The concept of “white privilege” only tells half the story. — Note: Get my writing straight to your email inbox each week by subscribing to my list! Here’s the problem with the concept of “white privilege”: It only tells half the story. Yes, being socially categorized as “white” — particularly in the U.S. but also across much of the world —…

To feel safe enough to stop whatever the habit we want to change, we need help. — Note: Get my writing straight to your email inbox each week by subscribing to my list! My therapist told me something once that I immediately wrote on a Post-it note I still keep on my desk. I constantly repeat it to people who come to me for help. “Without spiritual…

Setting boundaries, using dating apps as a tool, and more. — Note: Get my writing straight to your email inbox each week by subscribing to my list! The pandemic has been a global tragedy, but I’m grateful for it in this very narrow, selfish way: It helped me get better at dating. I’d gone through periods of dating before. But because…

Why the man you’re with isn’t enthusiastic about getting help and what you can do about it. — Note: Get my writing straight to your email inbox each week by subscribing to my list! To anyone in a relationship with a cisgender man, I want you to know that there is hope. After years of thinking I’d never go to therapy, I now see a therapist regularly and…

They say relationships are all about communication. But what does that really mean? — Note: Get my writing straight to your email inbox each week by subscribing to my list! Communication. Communication. Communication. Everyone from pioneering couples therapist John Gottman to contestants on The Bachelor say that romantic relationships live and die based on communication. But what does that actually mean? It can’t be…

If someone doesn’t have a job, it’s because they’re too lazy, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and other rich people want us to think. — The biggest lesson I’ve learned as a newly licensed therapist is that shaming people — thinking they’re flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging — is a surprisingly unproductive way to help them change and grow. I say “surprisingly” because our society is overflowing with shame.

We’re actually much more free to be who we want to be than we’re taught to think. — I recently came across a little factoid that surprised me: Blue and pink were not considered masculine and feminine — respectively — until the 1940s. “Even then,” wrote Jeanne Maglaty in a 2011 Smithsonian magazine article, “it took time for popular culture to sort things out.” Here’s what a 1918…

Instead, we should blame our hyper-individualized, isolating, alienating capitalist society. — Another day, another mass shooting — this time in a wealthy Chicago suburb. Why is this happening? Why do so many young men want to cause so much pain? I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But I want to get past the partisan back-and-forth about guns versus mental…

Many cisgendered men feel like there two options right now, either stay quiet or “mansplain.” But there’s another way. — Here’s why pro-abortion (cisgendered) men should be speaking up right now: This is an opportunity to practice talking about something we likely know little or nothing about without pretending like we do. As boys, we got the message from adults that we should always be in control of ourselves (stoic)…