There's Men's Work That Can Only Be Done With a Woman

When men sit with me for the first time, many have found me the same way: They have been reading, chatting with AI or their doctors, looking into tantra, men's groups, and psychology. Perhaps they booked a session with a sex therapist or considered it. They googled things at midnight that they would never say out loud. Maybe visited an escort or a sensual massage practitioner, or thought about it. But much like Goldilocks, none of it felt quite right.

These men are not reckless or lost. They are, in many ways, thoughtful people who have tried to do things right and tried not to rock the apple cart in their attempts to move forward. They are often married, holding their lives carefully, trying to balance everything with honour and intention.

When they find me, they often say some version of the same thing: This combination of psychological, spiritual, relational, energetic, and sexual work, integrated, was exactly what I was trying to find.

I can't help but smile every time I hear it.

Because it took a great deal to trust my intuition and my calling. To stop listing companies on Nasdaq in Stockholm, return to Cape Town, complete my shamanic training, study psychology, and open a practice in a culture that wraps working with sexuality in layers of shame. And then to trust that the work would be recognised for what it is, rather than reduced to something it is not.

This was not something I stumbled into. I built it deliberately, out of a decade of activism, out of watching what the patriarchy was doing to both men and women, and especially out of witnessing what it was doing to the relational field between men and women. That space between us, charged, wounded, distorted, often barely spoken, is also one of the most potent sites for genuine healing. Healing that does not just shift an individual but quietly reshapes the relational world around them.

The Question That Started Everything

Years ago, living a street away from the Swedish royal palace, engulfed in a culture that celebrates hyper-individualism, to the point where they're discussing a national loneliness crisis, I stood in a beam of sunlight at the dining table, and a question arrived that changed the direction of my whole life.

What would sex be like if nobody had seen any porn, and we hadn't been indoctrinated by religions, or colonised, and we were just animals in rapture? What would that look like? What would it feel like!

I remember the feeling of it, like stepping into the ocean and remembering that I could breathe underwater. The call to adventure was wild and exciting. The unknown was too intriguing and enticing to leave alone. And the results were beyond anything I could've imagined back then.

The undoing and reclamation that followed was intense, uncomfortable, and genuinely mind-blowing. It became the foundation of the work I now do.

And this question is, as it turns out, a version of the same one many are secretly carrying inside. In other words, with different textures, but underneath it the same thing: What would I actually be, sexually, erotically, relationally, energetically, if there was no shame, no script, and I could embody something more primal? Those who find their way to this work are often already sitting with that question. They just haven't found anywhere to take it yet.

What "Ready" Actually Looks Like

There's a general sense that men are not showing up for intense, uncomfortable undoing and reclamation work, but I have the privilege of knowing many who are. The container is deep, and I have sat with men who cry in sessions and return the following week to lovingly witness their shadows again. They bring the most raw and embarrassing confessions that they've never spoken aloud, and then come back, because something in them recognised the power and medicine of this work. The real, hard work. Not a workaround.

In developmental psychology, we understand that the crises adults face at particular life stages are not random. They are structural. Daniel Levinson's landmark research on adult development identified midlife as a genuine developmental passage, as real and as necessary as adolescence, with its own specific tensions and its own specific task.¹ Where adolescence asks, "Who am I apart from my family?", midlife asks something harder: "Who am I apart from the life I have built?" The structures that carried a man through his twenties and thirties, the career, the relationship, the identity, begin to feel insufficient. Something underneath starts pressing up.

James Hollis, writing from a Jungian perspective, describes this not as a crisis but as a summons. The discomfort is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is the Self, asking for a larger life.²

What looks like a sex problem, or a desire problem, or a vague marital restlessness, is often this. A man standing at a threshold he doesn't have language for yet. The burning thing inside him is not dysfunction. In developmental terms, it is precisely on time.

This is the water these men have been swimming in, whether or not they have words for it.

The man who is ready tends to recognise himself in something like the following.

He feels a pull towards expansion and knows intellectually that something needs to shift, but knowledge of this has not been enough. He can discuss this shift in theory. And still, in the body, in real intimacy, real desire, actual relational contact, something old and patterned takes over before he can catch it.

