I cried today looking at old pictures of my son.
In one, he’s grinning with his whole face, the kind of smile that seems too large for a photograph to contain. In another, he’s caught in motion, running toward whatever has captured his attention, unconcerned with how he looks or whether anyone approves. His body is loose. His eyes are bright. He’s not performing joy. He’s inside it. There’s a symbiotic relationship present.
As I moved through the pictures, I could see the child he was in the young man he is becoming. The humor is still there. So is the curiosity, the playfulness, and the ability to enjoy life without first asking whether enjoyment has been earned. He really does love life, and much of the boy who loved it so freely is still visible.
That recognition brought me joy. It also broke something open in me.
I began searching for comparable memories from my own childhood. Images came, but feelings did not. I could recall one or two moments in which I must have been having fun. I could see the place and picture what happened, but I couldn’t locate the sensation of being carefree. The memories felt like photographs without sound: proof that an event occurred, but not a doorway back into how it felt to be there.
I didn’t know whether I was grieving something I’d lost or something I’d never been given enough time to know.
That question has followed me into my work as a Black male therapist. The more Black men I counsel, teach, supervise, mentor, and sit beside, the more I notice how many of us have difficulty remembering ourselves as boys. We can recount what happened to us. We can name responsibilities, rules, dangers, and expectations. We can often explain exactly when we learned to become useful. What’s harder to retrieve is the memory of being delighted in, protected, playful, or free.
For therapists, that absence matters. If we listen only for trauma, pathology, or symptoms, we may miss a quieter loss beneath them: the boyhood that was interrupted, compressed, or traded for survival.
When Boyhood Becomes a Job
Too many Black boys become men before they’ve had the chance to fully be boys. Some are parentified early, carrying siblings, household tasks, or a parent’s emotional burden. Some learn to read the room before they learn to read themselves. In homes shaped by financial pressure, illness, addiction, incarceration, violence, or instability, being mature may become the safest and most loving thing a child can do.
The adults around them may genuinely admire this maturity. Teachers call them responsible. Family members describe them as the man of the house. Coaches praise their toughness. Churches celebrate their discipline. None of those adults may intend harm. Yet admiration can disguise the cost of adaptation. A boy can become highly competent while losing access to dependency, spontaneity, and play.
Other Black boys aren’t forced into responsibility by a single crisis. Instead, they absorb the steady message that ordinary childhood mistakes will not be treated as ordinary when they make them. Their energy may be interpreted as aggression. Their curiosity can be treated as defiance. Their fear may be met with punishment rather than comfort. They learn to monitor their bodies, lower their voices, control their faces, and calculate how others are likely to perceive them.
That vigilance is not irrational. It’s intelligent adaptation to a world in which Black boys are often experienced as older, tougher, and more threatening than they are. But an adaptation that protects a child in one environment can later limit the man he becomes. The body that learned never to relax may experience rest as exposure. The boy who survived by needing little may grow into a man who cannot receive care without shame.
There’s another pathway that therapists can easily overlook because it’s rewarded: achievement. Some Black boys strive so hard for greatness that no time is present for them. They become consumed with school, sports, leadership, work, responsibility, and proving their worth to the world. Their identity becomes attached to performance, productivity, and endurance, leaving little room for joy, rest, or emotional freedom.
Achievement may offer real opportunity, pride, and protection. I would never reduce Black excellence to pathology. But greatness becomes costly when a boy learns that accomplishment is the price of belonging. Joy begins to feel unproductive. Play feels childish. Rest feels lazy. Freedom feels unsafe. The little boy inside him is gradually buried beneath expectations and the constant demand to become exceptional—not because he is weak, but because he was never protected long enough to grow freely.
The Men Who Can’t Find the Feeling
In therapy, this loss doesn’t always announce itself as grief. It may arrive as irritability, overwork, emotional distance, perfectionism, or the inability to answer a simple question: What do you enjoy? A man may describe himself as a provider, husband, father, leader, or professional, yet struggle to tell me who he is when nobody needs anything from him.
When I ask about rest, some men give me their sleep schedule. When I ask about play, they tell me what they do with their children. When I ask what they want, they name what would make their family more secure. Their answers are sincere, loving, and revealing. Even in imagination, they remain on duty.
This is where therapists can unintentionally repeat the original injury. We may admire the client’s insight, self-control, and willingness to work. We may give him more tasks, more goals, and more strategies because competence is the language he speaks fluently. Therapy can become one more place where he performs well while remaining unknown.
We may also move too quickly to dismantle the armor without honoring the boy who built it. Guardedness, humor, intellectualizing, silence, and relentless productivity can frustrate clinicians who want emotional access. But these patterns didn’t appear from nowhere. Before asking a Black man to put down a protection, I want to understand what it protected, who required it, and what danger he believes may return without it.
That doesn’t mean romanticizing defenses or leaving harmful behavior unchallenged. Black men, like all clients, remain responsible for how they affect partners, children, coworkers, and themselves. Context is not exemption. It is the information that makes accountability accurate. A therapist can say, in effect, “This strategy makes sense, and it’s costing you now.” Both truths are necessary.
The deeper clinical question is not only, What happened to you? It’s also, What did you have to stop doing, feeling, or needing in order to become who everyone required you to be? That question often brings us closer to the missing boy.
Joy is Clinical Information
Every now and then, I see a video online of a little Black boy dancing freely, laughing uncontrollably, inventing a game, or being loved loudly. It brings joy to my heart and tears to my eyes at the same time. I’m witnessing him, but I’m also grieving for boys whose freedom was shortened and men who can no longer remember their own.
That emotional response has changed the way I listen in therapy. I pay closer attention to moments when a Black male client becomes animated—when his voice changes while talking about music, when humor arrives without self-protection, when he remembers drawing, riding a bike, cooking beside a grandparent, taking apart radios, or playing ball until the streetlights came on. These moments aren’t detours from the real work. They’re clinical information.
