Men need to talk too – Hypnotherapy…and not just on International Men’s Day?
Matthew is drawing attention to highlighting why it is important for men to seek help with stress-related issues.
International Men’s Day celebrates the contributions that men make to improve the quality of life in society. It’s an opportunity to highlight issues around men’s health and men’s roles in community, family, relationships and childcare.
Recent studies indicating that fewer men than women are seeking help with issues such as anxiety, stress or insomnia.
Matthew explains: “It’s not unusual for clients to cite other people as the source of their stress, and I’ve often wished some of my female clients’ partners would seek help, because it’s clear that they, too, are suffering from stress-related conditions. It seems the men in their lives don’t believe in seeking help. They also don’t seem to know how much their behaviour is affecting their families.”
Matthew is not alone in noticing a gender variation in the numbers of people seeking help. He is a member of the Association for Solution Focused Hypnotherapy (AfSFH) and in 2011 the Association conducted a survey of its members to find out more about client behavior.
Matthew explains, “73% of clients seen during the week we studied were female. Interestingly there was only a slight difference between the proportion of male or female clients seeing male or female therapists, but not enough to be significant. Clients seem to be equally comfortable seeing male or female hypnotherapists, with only a small bias towards same gender pairings.
“So, although the majority of the Association’s qualified therapists are female (72%), this doesn’t explain the fact that far more women than men seek our help. We can speculate that this might be down to a stereotypical reticence to talk about emotional issues, and studies have shown that men and women respond to stress differently, but in reality hypnotherapy is an effective approach to helping reduce stress and stress-related conditions, regardless of the client’s gender.”