Masculine energy in relationships is something most men have never been properly taught. They’ve been handed two versions, one that’s domineering and one that’s completely hollowed out. Neither works. The first drives his partner away. The second bores her. What actually works is something most men have never been taught: how to embody masculine energy in a way that is grounded, leading, and genuinely connective.

That's what this episode is about.

In this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay talks with GS Youngblood, men's coach, relationship expert, and author of The Masculine in Relationship, about what positive masculinity looks like inside a real partnership and why so many men are getting it wrong without realizing it.

GS built his Masculine Blueprint after his own marriage fell apart. What he found was that the failure wasn’t about being a bad person. It was about not being grounded, not leading, and not knowing how to build real emotional connection with his partner. His framework is the answer he wishes he had then.

The blueprint has three pillars:

• Respond vs react: Stay grounded when she is emotional. Stop being reactive.

• Provide structure: Lead in the relationship. Know your needs and act on them.

• Create safety: Build emotional connection and emotional safety so she can actually relax into the relationship.

GS and Marc also get into nice guy syndrome, polarity in relationships, nervous system regulation, sexual leadership, and what emotional leadership actually looks like the morning after a fight. This isn’t theory. It’s a practical, honest conversation about what it takes to be the man a relationship needs.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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Most men don't struggle in relationships because they don't care. They struggle because nobody ever taught them how relationships actually work, at a neurological, psychological, and structural level. And by the time most couples realize something is badly wrong, the damage’s been quietly building for years.

In this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay sits down with Dr. Stan Tatkin, clinical psychologist, researcher, developer of the psychobiological approach to couple's therapy (PACT), and author of the bestselling book Wired for Love — for a frank, science-backed conversation about what it really takes to build a healthy relationship. Dr. Tatkin doesn't deal in platitudes. He brings evolutionary biology, hard neuroscience, and some uncomfortable truths about what human beings are actually like, and what genuine relationship advice looks like when it takes all of that seriously.

Marc draws on what he hears from the men he works with, men who feel reduced to a paycheck, disconnected from their partners, unsure how to fix a relationship that has slowly hollowed out, and asks Dr. Tatkin directly what to do about it. The answers are practical, grounded, and unlike anything most couples counseling has ever told them.

The episode covers:

• Emotional safety; what it actually is and how to build it by design, not by luck

• Why love and chemistry are not enough to sustain a relationship, and what actually is

• The neuroscience of the male brain vs female brain and why it matters during conflict

• How to govern a relationship like a team, and why that's the most practical relationship advice you'll ever get

• Why physical intimacy alone, including sex, is not a reliable foundation for a lasting relationship

 "We see couple work as more like training for a sport, a two-person system, a team that has to work under increasing stress while remaining collaborative and cooperative."

If that framing sounds unfamiliar, that's the point. Healthy relationships, in Dr. Tatkin's view, aren’t the result of compatibility or chemistry. They’re built, deliberately, by two people who decide to design something together and hold each other to it. For men who want to know how to be a better partner but aren't sure where to start, this episode gives you the framework. 

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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The male loneliness epidemic is not just a trending phrase. It’s a quiet crisis playing out in the lives of millions of men, showing up in emergency rooms, in divorce statistics, and in therapy offices where men are finally starting to talk about what they’ve long kept buried.

That’s exactly where this conversation begins.

In this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay sits down with returning guest Dr. Ryan McKelley, a research psychologist and expert in masculinity and men’s mental health, to unpack why so many men are experiencing deep social isolation, and what that isolation is actually doing to them.

The episode opens with a striking statistic: a 2018 study found that one in three men reported having no one to call in a physical emergency, not a mental health crisis, but a car accident or a heart attack. That number sets the tone for everything that follows.

Dr. McKelley and Marc cover the difference between loneliness and solitude, the hidden face of male depression symptoms, the link between depression and anger, and why men’s therapy and men’s groups offer something most men have never had access to before.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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Modern masculinity has a missing piece, and most men feel it without being able to name it. They pay the bills, hold down big jobs, do everything they’re supposed to do as adults. But when they look in the mirror, they don’t see a man. They see a boy in a man’s costume.

In this solo episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast, host and therapist Marc Azoulay is making the case that what most men are missing is initiation. For hundreds of thousands of years, cultures marked the transition from boyhood to manhood through structured trials led by older men. That tradition stopped about 50 years ago, and nothing’s replaced it.

