My journey in men’s work started, unofficially, the day I lost my father to suicide. I was 22 years-old and I became almost instantly fascinated by how a man — much less the most important man in my life — could find himself at a point where the pain was so great he couldn’t go on. Flash forward ten years, and I’m 32, on the heels of a hard breakup, and I’m staring down the same choice: End it, or figure out a way to heal my pain.

I chose door number two.

I began looking at and exploring my pain, uncovering long lost emotions and unhealed trauma, and it didn’t take me too long to figure out that my pain was practically universal: As men, most of us grow up with a deep longing: a longing for initiation, attunement, guidance, and support from our father and other men and simply don’t receive it. And it leaves behind scars that color all of our lives and relationships.

We aren’t taught to know ourselves in depth, and therefore we don’t know how to connect to others with depth. We aren’t taught to be vulnerable, and therefore remain walled off, disconnected from our bodies, and disconnected from life itself. We seek answers to this state of misery in our addictions: in work, in money, in sex, and in consumption, yet we find what we are looking for nowhere. The longing remains. For many, it becomes a state of being. We are restless, and depressed, and anxious.

The final lines in Jay McInerney’s book Bright Lights, Big City ring in my ears as I write this: “You have to go slowly. You have to learn everything all over again.” And this line explains my approach to how I work with my clients: we move slowly, intentionally, and with great care as we navigate our inner worlds in the service of shedding the layers of unhelpful programming we’ve received as boys, opening us up, thawing us out, reintroducing us to buried emotions and untapped energy, and ultimately allowing us to return to our inherent power, vitality, and vulnerability.

On this path, in this work, we become openhearted men. Which is what the world needs now more than ever.