I’m often asked, what is a good men’s group? My standard answer is that it’s not therapy, its men learning what we didn’t get to learn growing up. All that is true, but it doesn’t explain what occurs during the meetings. Nor does it explain how, in six months, a man’s life can be transformed so that his once failing marriage brings joy to both partners.

Before I started my new groups eight years ago, I wanted  a complete redesign of my men’s group structure, so I stepped back and looked at what really changes people. I was looking for what worked in a quick, graceful and sustainable way. It certainly wasn’t telling someone how to be. Nor was it endless hours of analyzing what doesn’t work. Whenever either approach was used on me, not only did it not work, I got pissed and walked away.

Men aren’t broken

We’re not broken. We’re not bad. What we are is floundering: I realized that our problem was that we never had models or teachers on how to win as men. Our “problem” is not a therapeutic problem; it’s a learning issue.

I knew I needed to design a method that built on our innate, yet dormant masculine wisdom. This wisdom doesn’t exist outside us; it lies deep inside of us. We needed to be archeologists digging out buried treasure and ancient wisdom. We needed to take each man deeper into himself.

It turned out going deep was easier and more fun than we expected. Most men crave this form of self-discovery. It’s like going back to the house you grew up in to explore your old attic. You discover old memories in the items stored in the attic. You get to complete and reframe past experiences. You even get to take home a few of your old favorite possessions.

The magic

The core of our work is  a process that takes men deep. I developed the Healing Journey as a guided experience for a man to free himself of what binds him, so he may reconnect to what he lost as he survived his childhood, or even an adult experience. The Healing Journey weaves in many traditions and approaches I learned over the years.

A core to the Healing Journey and much of the work we do in these groups stem from the work of Milton Erickson, MD, a psychiatrist who developed an indirect way to utilize the unconscious mind. My primary teacher in this art was Stephan Gilligan, PhD. Back in the 1980s I began studying Ericksonian Hypnosis because it wasn’t standard hypnosis. It was a way to communicate with the unconscious, so it became an ally in healing and creation.

This video that Stephan recently did not only beautifully explains the work he’s developed over 40 years, it explains much of our work in our groups. He weaves into the video many of the aspects we work with – stress, PTSD, mindfulness, somatic psychology and the body. He does a better job explaining what we do than I could.

If you want to learn how to create a group that takes it members deep into their own resources, witnesses their healing and transformation, and then champions their success – watch the video.

A documentary film on the Sandpoint Men’s Group, About Men, will be released this spring. Here’s a trailer for the film. This documentary was shot over three weeks last summer exploring the inner workings of our group. This film will give you more insight to what we do, as well as the impact of our work on our families and community.

Free to Win sponsors One Day and Two Day men’s groups to introduce our work to more men. What we do is actually easy to learn with some good instruction. As the film will show and any man will tell you, it’s also a lot of fun. Men Corps is our nonprofit offering all the protocols to starting and running a group for free.

We are here to help you also have a powerful group. You deserve to win, with the help of other men. You can do it. With our support you can do it quicker and easier than we did. Go for it.

What are your thoughts or feeling around winning as a man?

Photo by almaarte II via Compfight

Over the years, we’ve had many men join our groups at the suggestion of their therapist. That’s right: a therapist suggested their patient check out a men’s group rather than enter therapy. That’s because more and more therapists are realizing men aren’t bad or broken. Being a man is not a pathological problem.

Men don’t need to be “treated” for the condition of being a man. In the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, women were subjected to that kind of prejudice—medicated and even hospitalized due to “hysteria.” Unfortunately, the pendulum swung the other way, and now being a perfectly normal man is considered aberrant behavior.

Enough. We men simply need a safe and fun place to learn, practice and get supportive feedback from other men.

An ongoing group, or an immersion into the group experience such as the ones we provide at Free to Win, can easily free up what blocks a man. These micro-communities of men tap into our primordial need for the brotherhood a group of men provides.

These men’s groups can be quicker than therapy at unlocking what binds men. After coming to a couple of meetings, men often report significant shifts in their lives even with only observing other men interact. We learn a lot vicariously; one man may say something that rings true for you, and it gets you thinking and feeling in a new way. A seed is planted, and that seed germinates into a new perspective, a new belief or a new action.

As an observer you see men be vulnerable, but not weak. You watch men take risks to express in ways you’ve never seen men express. Then you see these men honored for their courage to speak their truth.

A man recently expressed how he was afraid his wife would leave him because he wasn’t showing up like she or he wanted him to (“showing up” means participating, being present, communicating, etc.). We all felt his fear as well as his love for his wife. We also felt his panic – he was at a loss of what to do.

