Benefits of Men's Groups

At least six predictable patterns of behavior and communication will emerge in a group. If the members let these patterns unfold without attention, then they will get stuck in certain roles and ways of communicating. The feeling of dynamic growth and expectancy that marks the beginning of a group can disappear, and the group is likely to fragment, because members will begin to feel distant from each other.

These patterns are not good or bad, they happen automatically, like gravity. If the group is willing to pay attention to them, this awareness can lead to understanding of how we communicate, both within the group and outside, and can help enormously in our relationships.

Two of the patterns are issues of how the group creates itself: Commitment Leadership The four other patterns are personal or psychological issues which will emerge as men meet with each other.

SEE THE FOLLOWING FOUR PATTERNS IN NEXT MONTHS NEW ADDITIONS TO OUR HOMEPAGE

Creating and Avoiding Intimacy

Family Patterns

Dominance

Truth telling vs. Blaming

General questions follow each description. These questions can lead to fruitful discussions if group members plug them into the discussion format in Chapter 7.

GROUP CREATION

QUESTIONS OF COMMITMENT

These dynamics relate to questions of involvement: Are group members committed to the process? Are agreements about commitment, attendance, and promptness clear enough so that men can keep them? Laxness about creating the container of the group is a statement of intention; it says something like, "I want an escape valve so I don't really have to be here?"

If attendance becomes a consistent problem for a man, often he is showing his dissatisfaction for the group in the only way he knows how. Of course, men need to stay current with other members if their commitment level changes. It is easy to make the absent member the scapegoat for ambivalence that other members may be feeling, but do not know how to talk about. It is important to remember that the real commitment is for group members to be present and willing to invest themselves, their truth, and their vulnerability into the group.

Key Questions

1. Is the group set up so that the agreements about when and where the group meets are clear? Do the group members come on time and consistently? Do members expect a call when someone is going to miss?

2. Do group members feel free to talk about their own or others' lateness or missed meetings? What emotional reaction do these misses trigger in other members? How are these reactions familiar from previous relationships?

3. Do the members come ready to be present, or are they affected by their working pace or drugs like alcohol or coffee?

LEADERSHIP

Who is going to run the group, and how will this be decided? How will group decisions be made? Questions like these inevitably arise when men get together to create something. Men have found great inspiration and energy with good leaders, and they have been wounded and abused by bad ones. This history will be present in a group, especially at the beginning, as the members begin to develop some trust.

John Guarnaschelli, who has put together dozens of men's groups through "On the Common Ground" in New York City, has suggested to me that this is the one hurdle that his groups struggle with the most. Men launch into group work together without handling this single fundamental issue: how will the members decide where to meet, when to meet, and most importantly, how will they meet? The failure to come to a common agreement means that some men will unconsciously take power, and others will give it up. Unspoken resentments will build, until someone has the courage to tell the truth, or until the group fragments.

Key Questions

1. What kind of leader do I want for this group? Do I want to be the only leader? Will I give my respect to another leader? Do I want leadership to rotate, or rest with one individual?

2. What kinds of issues do I have around leadership? Do I want to control and manage, or do I sit back and criticize? How do I react when I am being lead or controlled and I don't like it?

3. Am I willing to make leadership a topic of the group? Am I willing to speak honestly about my needs when the leaders do not appear to be taking them into account?

CHAPTER 7: Stages in the Group's Life: The Beginning

We will always find the first meetings of a group exciting, frightening, and challenging. We come together bringing all our fears from past men's events (fraternity hazings, army drinking parties, high school football) where we were hurt or maybe shamed for being vulnerable. All these painful episodes and memories reside somewhere in the room when we meet. As much as we want to let go of these memories, we will also want to control group process, so we don't have to be vulnerable until we build up some trust.

When I began leading groups, I wanted to be in control, so that the group would work "right", and so that the members would get the "proper" experience. What that meant, of course, was I was afraid to be vulnerable and say when I didn't know what to do next. I needed to appear "together," so I could stay safe. In this phase of my leadership I thought I had to manage the group carefully, so that members would feel good about the group. (And thus I could feel good about myself.)

Over time, I learned to trust group process and the members more. I began to let go, to let the group take care of itself, in terms of deciding on and doing activities, and even in intervening with and making comments to other members. But most important, I let go of holding myself back from the group, and of attempting to create a positive image of myself in their eyes. I started sharing my own life events more in the group, my thoughts, doubts, and feelings while I was with them.

Because of my belief in the importance of men's community, I realized I had to be in the group more, instead of playing the role of a therapist-observer. This is also an issue of timing. After the group has built up cohesion and trust between group members and between members and leaders, the time is ripe for more personal sharing by the facilitator.

