u/J-hophop

TL;DR Core Qs without context:

What kinds of positives are easiest for guys to truly take to heart? What kinds of support generally work best?

Especially from someone very different from you (eg a woman who operates very differently, eg very emotionally and you're a very cerebral dude).

How can interpretive therapy type ways of engaging be used to foster joy? Or are those just times men need to engage with supportive therapies/approaches?

Deep dive:

Okay, so I'm thinking a lot about how to interface better with men and provide good support, especially in the thick of depression.

Yeah, I'm going to generalize here and focus on the majority. If you're a far outlier, cool for you, but unless you have good ways of bridging that with dudes already, it's not where I'm trying to go here.

As a woman, I can say the following articles resonate. I've been deeply depressed lately to the point where cultivating and/or experiencing joy seem impossible, and it makes odd sense that it could be a two-way pathway, that somehow finding more of it could work on repair.

https://scitechdaily.com/new-therapy-rewires-the-brain-to-restore-joy-in-depression-patients/

Also though per https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5937254/

Men more efficiently use executive functioning to regulate emotions, through not relating directly to the experience.

Reinterpretations via three categories:

(1) It’s not real (e.g. it’s just a game / scene from a movie / they’re just pretending)

(2) Things will improve with time (e.g. whatever is going wrong will resolve over time)

(3) Things aren’t as bad as they appear to me (e.g. the situation looks worse than it is, it could be a lot worse, at least it’s not me in that situation).

Women can do this, but at much greater cognitive cost and things such as fatigue greatly reduce their capacity to do so. Also which KIND of reappraisal may matter significantly.

"Women may use positive emotion in the service of down-regulation of negative emotion to a greater extent than men. This is consistent with reports that women use positive re-focusing as a coping strategy to a greater extent than men (Garnefski, Teerds, Kraaij, Legerstee, & van den Kommer, 2004). If this is the case, therapies that guide patients toward reducing their overall arousal state, or use neutral as a target state, may work less successfully in women...In one study...supportive therapy was designed to involve more praise, empathy, affiliation, and emphasis on strengths and talents, whereas interpretive therapy was focused more on the patient’s insight into his or her emotional conflicts. Women achieved better outcomes after completing supportive therapy than interpretive therapy. Conversely, men showed better outcomes after completing interpretive than supportive therapy (Ogrodniczuk, Piper, Joyce, & McCallum, 2001)."

Notably, both approaches to therapy help both genders some, the better match tends to help significantly more.

Yet there's a lot I don't get about how most dudes minds work. So um, how can interpretive ways be used to foster joy or are those just times men need to engage with supportive therapies/approaches? I find praise often doesn't hit home well and/or is extensively doubted, even when the person giving it wholeheartedly means it.

What kinds of positives are easiest for guys to truly take to heart? What kinds of support generally work best?

Especially from someone very different from you (eg a woman who operates very differently, eg very emotionally and you're a very cerebral dude).