The Lifeworks Group, Inc.

By: Christine Hammond LMHC William was ashamed and embarrassed. For years, he tolerated abuse from his wife yet he told no one. Knowing he would not strike back at her, she hit him, threw things at him, physically blocked him from leaving the room, and followed him when he did yelling insults. Sex was used as manipulation. If William did what she wanted, he could have sex. If not, there was no sex for months. He was so humiliated by the abuse that even when he entered therapy, he didn’t reveal what was happening. Instead, he minimized her rages as “disagreements”. But one day, after coming in with a fresh red mark on his face and looking visibly shaken by her latest outburst, he disclosed his reality. Just admitting the abuse was relieving but he had a long road ahead to recovery. All too often, the signs of domestic violence for men are dismissed. The old stereotype of an abuser being a male in a wife beater T-shirt is still alive. But in reality, abusers come f...

By Nate Webster IMH In 2014, Emma Watson, the lovable star from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Movie Series and a few of her peers, started a Gender Equality Campaign to fight for the equality of women globally. In one of her speeches at a United Nations venue, she proposed an interesting idea. Gender Equality affects men as much as it affects women. Do men suffer from being pigeon holed into their gender roles as much as women do?   Is Gender equality just liberation for women, or is it for men as well? As I thought about it, memories of my days in Division 1 football began to come back to me. Back then I didn’t know I would one day become a mental health counselor working with emotions and engaging my empathy as a vocation. Back then emotions like softness, compassion and pensiveness were a strain and burden as they grinded against the anger and roughness of my football career. When I eventually left college football, I began a journey to understand the history of...