In my counselling practice, I spend a great deal of time working with boys and men and exploring a concept that many of them struggle with: seasons and cycles. Not because men do not understand that life changes, most men understand that life has ups and downs. They know that relationships end, children grow up, jobs change, people die, opportunities come and go, and circumstances can shift almost overnight. What I have noticed, however, is that many men struggle to recognise what season they are actually in.
They know something has changed, but they do not always know what the change is asking of them. They are trying to build when they need to recover, trying to hold on when they need to let go, trying to start something new when something old still needs to be grieved, trying to perform when their body is telling them to rest, trying to stay in a relationship that has already ended emotionally, trying to make money when they need to repair their health, trying to become a father while still trying to understand the boy they once were, or trying to become somebody new while refusing to acknowledge that an old version of themselves has reached the end of its life. Sometimes the problem is not that a man is doing the wrong thing, sometimes he is doing the right thing in the wrong season. That distinction can change everything.
As I often say, a gift given too early can become a burden, or even a curse. Imagine giving a seven-year-old a Lamborghini as a gift. To you, it might seem like an incredible act of generosity. You have given the child something valuable, something most adults would love to own. But for that seven-year-old, it could actually become a burden. They cannot drive it. They cannot understand its value. They cannot properly appreciate what they have been given, and they have no idea what to do with it.
You may have done the right thing, but you have done it in the wrong season. The problem was not necessarily the gift. The problem was the timing. And I think this is something we often fail to understand about life. Sometimes we are praying, asking, working and striving for something that we are simply not ready to carry yet. And sometimes the very thing we think we desperately need, if it arrived too early, could become a burden rather than a blessing. Timing matters. A Lamborghini in the hands of a seven-year-old is not freedom. It is responsibility without the capacity to manage it. The same can be true of money, relationships, success, leadership, parenthood, influence, opportunity and even certain forms of knowledge. Sometimes the question is not, “Is this a good thing?” The question is, “Am I in the right season to receive it?”
The Five Spheres of Life
When I was working in a secondary school, I developed a framework that I sometimes share with clients. I call it the five spheres of life:
- Principles and laws
- Rules
- Seasons and cycles
- Roles
- Fundamentals and basics
I began noticing something among the young people I worked with: the students who were repeatedly getting into trouble often seemed to have difficulty understanding one or more of these five spheres. Sometimes they did not understand the expectations around them, and sometimes they understood them perfectly well but repeatedly chose to violate them. Equally, I noticed that many of the students who were progressing, developing, and achieving understood something important about how life worked. They understood that actions have consequences, that different environments have different expectations, that they occupied different roles, that some things had to be done before other things became possible, and, perhaps most importantly, that timing matters. That last point is something I have carried into my counselling work, because timing is one of the most underestimated psychological forces in a man’s life.
Right Thing, Wrong Time
Think about a young man preparing for his GCSEs. I used to explain to students that the period between January and May could become incredibly important, a relatively short period of intense preparation, revision, examination, and focus. I would tell them that this period might not feel particularly exciting; it might feel restrictive, they might have to say no to things, study when their friends were socialising, tolerate boredom, and sacrifice some immediate pleasure for something that was not going to pay them back immediately. But the season had a purpose: get through this season, do what needs to be done, and then the season changes. Perhaps you move into college, begin A-levels, start vocational training, enter employment, or discover that your path is completely different. The point is that the work of one season creates the conditions for the next.
This is something that adults sometimes forget. We think we have outgrown the idea of seasons because we are no longer sitting GCSE examinations, but we haven’t—we have simply changed the examination. There are seasons for building a career, raising children, dating, studying, recovering from addiction, grieving, saving money, starting a business, repairing a marriage, ending a marriage, becoming a father, becoming a son again when an ageing parent needs you, friendship, solitude, visibility, going quietly into the background, and seasons when the most productive thing you can do is stop producing.
Men Are Often Taught to Live as Though It Is Always Summer
This is where I think the concept becomes particularly important for men. Many men are taught, directly and indirectly, to live in a permanent summer: produce, earn, perform, provide, achieve, build, compete, improve, push, win, keep going, keep your head up, don’t complain, don’t stop, don’t fall behind, and don’t let anybody see that you are struggling. The problem is that human beings do not live in permanent summer. Neither does nature. There is spring, summer, autumn, and winter; there is growth, expansion, harvest, decline, rest, and preparation—and then the cycle begins again.
Yet many men interpret winter as failure:
- A man loses his job and thinks, “I am failing.”
- A relationship ends and he thinks, “I have failed.”
- His business slows down and he thinks, “I am falling behind.”
- He reaches his thirties or forties and begins questioning his career, thinking, “Something must be wrong with me.”
- He becomes exhausted and interprets the exhaustion as weakness.
- He needs help and interprets needing help as inadequacy.
- He wants to spend time alone and interprets it as isolation.
- He enters a period where he is uncertain about his direction and assumes that everybody else has figured life out.
But what if the interpretation is wrong? What if the question is not “Why am I failing?” but rather: “What season am I in?” That is a very different question.