Without genuine challenge, the nervous system starts treating ordinary social pressures like survival threats. Marc’s arguing that life has become too easy from a survival standpoint, not painless, but too comfortable to trigger real growth. The result’s a generation of men who’re anxious, isolated, and quietly waiting for permission to feel like they’ve arrived.

This episode covers how to identify the one core insecurity driving that imposter feeling, how to design the right level of challenge for self-improvement for men, what the fairytale Iron John reveals about masculine identity and breaking free from comfort, and why men bond through doing rather than talking. It’s a direct and practical look at how to build mental toughness and what becoming a man actually requires in the modern world.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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Addiction is one of the most misunderstood forces in men's lives. It doesn’t always look like rock bottom. It can look like a high-functioning executive who has a spotless professional record. It can look like the life of the party who stays for the after-party when everyone else goes home. It can look like a college student pulling straight A's while quietly unraveling in private.

That’s exactly what this conversation is about.

In this April Roundtable episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast, host Marc Azoulay, himself in recovery from polysubstance use, sits down with three therapists who specialize in addiction recovery: Jack Lambert, a New York-based therapist trained at the Addiction Institute; Dr. Michael Zang, a gambling psychologist and founder of Incumental, a gambling recovery support platform; and Tim Mullins, a substance abuse therapist who entered the field after his own long recovery journey and 11 years in Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACA).

Together, they cover the full landscape: what the signs of addiction actually look like, how isolation and deceit function as warning signals, what role shame vs. guilt plays in the recovery process, how spirituality in addiction recovery fits in (even for men who resist it), and what sobriety really feels like in those early, unvarnished months.

This isn’t a polished, clinical overview. It’s a candid, experienced, and sometimes raw conversation from people who’ve seen addiction from both the inside and the outside. And it’s a conversation that could genuinely change the way a man looks at his own relationship with substances, gambling, gaming, porn, social media, or any pattern he’s been quietly defending.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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Emotional numbness does not always look like a crisis. For many men, it is quieter, a steady flatness, a sense of static that will not lift no matter how much they push.

In this solo episode of the Men's Therapy Online Podcast, Marc Azoulay, therapist, coach, and founder of Men's Therapy Online, is breaking down one of the most common yet least understood struggles facing modern men: the feeling of being emotionally switched off.

Marc argues that what most men are experiencing is not a mindset problem, not laziness, and not something that will pass if they keep grinding harder. It’s a neurological issue rooted in a depleted opioid system, the part of the brain responsible for deep satisfaction, contentment, and enoughness. When that system goes quiet, a man stops feeling alive.

He covers anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure), and alexithymia symptoms (difficulty identifying and naming emotions),  that quietly accumulate when a man is always seeking but never arriving. He also walks through the mental fog causes that keep men stuck, chronic overstimulation, dopamine hijacking, and the fear of slowing down.

"Before I got into therapy and coaching and self-improvement, I was dead," Marc says. "I was doing all the things right,  the gym, dating, building a business, but I just felt completely empty."

The fix, he explains, requires going inward: starving the dopamine system through deliberate stillness, then learning to feel the body again through somatic awareness. On the other side of the discomfort — the fear, the pain, the noise — is what Marc calls enoughness. A felt sense of safety. Of being present on the earth.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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The fawn response is one of the most misunderstood patterns in men’s psychology. It doesn’t look like weakness. It looks like generosity, agreeableness, and keeping the peace. But underneath it, there’s usually a man who is terrified of being rejected, disconnected from his own needs, and slowly building resentment he has no healthy outlet for.

That’s exactly where this conversation goes.

In this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast, host Marc Azoulay sits down with Nima Rahmany — ex-chiropractor turned men’s coach and founder of the Becoming Trigger Proof framework — to unpack why so many high-performing men are secretly running a fawn response in their relationships, and why no amount of mindset work or personal development fixes it.

The episode is honest, direct, and at times uncomfortable, exactly the kind of conversation most men have never had. Nima opens with a personal story of becoming physically violent in a relationship, tracing it back not to anger, but to years of fawning: people-pleasing, self-abandoning, and suppressing his truth out of fear. That moment of violence, he explains, was the explosion that follows years of suffocation.

“Fawning is saying yes when the body is saying no.”

And for many men, it is so ingrained it doesn’t even register as a choice.

