For the first episode of The STILLWEST Sessions, I sat down with Nicole Adams, MS, LPC, LCPC. She owns RVIV Wellness in Gilbert, Arizona, and she's one of our clinical partners for the Father's Hour. She works with a lot of dads.
Most of them didn't decide on their own to come see her. Their wife told them to come, or their body did, or their anger did, or a divorce did. It's rare that a man shows up at Nicole's office because he chose to.
That's the pattern she sees. And that's the pattern we spent an hour talking about.
Anger is almost never actually anger
Nicole put it clearly. Anger is an outward expression of emotions that never got named.
Most men who walk into her office citing "anger management" as their issue aren't there because they're broken. They're there because at some point they stopped having language for what they were feeling. And when you don't have language for it, it comes out sideways as an argument about the dishes, a shorter fuse with the kids, a longer distance from the person sleeping next to you.
The work is figuring out what's underneath. The anger part usually takes care of itself once the underneath gets named. But you can't skip to the naming without doing the sitting-with-it first, and that's the part most guys are trained out of by the time they're thirty.
The shame that keeps men from asking
One of the sharpest lines in the interview came from a client Nicole worked with. He told her, on his first session, "I did not want to come here because it makes me feel like I failed as a dad."
That belief doesn't come from this one experience of needing therapy. It's older than that. It's a core story about what being a man and being a father is supposed to look like, usually built on a false either-or: either I have this handled, or I've failed.
Nicole's approach is to go underneath. Where did the "failure" story get written? Because until you rewrite that part, no amount of coping skills will hold. You'll manage your anger for a week, then something at work will crack the wrong way, and the whole edifice comes back down. The coping is the symptom. The story is the thing.
Identity, work, and the guys who are “always on”
We got into what happens when a man's identity gets fused to his job. When "provider" becomes the whole self-concept. Divorced dads see this most acutely, because when the marriage ends the role of provider gets challenged, and there's nothing else to fall back on.
But it's not only divorced dads. Nicole works with plenty of high-achieving executives who are winning at work and losing everywhere else. The identity that got you the promotion isn't the same one that gets you home to your kid on a Tuesday.
She told a story about one of these guys. Two young kids, marriage on the rocks, high-pressure job, and drinking his way through the stress until the drinking started causing its own consequences. He came in believing he was broken in a way that couldn't be fixed. Eighteen months later he was sober, the marriage was back on solid ground, and he was still doing the same job but managing it in a way that didn't require the numbing.
None of that happened because he learned to "manage" anything. It happened because Nicole helped him figure out where the anxiety actually started, which turned out to be a story he'd been carrying since he was six. The whole edifice was built on a floor from thirty years ago that he'd never gone back to look at.
The reframe on nagging
We also got into a practical one. What partners, wives, family members can actually do differently.
Nicole flipped the question. Instead of "what should they stop doing," she went with "what should they start doing," which is asking the man in their life the deeper version of "how are you?"
Not "how was your day," which everyone answers with "good." A different question. "How are you feeling today? What actually went well or didn't?" It throws people off in a way that opens the door instead of closing it.
And on the stop-doing side, she made a point I hadn't thought about clearly before. What guys hear as "nagging" is usually a communication style that creates defensiveness. "You didn't do the dishes." "You promised you would do this." That form of feedback puts the man immediately in a defensive posture, which shuts down the conversation before it starts. Same feedback, framed as "I felt frustrated because the dishes weren't done when you got home," produces a completely different response. It opens a conversation instead of starting an argument.
That's not just semantics. That's the difference between a marriage that talks and a marriage that fights.
The smallest first step
If you're a man thinking about therapy but not ready to book, Nicole's advice is not what you'd expect.
Don't book yet. Sit with yourself first.
Take a walk. Take a quiet ten minutes. Ask what's actually hard right now, what feelings are showing up, what you'd want a stranger to help you work on. If the first time you're articulating any of this is in the chair across from a therapist, that's a hard first session. Most of them go past before you've even started to say what you meant to say.
Booking is the second step. The first step is knowing what you'd bring in.
Why we made this the first episode
STILLWEST exists because I asked myself a version of this same question a couple years back. Working harder was supposed to make things easier. It didn't. And I realized the life I was working so hard to build wasn't waiting for me on the other side of anything. It was already happening.
Nicole works with the guys who are figuring that out the hard way. That's why she's our first episode, and that's why she's one of our clinical partners for the Father's Hour, the mission at the core of STILLWEST.
Listen to the full conversation
The full episode is on YouTube now.
Watch it here: https://youtu.be/uc4RABAa5qE
Nicole Adams, MS, LPC, LCPC
Website: rvivwellness.com
Instagram: @the_wellnesstherapist
Learn about the Father's Hour: stillwestco.com/pages/fathers-hour
Still the mind.