Helping Men to Be Confident

Talking about how you feel in a supportive group with a trained facilitator is powerful. In doing so you release the emotional charge behind what’s bothering you, heal your sense of shame around the issues you expose, and learn assertive communication skills for dealing with groups of people all at the same time. This is particularly powerful at dealing with one of the biggest factors that undermines our self-confidence: shame. It is a logical next-step from individual therapy, and many therapists run groups as an adjunct to individual therapy.

The most powerful short-term group process I’ve come across is Path of Love. Longer term groups that involve open, honest sharing in a non-judgmental environment are likely to be the most beneficial in the long term.

Advantages:

• You discover that you are not alone

• Powerfully de-shaming

• Helps you transition skills learned in therapy to using them in the real world

• You learn to deal with conflict

• You learn to handle other people projecting onto you

• Can offer more support than individual therapy

Disadvantages:

• Requires a skilled facilitator and/or strong ground rules, or the group can degenerate

• Potential for conflict with other group members to distract you from dealing with your own issues.

In Timeline Therapy, you work with a facilitator who constructs a creative visualisation where you go back in time to before whatever traumatic event has has undermined your confidence. Then you allow yourself to feel the feelings of confidence that you felt before the event, and transport those feelings forward into the future. You see your full potential open up before you, and start living your life towards the new possibilities that you imagine unfolding with this new and more positive view of yourself and your future.

This is a common Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) technique. Generally you get your body involved, and walk forward and back along the timeline representing the past, present and future. Can’t say I found it particularly effective, but you might love it.

Advantages:

• Conceptually simple
• Works well with goal setting
• You don’t have to relive the traumatic event emotionally

Disadvantages:

• Requires a creative imagination
• You need to be able to identify a specific event or time in your life before which you felt more confident
• Doesn’t really deal with the emotional impact of the traumatic event

Richard Bandler and John Grinder were interested in why some people achieved excellence in their lives, while others languished in frustration and mediocrity. They figured that if you wanted to be good at something, all you had to do was look at someone else who was good at the same thing, and copy or model them. So they modeled Milton Erickson, the most effective therapist they knew, and they created Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) based on how he related to his clients.

NLP isn’t so much a therapy as a toolbox full of way to get more out of your mind, your interactions and relationships with other people. For example, rather than delving deep into your psyche to get to the bottom of why you can’t relate to other people powerfully, you just find someone who has excellent relationships, and copy exactly what they do.

Don’t think about it, or worry how you feel about it, just do what they do and you’ll get the same results they get. Watch what they do, rather than asking them about it, because most experts can’t accurately describe how they do what they do. They do it using their intuition. Often their explanation of why this works is misleading, and they may be unaware of the subtle nuances behind it.… Continue reading…

Freud’s baby. The therapist sits back and listens as you lie on the leather couch and waffle on for billable hours about your shitty childhood, and how much you hate your parents. He steers you off superficial stories and into the really deeply painful ones as you probe the very depths of your troubled psyche together.

Advantages:

• Probably the most thorough therapy out there

• You’ll feel like a movie star

• Makes you rich if you’re a psychiatrist

Disadvantages:

• It never ends

• Costs a fortune

• You need to be a movie star to pay your therapy bills

• Perhaps Freud was wrong about your mother