Clinical Perspectives on Working with Men and Shame

This anthology explores the relationships between shame and masculinity, offering multiple clinical perspectives for understanding how shame drives many of the beliefs and behaviours associated with men’s psychological distress, disconnection, and harm to both self, others and society.

Using various models of clinical insight and cultural analysis from various authors, this book centres shame as a core emotion underpinning men’s relational struggles, societal positioning, and resistance to vulnerability. Through a collection of interdisciplinary chapters, the book examines how shame is formed, avoided, protected against, or internalised by men across different identities and life experiences. It highlights how shame operates in therapy, in relationships, and in online and offline communities, and within the shifting landscape of contemporary gender roles. The book brings together non-hierarchical voices from psychotherapists, psychosexual therapists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists, thus insuring the relevance of the context, issues and psychological approach. Aimed at therapists, educators, and students, this collection is both clinical and cultural, theoretical and applied.

It provides a compelling framework for understanding how men’s shame manifests in the body, the therapy room, and the wider world and how therapy can offer a transformative space for healing and reconnection.