For many men, reaching out for support can feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or even impossible. In this deeply honest personal account, Richard shares his journey through heartbreak, crisis, and recovery, alongside the lessons he’s learned both as a man and now as a counsellor working predominantly with male clients.
His story offers a powerful insight into the pressures men often carry silently, and why asking for help may be one of the strongest decisions a person can make.
Here’s Richard’s story in his own words:
I never thought I’d be the kind of man who goes to counselling. That’s probably the most honest thing I can tell you.
For most of my twenties I was doing what I thought men were supposed to do – keep going, keep providing, keep your head down. If something was wrong, you got on with it. That was the example I’d grown up with. My dad is an amazing man and I love him dearly, but mental health and therapy? That just wasn’t in his vocabulary. His generation’s answer was simple: get on with it. And for a long time, that was mine too.
Then my marriage ended. And the pain that followed was unlike anything I’d ever tried to outrun before.
By the time things reached their darkest point, I had attempted to take my own life. The next morning, I went to work just like I always did. I never missed a day. Not one. Not through the marriage breaking down, not through the divorce, not through what felt like my entire world collapsing. Because stopping – pausing, reflecting, admitting that I wasn’t coping – felt like weakness. There was all this pain and hurt and resentment just brewing inside me, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. So I just kept moving.
That, I now realise, was the most dangerous thing I could have done.
Eventually, I did start counselling. Something shifted in me through those positive therapeutic experiences. I started to understand that the story I’d been telling myself – that I was weak for struggling, that I should be able to cope alone – was simply not true. I had been incredibly strong in all the wrong ways. Strength, I was learning, isn’t about never stopping. Sometimes it’s about having the courage to sit down and be with it all.
What Gets in the Way for Men?
Almost everything, at first. And I say that as someone who has lived it, and now works as a counsellor myself, predominantly with male clients.
There’s the conditioning – the deep, almost unspoken belief many of us carry that admitting we’re not okay is a form of failure. My generation sits in a strange in-between. The generation above us simply didn’t ‘do’ mental health. The generations below are navigating a different but equally challenging pressure from social media: this idea that no one is coming to rescue you and that you just have to push through alone. Either way, the message is the same: don’t show it.
Many of the men I work with come to me only when they’ve exhausted every other option. By the time they walk through that door, they’ve already tried everything they can think of. They arrive looking for tools, for solutions, for a system – “tell me what I need to do to not feel this way.” And I understand that completely. That was me. That’s the way a lot of us are wired. We want to fix it, and we want to fix it efficiently.
But here’s what I’ve noticed: once those men feel safe, once they realise that the room is genuinely free of judgment – they don’t want the tools as urgently as they thought they did. What they want is to be heard. Many of them have wonderful partners, good friends, people who love them. But they don’t feel safe enough to show that side of themselves. There’s a fear – sometimes conscious, sometimes not – that showing vulnerability will have consequences. In a counselling session, there are no consequences. For fifty minutes, it is entirely okay to not be okay.
That’s the thing I wish someone had told me. You can still be the strong one at work, the provider at home, the person everyone else leans on. But for an hour a week, you don’t have to be. You can put it down.
Overcoming What You Think Counselling Is
I spent years believing that counselling was for people who couldn’t cope. I see now that it’s for people who are choosing to cope better.
There’s a version of masculinity many of us grew up with that no longer matches the world we actually live in. The idea that success means a house, a car, a certain life by a certain age – that script was written for a different era. Men today are measuring themselves against a standard that was never realistic to begin with, and concluding they’ve failed. They haven’t. The world changed, but the messaging didn’t keep up.
I do martial arts – something I’m deeply passionate about – and once pushed through a minor knee injury until it became a serious one, which led to a cascade of further injuries. There was every encouragement to tough it out. I look at my friends now and I tell them: it’s okay to miss a session, to ease up, to admit you’re in pain. The same logic applies to our mental health. Carrying something that needs attention doesn’t make you weak. Ignoring it until it becomes a crisis – that’s what costs you.
For men from different cultural backgrounds, there can be an extra layer of complexity. If you grew up in a household shaped by one set of values about what it means to be a man, and then moved through a world with a completely different set, you may be holding two competing ideas of masculinity and wondering how to reconcile them. One of the first things I ask a male client is simply: “What do you think a man is?” The range of answers is extraordinary. And that question alone can begin to open something up.
Why I Want to See More Men Walk Through That Door
I’m 37 now. I am remarried with a newborn daughter. Life looks completely different from how it did at 30, standing in the wreckage of a marriage and not being sure I wanted to continue.
It gets better. I know that’s easy to say and hard to believe when you’re in the dark. But it does.
I came into counselling training because of what I experienced – and because I want men to have somewhere to go that meets them where they are. Not a place that asks them to be someone they’re not, but a place that says: come as you are, with all the confusion and the weight of it, and let’s just see what’s here.
The Government has now published a ten-year men’s health strategy which is unprecedented. The NHS has run a media campaign encouraging talking therapy. Things are changing. But the biggest change will come when men can mention going to their counsellor the way they’d mention going to the gym – without lowering their voice, without bracing for a reaction, without feeling like they’ve admitted defeat.
That’s the normalisation I think we all need to work towards. A world where men are told they’re it’s acceptable to not be feeling great and not to hide it, and that asking for help is simply one of the more intelligent things a human can do.
Richard is a qualified counsellor working with Westmeria Counselling and in private practice, specialising in working with men. If you’re a man who has been considering counselling but hasn’t yet taken the step, he would say: you don’t have to have hit rock bottom to benefit. You just have to be willing to show up.