Yin and Yang Is Not Simply “Balance”
This is where I sometimes introduce clients to the idea of yin and yang. Yin and yang is often presented in Western culture as a simple symbol of “balance”—two equal halves, everything in equilibrium, keeping everything balanced. But that interpretation can be misleading. The traditional Chinese philosophical idea associated with yin and yang is more concerned with complementary forces, transformation, and continual change than with achieving a permanently static state of equilibrium.
The famous symbol itself is not a picture of two forces sitting still; it contains movement. Each side contains a small point of the other, the boundary between them curves, and one force gives way to another. The emphasis is not simply “keep everything balanced”—it is closer to “understand the changing relationship between different forces.”
That distinction matters psychologically. If you believe your life should always be balanced, then every difficult period can begin to look like a personal failure:
- You become tired and think you are doing something wrong.
- Your career becomes quieter and you think you are falling behind.
- You lose motivation and think you have become lazy.
- You experience grief and tell yourself that you need to get back to normal.
But perhaps there is no permanent “normal.” Perhaps life is movement, the goal is not to remain in one perfect position, and the real objective is to develop enough awareness to recognise the movement.
Winter Is Not a Failed Summer
One of the most useful things I can tell a man who is struggling is this: winter is not a failed summer. Rest is not a failed version of productivity, uncertainty is not necessarily a failed version of confidence, grief is not necessarily a failure to move on, a career transition is not automatically a failure of ambition, being single is not necessarily a failure to find love, changing your mind is not necessarily weakness, and starting again is not necessarily going backwards.
There are periods of life where the work is visible, and there are periods where the work is happening underneath the surface. A tree does not stop being alive because you cannot see it growing. Sometimes the most important psychological work a man will ever do happens during a period where there is very little to show for it externally:
- He might be learning to regulate his emotions.
- He might be confronting shame or grieving his father.
- He might be learning how to trust.
- He might be discovering that the anger he has carried for twenty years is actually covering fear.
- He might be learning to sit with loneliness without immediately escaping into alcohol, pornography, gambling, sex, work, or endless scrolling.
- He might be learning how to be a father because nobody taught him how to be one.
- He might be learning how to receive love because he became exceptionally good at surviving without it.
From the outside, it might look like nothing is happening. Psychologically, everything might be happening.
The Danger of Farming Against the Weather
One of the biggest problems I see in men is what I would describe as farming against the weather. Imagine a farmer planting seeds in the middle of winter and becoming angry because nothing is growing. The farmer could shout at the ground, work harder, dig up the soil every morning, and accuse the seeds of being defective, but none of this would change the season. The problem would not necessarily be effort; the problem would be timing.
There are things you cannot force simply by increasing effort. You cannot force someone to love you, force grief to disappear, force a child to grow up overnight, force a business to mature according to your preferred timetable, force your nervous system to recover because you have decided you are finished with being tired, force yourself to become emotionally secure simply because you have read three books about attachment, or force a season to become another season because you are uncomfortable with where you are.
This does not mean that we become passive—understanding seasons is not an excuse to do nothing. Quite the opposite: it helps you identify what action is appropriate now.
Every Season Has a Job
This is the part I want men to understand: every season has a job. Spring might be about beginning, summer about building, autumn about harvesting, reviewing, and letting go, and winter about rest, reflection, repair, and preparation. These are metaphors, not rigid psychological categories; real life is messier than four neat boxes. You can experience grief and growth simultaneously, be successful professionally and devastated privately, be financially secure and emotionally lost, become a father while simultaneously grieving the childhood you never had, or be in a relationship while experiencing profound loneliness.
Human beings are complicated, but the seasonal metaphor gives us a useful question: “What does this period of my life require from me?” That is very different from asking: “What do I want this period of my life to be?” Those two questions can produce completely different answers.
Counselling Is Sometimes About Identifying the Season
When a man comes into counselling, he will often arrive with a problem he wants solved:
- “My relationship is falling apart.”
- “I hate my job.”
- “I’m angry all the time.”
- “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”
- “I can’t stop thinking about my ex.”
- “I don’t feel anything.”
- “I’m exhausted.”
- “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
- “I’ve achieved everything I thought I wanted and I’m still unhappy.”
Sometimes the first task is not to solve the problem; sometimes it is to understand the season in which the problem has appeared:
- What has changed?
- What has ended?
- What has begun?
- What are you resisting?
- What are you grieving?
- What are you building?
- What are you avoiding?
- What needs to be maintained?
- What needs to be released?
- What have you outgrown?
- What are you trying to force?
- What are you refusing to accept?
And perhaps the most important question: “What would this season look like if you stopped fighting the fact that you are in it?” That question can be uncomfortable, but it can also be liberating.
The Man Who Refuses to Leave an Old Season
Sometimes the issue is not that a man cannot enter a new season; it is that he refuses to leave the previous one. A man can remain psychologically attached to a relationship that ended five years ago, continue trying to prove himself to a father who died years earlier, spend his forties trying to repair the humiliation he experienced at school, continue behaving like the broke twenty-year-old he once was after becoming financially secure, continue living like a single man after becoming a father, or continue living like a boy after becoming a man. Sometimes he continues fighting battles that no longer exist.
