Tom’s new website is here. The content of his email which brought the site to my attention takes up the remainder of this blog piece:
“For many years, people have asked me essentially the same question:
“Where can I find a simple explanation of how men heal?”
The answer has never been easy.
Over the last three decades I have written books, articles, blog posts, newsletters, and given countless interviews and workshops. The ideas are scattered across many places.
Recently I decided it was time to gather them into one place.
Today I’m pleased to introduce a new website:
TheWayMenHeal.com
The site is not a blog and it is not a therapy website.
Instead, it is an attempt to clearly explain many of the core ideas that have emerged from my work with men, women, boys, girls, grief, trauma, and healing over the past 35 years.
You’ll find sections on:
- Why men’s emotions are often difficult to see
- Action-oriented emotional processing
- Shame and dignity
- Solitude
- Grief
- The masculine side of healing
- Research related to men’s emotional lives
- A glossary of important concepts
- Frequently asked questions
One of the things I have learned over the years is that many people genuinely care about men but often misunderstand how men experience emotional pain.
Men’s healing frequently occurs in ways that are easy to overlook. We tend to notice tears, talking, and emotional disclosure. We are less likely to notice action, responsibility, service, problem solving, solitude, ritual, and purpose.
Yet these pathways are often central to men’s emotional lives.
My hope is that this site will serve as a practical and accessible resource for anyone who wants to better understand men, whether that person is a therapist, parent, spouse, partner, teacher, researcher, or simply someone trying to make sense of their own experience.
The site is still growing and will continue to expand over time.
I invite you to explore it and let me know what you think.
TheWayMenHeal.com
I hope it proves useful.
Here’s an excerpt from the boys and play sectionn
— Tom
Boys, Play, and Development
Research on play, movement, and rough-and-tumble interaction helps explain why boys often need active, physical, socially negotiated forms of learning and emotional regulation.
Many boys learn through their bodies before they learn through words. They move, chase, wrestle, compete, test limits, take small risks, laugh, fall, get back up, and negotiate rules in the middle of action.
To adults who are uncomfortable with active boyhood, this can look like disorder. But research on play suggests that physical play is not merely noise, chaos, or pre-aggression. It can be a crucial part of development.
Rough-and-tumble play, recess, movement, and active peer interaction help children practice self-control, read social signals, manage intensity, test boundaries, and learn how to stay connected while excited.
When normal boyhood energy is treated as a problem, boys may lose one of the natural pathways through which they learn regulation, relationship, and resilience.
Rough-and-Tumble Play Is Not the Same as Aggression
Researchers have long distinguished rough-and-tumble play from real aggression. Rough-and-tumble play may include chasing, wrestling, mock fighting, tumbling, laughing, fleeing, returning, and exaggerated physical movement. Aggression, by contrast, is marked by intent to harm, distress, coercion, or domination.
This distinction is essential.
When adults cannot tell the difference between play fighting and real fighting, boys’ normal play can be misread as dangerous or disruptive. That misreading may lead to unnecessary discipline, restricted movement, and the loss of important developmental experience.
Good supervision matters. Children need boundaries. But eliminating rough play entirely may remove opportunities for boys to learn how to manage strength, excitement, consent, restraint, and repair.
What Boys Learn Through Active Play
Active play teaches lessons that are hard to deliver through lectures.
Through physical play, boys often learn:
- how hard is too hard,
- when another child is no longer having fun,
- how to stop,
- how to re-enter play after conflict,
- how to manage winning and losing,
- how to read faces and body language,
- how to negotiate rules,
- how to take turns leading and following,
- and how to keep excitement from becoming harm.
These are not trivial skills. They are social and emotional regulation skills.
In other words, active play may be one of the ways boys learn empathy, self-control, boundaries, and connection.
Movement as Regulation
Many boys regulate emotion and attention through movement. Sitting still for long periods may be especially difficult for boys who need active engagement in order to organize themselves.
Recess, outdoor play, physical education, and unstructured movement are not luxuries. They can be part of how children reset attention, discharge tension, build social competence, and return to learning.
This connects strongly to the broader theme of action-oriented emotional processing. For many males, from boyhood into adulthood, movement helps emotion and stress become manageable.
Play and the Social Brain
Jaak Panksepp emphasized the importance of play systems in mammalian development. His work suggested that rough-and-tumble play is rooted in ancient brain systems and helps young mammals develop social subtlety, self-regulation, and sensitivity to others.
This perspective is important because it frames play not as an optional extra, but as a biological and social need.
Boys who are drawn to rough physical play may not simply be acting out. They may be seeking developmental experiences their brains and bodies need.
When Schools Misread Boys
Schools often reward quiet, verbal, compliant, sedentary behavior. Those are useful capacities. But when they become the only accepted model of maturity, many boys are placed at a disadvantage.
Boys who need movement may be viewed as disruptive. Boys who learn through action may be viewed as inattentive. Boys who enjoy rough play may be viewed as aggressive. Boys who compete may be viewed as insensitive.
Some boys do need help learning restraint, empathy, and self-control. But those capacities may develop better through guided play than through constant suppression.
When normal active development is treated primarily as pathology, boys may begin to experience themselves as problems.
The Link to Male Emotional Development
Boys’ play is not separate from men’s emotional lives. It is one of the roots.
If boys learn to regulate emotion through movement, competition, risk, humor, physicality, and shared action, then we should not be surprised when adult men continue to process emotion through action, work, exercise, solitude, problem-solving, and side-by-side activity.
The adult masculine side of healing may have developmental roots in boyhood patterns of learning through the body.
This does not mean boys should be left unmanaged or that all rough behavior is healthy. It means boys need adults who can distinguish development from disruption and energy from aggression.
A Humane Interpretation
Boys need language. They need empathy. They need self-control. They need emotional awareness. But they may not always acquire these capacities through stillness and verbal instruction alone.
Many boys need movement, play, risk, contact, competition, laughter, boundaries, correction, and freedom.
A culture that misunderstands boys’ play may later misunderstand men’s emotional lives. The same boy who once needed to run, wrestle, build, and test limits may become the man who needs to walk, work, repair, exercise, drive, or create in order to process emotion.
When we understand boys more accurately, we begin building a more humane understanding of men.
References
Smith, P. K. (2023). Play fighting (rough-and-tumble play) in children. International Journal of Play, 12(1), 1–20.
Pellegrini, A. D. (1989). Elementary school children’s rough-and-tumble play. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 4(2), 245–260.
Scott, E., & Panksepp, J. (2003). Rough-and-tumble play in human children. Aggressive Behavior, 29(6), 539–551.
Flanders, J. L., Simard, M., Paquette, D., Parent, S., Vitaro, F., Pihl, R. O., & Séguin, J. R. (2009). Rough-and-tumble play and the regulation of aggression: An observational study of father-child play dyads. Aggressive Behavior, 35(4), 285–295.
Panksepp, J. (2008). Play, ADHD, and the construction of the social brain: Should the first class each day be recess? American Journal of Play, 1(1), 55–79.”
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