WHY MEN CALL IT SOMETHING ELSE
When it comes down to it, not every man denies what's happening to him. It’s not universal, and that's worth saying up front, because the easy version of this post would frame it as denial, and for a lot of men, it isn't that at all.
I didn't deny what I was going through. What I had instead was confusion. I remember conversation after conversation where I genuinely didn't understand what was going on inside my own head. Not refusing to look at it. Just struggling to get a grip on it, because there wasn't a name for what I was experiencing yet. I had no experience with this and had to write my own book as it went along
That's a different problem to denial, and it needs a different kind of attention.
The most common phrase
When men describe this to me now, one phrase comes up more than any other. I can't deal with this.
It sounds like a complaint, and that’s actually a fairly good description of what's happening. Not ‘I don't want to deal with this’, or ‘I'm avoiding this’.
I can't.
The system is overloaded, and the man saying it usually knows something is wrong; he just doesn't have language for what it actually is. And without being able to put a finger on it, there’s no chance he can manage his way through it confidently.
This matters because it changes what kind of help is useful. The presence of denial means the man is avoiding something, and needs to be shown what he's avoiding. A man who's overwhelmed and doesn't have the words for it needs something different. He needs a reframe. He needs a way of understanding what's actually happening to him, so the experience stops being confusion and starts being something he can work with to overcome.
Why the mechanism stays invisible
Cognitive overload doesn't come labelled. Nobody wakes up one day and thinks, ah, my cognitive load has exceeded capacity due to the collapse of shared decision-making infrastructure. What actually happens is smaller and messier. A missed appointment. A conversation you can't follow properly. A wave of overwhelm that arrives without an obvious trigger. It seems benign, but it’s the symptom of something larger.
Without a frame for it, all of that just feels like personal failure. Like something is wrong with you specifically, rather than something structurally predictable happening to a mind that's suddenly carrying more than it was built to carry alone.
This is why the phrase matters so much. ‘I can't deal with this’ isn't weakness talking. It's an accurate report from a system that's genuinely overloaded. The problem isn't the man. The problem is that nobody told him what to expect, so he has no way of knowing that what he's experiencing is common, predictable, and has an actual explanation.
Where the shift happens
I've watched this shift happen more times than I can count, and it's almost always the same moment. It's not more information. It's not a longer list of coping strategies. It's a reframe.
The moment a man can look at what's happening and say, this isn't me falling apart, this is overload, and overload has a cause and a shape to it, something changes. The confusion doesn't disappear immediately. But it stops being shapeless. It becomes something he can actually work with, instead of something that just happens to him without explanation.
As a coach, this moment is one of relief. The man in front of me is there because he wants to move, but he can’t. Once the reframe happens, we call it ‘the ah-ha moment,’ which can be described as the light being turned on in a pitch-black room, and there’s the door!
That reframe is the whole hinge point. Before it, a man is fighting something he can't see clearly. After it, he's dealing with something that has an actual outline.
Why this post exists
If you've been telling yourself you're just tired, or getting older, or not handling things the way you used to, there's a decent chance what's actually happening is closer to what's described here. Not a character problem. Not weakness. A mind running more open processes than it was ever built to carry alone, without a system in place to offload any of it.
Naming it accurately is the first shift. Not the whole solution, but the beginning of one.
The next post in this series looks at what happens if this goes unaddressed for too long, followed by one concrete way to actually reduce the load rather than just enduring it.
If this is landing and you want to talk it through, the chemistry call is free. No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation about where you are and whether working together makes sense.