely painful to sit with: most men suppress precisely because they don’t want to burden the people they love. The intention is protection. What lands, for the other person, is distance.

The thing you’re doing to keep people from worrying is often the very thing that’s worrying them most.

And it ripples further than your partner. Your children are watching you, whether you’re aware of it or not. Children are extraordinarily attuned to the emotional atmosphere of a home — far more than most parents realise. They may not be able to articulate what they’re picking up, but they are picking it up. A father who is emotionally unavailable — not because he doesn’t love them, but because he’s spent so long managing himself that he doesn’t have access to the parts that can be fully present — teaches his children something about what men are supposed to look like. About what closeness is supposed to feel like. About whether it’s safe to need anything from the people you love. That’s not a criticism. It’s an observation about how these patterns transmit, because I think you deserve to know.

Your friendships are probably thinner than they look too. I say this gently, because I see it constantly: men who have mates, who catch up regularly, who by all appearances have a full social life — and who have never, not once, told any of those people what is actually happening for them. The friendship exists, but it lives entirely on the surface. And that surface-level connection, maintained year after year, starts to feel less like closeness and more like loneliness with company. Men aged 30 and beyond in particular face a quiet epidemic of social isolation — not because they don’t have people, but because the connections they have never go deep enough to actually sustain them (Movember, 2024).

And then there’s the person you might be most emotionally distant from: yourself.

Emotional suppression is not selective. When you close the valve on grief, fear, sadness, or need — you close it on everything (Linder, 2023). The capacity for joy, for genuine pleasure, for feeling moved by something, for desire — all of it runs on the same system. When men come to me saying they feel flat, or numb, or like they’ve lost interest in the things that used to matter, they are often describing the downstream effect of years of managing their emotional life rather than living it.

I say none of this to make you feel worse about where you are. I say it because you deserve an honest picture. And because the fact that you’re still reading this tells me something important: part of you already knows.

What Your Body Is Already Telling You

There’s something else I hear from men that doesn’t get talked about enough. Not the emotional stuff — the physical stuff. Because the body is an extraordinarily honest place, and it will often tell the truth long before the mind is willing to.

Persistent tension across your shoulders. A jaw that’s clenched so much of the time you’ve stopped noticing. Sleep that technically happens but doesn’t rest you. A short fuse you can’t quite account for. A restlessness that nothing resolves. A general flatness where appetite used to be.

These are not separate problems from what’s happening emotionally. They are the same thing, speaking a different language — the language of a body that is carrying more than it has been given space to put down (van der Kolk, 2014). Your nervous system does not distinguish between emotional pain and physical pain. It simply responds to threat. And when a man has been in a low-grade state of threat — of managing, performing, holding — for a long time, the body starts to reflect that. Not as weakness. As evidence.

I hear you on this. And what I want you to know is that there is no version of what I’m describing that I haven’t sat with before.

When It Gets Into Your Sexuality, Your Intimacy, and Your Capacity to Love

This is the part that almost never gets talked about. And I want to talk about it directly, because in my practice as a sex therapist, it is one of the most consistent — and most quietly devastating — ways that depression and emotional suppression show up in men’s lives.

Sex, desire, and the capacity for genuine intimacy are not separate from your emotional world. They are expressions of it. And when the emotional world has been locked down for a long time, those expressions start to change — sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly — in ways that can leave a man feeling profoundly confused, ashamed, and alone with something he doesn’t know how to name.

Maybe your libido has gone quiet. Not dramatically — just a slow fading, like a signal losing strength, until one day you realise it’s been weeks and you haven’t thought about sex at all, and you don’t quite know what to make of that. Maybe it’s the opposite: desire is still there, but it feels disconnected from anything relational — more like an urge to escape than an urge to connect, and the aftermath of it leaves you feeling emptier than before. Maybe you’re having sex, technically, but you’re not really present for it. You’re managing it, the way you manage everything else. Going through the motions while some part of you watches from a distance.

