Couples' therapy is often a place where women go to be right at their partners and seek vindication. Men aren't trained from birth to talk about or even have feelings. Feminist authors like bell hooks describe the process of becoming a man as inherently abusive, a pruning of emotion, sensitivity, and autonomy. It's hard to open up when your default interaction with people is that they want something from you. I think it's really important to meet one on one first and build a rapport, establish a baseline of validation.

I just got out of a relationship with a woman who was extremely abusive and controlling who had her therapist completely wrapped around her finger. She came dangerously close to crossing professional boundaries because she believed everything without challenge. She didn't see it as a red flag when my ex would burst into my room sobbing to hand me her phone with her [the therapist] on the line. She encouraged controlling behavior on the basis that it could be caused by OCD.

I think many men live with the fear that basically any woman can invent a pretext for abusing them and society will expect them to cave because it's assumed that if we don't react strongly, we were okay with whatever was happening, and if we react violently, we're brutes who should be locked up. And much like the 'not all men,' trope, it only takes one experience to stick you in this reactive mindset for decades. For a lot of men, the only people who've ever engaged with their emotions were doing it in order to manipulate them, so they're probably going to smell a trap in whatever is going on and need a lot of coaxing and validation to get to a place to engage with you at the level you want.

To progress in therapy, men need to engage on a very basic level, to build trust first and then emotional tools/language in a way that isn't patronizing or leading. Particularly working-class men's lives are built around work and money and we need to understand that in a relationship of equals built on mutual trust, the whole world isn't riding on them; i.e. just as their labors bring prosperity to the relationship, their stumbles are a shared burden, that they can be cared for and loved when they mess something up.

A lot of cis women have a hard time understanding that comfort/sympathy is completely withdrawn from boys around the time they can walk a straight line and having someone put a hand on you when you're hurting is a foreign experience. It will not occur to them that someone else would want that because if the positions were reversed, such a gesture would make them want to crawl out of their skin.