In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy, masculinity, therapy, and the fragile work of carrying the fire. I begin with a personal memory of my own therapist, who loved McCarthy’s novels and encouraged me to read them during my own therapy process, and then I explore why those books continue to matter to me now as a therapist working with men who are trying to deconstruct machismo, emotional repression, and inherited versions of masculinity that have cut them off from tenderness, grief, intimacy, and their own inner lives. Through No Country for Old Men and The Road, I think about masculinity not simply as something to condemn or defend, but as something that can mature or fail to mature. McCarthy gives us men who are brave, capable, haunted, violent, loving, terrified, and often unable to speak directly about what is destroying them. And in that world, “carrying the fire” becomes a powerful image for a different kind of strength: not domination, not invulnerability, not control, but the ability to protect something vulnerable without destroying it. This episode is about fathers and sons, old myths and new possibilities, therapy as a different kind of initiation, and the hope that even in the dark, men can learn to become more fully human.
