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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Our thanks to cp for this:

“As soon as women gain political power, they organise the rules to suit their own reproductive preference of hypergamy through rotating temporary monogamy. This is the sexual freedom which motivates her. There are overriding biological reasons why women are programmed in this way. She seeks resources for herself and her children, she wants the best possible genes for those children, and she (subconsciously?) desires different fathers for her brood, as this will minimise the possibility of genetic defects pervading her entire ‘family’.

[A family = ‘a woman and her children’ according to Harriet Harman and her 1990 publication ‘The Family Way’, provided for the Institute For Public Policy Research. In it, she states “It cannot be assumed that males are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means of social cohesion.” ]

Hence, we have ‘no fault’ divorce, originally introduced into 1950s America by NAWL, the National Association of Women Lawyers. Now prevalent across the West, it is a thinly-disguised means of asset-stripping men while madam moves up in the world with a house, her first kids, and child support.

What else does madam need..? Well, she requires that men, still the majority of the income tax base (72%) should pay for her advanced education, facilitate her placement in the workplace (putting her in proximity to higher value men) through AA, ESG and DEI initiatives. She needs a generous welfare system, with unlimited numbers of children provided for – as a safety net should it all go wrong (or if she’s too lazy to take advantage of her facilitated opportunities). She needs abortion ‘rights’ so that she can forget any little mistakes she made.

So where does that leave us..? The West, once the driver of progress, is now crippled by stagnant or declining real wages since the workplace was swamped by women, often destroying meritocracy in the process. There is a growing gap between rich and poor which is all too real (unlike the imaginary ‘gender pay gap’). There is unsustainable public debt, much of it used to finance the social security of women through welfare, and promoting the over-production of young female graduates. The debt will be subject to Stein’s Law of Economics – if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Abruptly.

Meanwhile, women, safe in the social cocoon provided for them, and blithely unaware of much beyond themselves, refuse to engage with men beneath their pay grade. Their ‘standards’ of hypergamy have become astronomical. In the US, they threatened a (quite ridiculous) 4B Movement because they were a bit peeved that the Nov 2024 presidential election didn’t go their way, and they didn’t get Kamala Harris in power, to further increase the economic and social pressure on men!

They just don’t get it! When women induce social situations where men can’t have sex with them, men quickly realise that the ladies are simply vectors of materialistic aggravation. A whole lot of hard work, without a compensation package.

So – we check out. What does society offer us under Starmer, who built his career by pandering to feminists? He signalled his credentials in the 2012 Levitt Report which he co-authored with Alison Levitt, and has a predominately female Cabinet, including a Home Secretary who wants mandatory chemical castration for male sex offenders, while ignoring the rates of false accusation for such offences (the forged statistics of the Levitt Report were handy, here). Meanwhile, she aims to close women’s prisons. Those women will turn on Starmer when he no longer serves a purpose, or if he upsets them. Louise Haigh, Lucy Powell, Angela Rayner… He’s got a lot to learn, and is fiddling while Rome burns.”

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Our thanks to Nigel for this. He writes:

“As an example of how female victimhood plays out in public services, this is a very good example. The report is detailed and so one can see the story unfolding. As a couple of women collude in using their supposed victimhood to attack a male colleague.

Surprising to me is that the Panel used common sense. What would surprise people not in public services is the sheer triviality of the accusations that fuelled this investigation and panel. Illustrating the “category creep” whereby such stuff is called “sexual harassment”. I note that the spark for this vendetta appears to have been the accused officers judgement about a DV case. A question that does occur to me, how can a Sergeant continue if the panel has found she is the sort of person to lie and pursue a vendetta against one of her Officers? The rank has an absolutely pivotal role in any force (Oops sorry “service”). But I expect no action will be taken.”

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Today’s video is here (2:07).

We’re posting videos every day from the Comedy Channel of our award-winning website Laughing at Feminists.

Remember, it’s more than important to laugh at feminists, it’s a civic duty. 

Today’s video is here (1:13:36).

Over a period of more than two years we’re posting links to one video daily from the J4MB YouTube channel. The channel includes our media appearances since 2012, 300+ videos of talks and other materials from the International Conferences on Men’s Issues (2014 – ) and other men’s issues conferences we’ve been involved with, and so much more. The individual conference playlists are here.

Our website Campaign for Merit in Business was created in the light of the considerable evidence of a causal link between increasing gender diversity on boards and corporate financial decline. Mike Buchanan, Steve Moxon and Dr Catherine Hakim (the originator of Preference Theory) presented evidence to House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries in 2012, the video of their House of Commons evidence session is here (56:50).

Finally, we run the award-winning website Laughing at Feminists. The related comedy channel (170+ videos) is here. Remember, it’s more than important to laugh at feminists, it’s a civic duty.  

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If you’re a man with a drinking problem and you’d like to be abstinent, you should check out my initiative Men Stop Drinking.

