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We’re just one day away from the season 4 premiere of Iyanla: Fix My Life which will work extensively with African American men to address issues related to abandonment, sexual abuse, incarceration, infidelity, and more.

The focus of this season was music to our ears, as we’ve grown tired of women always being told who they should be, what they should do, and how they need to act, while men’s transgressions largely go unaddressed. But even though Iyanla Vanzant will be unpacking some of men’s deepest issues on camera for the next eight episodes of her OWN TV show, the author and spiritual healer is keenly aware criticism may follow because people don’t understand you have to approach men differently than women.

“Very often people accuse me — or challenge me — of being softer on men than I am on women,” Vanzant told us in a phone interview. “They say I’m hard on women and soft on men. No, see I can go into deeper places with women quicker because I’m a woman. With men I have to kind of creep up on them.”

Explaining the difficulties of getting men to open up and be vulnerable, when it comes to the men we’ll meet this season choosing to work through their struggles with her, Vanzant said “The only thing I can say is they trust me.” Reason being? Vanzant knew how to earn their trust.

“The thing with men is you have to be very, very mindful  — I have to be very, very mindful of how I speak to them because once I touch that ego thread, they can shut down. So, it takes longer for me to create a relationship with men. I don’t have a lot of time with them so I have to establish our relationship quickly.

“With women, the relationship establishes quickly because we’re women and I can speak to them in a way because I know and they know I know. But as a woman, men assume that I don’t know. I don’t know their thought process, their emotional place, because they think it’s an intellectual thing when its a spiritual thing.”

Because these men don’t live in silos, a number of their wives and girlfriends will also appear on the show to help facilitate their partner’s healing and in turn their own. One of the biggest lessons Vanzant said she had to impart to the women was to stop making the mistake of believing men think and feel like we do.

“I constantly have to tell women, your boyfriend is not your girlfriend. They don’t think like we do. They don’t go to the places, emotionally, that we go, sometimes psychologically the places we can go. I think for the women who were present, the women have to retrain themselves to understand how men think because it’s very different. I always say men think in headlines, women think in fine print. They get the big picture and they’re good with that. We want the details, we want the color of the ink, we want every punctuation mark in the right place, they don’t care if it’s a run-on sentence.”

While being aware of those differences is key to the success of romantic relationships, there’s another motive that’s even more important.

“We have to recognize the distinctions between how we be and how men be because we’re raising sons,” Vanzant said. “So many women are raising sons and in many of the shows the issues that the men had hinged on the mother — not because it’s her fault, not because she did anything wrong, not at all blaming mothers, but there is an ancient African African proverb that says ‘A man is who his mother makes him.’ How she speaks to him, how she raises him, how she feeds him, what she expects of him, what she requires of him, determines how he approaches his life as a man, particularly his relationships with women.

“Men model for boys how to be a man, but a woman teaches a boy how to be a man. We think women can’t teach men but every man was taught by a woman. This notion that women can’t teach men, that’s fallen.”

Check out a sneak peek of episode 1 featuring Hot Boys rapper Turk and his wife Erica which airs September 30 at 9 pm on OWN below.

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