Joy tells us where vitality still lives. It reveals desire beneath duty and identity beyond performance. It shows us what the nervous system may experience as freedom, connection, mastery, or safety. Sometimes the path toward grief opens more naturally after a man has been allowed to remember pleasure. Sometimes he cannot mourn the boy he lost until he has briefly felt that boy return.
Therapists don’t need to manufacture cheerfulness or make joy another assignment to complete. We can become curious about it. What did you love before you had to be good at something? When did you last lose track of time? What makes your body feel less guarded? Who allowed you to be silly? What did you stop doing because it seemed childish, unsafe, or unproductive? What happens inside when someone takes care of you?
These questions may expose pain. A client might realize that he can’t remember anyone playing with him, or that the activities he loved disappeared when family responsibilities increased. He may discover that receiving care feels dangerous because dependence once led to disappointment. Joy work isn’t an escape from trauma work. It can show us the precise shape of what trauma constrained.
The pacing matters. If a man has spent a lifetime being evaluated, even a warm question about joy can feel like another test he’s expected to pass. I try not to fill the silence or rescue him from not knowing. Sometimes “I don’t know” is the most honest doorway available. We can stay there together and notice what the question evokes: embarrassment, suspicion, sadness, numbness, or the urge to offer the answer that sounds most acceptable. The goal isn’t to force a happy memory. It’s to create a relationship in which not knowing doesn’t become another failure.
I also listen for the ways joy and grief coexist. A man may laugh while telling a childhood story and then become quiet when he realizes how alone he was inside it. He may feel pride in caring for younger siblings while also mourning that nobody cared for him in the same way. Therapy becomes more truthful when we don’t require him to choose between honoring the strength he developed and grieving why he needed it. His competence may be both an achievement and a wound. His ambition may have opened doors and kept him from ever feeling at home once he entered them.
It can also help us avoid reducing Black life to suffering. Black men deserve therapy that can hold racialized harm without treating pain as the most authentic thing about us. Our creativity, humor, tenderness, pleasure, spirituality, friendship, sensuality, and play are not footnotes to survival. They are part of the self that survived.
Making Room for the Boy
Reclaiming Black boy joy isn’t the same as asking adult men to become children. It’s helping them recover capacities that should have been allowed to mature with them: wonder, flexibility, imagination, dependence, delight, and the freedom to be imperfect.
In practice, this may mean slowing down when a client mentions something that makes him light up instead of immediately returning to the problem list. It may mean noticing the shame that appears when he rests or asking who taught him that pleasure must be earned. It may mean helping couples recognize that a man’s withdrawal isn’t always indifference; sometimes he has no template for being present without producing. It may mean inviting fathers to protect their sons’ softness without projecting onto them every danger they themselves had to survive.
It also requires us to examine our own expectations as clinicians. Do we experience a Black male client’s quietness as resistance more quickly than we would another client’s? Do we overvalue his composure? Are we more comfortable with his strength than his fear? Do we expect vulnerability on our timetable and then interpret caution as lack of engagement? Can our offices hold a Black man’s joy without making it performative, exceptional, or inspirational?
Safety isn’t created by announcing that therapy is safe. It develops when the client repeatedly discovers that his full humanity won’t be punished. He can be angry without being reduced to anger. He can be afraid without being diminished. He can be accountable without being shamed. He can laugh without having his pain dismissed. He can need others without surrendering dignity.
For some men, reclaiming joy begins quietly: buying the sneakers they once wanted, returning to an instrument, watching cartoons with their children, learning to swim, taking an afternoon without earning it, or allowing themselves to be celebrated. The activity itself is less important than the new relational message: You are allowed to exist beyond what you carry.
This is not indulgence. For a man whose worth has been organized around usefulness, play can be a confrontation with shame. Rest can be exposure. Receiving can challenge an identity built on providing. The therapist’s job isn’t to prescribe fun, but to help him notice the rules that make aliveness feel dangerous, and to build enough internal and relational safety for a different experience.
What I Saw in the Photograph
Looking at my son’s pictures, I felt gratitude that so much of his joy remains available to him. I also felt the ache of not being able to reach my own childhood feelings with the same clarity. Fatherhood has sometimes allowed me to witness the boyhood I wanted, but witnessing is not the same as reclaiming. That work belongs to me.
I am learning that the little boy inside many Black men isn’t gone. He may be hidden beneath competence, vigilance, ambition, service, or fatigue. He may not trust invitations to come forward. He may have learned that every room needs a protector more than it needs a playful boy.
Healing begins when we acknowledge that loss without shame and without making Black men defective for adapting. It grows when fathers hug their sons longer, when families release boys from adult burdens, when schools make room for curiosity without criminalizing it, and when therapists stop treating rest, pleasure, and play as secondary to the serious work of healing.
Black boy joy is more than laughter. It is safety. It is innocence. It is exploration without punishment. It is the freedom to make mistakes without being labeled dangerous. It is being held before being hardened. It is the ability to exist without carrying the weight of the world too soon.
Seeing a free Black boy should not feel rare. Yet when it moves us to tears, we should listen to what those tears know. They may be grieving what was stolen, what was suppressed, or what never had enough room to grow. They may also be recognizing something still alive.
Perhaps part of our work as therapists isn’t only to help Black men survive what happened to them, but to help them recover what survival asked them to leave behind. Perhaps part of our work as fathers, mentors, and communities is to protect the joy of the next generation before it has to become a memory.
And perhaps the little boy inside many Black men isn’t gone at all. Maybe he’s waiting for a relationship safe enough, and a life spacious enough, to give him permission to come outside again.
