The time and place

From Dmitri Bilgere's excellent and in may ways brave book Beyond the Blame Game: Creating Compassion and Ending the Sex War in Your Life:

Women demand that men share their feelings, and men, ashamed, have no idea how. This sometimes makes women so angry that they try to make men share their feelings by applying shame. Rock singer Madonna advises women to "make him express what he feels, and then you'll know your love is real," as if he were holding back his feelings simply to be irritating.

And, even better:

When a woman says to a man, "Tell me your feelings," she probably hopes to hear a tender "I love you," not a fierce "I'm really, really angry!" or a whining "I'm felling really ashamed." Often, anger and humiliation are all a man has to share.

And that is fundamentally why men need to go to safe spaces with other men to do their healing. The time and place for a man to fight his battles, whatever those battles may be, is not in the home or with his family. The time and place is with other men - men who know how to hold the space for another man's battle. In that place a man may bring his anger and humiliation for transformation, so that he might return home the man he has always dreamed to be, the one that is capable of the deep love that his partner and family so hope to hear and feel.