He is tired of performing. In sex, in relationships, perhaps at work. Some part of him is exhausted by the effort of maintaining a version of himself that does not quite match what is actually there.

He has a complicated relationship with his own desire. Maybe there is shame around it, or it's been compartmentalised to fit the rules governing his life. Maybe there is numbness, or intensity without direction. Maybe pornography has shaped it in ways he senses but hasn't fully reckoned with. Maybe it has gone somewhere he doesn't understand.

He wants to be a better lover, a better partner, a more present and responsive person. Not better in the performance sense. Better in the sense of embodying the expansiveness in a sustainable way.

He is, somewhere underneath everything, ready. He just doesn't know yet that that's what this is.

Something's Still Missing

There is a particular quality to this kind of searching. It is not impulsive or confused. It is persistent, methodical even, and it keeps coming up against the same wall: the thing on offer is good, but it isn't quite it.

Tantra opens something, but stays philosophical. Therapy goes deep, but won't touch the body or speak plainly about sex. Sensual bodywork reaches the nervous system but has nowhere to take what it finds. Men's groups offer real brotherhood, but the specific terrain that lives in the space between men and women stays untouched.

This is not a failure of any of those containers. It is information. A man at a genuine developmental threshold is not looking for a technique or a framework or even a healing experience in the conventional sense. He is looking for somewhere to take the whole thing. The ambition, the shame, the desire, the grief, the aliveness pressing up underneath the life he has carefully built. He needs a container large enough and honest enough and embodied enough to hold all of it at once, without flattening any of it into something more manageable.

That is a different ask. And it explains why the search keeps going even when each individual thing he tries has genuine value.

Most of the men who find me have not been doing this wrong. They have been doing it faithfully, and incrementally getting closer to understanding what they actually need.

Men's Work With Women

Some of men's psychological and sexual work can only happen in relationship with a woman. Not because women are superior containers, or because male practitioners and men's spaces are less valuable. They are essential, and for many things, irreplaceable. But there is specific terrain that doesn't fully open in those spaces alone.

In our work, the most significant thing is the quality of the relational field. Safe, honest, warm, funny, direct, always boundaried, and genuinely, lovingly attuned. In life, we are seldom modelled relationships built on healthy communication, secure attachment, loving witnessing, or open conversation about sex, desire, and how we want to structure our intimate lives. Boys, especially, are left to piece together their relational understanding from silence, performance, and whatever patriarchal cultural scripts happen to be available.

I offer a lived experience of something different. We explore what it feels like to express desire without it becoming a risk, to be close to someone without the familiar scripts or armour. And, as a result of repeated contact with something that simply feels safe, cathartic dearmouring unfolds. For some men, this is the first relationship where that can take place.

There's heavier material too. Some arrive carrying things they could barely say out loud: shame, rage, resentment toward women, a recognition that they have caused harm or fear they might, and nowhere to take any of it that won't make things worse.

For this work, I bring my fullness. A woman who has lived a life marked, as so many women's lives are, by harassment, predation, and violation, and who has done the work of healing her own feminine and her own wounds with the masculine. That healing is what creates the capacity. I can hold messy, uncomfortable complexity without collapsing into it, without taking it personally, and without responding from fear. What I bring into the room is not detachment but something harder won: the ability to meet a man in his worst self-knowledge and remain present, grounded, and genuinely on his side.

That quality of witnessing, it turns out, is itself part of the medicine.

What becomes possible is something I have come to understand as restoration. Two people in actual contact with something real, and something shifting that could not have shifted any other way. Jean Baker Miller's relational-cultural theory argued that much of men's relational injury happens in gendered contexts that require specifically gendered repair.³ I find this confirmed again and again.

Queer and trans men, single men, married men navigating complexity, all bring their own distinct terrain to this space, shaped by different histories, different bodies, different negotiations with masculinity, femininity, and desire. The work meets each person where they are.

When a man moves through this terrain, something shifts in the relational field that is hard to describe but unmistakeable to be inside of. More ease. More honesty. Men often describe feeling, for the first time, that their presence, their desire, their power, can be welcome rather than something to contain. That is not a small thing to walk out into a relationship, a family, a life.

