21/10/2025
From why me to what now.
The men who come to me already know why they're struggling. They've traced it back... childhood trauma, brutal breakups, years of self-destruction. They can explain the origin of their pain with frightening accuracy.
But knowing why hasn't freed them.
I've worked with enough men in crisis to see the pattern. The "why" question sends your brain straight into the past, and for a lot of blokes, the past isn't a safe place to spend time. That's where the damage lives. Where the neurology got rewired in ways that now drive the behaviors they hate.
In Australia, men account for 75.3% of su***de deaths. That's 2,419 men in 2023 alone.
These men don't need more analysis of why they're stuck.
They need tools for how to move forward.
Traditional mental health approaches love the why question. Dig deep enough, find the root cause, and you'll heal. That's the thinking. But I watch men spend years in this trap, understanding their trauma perfectly, explaining their triggers with precision, knowing exactly why they lose control... yet nothing changes. They're still stuck in the same destructive patterns.
So I ask them something different.
What's preventing you from taking a step forward right now?
Most of them sit there and realize the answer is nothing. That single question shifts everything. It moves focus from past causes to present obstacles, and usually there aren't any real obstacles. Just the habit of looking backward instead of forward.
Your neurology has been fundamentally changed through whatever you've been through. Trauma rewires the brain, creates new pathways, alters how you process triggers. These aren't metaphors, they're physical changes in how your brain works.
Understanding why this happened doesn't automatically rewire those pathways back.
What actually rewires the brain? New behavior. Repeated action in a different direction, building new pathways through practice instead of analysis.
The men I work with don't lack insight.
They lack practical strategies for how to change.
They need presuppositions, useful statements that help them see how they're representing the problem is probably the problem itself. Not the past event. Not the trauma. The way they're thinking about it right now, the story they're telling themselves, the meaning they've assigned to what happened.
That's what keeps them stuck. And that's what they can change right now.
Rather than dive back into why, I ask them to look at where they want to get to. Then we start taking steps in that direction, immediately, no waiting until they've fully processed their trauma or understood every nuance of their psychological patterns before moving forward.
Just movement.
One step, then another.
The real question isn't why. The real question is: What's preventing you from taking a step forward?
And if the answer is nothing?
Then let's go.
Like and comment if you've spent too long asking why and you're ready to start moving forward instead.
