Many spousal dementia caregivers struggle emotionally watching their life partners slowly decline. But I also knew that male caregivers, especially spouses, tend to be stoical, avoiding expressions of negative feelings, and often declining other’s help.

By Barry Jacobs - Basketball has taught me many lessons. I learned about trust, relationships, and teamwork. I learned the power to regulate feelings. It would shape my clinician's game too. I developed a knack for handling male aggression, as well as physical decline and loss.

By Barry Jacobs - Nothing reveals the fault lines in sibling relationships like the seismic shift caused by an aging parent's sudden decline. Brothers and sisters can quickly become locked in conflict about what's best for Mom and Dad. Here's how to help them forget their old rivalries and cooperate with one another.

By Barry Jacobs - For those who've spent their lifetimes taking pride in giving generously to others, suddenly being on the receiving end of care because of illness or age-related infirmity can be tormenting. For many, rejecting help is regarded as a measure of one's courage and determination in battling family crises brought on by old age or disease. Here are some ways of overcoming this common tendency to refuse help.

By Barry Jacobs - For 58 years, from my birth until her death, my mother and I clashed over money and material values, cents and sensibilities. She may have felt entitled to a grand lifestyle, but I felt entitled to a less solipsistic mother—one who relished, not hated, my help. Years later, I found myself able to relax and just be her adult son in a way I’d never experienced.

By Barry Jacobs - A lot of blended families don’t really blend: the new “relatives” at first try to join together, but then they quietly distance themselves, however awkwardly, as differences and conflicts emerge, even as they try to pretend otherwise. My stepfather, Steve, and I made no such pretense—we were enemies from the start.

By Barry Jacobs and Julia Mayer - The bedraggled, beleaguered, and bereft family caregivers who come to us for therapy have a common litany of complaints. They feel overburdened by caregiving tasks, unacknowledged by those they’re caring for, and unsupported by family members who take their herculean efforts for granted. Here's how to help them approach the caregiving experience more positively.

For 17 years, managing responses to death has become part of my work, whether originally my intention or not. I’ve aspired to helping families hang tough through medical crisis, but now spend some of my time hanging crepe. I’ve now accepted the variety of ways people react to their dying. All of these ways of facing death are utterly ordinary and human. Throughout it all, I've learned that as difficult and awkward as confronting death can be, this work also gives me a richer sense of my client, the cast of characters in their world, and the drama of their life.

I understand and relate to the passion that many men have for sports. At the same time, I'm aware of a counternarrative held by many of my psychotherapist colleagues: sports breeds competition, which causes decreased empathy, which foments injustice. Still, there's so much more here: rich drama, with which to understand the strivings, insecurities, and identities of many of our male clients. Sports can teach us about trust, relationships, teamwork, and our power to regulate feelings.

After a lifetime of conflict, a son faces the question of what he owes his mother.

A stepson reconsiders a long-held resentment.

How to help beleaguered caretakers of elderly parents find meaning and purpose in a challenging task.

A parent's failing health can stir up a hornet's nest of trouble among adult siblings.

Although therapy is often considered a profession dominated by the female sensibility, a lifelong gym rat, much practiced in the arts of masculine aggression, applies the lessons of the basketball court in the consulting room.

Few of us instinctively know what to do and say when families are confronting the death of a loved one. But we can start by being with them in the struggle.

Ted was like many older men I'd seen who, after suffering sudden medical catastrophes, figured they had no other choice but to surrender to their dire circumstances. He hadn't asked to see a psychologist; in fact, he had never in his life dreamed of speaking with one. Yet I was supposed to march into his hospital room and sound some battle cry, compelling him to fight to live again.