by Rick Belden
I’ve been thinking recently about the deficiency of appropriate, effective male mentoring in my life and how it’s affected me. I’m 52 and it’s still affecting me, just as it’s affected me at every stage of my life. There’s a huge hole in my life where my father should have been (and still should be), but as big as that hole is, it’s merely the center of a much larger hole, the product of a male culture that is woefully inadequate to meet the true needs of men and boys.
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Country music and country artists are no strangers to the struggles of mental health. Many of the genre’s legends and icons battled with addiction, depression, anxiety, and abuse and their thoughts, feelings and experiences have made up the raw, genuine hurt that is often found in country music. Yet, when you think about current, male country superstars who are open about their mental health journey, few examples, save names like Keith Urban, come to mind.
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How To Engage In Conflict And Build Love In Your Relationship
It’s a truism in relationships – we argue and fight. You could say that the process of becoming close with another person involves bringing down all of the defences we have built into ourselves to protect us from being vulnerable and being hurt. Some of these defences we are aware of and yet many of them are purely beyond our awareness and in our unconscious.
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By Michelle Travis
Today’s dads are raising confident, empowered daughters who believe they can achieve anything. In a recent survey, dads rated strength and independence among the top characteristics they want to instill in their daughters. But the world our daughters are entering is still profoundly unequal, with girls’ opportunities often limited by deeply-ingrained gender stereotypes. The good news is that engaged fathering holds enormous power for changing this reality.
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By Rick Fortier
The thought of recovery terrified me.
A part of me assumed the worst and the life I knew would be over. I would lose everything that I had worked for. How could I possibly exist without my go-to coping mechanisms?
I was dependent on a number of unhealthy habitual behaviours: pornography, self-defeating thoughts, excessive TV, work and alcohol. I had no idea what lay ahead when I finally gathered my courage and forged ahead into recovery. I chose my initial focus was to combat my mental, emotional, and physical dependency to alcohol.
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ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder affects nearly 11% of children in the Western hemisphere with more boys than girls being diagnosed and treated. Popularly understood as a childhood mental health issue ADHD is in fact often diagnosed first in children, where behavior and learning challenges prompt the search for specialized treatment, and remains with a person throughout their life. Fully one third of children diagnosed with ADHD, one of the more common neuro-developmental disorders, will retain their symptoms into adulthood and 41 – 55% of families with a child with ADHD has at least one parent who also has the disorder.
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By Jacqui Olliver
In an intimate relationship one of the first signs of an underlying disconnection between two people is a drop in the frequency and quality of their sexual connection. In the midst of COVID 19 many couples have unconsciously parked their sexual connection to deal with more fundamental needs. However, sex is a big part of what makes an intimate relationship intimate and in this piece, by Men’s List member, and psychosexual healer at End The Problem Jacqui Olliver, we reveal some of the most natural ways each person can bring more focus and intention to their sexual connection.
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Fathers are shapers not molders. As men, who choose to be fathers, everything we do and say becomes the rich soil that our children draw from to grow into their own full potential. But no one handed us a book on how to get this fathering thing right – right? We borrowed from our fathers or father figures – we kept what worked for us and tossed out or changed what didn’t work. We get it wrong more than we get it right – and most of us know that – we accept it.
Here at The Men’s List we’re celebrating Fathers and the art of Fathering and in time for Fathers’ day and in honor of inclusion, equality, diversity and love, here is our Top 5 for books on Fathering.
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by David Jurasek
How do We Play with THAT?!
A conversation about connecting across difference and responding better to conflict
In these times of personal isolation, social tension and societal conflict, I’ve been thinking a lot about the worst moments for me and my family recently.
At the same time, many friends and clients have been reaching out about various conflicts they are having online and in real life.
They are asking me,
“What can I do about this?!
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“I know I’m not the only guy to have depression, but I feel like I am. Do any of you guys feel like this as well?”
“I look around and none of my friends are as anxious as I am -why am I the only guy with this?”
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are all full of forums and special peer support groups of guys who are asking questions like these every single day. Despite messages and campaigns aimed at normalizing mental illness especially for men it seems that the majority of men suffer with their symptoms in silence and in a belief that they are the only ones to have an illness.
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