And I know that whenever I join a group or a project, I am anxious, and this anxiety shows itself in different ways. I want to please the other members of the group, and sometimes I make jokes to diffuse my own fear. All of us, in the beginning stages of a group, will resort to old defensive patterns to keep people away, to control how vulnerable we will become.

One time several years ago, my men's group interviewed a new man. The whole evening he was there, he spent drawing a picture on a big pad in his lap. Finally one of the other members said, "Tim, what are you doing..." Tim said, "Oh just trying to sketch out some ideas I had about...." Needless to say, we were not impressed with his willingness to be present and didn't invite him to stay.

I use this example because we all resist intimacy in some way. Men will ask a thousand questions before they commit to a group, and most of the questions revolve around one or two central issues: Will I get hurt? Will the group love and accept me if I really show myself? If the group can talk about these issues in depth, great awareness and transformation can occur.

I have begun here in Chapter 7 with a group of exercises designed to help the group get started with clear intentions and a clear vision, with some simple group activities (mostly discussions), and with brief rituals to open and close the group. This section of exercises could take six to ten meetings to complete, since the discussion questions raised in the Group Topics exercises could each take a two-hour meeting or more to complete. I recommend taking time on each one, until members feel in accord with the vision of the group and their intentions to explore psychological dynamics that will inevitably emerge in a group.

CHAPTER 8: Stages in the Group's Life: Going Deeper

In the second stage in the group's journey, men feel excitement, deepening trust and new depths of friendship. Often group members are exhilarated that such great obstacles as fear and logistics were overcome and that they actually can meet together and bond.

I remember reading in Alan Ginsberg's journals where he described the long, cross-country journeys he and Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and others would take to meet. He wrote something like, "We would hitchhike across America to talk to a friend." In Ginsberg's comment I heard his great loneliness, and also the bond he shared with his fellow travelers and dharma bums, a bond in which their hearts had been touched by some capacity for truth or joy or creativity in their brothers. A heart once touched by a kindred spirit will never be the same. Many men like myself have experienced these powerful emotions of bonding and brotherhood through men's meetings.

In the early 1980's the men in the Bay Area who attended retreats together created a group called the Golden Gate Men's Council. We drove from all over the Bay Area to a small community center in San Francisco one Sunday a month, and well I remember the fondness and even hilarity with which we greeted each other after a month's absence.

We were new to such intense male friendships, and we created funny rituals and awkward activities, as we experimented with community building. One time at the Golden Gate Men's Council meeting, my friend Doug and I tried in one afternoon to bring back a ten-thousand-year-old tradition of initiation, a tradition that the men there agreed we had lost in our childhoods, somewhere between the "Ozzie and Harriet" show and little league.

Doug and I dressed up in robes, and we wore the bones of cattle over our heads. We asked the thirty men at the meeting to line up blindfolded all around the walls of this small gym. We tried to terrorize them by blowing conch shells in their ears and jostling them, because we knew that indigenous tribal rituals contained the threat of death, or at least embarrassment, for the boys. But unfortunately most of the men there knew when they took off their blindfolds, they'd still be in the gym. No lives were at stake. Doug and I wondered why these guys weren't permanently transformed by our attempts to bring back ritual into their lives. Then we sat down together to a lunch of spaghetti, after which we played volleyball with terrific zeal and little skill.

In the second stage of the group's life, besides the excitement, men are testing each other. How safe is it? How much of myself can I reveal? As we share secrets about our lives, we look around the room, afraid to be so vulnerable. Will we be received, or will someone shame us, and recommit the abuses we've all experienced in the past? There is only one way to find out.

As my friend and colleague, Lou Dangles, suggested, the group is deepening into contact in at least three different ways. Personal stories and discussions both bring the group together, and they prepare the ground for direct sharing and interactive work between men, the second form of depth. Ritual work provides a context for men to work and bond in; we see ourselves as part of the great forces and mysteries of the universe, not just guys stuck in our personal dramas and traumas, but men wrestling with important issues of community, creativity, and compassion. This larger picture brings yet a different form of depth.

In the exercises for Chapter 8, I have included a number of discussions, creative arts activities, and rituals. A couple of the discussion activities encourage direct dialogue between group members. These direct dialogues prepare the way for activities which help solve group problems in Chapter 9, Plateaus and Problems.

CHAPTER 9. Stages in a Group's Life: Plateaus and Problems

As months go by, the group can begin to feel stale and dull. Sometimes a new member can bring in excitement, or doing new activities can help, but eventually, my experience has shown me, the group has to move towards introspection.

Members have to do a "gutcheck" and ask themselves if they like what the group is doing. This self-analysis scares members. It forces them to look deeply at their communication habits and their ways of being intimate and being distant. It also requires direct conversation between members.