Maybe erections have become unreliable. And maybe that has layered its own particular shame on top of everything else — because in the story most men have absorbed about themselves, a body that doesn’t perform on demand feels like a verdict.

I want to say this as plainly as I can: none of this is a verdict. Erectile difficulty, loss of desire, disconnection during sex — these are among the most common presentations of depression and chronic stress in men, and they are among the most treatable (Atlantis & Sullivan, 2012). They are not a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with you. They are a sign that something in you is exhausted and needs attention. That’s a different thing entirely.

But there’s something deeper I want to get to, because sexual function is only part of what I’m describing.

What depression and emotional suppression really take from men is not just the sex. It’s the intimacy. And those are not the same thing.

Intimacy — real intimacy — requires a particular kind of availability. It requires being able to let someone actually reach you. To be seen not just in your capable, functioning, holding-things-together self, but in the softer, less certain, more vulnerable parts of who you are. It requires the capacity to receive, not just to give. To be held, not just to hold. And it requires — this is the part that depression makes almost impossible — a relationship with yourself that is honest enough to know what you actually feel, and want, and need.

When a man has spent years keeping that all at arm’s length, intimacy starts to feel threatening rather than nourishing. Not because he doesn’t want it. Because some part of him has learned that being fully known is dangerous — and that the safest thing is to keep just enough distance to stay in control (Johnson, 2008). The result is a particular kind of relational loneliness: being in close proximity to someone you love, and feeling utterly unreachable to them. Being wanted, and not being able to let that land.

I see this in couples. I see the partner — confused, hurt, trying to reach a man who is trying to let them — and the man himself, caught between a genuine longing for closeness and a deeply conditioned reflex to pull back the moment it gets real. Neither of them understanding quite what is happening. Both of them slowly losing faith that the connection they used to feel is still there.

It is still there. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It has simply gone underground, beneath layers of protection that made sense once and that now need to be carefully, gently unwound.

And this is where attachment matters. Because the way a man learned to attach — to trust, to depend, to be close — in his earliest relationships shapes everything that comes after it. Men who learned early that needing people was unsafe, or that closeness came with unpredictability, or that the way to keep love was to be useful and not demanding — those men carry that blueprint into every intimate relationship they have (Johnson, 2008). Not as a conscious choice. As a felt sense, running underneath everything, shaping what feels possible and what feels like too much of a risk.

Depression deepens all of this. It narrows the window. It makes the withdrawal feel more justified, the distance more necessary, the idea of being fully present in love feel further away than it actually is.

What I want you to hear is that this can change. I work with men on exactly this — not just the symptom (the sexual difficulty, the emotional distance, the loss of desire) but the whole system underneath it. The patterns that formed a long time ago. The parts that learned it wasn’t safe to be soft. The relationship between depression, shame, attachment, and the body — because all of it is connected, and all of it responds to the right kind of care.

You are allowed to want a love life that actually feels like something. You are allowed to want to be fully present with the people you’re intimate with. You are allowed to want to be known — not just needed, not just useful, not just the reliable one. Actually known.

That is not too much to ask for. And it is not too late to find it.

The Australian Reality — Because These Numbers Are About Real Men

I include these statistics not to lecture, but because I think men deserve to see clearly what is actually happening — and because behind every number is someone’s son, partner, father, mate, coworker.

Three out of every four suicides in Australia are by men. That is an average of seven men every day (ABS, 2023).

Suicide is the leading cause of death for Australian men aged 15 to 44 (Movember, 2024). Not illness. Not accident. Suicide. Men who died by suicide in 2022 lost an average of 34.9 years of life (AIHW, 2024). Close to one in five Australian men will meet the criteria for a mental illness in any given year — and most will not seek help (ABS, 2023).

Of those who do try to seek help, many encounter a system that isn’t built to recognise how men actually present when they’re struggling. In Movember’s national survey of Australian men, 67% had wanted to leave their healthcare practitioner due to a lack of personal connection, 63% reported that gender stereotypes had shaped their experiences in healthcare settings, and 58% reported facing real barriers to effective engagement (Movember, 2024).

