Loneliness and Isolation Therapy for Men
For the man who has people around him and nowhere to be honest. What the work is, the forms it takes, and how to start, in Long Beach or by video anywhere in California.
When you have people around you and nobody who knows you.
Most of the men who come to me about loneliness are not short of company. They have a partner, coworkers who like them, friends from years back. What they do not have is one place where they are allowed to stop managing how they come across. That is a particular kind of isolation, and it is easy to miss because the calendar looks full.
It usually was not chosen. Handling things alone was taught early, praised often, and it worked. The cost shows up later. You know a great deal about other people and they know your job title. You do the calling and the organizing, and you are not sure what would be left if you stopped. Ask yourself what you need and the answer comes back as logistics.
This page is the practical version: what I work on with men who feel this way, and the forms the work takes. The longer argument about how men get trained into it is in the journal.
How isolation and private behavior feed each other.
A lot of my work is with men on compulsive sexual behavior and pornography use, and loneliness sits underneath much of it. Not always, and I am wary of single explanations. But the loop is common enough to describe.
What individual sessions are for.
In individual therapy we treat disclosure as a skill with parts, because parts can be learned. Knowing what you feel while you are feeling it, instead of three days later. Finding words more exact than fine and stressed. Saying one true thing to another person and staying in the room while it is received, which is less comfortable than it sounds the first few times.
We also work on knowing your own yes and no, so that being close to people stops feeling like one more obligation. For many men that means boundaries and assertiveness before it means anything else.
Then it leaves the room. You try a smaller version of the same honesty with someone in your actual life, a brother, a friend, a partner, and we look at what happened. I do not promise how that goes. The work is aimed at adding one more setting to the one you already have, used with a few people, in the hours when you need it. It is not aimed at turning you into a different kind of man.
I also run a men's group, because hearing another man describe your week in his own words does something an individual hour cannot. The current details are on the group page.
Living between two cultures.
Some loneliness is about place and language. I was born and raised in Madrid and came to the United States at thirteen without English. If you are carrying the particular loneliness of straddling two cultures and belonging completely to neither, you will not have to explain it to me from the beginning.
Sessions can be in English or Spanish, or both if that is how you actually think.
Long Beach, Huntington Beach, or video.
The office is at 192 Park Ave in Long Beach. From Huntington Beach it is a real drive up Pacific Coast Highway, and I would rather say so than pretend it is close. Some men make it because an hour in a room with a door closed matters to them. Others work by secure video, which is available anywhere in California.
I am licensed in California only. If you are not sure which format fits, that is a fair thing to ask on a first call.
What men ask before they call about something this hard to name.
Frequently Asked Questions
You do not need a crisis to call
A short phone consultation is a low-stakes way to hear how I work and ask what you need to ask. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.