What We Actually Work With

The modality I have developed for this work is called somatosensual therapy. It is therapeutic, educational, somatic, and relational. The work is physical and intimate, and the specific nature and degree of that intimacy is something we navigate together, carefully, with consent and clear boundaries as a living part of the process. Confidentiality is a sworn ethical commitment. What happens in this space stays there.

Here is a man I have sat with. Not one man exactly, but a composite of many.

He looks at me, defeated, and says he feels numb. He goes through the motions: foreplay, same position, then gets the job done. It works, technically, but something in him has quietly given up. Sometimes he sneaks a pill to make sure he doesn't fail. Then, slowly, he ventures further. His mind is full of wild fantasies he has never spoken aloud. Things have started to feel compulsive. He went for a sensual massage recently, and the shame of it brought him here. But he pauses, and then says the thing underneath everything else: that massage made him feel more alive than anything has in years. Something about this ferocious, inconvenient desire is making him feel more like himself than the rest of his life does. More primal. More real.

What if this isn't pathology? What if this is a body that is wise, that has been quietly refusing to keep pretending, and has finally brought him to this moment?

From there, the work opens into whatever is actually there. We explore his relationship with his own body and with pleasure, learning what he wants, developing his skills and literacy as a lover, and discovering what his nervous system has never been given permission to feel. We trace shame back to its origins. We work with his erotic imagination and the fantasies he thought made him strange. We learn to communicate desire safely and honestly, which for many men is entirely new territory. Some men opt for plant medicines, psilocybin, or MDMA work as part of the process. Some bring their partners in. Some book a private retreat and discover how much heat was always there in their relationship, waiting for a little guidance and permission. Some open their relationships. Some simply come home to themselves and find that changes everything.

The outcomes are always unique. What they share is that the man on the other side feels more whole, more aligned, alive in his body, rooted in his power, and able to connect in ways that finally feel real.

What Changes

Someone slipped a handwritten note into my book after a couple's retreat recently. I won't share what it said, but I sat with it for a long time afterwards, that particular kind of full that is hard to describe and impossible to manufacture.

This is what still gets me. After everything I have witnessed in this work, the transformations still surprise me. Not because I doubt the process, but because human capacity for aliveness, when finally given the right conditions, exceeds what any of us imagine going in.

Men message me months later, sometimes years later. Couples send updates about their adventures with a kind of gleeful energy that makes me laugh out loud. People book sessions just to celebrate, to share what has opened up, to bring me into the joy of where they have arrived. A partner who turned out to be craving the exact same expansion, waiting for permission, for a shared language, for someone to go first. Connections that surprised everyone involved, including me.

What moves me most is how consistently the thing a man thought was his problem turns out to be the exact opening he needed. The restlessness that felt like a threat to everything he had built becomes the thing that deepens it, or, honestly and courageously, transforms it into something more aligned. The desire he was ashamed of becomes a doorway.

These things do not stay contained to the session. They move outward into marriages, partnerships, parenting, friendships, or into how a man inhabits his own skin.

The Next Frontier

Men's receptivity to this work, their hunger for it, continues to inspire me. There are men quietly doing this work right now. They are not talking about it at dinner. Not yet. But they will.

I believe the next frontier is when that changes. When men begin to tell each other. When the cultural permission to seek this kind of depth becomes available to more men, not only those willing to search alone until they find something real.

That future feels genuinely close.

In developmental psychology, what looks like dissolution is often transformation. The container we build together is a chrysalis, available to any man willing to enter consciously rather than waiting for life to force him in sideways.

If you have read this far and something in you has been quietly saying "yes, this is the thing", that recognition is worth following.

You don't have to have it figured out. The pull is enough.

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If you want to explore this work, get in touch. The conversation is where it starts.

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References

1. Levinson, D. J. (1978). The Seasons of a Man's Life. Knopf.

2. Hollis, J. (1993). The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife. Inner City Books.

3. Miller, J. B. (1976). Toward a New Psychology of Women. Beacon Press.

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