While there aren’t any official stats on it, my educated guess is that north of 200,000 men have participated in some form of men’s work across the US. And despite being around for over 30 years, it’s currently seeing a surge in popularity. In my opinion, it’s the most positive trend for men’s mental health today.
What is men’s work? It’s men sitting in a circle telling the truth.1 Often, it gets emotional. Beyond that, each circle of men operates a little differently. They can range from simple discussions to intense trauma therapy. Usually they are peer led, cheap or free to join, and skew towards men in their 30s to 50s. Before I go deeper into what this work looks like, here’s why I think everyone should be rooting for men’s work.
Why should anyone care?
I think men are doing groundbreaking stuff inside men’s circles. They’re taking skills that are normally seen as feminine - stuff like creating norms for emotional safety, developing language to express tough emotional issues, and developing methods of listening intently - and developing those skills in ways that feel intuitive and powerful for men. It’s a hard thing to describe because I haven’t seen public examples of this work, but it’s more intense, confrontational, and physical than any “healing” setting I’ve seen before.
Before men’s work, if you had asked me to envision what a super masculine dude devoted to emotional safety and healing looked like, my brain would short circuit. It would not be able to compute. Now it can, and this is the gift of men’s work in my book. It provides a whole new way for men to show up that is centered around safety and healing. And it feels raw and powerful, allowing men to feel more like themselves unlike a lot of “anger management” or cultural/emotional sensitivity trainings. As a result, I believe men’s work will be the birthplace of some of the most exciting male leaders in the century to come.
What men’s work looks like
Most men’s group activities fall into two buckets: retreats and weekly circles.
Retreats. I remember my first retreat. It was three days long with a group of 25 retreat participants. I expected there would be a couple of dudes running the show. Instead there were over 30 staff - all of them volunteers. It was the first thing that struck me about the men’s work community. They could have gotten away with far fewer staff, but that wasn’t the point. These dudes loved serving the community, and this was the first time I had seen something like that.
And then we got down to business. In a series of progressively vulnerable exercises, we looked at how anger, shame, fear, sadness, and joy were showing up in my life. This culminated in me stepping onto a carpet with two facilitators. Within 5 minutes, they had me bawling. I can count on one hand the number of times I remember crying before that experience. And yet through a series of simple questions, they cracked me like a nut. The whole thing took place in a large room that looked like it could be a summer camp cafeteria. 20 feet to my left, another man was being physically restrained as he yelled with anger. 20 feet to my right, another man was being held as he cried. “The work” as it’s called, is surprisingly physical. Despite the commotion, the facilitators were laser focused on me as 30 years of repressed emotions came out.
It’s hard to adequately describe the retreat experience. To date, I’ve only seen one depiction that captures the energy of it, which is the documentary The Work. The Work depicts Inside Circle - inmates at Folsom Prison running their own men’s group retreat, facilitating themselves and men from the outside. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Inside Circle members continue to do the work today, and are some of the most skilled facilitators found anywhere.
Circles. Circles are a weekly meetup of between 3 and 15 men - often in a community space like a church basement. The one I’ve helped run in Brooklyn starts with a “checkin,” where each man in the circle says whatever they have to say to get present. There’s no interrupting unless a man runs out of time, and we encourage men to focus on the emotion and not “get into story”. That means that if I’m feeling fear that day, I don’t go on a 5 minute story about why. I simply say “I’m feeling fear because X” and describe how that emotion feels. This is difficult. Coming into the work I was comfortable describing my day and “why” I thought I felt things. Describing the physical sensations various emotions made me feel was completely foreign.
After the initial checkin we often do another checkin with a prompt like “say what you didn’t say the first round.” For me, there’s always something else there beneath the surface. Often this uncovers a deeper level of sadness, fear, or shame that I’ve pushed to the back of my head. If the emotion feels strong enough, I’ll ask to “do work” on that emotion, and another man will volunteer to facilitate by asking me simple questions.
This is where things get really interesting. Good facilitating follows the man down to wherever he wants to go - however deep, weird, or scary those places may be. As a facilitator, it’s very difficult to withhold advice or comforting words when a man is experiencing pain. But it’s the lack of me inserting my own ego that keeps the work safe. The more the man directs his own journey into his own pain, the more “complete” he feels after it. The more the man is focused on feeling his own bodily sensations as opposed to thinking in his head, the more he can process the negative stuff and make space for the positive.
For example, if I’m processing the death of my dad, a facilitator might ask me “what do you feel?”, “where do you feel it?”, “if that feeling were a voice, what would it say to you?”. These types of questions allow me to step deeper and deeper into the sadness, until I feel it completely. Only then am I able to feel the loss in a new light - one that supports me rather than tears away at me. A common rule is to not ask the question “why?” in facilitation. That question tends to pull people out of whatever they’re feeling and into their heads. The times I have seen it used, the person abruptly stops feeling and starts thinking.
