The core of men's work with Lucas Krump
The core of men's work with Lucas Krump
What is men's work at its core? Is it even about masculinity?
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Lucas Krump is the CEO and Co-founder of EVRYMAN, one of the largest and fastest growing men’s groups in the world. I’m currently in the middle of EVRYMAN’s Advanced I program and it’s easy to see why: their facilitators are able to create vulnerable, no bullshit conversations through Zoom.
I interviewed Lucas about what makes EVRYMAN as successful as it is, the benefits of group work vs. 1:1 therapy, and how Lucas wants to see men’s work evolve.
Men’s work for every man
Johnny: What decisions did EVRYMAN make to ensure that it worked for everyday dudes?
Lucas: I think, one, is the language. Contrary to popular opinion, Everyman is not a masculinity organization. We're not interested in really even talking about masculinity. Our belief, my belief, is that masculinity is sovereign to the man, and it's up to him to decide what that definition is for himself. We obviously give him the space to explore it, but I'm not going to tell a guy what it means to be a man.
And also, I think moving away from the woo-woo. These overused words of healing and this and that. That’s all well and good. But when you're trying to talk to everyday guys, they don't connect with that language.
Johnny: What do you talk about instead?
Lucas: We talk about how you feel because feelings are what's true. Feelings are our physical sensations in our body that ground us in the present moment. They're not made up. They're not somebody else's. They're our feelings and our relationship with our physical self and our emotional self. Every human and every man can relate to that.
And so we really focus on the physical bodies and our relationship with our emotions. Because I think that that's one place where guys are, and I know it was for me, we haven't been taught how to be emotive as men. For the most part, our understanding of emotion and emotionality has been taught to us via women. I don't say that in a negative way, but if you think about it, our mother, our teachers, our school nurses -- at a very critical point in our development as men, our relationship with emotion has been taught to us through a feminine lens, mainly because men of our age demographic were largely disconnected from their emotions.
So their ability to show us masculine emotionality was very limited. So most guys' relationships with feelings comes from a very feminine place. And I think one of our focuses is: how do you create a masculine relationship with your emotions?
What does a men’s group circle look like?
Johnny: I'm curious how you do that. Can you describe what happens in EVRYMAN’s group circles?
Lucas: One of the first things that happens is agreements. Agreements create safety, and safety is absolutely critical for self-discovery and exploration. Quite frankly, most people don't feel safe - physically safe, psychologically safe. If we know that we're all playing by the same rules and that there's a set of agreements that we're all committing to, that's really, really critical.
From there, we check in with our physical self and we check in with our emotional self. Why do we do that? One, it grounds us in the here and now. Most guys are not present. Most people are not present. And what I mean by that is we're always thinking about the shit that happened to us before this moment, the shit that we got to do after this moment. But when we can tap into our emotional self, those emotions are what's happening for us in this present moment.
One of the things that's core to what we do at EVRYMAN is we try to get out of our head and into our heart. And so when a guy says, let me think about it or let me figure it out, it's red alert. It's like, dude, we spend all day long, every day, figuring it out. Let's actually focus on feeling it out.
And a lot of what we do in our groups is expanding our emotional capacity. I think of what we do with EVRYMAN is like a rubber band. If you take a rubber band and you stretch it a million times, eventually it just doesn't go back. And that's what's happening with this emotional muscle that we have. We’re expanding that capacity.
Group vs. 1:1
Johnny: What do you think is different about the growth men see sitting in a circle as opposed to one-on-one therapy?
Lucas: I think our life is made up of relationships: relationship with ourself, relationship with our family, with our colleagues, with our loved ones, with our romantic partners. Most people haven't had a lot of practice being in relations with others. Most men haven't had a lot of practice being in relation in a healthy way with other men. One thing that I hear very often is: “Oh, I'm scared of dudes. I don't really like other dudes.” So one of the core things that we're doing in group is we're actually practicing being in relation with other men and in turn, developing skills that support us in other aspects of our life.
The other difference between traditional one-on-one therapy and coaching is those are very generic environments. It's a very controlled environment. And if you're doing therapy or doing coaching and you're discovering things about yourself, things that you want to change, ways that you want to show up differently in the world, you now need to actually practice doing that. And so EVRYMAN creates an arena for you then to show up and practice.
If you're conflict averse because of some traumatic incident in your childhood, and you have to have a difficult conversation with your wife, and you realize that in therapy, wouldn't you want to go practice having difficult conversations before you go and have one of the most difficult conversations in your life?
The future
Johnny: How do you see men's work evolving in the next 10 to 20 years to meet men where they're at?
Lucas: My biggest hope would be that EVRYMAN and organizations like it don't need to exist anymore because we've worked our shit out. Unfortunately, I don't think that's in the near future. My hope is that we continue to normalize this work, and it becomes more and more accepted in the mainstream, and that this work, we reach enough men that then this work starts to trickle down to younger generations. And then we start to see this exponential impact of this growth.
I also think this is human work. This isn't men's work. This is human work. It's really, really important. All of us experienced COVID. We know what it feels like to be disconnected from other humans.
I think we will recognize the importance of learning how to be in relations with other humans, and we will start to get the benefit of that. And the idea that I'm in a group -- somebody doesn't immediately think, “Oh, he's in AA in a church basement.” No, he's in a group because he wants to be a fucking badass leader, and he understands that those skills are critical to being a good man and being a good leader.
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