This is one of the things counselling can help uncover:
- Who are you still trying to prove yourself to?
- What old version of yourself are you still protecting?
- What happened to you that you have never allowed yourself to finish grieving?
- What identity did you build in order to survive that you no longer need in order to live?
These are not easy questions, but they can be transformative.
The Danger in Romanticising Every Difficult Season
I think it is important to add a caveat: not every difficult circumstance should simply be accepted as “your season.” Sometimes a man is depressed and needs professional support; sometimes a relationship is abusive and requires safety planning and external intervention; sometimes financial hardship requires practical action; sometimes an unhealthy environment needs to be left. Sometimes a man is not in a season of rest—he is in a situation that needs changing.
The language of seasons should never become another way of telling men to tolerate things that are harming them. Acceptance is not the same as resignation, patience is not the same as passivity, rest is not the same as avoidance, and understanding your season does not mean refusing to act. It means asking: “What action belongs here?”
The Right Question for Men
Perhaps one of the greatest problems we create for ourselves is asking the wrong question:
- We ask, “How do I get back to where I was?”—but perhaps you are not supposed to go back.
- We ask, “Why am I not where I thought I would be?”—but perhaps the life you imagined at twenty was based on information you no longer have.
- We ask, “How do I make this feeling go away?”—but perhaps the feeling is telling you something.
- We ask, “How do I get back to normal?”—but perhaps you are being asked to create a new normal.
And sometimes the question needs to become: “What is this season trying to teach me?” Not because every painful experience contains some beautiful predetermined lesson—life is not always that neat. Sometimes terrible things happen, people hurt us, circumstances are unfair, or we simply have to survive something. But even then, we can ask what we want to do with what has happened to us. That is where agency comes back into the conversation.
Your Life Will Turn Again
The most important thing about seasons is that they change. The winter does not last forever, and neither does summer. A man who understands this does not have to panic every time life becomes difficult; he can learn to ask what the current season requires. If it is a season of building, build; if it is a season of learning, learn; if it is a season of grieving, grieve; if it is a season of parenting, parent; if it is a season of recovery, recover; if it is a season of letting go, let go; if it is a season of beginning again, begin. And if it is a season where you genuinely do not know what comes next, perhaps your task is simply to tolerate not knowing. That, too, is a psychological skill.
Men are often taught that they need a destination, but counselling sometimes teaches us something different: sometimes the work is not to know exactly where you are going, but to understand where you are. Because once you know where you are, you can begin to ask what the moment requires. You stop farming against the weather, stop measuring your winter against somebody else’s summer, and stop interpreting every period of uncertainty as evidence that your life is falling apart.
You begin to understand that a human life is not a straight line; it is a series of movements:
- Beginnings and endings
- Growth and loss
- Expansion and contraction
- Connection and separation
- Action, rest, and change
The goal is not to remain permanently balanced; the goal is to become sufficiently aware to recognise the turning. Perhaps this is one of the most important questions a man can ask himself: “What season am I in right now?” and then: “What does this season require of me?” Because sometimes the breakthrough is not found in trying harder, sometimes it is found in finally recognising that the weather has changed.
Counselling for Men Navigating Change, Life Transitions and Finding Direction in Reading
Life does not always follow the timeline we imagined. You may have reached your thirties, forties or fifties and find yourself questioning your career, relationships, identity, family life or sense of purpose. Perhaps you feel stuck between who you were and who you are becoming. Perhaps something has ended and you are struggling to understand what comes next.
At Male Minds Counselling in Reading, I work with boys and men who are navigating periods of change, uncertainty and transition. Counselling can provide a confidential space to slow down, make sense of what is happening and explore what this particular season of your life may be asking of you.
You might be dealing with career change, relationship difficulties, divorce or separation, fatherhood, grief, burnout, anxiety, depression, loneliness, identity, masculinity, emotional regulation, confidence, life transitions or a growing sense that the life you have built no longer feels like the life you want to live.
Sometimes counselling is not about finding an immediate solution. It is about understanding what has changed.
You may be asking:
Why don’t I feel fulfilled despite achieving so much?
Why am I exhausted all the time?
Why am I struggling to let go of the past?
Why does my life feel like it is changing?
What do I actually want now?
Who am I becoming?
What do I need to let go of?
What do I need to build?
Counselling can help you explore these questions without judgement. It can provide an opportunity to understand your patterns, recognise what may be within your control, process experiences you have never properly dealt with, and consider what you want your next chapter to look like.
Men’s Counselling in Reading and Berkshire
At Male Minds Counselling, I provide counselling and psychotherapy for boys and men in Reading and surrounding Berkshire areas, with online and in-person sessions available.
My approach is particularly informed by the experiences of men and the pressures that can sometimes make it difficult for men to talk openly about what is happening inside them. You do not have to arrive knowing exactly what is wrong or what you need to change. You can simply arrive with the feeling that something needs to be understood.
Sometimes the most important question is not: “How do I fix my life?” It is: “What season of my life am I actually in?” Understanding that can be the beginning of understanding what comes next.
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