There are many routes from problem drinking to sobriety. The fastest and most effective option – the option I used myself – is disulfiram (Antabuse), a drug licensed by the FDA in 1951 (75 years ago). Paul Elam and I recently co-wrote a short book, ANTABUSE: The one-stage program for alcohol abstinence.

I host Zoom video meetings daily (Monday – Saturday) for men with drinking problems. The meetings start at 7:00pm (19:00) GMT/UTC and last at least an hour. Details of the philosophy behind the meetings, and guidelines for them, can be found here. You can join the meetings by clicking here.

The meeting time has been chosen to give convenient access to men living in the UK and other European countries, and as far west as the Pacific coast of the United States.

Interesting (video, 1:12:45).

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Interesting.

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Our thanks to a regular contributor (cp) for pointing us to this, a free Kindle book he wrote under a pseudonym. I’ve downloaded it. He writes:

“Back in 2021, exasperated at the showpiece trials of Harvey Weinstein on the say-so of ‘innocent’ #MeToo ingenues who had never heard of the casting couch and didn’t know what to expect when they visited the hotel room of a film producer at 2am, I made my first stumbling forays into self-publishing. The result was ‘We Won’t Need Gillette When the Taliban Arrive’ by Ken Jataimu. There was a very good reason for that pseudonym.

Kenjataimu (literally ‘wise man time’) is the Japanese term for the devastating wave of clarity, calm, and often regret that washes over a man, immediately after orgasm. He can suddenly see, often with uncomfortable clarity, the underlying motivations of the woman he’s with.

I’ll bet Mr Weinstein had a few such moments. But, unlike the ‘starlets’ who only wanted to use him to get into films, he was gentlemanly enough not to launch legal action, seeking redress for the consequences of his own actions. In the event, I needn’t have bothered writing anything. The world treated Ken’s ramblings with indifference! But, they’re free on Kindle this week!!”

The full description on Amazon:

“Men will face battles aplenty in their lives. They must compete with other men for status, power and resources, including the sought-after prize of a female with whom to mate. They will be expected to hand over their hard-won material gains to this woman, who will bask in her new social status. And, if you’re lucky, she won’t betray you for a better deal should one come along. Because, in all our epic adventures, there will be no greater adversary to face than the molecule oestrogen. Life, for males, is a war against oestrogen, from day one. In mammals, female is the default position for life itself. In the womb, we develop in an environment saturated with female hormone, and our characteristics will be feminine, unless we grow a pair pretty quickly. Fortunately, that’s what happens. We experience a testosterone surge at seven weeks or so, followed by another blast which endures for three months after birth.

The effects of sex steroids on the body are well understood – but, on the mind, rather less so. However, the neuroendocrinology of the left and right brain hemispheres is undergoing a radical comprehension, turning the origins of empathy and creativity upside down. Earlier assumptions are so far wide of the mark that they are, basically, untrue. This hasn’t prevented the myths from being used by feminists to advance their cause, at the expense of men. ‘If you want an empathetic, creative manager – hire a woman!’…..and so on. Feminists don’t want you to know that men evolved to be better at both competition and co-operation with other men. All-male teams perform better than all-female, or those of mixed sex. The right brain, dominant in males, is not only the root of human empathy, but is also particularly suited to creativity. The non-depolarising adrenergic circuitry doesn’t fatigue, and can withstand sustained demands – a male characteristic useful both for soldiers and for the constant practice necessary to become a master of any craft. Think guitar practice. By contrast, left-brain, pleasure and comfort seeking dopamine neurotransmission gives up too easily whenever a task becomes difficult.

Together with other less desirable left brain traits, such as a tendency to follow rules, creativity doesn’t stand a chance. The role of oestrogen-governed left brain activity will be seen to be critically important in typically female behaviours. That mind cares only about itself, gaining resources, and bringing the best possible offspring into the world. As for the fallout – the effects on men can be devastating. But, nobody cares. It’s a hard world for young men out there, and the battles are increasing in intensity.
Testosterone can easily be converted to oestrogen in the body, but the reverse can’t happen. It’s a very sneaky trick for Mother Nature to continually get her own way. Even before you were born, Nature was templating you to be a serf, born only to be empathetic to women, to serve them and give them what they want.

Testosterone is facing unprecedented environmental and cultural challenges. The culture wars have already kicked off, and testosterone is losing – just when there are looming pressures on resources such as oil. Soon, there will be a descent into chaos, unless we can gain some understanding of what’s going on inside our own heads, and behind the inscrutable smiles of our loveliest muses. Because female, left-brain, oestrogen thinking won’t allowthem to see the damage they are doing. That left brain believes that its world-view is the correct one. While believing themselves omniscient, women actually understand very few of the universal underlying principles which govern us. But, women are desirable, courtesy of the testosterone-amplified right brain chemistry of men. Tragically, therefore, the human condition becomes a case of the blind leading the besotted. Take a look around you..!”

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Our thanks to Gerry for this (video, 29:06).

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