Let me guess what's going through your head right now: "Real men handle their own problems." "I should be able to figure this out myself." "Asking for help means I'm weak."

I've heard it all, and I get it. Everything in your life has taught you that strength means going it alone, that asking for help is admitting defeat. But what if I told you that the opposite is true? What if getting help is actually the most powerful thing you can do?

You wake up and you're already tired. Not just physically - though God knows you barely sleep anymore - but tired in your soul. You go through the motions: work, responsibilities, maybe grab a drink to numb the edges. But somewhere along the way, you stopped living and started just surviving.

When most people think about trauma symptoms, they picture panic attacks, nightmares, or someone curled up crying. But trauma doesn't always look like what you see in movies. Especially for men. Maybe you've been told you're "fine" because you're still showing up to work every day. Maybe you think you're handling things because you haven't fallen apart completely. But trauma has a way of hiding in plain sight, wearing masks that even you might not recognize.

"I've tried therapy before. It didn't work."

I hear this regularly in my initial consultations with men who've experienced trauma. They say it like they're confessing to a personal failure, as if they're somehow broken beyond repair because traditional therapy couldn't help them heal. Here's what I've learned working specifically with men who've experienced trauma: most of the time, the problem isn't that you can't be helped. The problem is that traditional therapy approaches were developed within the same cultural system that created many of the barriers men face in the first place.

People are always surprised when they find out that a significant portion of my caseload is men dealing with trauma. I'm surprised too. When I tell people what I do for a living, I get some pretty interesting reactions. Picture this: I'm a middle-aged white lesbian woman who specializes in helping men recover from trauma. Not exactly most people's first guess, right?