The episode covers:

Nima is direct, personal, and deeply knowledgeable. He isn’t offering a theory. He lived it. And the result is a framework that’s changing how men relate to themselves and the people they love.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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Divorce recovery is rarely just about legal paperwork and splitting assets. For most men, it’s one of the most disorienting experiences of their adult lives, and for those going through a high-conflict divorce, the chaos can stretch on for years.

That’s exactly what this episode unpacks.

In this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay talks with Karen McMahon, a divorce coach, host of the Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast, and author of Stepping Out of Chaos: Turning Pain Into Possibility. Karen has fifteen years of coaching experience and a three-and-a-half-year high-conflict divorce behind her. This conversation is equal parts honest and practical.

“Death is first, divorce is second,” she says, before noting that many of her clients would argue the order should be flipped. Grief is one thing. Divorce is something else. You’re dealing with your own emotions, your ex’s reactions, your children’s confusion, money, and where everyone is going to live, often all at the same time. Karen describes her own divorce as “an absolute living hell”, and the greatest gift she’s ever received. What the pain gave her was a mirror.

What causes divorce, she argues, is rarely one dramatic event. It’s a slow breakdown of respect and communication in relationships, small problems swept under the rug until there is, as she puts it, “a mountain in the middle of the living room.” Every upset, she tells her clients, is a setup: a chance to look inward rather than blame the other person. Codependency in relationships, the martyr dynamic, self-abandonment dressed up as love, these are the patterns she helps men work through. And most of them go back to childhood.

Her core message on how to survive divorce and how to cope with divorce is the same: use the pain. If you get through the legal process without doing the inner work, you’ll re-create the same relationship with a different face. The episode covers the key terrain of real divorce recovery:

The episode closes on generational trauma. “Addiction stops here. Abuse stops here. Codependence stops here.” Real divorce recovery, Karen argues, isn’t just a fresh start for one person, it’s a chance to break a cycle that may have run for generations.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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Workaholics rarely see themselves coming. The long hours feel necessary. The grind feels justified. And the people closest to them - a spouse, a child, a close friend — are left standing at the edge of a life that keeps getting smaller while the work keeps getting bigger.

That’s where this conversation begins.

In this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay is sitting down with performance coach and therapist Michael Ceely, who specializes in working with high-achieving men, workaholics, and driven professionals. Together, they’re unpacking why so many successful men are using work not as a tool, but as a drug, and what it’s actually costing them.

The episode is making one thing very clear: workaholism is not about ambition. It’s about avoidance. Michael is explaining that the modern workaholic is not grinding because he loves the work. He is grinding because stopping feels unbearable. The work is serving as a coping mechanism, a way to self-soothe anxiety, sidestep difficult emotions, and outrun an inner critic that is never satisfied.

“You know that you’re a workaholic if you are really actually addicted to work, you’re using it as a way to self-soothe. Maybe you had an argument with your spouse. What do you do? You go work for five hours and you feel better.”

It is showing up when a man:

Hustle culture is making all of it worse. The relentless glorification of overwork on social media is creating an environment where being a workaholic is not just accepted, it’s celebrated. Comparison syndrome is doing the rest of the damage, turning a highlight reel of other people’s success into a personal failure narrative that keeps men chained to their desks.

Marc and Michael are walking through what it looks like to break the cycle, covering perfectionism and anxiety, the ROI framework for real-life decisions, the psychology of fear-driven productivity, and what active recovery looks like for men who can’t sit still.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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Writing a book is one of the most revealing things a man can do. It forces you to sit with yourself, confront your insecurities, and commit to a process with no guaranteed payoff. For most men, that is exactly where the growth is, and it’s exactly where this conversation begins.

In this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay sits down with Magnus Johnson. He’s a former Green Beret, founder of Mission 22, and author of The Men We Make. Magnus talks about what writing a book taught him about men’s mental health, healthy masculinity, emotional intelligence, and what it really means to raise a son today.

Magnus grew up in a van, was homeschooled on the road, and struggled with dyslexia and dysgraphia. Writing was never supposed to be his thing. But at 44, something shifted. He stopped caring what people thought and started writing anyway. The result is a novel told twice: the same story, two different outcomes. It explores how the small choices of the people around us shape the course of a life.

The conversation covers:

Writing a book, Magnus argues, forces a man out of strategy and into honesty. You can’t fake your way through 500 words a day for four months. You either show up or you don’t.

For more podcasts, blogs, and to get involved in the Men's Therapy Online Community, visit www.menstherapy.online.

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