This cycle of group life can lead to great awareness and revived interest in the group, and to learning new skills that are invaluable outside the group. If however, group trust and safety have not been created, and if men don't feel bonded, the group can fragment. This is a tough balancing act, but it is one that we do all the time with other relationships too, so we have some experience with this judgement call.

A couple of years ago, a friend, Andrew, was starting up a group with some of his buddies. After a few meetings, I called and asked him how it was going, and he said, "I can't believe how angry I have gotten...First of all this guy, I hardly know him. Didn't come two times ago. He called in to say that his girlfriend wanted some quality time and it had to be on that night. We had just agreed on meeting nights the week before...But that wasn't all. There's this other guy in the group, very successful doctor...he talks all night. Whenever there is a pause in the action, he jumps in. He takes up all the time. I don't get to talk..."

I asked him if he felt like he could tell these guys about the problems he was having. He said, "No. It just makes me want to stay home too." I knew that he had joined the group to get support about issues with his teenage kids, and to practice interacting with people, so I said, "Do you see how the group is doing its work? You feel like people can't hear you. You feel abandoned by this man. And you don't know how to talk to them without blowing up, just like your father used to do with you...I'd say that the group is giving you a perfect opportunity to work on the issues that you said you're there for."

"Yeah, I guess so," Andrew said. "It's just hard to be vulnerable with this group of guys. Even though I've known some of them for a long time, I don't know how to bear my heart to them. There is such fear in me. And of course, I don't want to talk about that, I'd rather be mad at the other fellows. I see how that is my pattern of protection."

Andrew's group had originally met to talk about specific topics, but inevitably group dynamic issues were raised. And Andrew was wrestling with fundamental problems of safety and trust, within this group of powerful men. My experience shows me that unless Andrew's group could communicate some of these deeper group experiences, the members would reach a plateau. Eventually general topics will not hold the group together, because of the unspoken conflicts which need to be aired.

Several clear signals indicate when a group is in a plateau.

1. Men are complaining outside the group about certain members, or about the way the group is working.

2. Men leave the group meetings feeling uninvolved, or there are long periods at the meetings when men are bored.

3. Men begin missing group sessions; other life commitments become more important.

4. There is more expression of anger at the meetings, sometimes with inexplicable causes.

5. There are no activities or conversations that bring men into direct contact with each other, so a backlog of un-communicated feelings builds up. It is important to remember that what may be a plateau for one man, a time when the group feels slow and stagnant, may be a period of quiet calm and nurturing for other members. These divergent voices must all be heard, so that men can reflect on and communicate how the group is working for them.

The exercises in this chapter build on some of the interactive exercises in Chapter 8. They ask men to tell the truth to each other and about the group itself.

For example, in one group, we spent three sessions in a row going around the room and saying to each other, "Blank, something I have been meaning to say to you for a long time but I haven't been able to is....." Many deep hurts surfaced, and some men expressed their pain and anger. But the group provided a place for an exciting experiment in conflict resolution, and after the emotional clearing, we felt much more bonded and open to truth telling.

Men should hold in their hearts the vision that they can clear their judgements and old unspoken communications in a group setting and thereby become closer to the other men.

After ten years of group work, I know that groups will deepen as they begin to deal with conflict directly. The exercises in this chapter give tools for this important exploration. They help members confront their own deeply unconscious patterns of withholding love and truth from others. Sometimes meetings which use these exercises can be painful, but if men enter into them with a heart full of hope and forgiveness, and with a mood of exploration, they can create deeper bonds.

Here are some tips for these interactive processes.

1. These exercises should have a designated facilitator for the night, since each man can get caught up in his own emotional reactivity. An outside observer is very helpful.

2. When doing one of these exercises, the leader should help participants take the focus off the other man whom the member is talking to and about. The member should concentrate on his own bodily-emotional experience. One of my teachers, Dr. Gay Hendricks, says the goal is to make statements from our own truth which are inarguable, such as the difference between "You let me down," and "When you act that way, I feel sad and distant, and my chest hurts." The second statement is strictly my own truth--to the bone.

3. Members should always ask themselves what past wound or hurt in their personal history is being activated, if they are feeling reactive to another man, if they want to judge or blame, or if they are angry with? These face-to- face talks go much better when each person is trying to plumb the depths of their own patterns of emotional experience.

4. The facilitator for the night must pay attention to the types of statements that are being made: are they inarguable personal truths, or are they accusatory or blaming? The easiest way to tell is to listen to the response of the other man.

