A clinical psychologist named Dr. Stephen Blumenthal wrote a piece in The Guardian about why men don’t go to therapy. Eight reasons. All of them sound pretty true.
Men are primed for action, not words. Therapy feels feminized. Vulnerability feels dangerous in a hierarchy. We go it alone. We wait until we’re in crisis. We fear what we might find if we start pulling on threads.
I’m not sure if his piece makes a case for therapy or just validates men’s reason to avoid it.
Regardless, I’m going to make a different argument.
Not against therapy. Therapy saves lives. But if those eight barriers are real, and they seem like they are then maybe the answer isn’t convincing men to white-knuckle their way through something that doesn’t feel like it was created for them. Maybe the answer is building something that works with how men are actually wired.
That’s what a men’s retreat does.
Men are action-oriented. Retreats are built on action and the body.
Blumenthal says men’s mother tongue is action, not words. Sitting across from a therapist for 50 minutes a week, hashing out your feelings in a beige office, runs directly against the grain of how most men process the world.
A retreat is different. You’re doing things, often side by side, shoulder to shoulder, like how men have been talking and sharing since the first hunting expeditions. But now it’s hiking. Breathwork. Fire circles. Cold plunges. Somatic work, practices that bypass the analytical mind and go straight to where most men actually hold their stuff: the body. Tension in the chest. The jaw that won’t unclench. The shoulders that haven’t dropped in years.
Men’s retreats combine somatic practices, coaching workshops, and the cultivation of mature masculinity, often outside or in nature, reconnecting participants with their bodies and emotions in ways that talking alone often can’t reach.
For men who’ve never been able to “just talk about it,” the activity or the body becomes the door.
Therapy is one-on-one. Retreats are communal, and you learn even when you’re not the one speaking.
There’s something about being alone with a therapist that activates the exact defenses men carry into every room: perform, manage, control how you’re perceived. Sometimes that one-on-one triggers the being sat down and scolded from Mom or the principal. Forced to share what you did and talk about it. For boys, getting in trouble is often the only time you had to do that.
A retreat operates differently. You’re surrounded by men who are just as guarded, just as skeptical, just as “I’m only here because something had to change.” And then one man speaks his truth and something in the room shifts. You didn’t say a word. You’re not on the hot seat. But something in his story cracked something open in you.
When men see others being vulnerable, it normalizes the experience and reduces the stigma associated with expressing emotions. They realize they are not alone in their struggles and that it’s possible to be both vulnerable and strong. Welldoing
You can’t replicate that in a one-on-one session. Brotherhood isn’t a technique. It’s an experience.
Men wait until crisis. Retreats catch them before it and sometimes prevent what’s coming.
Men’s reluctance to engage with the healthcare system means they’re often not diagnosed or treated until advanced stages — or after severe crises. nih
Therapy, for most men, is a last resort. Something you do hoping to barely escape the divorce, after the breakdown, after everything has already cracked.
A retreat doesn’t carry that weight. It’s framed as growth, not treatment. Performance, not pathology. A lot of men show up not because they’re in crisis, but because they want more, more connection, more presence, more aliveness. They want to sit around a fire with men who actually give a damn. They want to be in nature and remember what it felt like before the grind took over.
And sometimes, that weekend of more becomes the thing that prevents the breakdown that was quietly building. Not all healing is reactive. Some of it is proactive. Some of it is just finally saying: I deserve more than this half-life I’ve been living.
The fear of what you’ll find and what you might be missing.
Blumenthal’s eighth reason is the one that cuts deepest: men are afraid of what happens if they start pulling on threads. What if the whole structure collapses?
Here’s what we know after years of this work: what men are usually most afraid of finding, the grief, the loneliness, the gap between who they are and who they wanted to be, is also what they’re most hungry to finally face.
But here’s the other side of that fear. Some men don’t come because they can’t picture what’s waiting on the other side. They don’t know what a fire circle feels like. They can’t imagine talking honestly with men who aren’t competing with them. They’ve never experienced nature as medicine, or laughter as release, or a weekend that left them feeling like themselves again for the first time in years.
Therapy can absolutely be a path to healing. But for a lot of men, a retreat offers something therapy rarely can: the experience of belonging as the breakthrough itself.
Men who maintain strong friendships and emotional connections live longer, have better relationships, experience less depression, and report higher life satisfaction.
One more thing worth saying out loud.
Therapy was largely developed within a clinical model that, historically, was shaped by and optimized for how women tend to process emotion, verbally, relationally, in a contained one-on-one setting. That doesn’t make it wrong. It makes it incomplete for a lot of men.
While many spheres of society are pushing for equal treatment of the sexes, therapy rooms are actually becoming more attuned to their differences, which is good. But a men’s retreat doesn’t need to adapt. It was built from the ground up for how men actually process information, feelings, and experience: through action, through brotherhood, through the body, through doing hard things alongside other men. VICE
There’s no couch. There’s a fire.
The Bottom Line
If therapy works for you, go. Seriously.
But if it doesn’t or if you’ve read those eight reasons and recognized yourself in every single one, if you’ve been waiting until it gets bad enough, or convincing yourself you can handle it alone, a retreat might be exactly the thing that breaks the pattern.
Not because it’s easier. Because it was built for you.
