I know a guy. Sharp brother. Successful. Raised by a man who fixed everything himself, never complained, never asked for help. When his marriage fell apart, he did what his father would have done — he powered through it. He went to work every day, kept his game face on, came home to an empty apartment, and drank himself to sleep. For two years. Nobody knew. He thought he was handling it. He wasn't handling anything. He was drowning in a suit.

Sound familiar? Maybe the drinking isn't your thing. Maybe it's the rage. Or the isolation. Or the way you haven't really laughed — not really laughed — in longer than you can remember. You're a man who's been through divorce, and the world handed you a playbook that said: stay strong, stay quiet, keep moving. And you followed it. Because that's what men do.

That playbook left something out. The divorce rearranged your entire identity — your role as a husband, your daily life with your kids, your financial stability, your sense of home. Seismic. The kind of disruption that professionals train specifically to help people navigate. Handling it alone is how good men end up in very dark places.

The Numbers Don't Lie — And They Should Scare You a Little

According to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS, 2025), only about 1 in 4 men who experience depression ever receives counseling or therapy. In 2023, just 17 percent of American men saw a mental health professional, compared to 28.5 percent of women — even though men die by suicide at a rate nearly four times higher than women.

Read that again. Men are dying at four times the rate, and going to therapy at half the rate. That gap has a body count.

Dr. Myers, director of the Marital Therapy Clinic at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, stated plainly: when men go through divorce and experience a complete severing of family bonds — especially from their children — they can become suicidal. Not dramatic. Not theoretical. Real.

And yet here we are. Still telling men to toughen up.

Michael Phelps — the most decorated Olympian in history, a man who accomplished what no human being had ever accomplished in the pool — has spoken openly about his post-career depression and how therapy saved his life. Phelps has said publicly that he reached a point where he didn't want to be alive anymore. Therapy pulled him back. If the greatest swimmer who ever lived needed a therapist, you can sit down and talk to one too.

What's Really Stopping You

Research from the Priory Group found that 40 percent of men have never spoken to anyone about their mental health. Of those men, 29 percent said they were too embarrassed, and 20 percent pointed to the stigma attached to mental health as the reason. There's also the cultural layer. The CDC reports that only 26.4 percent of Hispanic and Black men sought mental health treatment, compared to 45.6 percent of white men. If you grew up in a culture where mental health was considered weakness, a taboo topic, or flat-out shameful — the hurdle is even higher.

Think about this: every barrier you have to therapy is a story you've been told. A script someone handed you a long time ago. "Real men handle their problems." "Only weak people need therapy." "Nobody wants to hear your problems." "It's too expensive." "I don't even know where to start."

Those are the same voices that kept my guy drinking himself to sleep every night while the people who loved him had no idea he was falling apart.

What Therapy Actually Does for Divorced Men

Therapy gives you a structured, confidential space to process everything you're carrying — the grief, the anger, the guilt, the fear, the questions about who you are without the marriage, the anxiety about your kids, the financial stress, all of it. A good therapist doesn't judge you. They help you see what's underneath everything you're feeling, and they give you tools to work with it instead of drowning in it.

A 2019 systematic review published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry found that men who engaged in therapy specifically designed around male help-seeking showed measurable improvement in depression, anxiety, and relationship functioning. The key was that the approach respected masculine values — autonomy, problem-solving, goal-setting — rather than ignoring them.

Spend an hour in a good therapist's chair and you'll understand quickly what it actually is. You're building self-awareness. You're learning why you do what you do. You're becoming the kind of man who can sit across from his children, be present with them, and not drag his unprocessed wounds into every moment of their lives.

The Friend Group Won't Cut It

Your boys love you. And they will absolutely let you vent over drinks for an evening. But they are not equipped to help you work through the kind of psychological weight that divorce creates. The 2021 American Perspectives Survey found that 15 percent of men report having zero close friends — up from 3 percent in 1990. Even among men who do have friends, most report not using those connections for emotional support.

Your friends are not trained to help you process trauma. Your family means well, but they have their own emotional stake in your situation. Your attorney handles the legal mess, not the psychological one — and that's a trap a lot of men fall into (and pay dearly for).

A therapist is the only person in your life whose entire job is to help you — without judgment, without their own agenda, and with specific training to help men in exactly the kind of crisis you're navigating.

The Man You're Becoming

There's a version of you on the other side of this work. He's clearer. He's calmer. He knows what set him off in the marriage and why. He doesn't repeat the same patterns in the next relationship. He shows up for his kids without an invisible cloud hanging over every visit. He made the call. He did the work.

The men who get that far made a choice. They were honest enough with themselves to pick up the phone and ask for help. That's it. That's the whole move.

My guy — the one who was drinking himself to sleep — he finally called a therapist. He went for six months. He stopped drinking, worked through the grief of his divorce, and rebuilt a real relationship with his kids. He told me that making that call was the bravest thing he ever did.

You've been through a war. You don't come back from a war by pretending it didn't happen. You debrief. You process. You heal.

Make the call, brother. Your future self — and your kids — are counting on it.