Why men struggle to talk to each other

There is something that happens in the groups we run that we have never quite got used to, even after many years. A man says something honest, something he has clearly never said aloud before, something about shame or loneliness or the gap between who he appears to be and what is actually happening. And the room changes. Not dramatically. Just a shift in the quality of attention, a collective recognition, an almost physical sense of relief that the thing has been said. And then, another man says: I thought it was just me.

This response is perhaps the most important thing to emphasise in this piece. The isolation that compulsive sexual behaviour produces is real, but the sense that the experience is uniquely yours, that no one else would understand, that saying it aloud would produce rejection or contempt, is almost always wrong. The men sitting on either side of you in that room know exactly what you are talking about. They have been carrying the same silence.

This piece is about why that silence forms and why it holds, sometimes for decades.

What male socialisation teaches about disclosure

Many boys learn early, and from many sources simultaneously, that certain kinds of disclosure are not available to them. Vulnerability is weakness. Struggle should be managed privately. Asking for help is an admission of inadequacy. The performance of competence and control, the appearance of having things handled, is one of the primary social requirements placed on men across almost every cultural context.

These lessons are not delivered through a single conversation. They arrive through accumulated experience: the father who responded to distress with impatience, the peer group where emotional honesty was mocked, the culture that consistently depicts men as needing and relying on nothing. By the time a man is an adult, the prohibition against genuine disclosure to other men is so deeply established that it does not feel like a rule. It feels like reality.

The result is a particular quality of male friendship that many men recognise, even if they have never named it. Friendships that are warm, loyal and genuinely important, and that almost entirely lack any conversation about what is actually happening internally. Friends who would do almost anything for each other, and who would never say: I am struggling with something and I don't know what to do.

The specific prohibition around sex

If emotional disclosure in general is difficult for men, sexual disclosure is in a category of its own.

Sex carries additional weight because it is also an arena of performance and assessment. To admit that something about your sexual life is out of control is to admit not just emotional difficulty but a particular kind of failure: the failure to be in command of something that men are supposed to command. It adds inadequacy to vulnerability in a combination that most men find almost impossible to present to another man.

There is also the question of judgment. Most men assume, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, that the men around them are managing their sexual lives without difficulty. This assumption is almost always wrong, but it is very hard to correct in the absence of honest conversation, and honest conversation is prevented by the assumption. It is a perfectly closed loop.

For gay and bisexual men, the prohibition has additional texture. Sexual honesty in spaces for gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM) can feel simultaneously more available, because there are contexts where sexual openness is culturally sanctioned, and more specifically restricted. Admitting struggle within a culture that celebrates sexual confidence can feel like a betrayal of community identity, or a confirmation of the homophobic narrative that gay sexuality is inherently disordered. The result is that men carry shame silently even in spaces where sexual honesty is theoretically permitted, because the specific shape of their struggle does not fit the available scripts.

What the silence costs

The silence is not neutral. It has a direct relationship with the behaviour that brings men into this work.

When there is no legitimate space to say what is actually happening, the emotional pressure of what is happening has to go somewhere. And the behaviours that are most immediately effective at managing unspoken emotional pressure, which in many cases is what compulsive sexual behaviour is, tend to intensify in the absence of any other outlet.

Men who have had even a single honest conversation about their struggle, with a therapist or in a group or occasionally with one trusted person, consistently describe it as having changed something. Not resolved it. Not fixed it. But broken a seal that had been holding an enormous amount of pressure. The shame that operates most powerfully in silence is reduced, even slightly, by being spoken. And reduction in shame is a reduction in the threat state that drives the behaviour.

What group therapy makes possible

The group format I use is specifically designed to interrupt the prohibition against male disclosure in the most direct way available: by putting a man in a room with other men who are doing the thing he has never been able to do.

The alarm inside us learns from experience.

This is more powerful than it sounds. It is not simply that hearing other men speak honestly about their struggles gives permission. It is that the experience of doing so yourself, in a context where it is received without judgment, produces a kind of evidence that argument alone cannot. The alarm inside us learns from experience. Telling a man that it is safe to be vulnerable with other men has limited effect if his entire history suggests otherwise. Giving him a repeated experience of being vulnerable with other men and finding that nothing terrible happens: that is different evidence. And different evidence can update the system.

The moment I described at the beginning of this piece, the man who says something he has never said and hears in return: I thought it was just me. That moment is not a side effect of the therapeutic work. It is some of the most important work there is.

For more on how the group specifically addresses loneliness, see When you realise you're not the only one: why group therapy works. For the broader picture of loneliness as a clinical driver, see The loneliness behind compulsive sexual behaviour.

Information about applying to the programme is on the apply page.

Dr Michael Yates is an HCPC-registered Clinical Psychologist and Psychosexual Specialist. He is an EFS-ESSM Certified Psychosexologist and COSRT-registered Sex and Relationship Therapist.