Men are not failing to reach out. Too often, they are reaching out and not finding what they need.

I know this. And it’s part of why I work the way I do — because I want the room I offer to actually feel like somewhere a man can be honest.

What Actually Happens When Men Come to Therapy

Let me tell you what I actually see, because it’s not what the stereotype suggests.

I see men who walk in with their arms crossed and their defences up — entirely reasonably, because they’ve spent years in environments where letting the guard down came with a cost. And then, a few sessions in, sometimes a year, something shifts. Not dramatically. Not a breakthrough moment. Just a gradual, quiet sense that nothing bad has happened because they were honest about something. That they haven’t been judged. That the room has held what they brought into it.

Men are not resistant to this work. In my experience, they are hungry for it. They simply haven’t been given many spaces where doing it felt safe. Where it didn’t feel like losing something.

“There’s no way to ‘fail’ therapy — for men, they’ve already won by coming through the door.”

— Movember, Men in Mind

I believe that completely. Walking through the door is the hardest part. Everything after that, we figure out together.

Working With Me

I’m a male counsellor and sex therapist working from my practice in Goodwood, Adelaide — five minutes from the city — and online for clients elsewhere in South Australia, across the country and the world.

I work with the whole of you. Your history. Your body. What you learned — probably a long time ago — about what it means to be a man, what is and isn’t allowed, and how to manage yourself so that other people don’t have to worry. And I work with what that has cost you, because it has cost you something, and you deserve to have that acknowledged.

My approach is integrative and trauma-informed. I’m not going to hand you a worksheet. I’m not going to tell you to think more positively. I’m going to sit with you, listen carefully, and help you start to make sense of things that may have been making no sense for a long time.

If something in here landed somewhere — if any of it felt familiar — that’s worth paying attention to. You don’t need a referral. You don’t need to arrive knowing what to say. You just need to show up.

I’ll take it from there.

To book your first session with me [click here].

References

An, U., Park, H. G., Han, D. E., & Kim, Y.-H. (2022). Emotional suppression and psychological well-being in marriage: The role of regulatory focus and spousal behavior. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(2), 973. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19020973

Atlantis, E., & Sullivan, T. (2012). Bidirectional association between depression and sexual dysfunction: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 9(6), 1497–1507. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2012.02709.x

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2023). Causes of death, Australia, 2022 (Cat. No. 3303.0). https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/causes-death-australia

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2024). The health of men in Australia. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/mens-health/health-of-men

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Gotham Books.

Johnson, S. M. (2008). Hold me tight: Seven conversations for a lifetime of love. Little, Brown Spark.

Linder, J. N. (2023, December). Pitfalls of suppressing emotions and pros of processing them. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mindfulness-insights/202312/pitfalls-of-suppressing-emotions-and-pros-of-processing-them

Möller-Leimkühler, A. M. (2003). The gender gap in suicide and premature death or, why are men so vulnerable? European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 253(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-003-0397-6

Movember. (2024). The real face of men’s health: 2024 Australian report. Movember Foundation. https://cdn.movember.com/uploads/files/Media%20Room/AU/The%20Real%20Face%20of%20Mens%20Health%20Report%20-%20Movember%20AU.pdf

Movember. (n.d.). Men in mind: A guide for mental health practitioners working with men. Movember Foundation. https://au.movember.com/mens-health/mental-health

Real, T. (1997). I don’t want to talk about it: Overcoming the secret legacy of male depression. Scribner.

Rochlen, A. B., Paterniti, D. A., Epstein, R. M., Duberstein, P., Willeford, L., & Kravitz, R. L. (2010). Barriers in diagnosing and treating men with depression: A focus group report. American Journal of Men’s Health, 4(2), 167–175. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557988309335823

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

For immediate crisis support, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, or text Lifeline on 0477 13 11 14. If your mental health emergency is life-threatening, call 000. If you identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, 13YARN 13 92 76 is a free crisis support line available 24/7.