As the man spoke the unspeakable he began to relax. He continued to talk about how, as a kid, his father was always gone on trips to return to a house his mother ran. The man didn’t know how to “step up” because he’d never had a role model on how to assert himself. Yet as he spoke, he recalled seeing other men step up in the group, regarding matters outside and inside the group. The men in the group began to form a new model for him of how to show up at home.

Over the course of the next couple of months, through risking and practicing at home, and getting support in the group, he transformed his marriage. What was a heavy situation evolved to be fun and passionate. His risking continued to not only meet with approval from his wife, she became more attracted to him.

The feminization of therapy

10,000 years ago we left the tribe for the farm, then 200 years ago we left the farm for the factory. This progression of more time away from home means less modeling and less teaching of the masculine aspects of emotions for their sons. Women did what they had to do. They stepped in to fill the gap left by men going to work. They did a great job teaching us what they knew.

Over the last 10,000 years, the natural evolution towards the feminine perspective of emotions is the environment psychotherapy grew up in, so it’s to be expected that it has a feminine bias. From that slant, it’s easy to see how as men we would be seen as broken. And how men would resist going to therapy. It’s unlikely a guy will explain it in these terms, but in his gut it won’t feel right.

We often take a man’s resistance to going to therapy as resisting growing. Yes, there is some of that often there. Change frightens all of us. Yet deeper in him, something doesn’t feel right. Men frequently talk about how the therapist didn’t get him or how he felt he or she couldn’t appreciate his perspective. When these same men join a men’s group they will start opening up in ways that surprise them. The feedback the other men give him is usually heard and used.

As women therapists have said to me, often a man just needs to have a model of how to feel and express as a man. He doesn’t need more education around how to be emotional from a feminine prospective. That didn’t work for me. It didn’t work for women I dated. Women want a man, not a masculine version of themselves.

Even though women are good at spotting what is missing emotionally with men, they naturally suggest feminine ways to fix the problem. I learned that in spite of their and my best intentions to do it right. That feminine perspective didn’t work for either of us. I felt as if I were wearing someone else’s clothes. She felt my behavior was disingenuous. She was right, it was.

Most therapists these days are women, and virtually all were trained by women, as described in this New York Times article. A men’s group is men. For men. About men. Men often feel inhibited with a woman therapist. Don’t get me wrong, I have actually encouraged some men to see female therapists or coaches because I felt they needed that perspective. But most men don’t need more education on a femine version of emotionality; they need to be shown what Masculine Emotional Intelligence™ is.

These groups are fun. When men loosen up so does their humor. Men often report laughing harder than they had in decades. When a man finds it’s OK to be emotional in a masculine way, he loosens up. He can laugh at himself and what it is to be a man.

When men get real and sit together they become natural friends. Think back, when you were young and felt free to express yourself you had real friends. Even the men who felt they never had real friends get them from these micro-communities.

In a culture that pathologizes normal behavior and thought, it’s reassuring to see the growth of men’s groups as an open source means of addressing individual needs. Part of the healing that occurs when men realize what they or others might have labeled flawed is actually normal for men. When a man realizes through other men that what he judged as screwed up is natural he relaxes. When he relaxes, the man immediately begins to function at a higher level.

Being a man today is tough. We have centuries of training in how to behave in accordance to a limited social norm. We have a culture that at best gives us mixed messages. Hanna Rosin describes in her new book The End of Men how we are losing our power. As good as our fathers were, they were of little value in guiding us in the masculine arena.

The collective wisdom of a micro-community of men provides what was missing. It’s not magic – it’s masculinity.

Photo by federico borghi via Compfight

Now that we investigated the upside and downside of Bad Boys for men and women, let’s extract what works from this model of the masculine that fulfills what both men and women need. I’ve written how Manhood 2.0 is the evolving model of what it is to be a man today. This new man has [...]

This is third part of a four-part article exploring the traps and the power of Bad Boys for both men and women. From working with women and having them as friends and partners, I’ve learned that they realize the price of being with a Bad Boy. A Bad Boy can be a lot of fun [...]

This is second part of a four-part article exploring the traps and the power of Bad Boys for both men and women. What’s in a Bad Boy – the upside of being bad A Bad Boy’s outward struggle with men and women mimics his inward struggle. His emotional ADHD makes it difficult to settle down [...]

Today President Obama speaks in Chicago about gun violence because the Black Youth Project generated over 45,000 signatures on their petition to have the president come to Chicago. Having our President speak about gun violence’s largest set of perpetrators and victims is huge. Black boys are traditionally the last to receive political attention. Now that [...]

  You know that guy who walks into a room as if he could care less? We all want to be that guy. Assuming you’re not that guy, I’ll teach you how you can that confident without the downside of the typical Bad Boy. This is a four-part article exploring the traps and the power [...]

You know that person who always has something nice to say, even when you told him how you just had the worst day of your life? You spilled out your guts only to receive back some New Age or motivational affirmation about how good always comes from bad. If you are like me, rather than [...]