Being a man in today's world brings with it challenges that require each man to define for himself what this means to him and how to live this out while remaining true to who he feels himself to be at the very heart of his being. This challenge involves ascertaining for oneself what it feels like to be a man on the inside as opposed to blindly following the dictates society may impose according to some cultural norm that arbitrarily defines what being a man means. The litmus test for one's manhood, therefore, needs to be an internal frame of reference sourced in each individual person and not some abstract external sociocultural frame of reference. In this way, masculinity can be mediated by the particularities and peculiarities of the person in question: whether he/they be heterosexual, homosexual, transgender, or some other variant that is more truly reflective of the person's sense of oneself.

What is required in our contemporary experience of being a man is the freedom for enough flexibility in our definitions to encompass the different versions of oneself we each may inhabit at different times and in different places and spaces. These meanings may vary depending upon one's race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, the region of the country where one was born as well as what region one currently lives and has lived over the course of time. Each man will therefore have to come to terms for oneself how to live out one’s own particular version of masculinity in the world. Instead of a uniform notion of masculinity, it would perhaps be more correct for us to speak of masculinities in plural as what defines masculinity for each of us is as unique and varied as our different personalities and characters.

There is nonetheless a singular masculinity that is held out as a standard, however abstract and unattainable, that is a culturally implicated norm with which each man must contend. Each man who fails to live up to this cultural norm may then be stigmatized or even castigated for such deficits. Some of these norms are characterized by whiteness, heterosexuality, athleticism, vigor, higher socio-economic class, etc. Failure to be a member of one of the aforementioned groups can make a man so fated feel as if he/they somehow doesn't measure up. This fabled "white upper-class heterosexual male" norm creates adverse consequences for working class men, men of color, gay men, transgender men, immigrant men, and any man who fails to reflect this implicit cultural notion of manhood, as well as, paradoxically, for white upper-class heterosexual men. These consequences manifest in the many ways men express themselves: aggression, anger, tenderness, love, care and nurturance, etc.

Having a sensitivity to the societal pressures each man faces serves as the background to any given man's presentation in the consultation room. While my work entertains this environmental context and may be important in developing an empathic connection, the focus of the work is primarily concerned with what lies in the foreground: addressing the particular set of issues each one brings into therapy, as well as the trajectory and different forms one’s identity has taken over time.