What is Men’s Work?
A guide to what it looks like and how it benefits men.
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 without seeing it in person, 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. 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 men 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 men loved serving the community, and many traveled far to be there. I had never seen that kind of service mindedness before.
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 that 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, anger, 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 uncomfortable those places may be. As a facilitator, it’s very difficult to withhold advice or comforting words when a man is experiencing pain. But doing that is exactly what keeps the work safe and transformational. 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 surrender to it and 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 brings them 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 he doesn’t get the change in his life he’s seeking. 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. For example, 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 man. 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 - at least until I started doing men’s work.
Once I viewed creating emotional safety as a skill, I started paying attention to how to get better at it. Whenever I sense anxiety, a feeling of unworthiness, or the need to act tough in someone else - it’s easier for me now to see the perceived lack of safety that’s driving those emotions.
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 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
Asking clarifying questions.
And that’s it. It’s surprisingly simple and surprisingly effective for having deep conversations. And it’s not just useful for men’s work. Anytime I speak with someone who is feeling anger, sadness, shame, or fear - active listening helps me get to the bottom of it way more effectively than anything else I’ve tried.
It gave me a sense of worth through service as opposed to winning
Self-worth doesn’t come from a lot of places. For a long time I only felt it 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. I get it now. Helping other people do difficult things - and seeing them do those things in front of my own eyes - feels great. I had never served a cause higher than myself like that, and it is a bonafide adrenaline rush.
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 and anger.
In my experience men are pretty good at “monkey see monkey do” styles 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 difficult emotions, the more I feel. If I were to try to summarize what “the work” means to me in one word, it’s “feeling.”
And there are plenty of other benefits where those came from. 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. Every few weeks there’s something new I learn about myself and those around me.
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.