There's a particular search men make late at night, often after a hard week. Why is my wife so angry. Why does she seem like a different person. Is this normal. What did I do. This piece is for the man trying to figure out what is happening in his own home, with no useful framework for what his partner is going through.

A man arrives in therapy, often referred by a partner who's been trying to get him to come in for a while. He doesn't think anything is really wrong. He's been a bit irritable, sleeping poorly, drinking a little more than he used to. His shoulders hurt. His stomach has been off for months. He thinks he might just need a vacation. Somewhere in the first or second session, the word anxiety comes up — and he resists it. Anxiety, in his mind, is something else.

A lot of men arrive in therapy with anger as their presenting concern. They want help managing it. They want techniques. They want to know why they keep getting so worked up over small things. In our experience, this is almost never quite right. Anger is rarely the problem itself. For most men we sit with, the anger is doing protective work — covering, redirecting, or substituting for something more difficult to feel. Often, what it's covering is grief.

The conventional reading of male silence is that the man is avoiding something — that he doesn't want to talk, that he's stonewalling, that he's choosing distance. Sometimes that's accurate. More often, in our clinical experience, it's something else: the silence isn't a refusal. It's an absence. Many men don't have ready access to the internal information that would be needed to answer the question.