The benefits of men’s work
Every participant has a different reason for showing up, but here is how men’s work has benefited me, and why it’s made me such an evangelist.
It taught me what a community focused on safety looks like
Safety is at the center of men’s work. If a man doesn’t feel safe, he doesn’t do the work, and the whole point is to do the work. As a result, every men’s group has strict rules around safety: processes for clearing interpersonal grievances, not touching someone else without their permission, confidentiality agreements, etc.
And then there’s what’s called “creating the container”. This is the subtle art of creating the kind of vibe where everyone feels safe and able to be present. This is part of the reason why every person in the circle has a chance to checkin before deeper work begins. In my experience, things feel much safer once everyone has had the chance to speak. If a door is open, someone will close it. If chairs have a large space between them, someone will ask folks to come in closer. If there is an unspoken tension or question in the room, a skilled facilitator will speak to it. All of this in service of creating a “tight” as opposed to a “loose” container. The tighter the container, the deeper the work tends to go.
This is a different kind of safety I’m used to thinking about as a dude. I’m used to valuing physical safety. I’m not used to explicitly thinking about the ways someone might not feel safe enough to speak their mind. I viewed caring about emotional safety as an instinct, not as a skill to develop until men’s work. And once I viewed it as a skill, it became something men can and should pay attention to. I imagine a lack of emotional safety leads men to feel anxious, not good enough, or the need to act tough. I get the sense that the older I get, creating this kind of safety and allowing myself and others to “be me” is going to be a greater focus in life.
It taught me how to listen and “be present”
I used to think “listening” meant not talking and trying to remember what someone is saying. In facilitation, the focus is on following a man down into his emotions. The core of this is called “active listening,” and my favorite definition of what that means comes from Bill Wich, a man who’s written a lot of the protocols for many of the most active men’s groups. Bill simplifies active listening into three things: being in silence, echoing what someone says, and asking clarifying questions. And that’s it. Whenever I do those things, the conversation ends up going way deeper and into more interesting places than it would otherwise. If you’re interested in building these skills, Bill created a free program you can do with a friend called the Omega Point Program. I did it for 40 days and it’s the skill I treasure most from men’s work. The program is for everyone, not just men.
It gave me a sense of worth through service as opposed to winning
Self-worth doesn’t come from a lot of places. One of the few ways I learned to give myself permission to feel it was by “winning” at different things: getting good grades, doing well in my job, being decent at sports, etc. None of these are bad pursuits, but it’s a hard and endless race. When I went to my first retreat and saw dozens of men beaming because they had just sacrificed their weekend to help other people like me, I didn’t get it. Over time I understood that helping other people get through difficult shit right before my very eyes is one of the most cathartic experiences I can possibly witness. I had never served a cause higher than myself like that, and it turns out it feels pretty good.
It changed my nervous system to feel more sensitively
Before men’s work, I didn’t know what it looked like for a man to cry. Outside of movies, I just hadn’t seen it, and so I never understood it as an option. Men’s work retreats changed that for me. I went from not really knowing what crying feels like to being able to sit by myself and go there. I found a similar ability with a sense of calmness. This doesn’t work for every emotion for me - I still struggle to access anger for example - but the ability to sink myself into sadness and peace makes me feel more human and alive. I judge that men are pretty good at “monkey see monkey do” kind of learning. I needed to see someone like me show emotion before I could do it myself, and the more I see it, the more “instinctual” it becomes. This is a big reason why I value the group aspect of men’s work. The more I see other men going through shit, the more I feel. If I were to try to summarize what “the work” means to me in one word, it’s “feeling.”
There’s plenty more benefits I’d like to go into at some point. Men’s work has changed the language I use to be more personal and precise. It’s shown me the importance of intergenerational community and what being an “elder” can look like. It’s created the idea for me that men can heal each other without needing a medical license. But I’ll save those rants for later.
Get involved
If you’re interested in joining a men’s group, respond to this email and let’s talk. There’s a lot of different groups all over America, and each caters to different interests and demographics.
Additionally, I’m a member of All Kings, which focuses on formerly incarcerated men. All Kings has a fundraiser coming up Thursday May 25th in NYC at 6pm. It will feature an open circle so participants can get a sense of how “the work” happens. Everybody is welcome and there is no price to attend. If you’re in the NYC area, please come! Information and registration are here.
I heard this definition from Kevin Wall, cofounder of the men’s group All Kings. So thank you Kevin.