CHAPTER 11: Men's Resources for Change

1. Books

FAIRY TALES AND MYTHS

King Warrior Magician Lover. Moore and Gillette. HarperCollins. New York. 1990. Many positive images of men and a sympathetic analysis of our psyches.Iron John. Robert Bly. Harper and Row. New York. 1990. The book that came from the material that started it all. How can you miss it? (order on-line)

The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Jack Zipes, translation. Bantam Books. 1987. The seminal work of the Grimms, seedbed of story lines and images. (order on-line)

SOCIOLOGY-HISTORY

Warrior's Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet. Jed Diamond. New Harbinger. Oakland. 1994. A book that inspires change and outlines a plan to get from here to there. This book provides an thoughtful analysis of violence and addiction, and shows how men can heal from these habits, from a pioneer in the men's movement. Order hardcover on-line Save 30% Order softcover on-line Save 20% Interviedw with Jed Diamond about this book: "Warriors and the Planet"

Manhood in the Making. David Gilmore. Yale University Press. 1990.Another sympathetic analysis of how men are trained to be the way we are. Fascinating, slightly academic and intelligent. (order on-line)

RITUAL

Of Water and the Spirit. Malidoma Somé. Tarcher-Putnam. 1994. An African shaman with a Western education describes his life in these two worlds. Order on-line: Book

Audio Cassette

Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation. Louis Mahde, Stephen Foster and Meredith Little, eds. Open Court Publishing. 1987. An anthology of articles and descriptions of personal and tribal initiations, with information about how to create our own. (order hardcover on-line) (order trade paperback on-line)

SPIRITUAL LIFE

Healing into Life and Death. Stephen Levine. Doubleday. 1987. A road map on how to work with illness, death and loss. Many valuable guided meditations. (order on-line) (audio cassette)

A Path with Heart. Jack Kornfield. Bantam. 1993. Stories, autobiographical and otherwise, by a leading western teacher of Buddhism. A man with heart has chosen inspirational stories and teachings to help us wake up to living life with attention and compassion. (order on-line)

POETRY

News of the Universe. Robert Bly, ed. Sierra Club Books. 1980. A seminal collection of poetry on nature, mysticism, love and death, organized around Bly's thesis that nature poetry is re-emerging as a vital stream in Western poetry, after centuries of misuse and ignorance. (order on-line) (audio cassette)

Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Meade, eds. Harper Collins. 1992. A collection of poetry loved by men who have attended workshops with these three important teachers. (order on-line)

RELATIONSHIP

Conscious Loving. Gay Hendricks, PhD. and Katie Hendricks, PhD. Bantam. 1990. Excellent text for understanding body-oriented healing and for practicing truthtelling and non-blaming conversations. See especially the exercises in the back of the book. (order on-line)

2. Video:

A Gathering of Men. Bill Moyers. PBS. A poignant interview with Robert Bly explaining his work with men, intercut with workshop footage of men talking with each other and Bly.

3. Web resources Check out MenWeb's listing of resources for men on the Web.

4. Men's Centers

The best place to find a current listing of centers in your area is:

Menstuff:The National Men's Resource Calendar

MAS Medium Co., Box 882,San Anselmo Ca 94960-0882

Phone Line: 415-453-2839. This quarterly has ceased hard-copy publication, but the information is now available on the Web.

This project of maintaining information on these groups is a massive on and all praise is due to Gordon Clay for his work on this.

MenWeb has a listing of men's centers and men's councils as well. Click here to see it.

The following is a list of centers which I am personally aware of:

West Coast Regional Centers

Bay Area Men's Centers:

Berkeley

Berkeley Men's Center

2925 Shattuck Ave.

Berkeley CA 94705

415-644-0107

Marin County

Echo Rock Therapy Center Men's Program

45 Camino Alto

Mill Valley Ca 94941

415-388-0333

Coordinator: George Taylor.

Santa Rosa, Sonoma County

Redwood Men's Center

705 College Ave.

Santa Rosa, CA

707-575-0550

East Coast

John Guarnaschelli

On the Common Ground

250 W. 57 St. #1527

New York, NY 10107

Here are some numbers I'm reprinting from Gordon.

Seattle Men's Wisdom Council. 206-454-1189

Portland Resource Center. 503-235-3433

Los Angeles Lost Dog Men's Council. 310-475-1069

Midwest

Men's Council Project

Box 17341

Boulder CO 80301-0431

303-444-7741

5. Publications and Periodicals

Men's Voices Journal. 7552 31st Ave. NE, Seattle WA 98115 (quarterly, $20/4 issues)

Brother to Brother. P.O. Box 1876, Nevada City Ca 95959

Journal of Men's Studies. Box 32, Harriman TN 37748. ($30)

Men's Center of Los Angeles Newsletter. 213-276-9598. $10