During my recent Shame Bite with Erica Liebman, Psy.D. MA, MEd, on Men, Shame and Vulnerability, I had a humbling realization about my own clinical framework.

In my clinical practice and consultation groups, I talk about shame as the ultimate relational disrupter. It is an evolutionary survival mechanism—a biological alarm system designed to alert us to a break in connection, because historically, isolation from the tribe meant death.

It’s a framework I’ve leaned on heavily. But recently, while recording an episode of Shame Bites with Dr. Liebman, I hit a wall of my own making.

I realized that the way I have been teaching and conceptualizing shame leaves out a massive, foundational piece of the puzzle. I had been treating shame as if it were exclusively about a break in connection that occurs in a certain way – triggering a sense of not belonging based on not being accepted, loveable, and worthy. What I was missing—and what is so often the hidden variable in therapeutic impasses with male clients—is that for men, shame can just as frequently about a break in status which is another pathway to expulsion from the group or connection.

Owning My Countertransference

This is a blind spot born of my own gender socialization. As a cis-woman, shame brought on by being misunderstood, not worthy or acceptable (pretty enough, smart enough, taken seriously) is a language I speak fluently. Furthermore, I realized I carried a personal story and bias: I have historically looked at intense competitiveness with a degree of disdain, while viewing sharing, emotional vulnerability, and cooperation in an inherently positive light.

But during our conversation, Erica—who serves on the board of the APA’s Division 51 for Men and Masculinities—helped me see how limiting that binary is. Neither cooperation nor competition is inherently good or bad. If you flip the switch, you can see that they are simply two different evolutionary strategies for achieving relational safety:

• The Horizontal Axis (Cooperation): Finding safety through belonging, vulnerability, and mutual support.
• The Vertical Axis (Competition): Finding safety through hierarchy, competence, authority, and strength.

For many men, status is a form of connection. It implies a relational contract where you are valued and protected because of your utility and your strengths. When a man experiences a drop in status—whether through job loss, a relationship rupture, or perceived weakness—his evolutionary alarm system fires just as strongly as if he were being physically exiled.

When the Therapy Room Triggers Status-Shame

This is precisely why traditional therapeutic validation so often backfires with men.

Historically, our field has leaned into a more traditionally feminine style of communication. We design our offices to be soft, horizontal spaces. We ask clients to step off the competitive ladder, sit with their softer emotions, and cooperate with us.

But if a male client is heavily socialized to find safety through the vertical axis of status, demanding that he instantly drop his armor doesn’t feel safe. It feels like an execution of his status. As Dr. Liebman pointed out via the evolutionary work of Paul Gilbert, when an individual is locked in a rigid, threat-based masculine state, they actually perceive a therapist’s compassion as a hierarchical danger.

If he softens, he loses status. If he loses status, he is unsafe. So, his shame masks itself as the only thing that can restore vertical safety: irritability, intellectualization, withdrawal, or defensiveness.

Shifting from Deficit to Maladaptive Strength

If we want to review this with clinical accuracy, we have to look at the data. When we expect our male clients to shed their drive for competence, decisiveness and being respected in order to engage in therapy we might not be creating a welcoming space. In some cases, we might actually be doing the opposite by triggering status-shame and contributing to the almost 50% drop out rate of men and boys who seek therapy (Seidler et. al, 2021).

But the solution isn’t to pathologize these traits or label them as simple deficits.

Instead, as clinicians, we need to flip the switch. We must reframe a man’s defensive posture as a maladaptive strength rather than a character flaw. The hyper-independence, the competitive drive, and even the stoicism are the exact tools that allowed him to maintain status and survive in a world that tries to shape boys to disconnect from their softer feelings incredibly early. Their stoicism or self-reliance may be the exact strengths they use to protect their status, and hence the sense that they matter in the world and to others, even if those same qualities get in the way of connection sometimes.

Our job is to honor that armor. We need to use psychoeducation to explicitly name the interplay between status and shame, level the hierarchical threat in the room, and leverage positive masculinity (like loyalty, protectiveness, and leadership) to build a bridge toward deeper relational safety.

Watch my conversation with Erica here: