 where we do a lot of family of origin stuff too, so we'll explore his childhood experiences. First and foremost is a way of helping him understand what he's experienced, and everyone's experienced trauma, Peter. It's not a big tea or a little treat, but we've all been there. So once they're able to actually understand the impact of their own childhoods that had on their current behaviour and their current personalities as they emerge, we have this sort of really weird shift in dynamic where you can see them empathising with their younger selves, which then assist them with understanding their current selves, and then we talk very educationally as well about the impacts of violence on children and what that looks like and things like attachment theory and how disruptive it can be when those kind of relationships, those early childhood relationships are disrupted. Hi Tony, I'm interviewing today Tony Johansson and Tony is one of our workplace mental health specialists, so he delivers and facilitates workshops for us in Australia, all over Australia, but you're located in Melbourne, right Tony? Yep, yeah, Melbourne, Victoria. Great, and also you dabble in men's mental health. Actually, I believe that that is one of your passions, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Look, I go beyond dabbling, I guess, Peter, after all these years, it's probably my expertise, I would say, just in men's mental health. Yeah, and that's why I invited you because I wanted to hear from the horse's mouth what is happening for men's mental health on the ground. Now, you are in Melbourne, so we're kind of using Melbourne as an example for what's happening in men's mental health around the world with the idea that, you know, men are men everywhere and what is impacting men's in Melbourne is probably what is impacting men's in Sydney, all over Australia and in any other parts of the world. So, let's start. Give us a bit of your background. How do you get into men's mental health? How did that happen? And yeah, what brought you here? Okay, before I, I guess, upskilled as a counsellor, I was a tradesman and a touring rock musician as well, I still play music as well, so when I decided to change careers and go get a counselling degree, it was a pretty good fit for me to work with men given that I was already well versed in sort of men's spaces like building sites and rock and roll at that point in time was a very masculine activity as well. And so once I started working as a counsellor, I started working as a drug and alcohol counsellor and men are overrepresented in substance misuse, as we know, which meant that the majority of my clients were male as well. And then I was also working with a lot of men who were on intervention orders with family violence related matters as well, so then I upskilled in that space as well and did some more, went back to university, got a few more tickets up my sleeve, I guess, and got qualified in working in that space. And so I spend a lot of my time working with men where there's been some kind of court involvement or some kind of intervention orders or things like that, where there's substance misuse, where there might be family violence, things like that. That's where all those things meet is really where I sit. That's where my expertise is, but I also just work with men more broadly as well, just in generalised mental health, depending on the circumstances. So it's fairly heavy. You're very much at the core phase when men are having problems in the family, domestic violence, they're looking at, well, they're in the legal system, obviously, and they're looking potentially at being put in jail. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. I try and position myself as early intervention with the services that I'm involved in and the programs that I design and implement. However, sometimes that early intervention still might have involved a short custodial sentence, but hopefully not for men who are too far entrenched in the criminal justice system. My passion is trying to assist men with, I guess, being diverted out of that space, learning some skills, getting to know themselves a bit better, understanding how their behaviour impacts other people, all in the effort of keeping men out of the criminal justice system. And for how long have you been doing this for Tony? That kind of specialist work I'm describing now would be about three to four years, and then just generalists sort of drug and alcohol work and generalist mental health work and counselling and therapy and things like that. It's about eight years now, I think, all up here. And look, when working at the coal phase, unfortunately, eight years is a long time. A lot of people don't last that long. So, yeah, I've been around for a while considering some of my contemporaries here. I remember many years ago working in Sydney in mental health services that we develop alliances with drug and alcohol services. It was always a bit of an easy alliance in the sense like, I mean, we got along famously, but it wasn't very clear when to refer to each other. And sometimes we overrefer like, oh, no, no, this is not a mental health issue. This is a drug and alcohol issue. Or this is a drug and alcohol issue. Or if they went to drug and alcohol services, they would say, no, no, that's not a drug and alcohol issue. Yes, he's using drug and alcohol, but that's because they've got a mental health issue. But you seem to have been able to work across both. Yeah, it's not, yeah, it's not, it's not easy though, Peter. It takes a lot of groundwork as far as relationships go. And by relationships, I don't mean with clients. I mean with stakeholders and things like that. For the same reasons, I've had that same experience as still do with mental health and drug and alcohol, whereby I might say, look, I'm not willing to work with this man's drug and alcohol issues until there's mental health involved and mental health positions are the same. So we hopefully learn to collaborate. And with family violence, it's the same as well, where there's always been a siloing. It's like, no, if a man's been using family violence and he has to deal with his family violence and his drug and alcohol concerns are completely different. So to blend the two, which is what I do, it's not traditionally done. It's quite innovative. There's a few other people doing it now and a few other services, but we're right at the start of that conversation and right at the start of exploring other ways of assisting men and their families, where there's both alcohol and mental health and family violence. So it's a pretty new space. So what kind of men end up in the mental health slash family violence system that you end up helping? Is it like rough men? Is it like laborers with very little education or what is it? It is the same as sort of substance use in mental health. It's pretty much, some demographics might be slightly more represented than others, but it's the guys I work with. It can be anyone really. If you think of there's a fine line right between family violence and a dysfunctional relationship at the start, like once a dysfunctional relationship progresses into family violence, if that's the case and the family violence becomes entrenched, then there's a big difference right between family violence and dysfunctional relationship. But if you intervene with families and people at the start, there's some commonalities. And so if someone calls the police, if a neighbour calls the police, it could be the first time that that family's ever had any interaction with the justice system whatsoever. So a lot of my clients and rightly so are really quite terrified by the whole prospect of having to go to court and it's a really new experience for them. They've got businesses they're trying to run. They've got to get their kids to school drop off tomorrow and they spent last night locked up in the cop shop. So it was a really different terrifying experience. And then some of the guys I work with have been in and out of the system longer than I've been in the role. So it's a really broad spectrum, Peter, which means that I guess I've got to speak a lot of different dialects of the same concepts. I can imagine. I can imagine because it's very, very different to deal for someone that is used to the legal system that is to be called into court and because of domestic violence to someone that has never had any problems with police all of a sudden having had to go to court or even spending a night in jail. And they must be very, very terrifying. So how do you help men in this situation? Because a lot of people will be saying, you know what? They deserve to be there. And maybe they harden their hearts a little bit. But what have you found? One of the challenges is that the sort of they deserve to be their approach is that there's little to no evidence to support that a punitive approach to any kind of offending behavior actually works. Corrections in itself is meant to correct someone's behavior. So the correctional institutions, their role, I mean, I think we forget that part of the component, but their role is to actually help people change their behavior, not punish them. And there is a desire to punish people that engage in offending behavior, whether it be family violence or drug dealing or whatever it is. The problem is, the evidence doesn't support that really works, yet we have to do something. So there's a lot of education both for myself, I guess, as an advocate for people that have transgressed the law, whether it be family violence or other things. So having conversations like this. But then if I'm working with the men themselves, again, there's a lot of education. And so depending on his level of comprehension with what's going on in the space he finds himself in, that determines where my in is. But a lot of it is assisting him with understanding my entry point generally is something along the lines of what I'd call emotional literacy, that would be my start point, depending on risk. And then then I use that as a framework to bring in all sorts of other things. But I mean, I guess my question is, how do you how do you want to conduct this part of the conversation? Do you want me to talk through from go to why what it looks like? Yeah. Okay. Ideally, Peter, I would start from from a position of what we you know what we'd call psychoeducation, right, where we're going to do some some talking in a therapeutic standpoint, but I also have some explicit things that I want this guy in front of me to have better comprehension of. So one of them is being able to articulate emotion and being able to understand that there's more than just glad that sad. And there's a bit of work that goes into that. Some of that might be through dialogue and and not always overt or sorry, yeah, not always a person that might be covered. But a lot of it's really explicit. Oh, I have some, you know, there's handouts and diagrams and we use kind of visual aids and less kind of stuff. And, you know, we challenge men, we will talk about it will say, so what happened? What was the situation that brought you here? And generally, it's something to do with being angry or pissed off or something. And, and so we'll challenge even just that that word to describe that feeling. And then we'll drill down and we'll look for two or three other descriptors. And then we'll assist him with exploring how much the story changes when he uses different words to describe his emotions, for example. And so that's that first part of that really cognitive part of understanding your emotions. And then we do a bit more sort of somatic stuff as well. And then we were really big on assisting them with understanding the fight flight freeze response and how that affects their body. And really, I mean, what we're trying to do there, Peter, is when they become aroused or angry, we're actually assisting them with employing mindfulness techniques by being really mindful of their body as to what happens at that point in time, not with the other person in front of them that's making them mad as such. There's a lot of education in that space. So what you're talking about is basic, well, basic, a little bit more than basic communication skills, right? When I feel something instead of going into the immediate violent anger response or aggressive, I'm sure not all of them is violent, but it can be verbally aggressive. It's a spectrum. Stop. Think about exactly what's bothering you and talk and maybe even start talking even before it becomes an emotional issue, a big one. Yeah, that's a slow burn. And for a lot of guys, the communication element of it is a lot further down the road. First and foremost, we want them to be able to identify their having an emotion other than anger. Or if it is anger, are there other ways of describing it? We assist them with understanding how that sort of old Freudian that anger might be repressed sadness or sadness might be repressed anger, that kind of stuff. So we explore all the things that sit underneath that. And what that means is we're inviting him to tell us his story. So you can imagine if he's considered to be an offender of family violence, then there is some resistance from other stakeholders to invite a man to tell his story from an empathic standpoint, if we're seeing him as a perpetrator of violence. It looks like we're colluding with his behavior to some degree. And I understand the resistance to that. But I personally don't believe that we can assist somebody with empathizing until they can empathize with themselves. A lot of the guys I work with don't know how to empathize with themselves, which means they have a very limited capacity to empathize with anybody else. So a lot of the work we do first is to identify the feelings cognitively, like what kind of words are we going to use to think and describe about how we're feeling. And then this somatic stuff, where do I feel it? And that's all that central nervous system fight, fight, freeze, response stuff that we do in corporate training as well. It's really similar on that level. And then once we get to that level, when we're talking about his experience as well, where we do a lot of sort of family of origin stuff too. So we'll explore his childhood experiences. First and foremost is a way of helping him understand what he's experienced. And everyone's experienced trauma, Peter. Like it's not a big tea or little treat, but we've all been there. And so once they're able to actually understand the impact that their own childhoods have had on their current behavior and their current, I guess, personalities as they emerge, we have this sort of really weird shift in dynamic where you can see them empathizing with their younger selves, which then assist them with understanding their current selves. And then we talk very educationally as well about the impacts of violence on children and what that looks like and things like attachment theory and how disruptive it can be when those kind of relationships as early childhood relationships are disrupted. And then once they really understand the effect it's had on them, then it actually becomes a lot easier to assist them with understanding the impact it has on their own children and their own partner. Most people just try and go straight in first and do the whole, you need to understand the impacts your behavior is having on other people. And if you don't have a framework to understand your own experience, how can I empathize with you, Peter, if I don't even know my own feelings? So we do this preparation work that is not part of traditional, I guess, interventions with a lot of men in this space. So it looks more therapeutic and you can consider it therapeutic, but we think ultimately it's a better way of encouraging empathy in a way that mitigates violence and mitigates aggression. And it's very important the work that you do because it's not about thinking, oh, this is a bad person. This is a bad man. It's not like, what else is going on? Why are they behaving in this way? Why are they having this reaction? Most of the time they don't even know why they're having that reaction. And this work of investigating, you know, when did it start? Kind of a bit of a detective work and forensic work. It reminds me this morning we had a bit of a meltdown with an eight-year-old. It's a boy and we turned up and he was yelling and it was simply because today is sports day and he needed to bring his football socks, but he couldn't find the words. He was just a big emotion and this emotion, he got frustrated and he grew up in yelling and all that stuff, but it was easily, it was about educating him, you know, hang on, find the words, what's going on, sit down and find the words. And basically, sometimes it's the same with grown men. We have the emotion first and then we need to go back and find the words. What else really the problem? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, it's exactly what I'm talking about. And the challenge is if guys are already sort of physically aroused or frustrated and not just guys, it just happens to be that men are probably overrepresented. Yeah, and so we've got to assist them with understanding first that they're actually really aroused, right? They've got to check in and so it's that metacognitive awareness for lots of a bigger word. We're really encouraging them to be curious about how they're thinking, not what they're thinking about, because, you know, when we get angry, we get very fixated on the thing that's making us angry and we're less curious about the fact that that we're angry. So there's a lot of that as well, really assisting people with being, assisting guys with being curious about that you're angry and how that feels and why is it, do you think, you know, rather than being obsessed or frustrated with the stimulus or the thing that's in front of you. And all of those things are trying to slow it all down, so that as with your experience with your eight year old, you know, so that this guy's got a better chance of at least finding some words to express himself before the whole thing explodes. And when we meet them, that opportunity is pretty small, right, between sort of stimulus response and hopefully we do a 15 week program, most of the work I do with guys, we just want to extend it. It's like sort of any therapeutic work in the sense that you want to extend that, that what do you say, gap between stimulus and response, something happened in your environment, how you respond. I think the difference with the work we do as well is that we're always inviting the memory work with to understand how their behaviors experience by other people as well. And I think that's a component that misses in a lot of individual therapy, like if I think if you're a man who's in a family with children, sometimes individual therapy is too focused on your own experience. And that's not necessarily the benefit of you or your family. I think some of some of the good things about group work and behavior change programs and things like in the field that I sit in, is that there is a lot of accountability to understand how your behavior impacts other people too. And I know just as a facilitator, I would like to think I'm more humble now as a man moving through the world, just understanding the impact that my baby can have on people that probably aren't as, don't have the physical presence or the social status that I do as well. I'm sort of a lot more mindful of that now with the work I do. Yeah, yeah. So you also help the family to communicate, also to put words to what they're feeling. Because I mean, this is not a uniquely male gender problem. This is just a human problem. I mean, yeah, because of our biology, men possibly are not as aware of the steps pre-anger sometimes. So we need to be educated. But it is not uniquely a male problem. And also the kids in the family are, in this, are they communicating? Are they also bottling it up? And so I would imagine that that work is really good. And when it works, it must be really rewarding, I would imagine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a group last night, and obviously I won't mention names and too many personal details, but it's right towards the end of the program. And you know, it's an interesting fella that we had in this group. And this particular program that I run, or that we run, I should say, is pitched for guys who have got pretty good cognitive capabilities. It's because of the psychoeducational component, they need to be reasonably clever people in order to engage in it. So it's not a one-size-fits-all program. So you do have some interesting intellectual arm wrestlers for some of these guys as well, because no one likes that cognitive dissonance of realizing that they have to, that they should change, right? So there's this, and anyway, after 14, 15 weeks, one chap in particular, one of his closing statements, we just, you know, do checkouts every week like you do. And there's something on the lines of, you know, I kind of get it now. It's just, it's really about transcending my desire to be right. Like, if I don't need to be right, if I just want to express myself and then try and understand the person in front of me, then we probably aren't going to get into conflict. And so to have those kind of revelations, like from anyone, Peter, right? Like, I mean, if you and I can transcend the need to be right, we've been a good space. So to hear that from a client, that that's sort of somewhere, that that's where they're heading, some of these guys. Yeah, it is incredibly rewarding. Wow, that's great. And then you've seen, probably you've seen a few families come together after that, and that relationship, they're flourishing. It's not just about saving a relationship, is it flourishing? Yeah. And if the other side of the coin being that if people are to remain separated, that it's amicable, you know, that they're not at each other's throats, and they're not, they're putting their children first. And a lot of these guys really understand the impacts of their behaviour have on young kids as well. We do a lot of work around the impacts of violence on children. And that's something I think that, I mean, you know, I wouldn't have had any idea how our childhoods impacted us until we started becoming trained professionals. Like, yeah, that's something we should probably know as a community, you know, that should be something that's readily available, that information, it shouldn't be held under lock and key for healthcare professionals. And also, you know, how our family history impacts on how we communicate. You know, it is so ingrained into us as kids that we don't even realise we're doing it. We copy the mannerisms from our parents, we copy the mannerisms of our family groups. And that is normal. That is how you get socialised. But if that hasn't happened properly, you know, then you have to start learning. And it doesn't mean that you're a bad person, it just means that you need to learn certain skills. Yeah, you just need to pick up a few trips. Yeah, you just need to pick up a few more skills as you were saying. Yeah. So how would, what would you say now that you have worked a few years in this, what would you say would be a great step forward in terms of systems to help around this domestic violence? And well, I would rather concentrate on what would help men's mental health. Since 80% of suicides in some countries is men's, that's a huge problem. So what would you say, what would we do to improve from your perspective men's mental health overall? I think, oh, that's a big question for you. I went to about 40 ideas and I was thinking, okay, let's distill this. I'll start with the work that I do and what would help that. And what would help that I think would be, I don't know if it's legislation, but definitely buy in right from the private sectors to assist men and their families with engaging in treatment. One of the biggest things that blocks guys out of programs that I'm involved with is that they conflict with work or they've worked a long day and now they've got to go and do two hours of sort of behavior change work on top of that. And meanwhile, before they had an intervention order, they might have been the coach at their son's football team and now they can't work on Thursday night, you know, all these kinds of things. People have lives, right? And so I would think that some kind of some mechanisms, whether they be health policy or legislation change, I'm not sure to the degree that we'd need it, but that make it very difficult for employers to not support men going through treatment of any kind, right? Whether it's mental health support, whether it's behavior change treatment, whatever it is, even just seeing the therapist, like whatever that looks like drug and alcohol support, if a guy needs to go into a detox program for 10 days because he's drinking too much and he wants to change his relationship with alcohol, I think all of these things from a renumeration standpoint, there should be support for the work these men miss, because obviously a lot of these men consider themselves, you know, being a provider is really important to a lot of the guys I work with. That A can be problematic, but B can also be leveraged for growth and change. And a lot of their employers, like if you're a tradesman and you're suddenly not going to be, if I'm working casually and now I'm not going to be at work for the next three weeks because I've got to go to detox and do two weeks in rehab because I've been smoking too much ice, for example, and I'm going to lose my job as a result. I think that's a terrible place we've got towards a society where we can't safeguard employment for men who are entering into therapeutic programs to try and become better people and better fathers. So that would be, I don't know how you go about orchestrating that Peter, but I think that would be an incredibly helpful component first off. And I think there's all these other sort of broader social things going on, obviously, okay, like masculinities in some elements of, in some walks of life, it looks like it used to in other walks of life that looks completely different. I wouldn't even know how to articulate masculinity anymore in a way that doesn't make it sound pathological. And so I think that in itself is a problem, right? I think there's, I just think there's so many beautiful things about being a man and about having male friends and about engaging in sort of activities that are sort of focused on male camaraderie and things like that. As I said, I've been a tradesman, I still play in rock and roll bands. I've probably seen my male friends now more than I'm getting older than I did when I was younger. I was more than happy to mix with anyone when I'm younger, but now I've sort of really grave my time and cherish my time with my male friends. And so I think having a more nuanced conversation about that and honoring the beauty of men helping each other and supporting each other and being really mindful with how we employ the term toxic masculinity. I'm not saying that it's not justified in some circles, but I don't think it's helpful to use it as a broad sort of sweeping brush whereby anytime men want to succeed as a collective or support each other, it's viewed with suspicion. I don't think that's helpful for men at all. No, I agree. It's not helpful because it taints the conversation. Yet there are some men that are bad men, you can say that, but it's not the majority. It's a small percentage. It's the same way that there are bad women, but it's not the majority. And to paint all with the same brush, it wouldn't be, if it's not fair, and it causes more problems than it solves. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, definitely. But as to how you go about, that's such a nuanced conversation, Peter, and I think a lot of times now when it comes to men's generalized violence or men's family violence, men's mental health, all these kinds of things, I think we come in with some pretty sweeping statements and we come in with some really broad generalizations. And there's some commonalities, of course, right, with these guys that I work with. And I work with the guys from all walks of life. I can have a group with one guy who's unemployed and has been so for a long time, with a few self-employed tradesmen who are probably homeowners and some of their kids go to private schools, a guy in international finance sitting next to them and a few engineers. It's really broad cross-section. Without question, there's commonalities that guys meet on and that if we address those commonalities, I think we could ease to some degree some of the challenges men feel. But there's also a lot of nuance, right, like there is with anyone. And so I think men like any other citizen also deserves to be treated like an individual with their own sort of idiosyncratic challenges. And that just saying men do this or men do that is quite unhelpful for a lot of these blokes, I think. And it is unfair and just as well, because we're also different. Yes, we are the same, but we are different. And we bring our own problems, we bring our own desires, our own wants, our own needs. And it doesn't make us any more of a man or any less of a man. And to be helped to be able to communicate somehow what we need, I think it's a beautiful work that you're doing there, Tony. So thanks, Pedro. Very, very elucidating. And I'm sure anyone that watches this video, I hope that they stay until the end because this is words of wisdom. It's about increasing the level of love and compassion in the world towards each other. And guess what? That benefits families, relationships. A lot of people out there I see that are wanting to have that beautiful relationship with another human being where they feel supported, they feel loved, they feel accepted. And this is part of the work that you do. You help people come together because one of us learns to communicate and say, hey, wait a second, my boundaries have been violated, but now I can communicate that in an appropriate way that is not destructive. Wow, that's such a huge step forward, not just for that person, but for that family and for that community. And that's winning a lot more of that kind of help and education, absolutely. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's one of the things too, Pedro. A lot of the men I work with are like, okay, I know I've done this, I know I've done that, I understand the impact, I understand what now. And I think we miss that component, right? It's not just about getting men to be accountable. It's assisting them with learning skills in a really compassionate way and understanding that men like anyone else just want to be a better version of themselves for those around them, regardless of what they're the behaviour they've engaged in. Absolutely. I'm yet to meet a man that wouldn't die for their family. I honestly say that. Now, are they able to communicate that? No, they're not able to communicate that, but we're willing to do that. And that's beautiful. And how do we tap into that and how would we encourage that? That's exactly. And I'm yet to work with a man who, once he understands that his voice is not the most important voice in the house and that his wife or partner has feelings just like he does, and that she too, deserves a seat at the table and an equal stake in things. Most men, once that penny drops right, it's not as if they go, oh, bugger that, she's a woman, I'm not going to listen. Most men are quite happy for that understanding. They're like, I've never thought about it before. I've never realised how hard she works for the family before as well. This is not something that men, once they understand, wish they didn't. They're grateful for an opportunity to have more empathy for their families and to have a better understanding of the work that everyone does to contribute to the family, not just them as the breadwinner or whatever it is. Once they're on the train, they're pretty generous with wanting to understand other people's positions. We've got to get them on that train, Peter, and that's one of the last broad of times. It's a bit of a quest. It's a quest. I'm glad that you're part of that, and I'm also glad that you're part of the WMHI and can share your wisdom also in our work, because I'm sure people will love that kind of aspect. We're starving for more love, kindness, and attention in the world, so thank you. Thank you for telling the story and bringing your wisdom. I'm sure a lot of people will benefit, and for all of you listening, you have enjoyed this, please like and subscribe and give some comments or ask some questions, and we'll be able to answer those. Thank you very much, Tony. Thank you, Peter. Hi, I'm Emmie Golding, Director of Psychology for the Workplace Mental Health Institute. We hope you liked the video. If you did, make sure to give it a thumbs up. 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