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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Therapy for men has a problem, and it starts long before a man ever walks into a session.

In this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast, Marc Azoulay is sitting down with Timothy Wienecke. Tim is a therapist, educator, air force veteran, and host of the American Masculinity Podcast. Together, they dig into how the mental health industry’s falling short when it comes to serving men, what counselor training’s missing, and what better care actually looks like.

Tim’s drawing on years of clinical work and guest lecturing in graduate programs to make the case that men are not simply harder to reach, they’re a demographic the system hasn’t been properly trained to serve.

The conversation is covering:

 “The field in general is almost always 10 years behind,” Tim’s explaining. “And if you put in men’s issues, tack another generation on that.”

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Spirituality is not the first word most men reach for when they are trying to fix their lives. But according to Dr. Dain Heer, it might be the most important one.

That’s the question Dr. Dain Heer is bringing to this episode of the Men's Therapy Podcast. Dr. Heer is the co-creator of Access Consciousness, author of Being You, Changing the World and Return of the Gentleman. He’s one of the most compelling voices at the intersection of spirituality and modern masculinity. In his conversation with Marc Azoulay, he’s presenting a fundamentally different way for men to navigate their lives — one built on energetic awareness, intuition, and spiritual practice rather than judgment and control.

The episode’s covering a lot: why men's emotional intelligence gets suppressed early, how people-pleasing and control are two sides of the same coin, what the access consciousness clearing statement actually does, and why the most powerful move a man can make is to stop trying to be right.

"Energy is our first language," Dr. Heer is explaining. "It's the one that we've been so far distanced from because we've grown up in a world where we value thinking, we value judgments."

The result, he’s arguing, is a generation of men who have done everything right on paper and still feel profoundly empty. Not because something is wrong with them. But because they are living inside a framework of judgment that has no room for what is actually true.

That’s what this conversation is trying to change.

How to become a mentor? What does it take to go from a self-described adrenaline junkie who sought his masculine identity in war zones and deadly mountain climbs, to one of the most thoughtful mentors for young men alive today? That is the question at the heart of this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast.

That is where this conversation goes.

In this episode, Marc Azoulay talks with John Graham, former US Foreign Service diplomat, founder of the Giraffe Heroes Project, and creator of the wildly popular Badass Granddad video series, about what it really means to be a man, and how older men can step up and lead younger ones.

The episode makes clear that for much of Graham’s early life, redefining masculinity was the last thing on his mind. He was too busy living what he thought manhood looked like: freighter ships in the Far East, hitchhiking through an active war in Algeria, climbing the deadly north face of Denali, and filing dispatches from the early days of Vietnam. John Wayne was his idol. Danger was his compass.

“I became an adrenaline junkie. The meaning of my life was to become a man, and I found that in violent adventure.” And that strategy got expensive.

It shows up when a man:

Not because he lacked courage, but because he had built his whole identity around being feared instead of being known.

That is the deeper problem here. When your whole sense of self is anchored in physical dominance and risk-taking, you lose contact with the rest of yourself. You stop feeling. You stop connecting. You start expecting the world to reward your self-abandonment. And when it doesn’t, something breaks.

Marc and John talk through what it looks like to break that pattern, touching on emotional risk-taking, mentorship for young men, masculine identity, the power of small acts of service, and what it truly means to ask: what is a real man? One kind of strength is about proving yourself. The other is about giving yourself.

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Nice guy syndrome is at the center of a quiet crisis in modern masculinity. It is shaping how men date, relate, suppress their needs, and carry resentment into adulthood. In this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast, host Marc Azoulay is sitting down with Kelvin Davis. He is a men’s therapist and coach specializing in male emotional development and relational health. He's the author of the book "Be a Good Man, Not a Nice Guy". His work is focusing on helping men move from approval-seeking patterns into grounded integrity.

Kelvin approaches nice guy syndrome not as a flaw to shame. He is seeing it as a learned survival strategy, one many men adopt early in life to avoid rejection and conflict. Rather than asking what is a nice guy in superficial terms, he is exploring the deeper emotional drivers behind the behavior.

“A lot of men confuse niceness with goodness,” Kelvin explains. “But niceness is often a strategy. It’s about trying to control how you’re perceived.”

He is describing men who overextend in dating, struggle with porn addiction, and feel chronically misunderstood in relationships. Kelvin is emphasizing that the issue is not effort. It is authenticity. Marc is guiding the discussion toward solutions, examining how men’s therapy, boundaries, and emotional resilience are reshaping modern masculinity.

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

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