AndroTherapy SF

With the addition of the completing fourth item, honor , Jack Donovan's The Way of Men identifies three of the same foundational virtues of manhood that I decided on several years ago: power, courage and skill. (Strength, courage and mastery, in his phrasing. ) I situated the question for myself in terms of the hunter-gatherer society, where to be a man, a male must father children, protect his tribe and family, and provide food by hunting or fishing. (Sex and violence!) Settling down, farming, building cities, etc. is a pattern that's not more than 12,000 years old. For 90% of our existence as a species, homo sapiens lived the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and it is likely that it remains a powerful determinant of what human nature, male and female, is. "Common to many societies, men must 'impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin'." Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity David D. Gilmore, 1991 ...

One of Graham Jackson 's typical pairings of men is the Yellow and the Green men, the men who live with their heads in the clouds and the men who live with their feet on the ground, men of sky and men of earth. Jackson gets most of his examples from art and literature. I see them showing up in less elevated realms. Despite the gay-victim theme in them, I like the Donald Strachey Mysteries largely because Chad Allen plays the title role so well. He and his partner Tim are a good Yellow and Green comrades-in-arms partnership. Tim is the Yellow Man, the idealist, the civilized man of thought and visions, concerned with the Great Issues. He's a senatorial assistant. Don is definitely a Guy, the Green Man, the earthling, practical, dealing in concretes and things-as-they-are. A private eye. Great complementarity. In male-female couples, each partner knows that because of their gender oppositions they are bound to be very different, often in quite predictable ways. A man can sometim...

One of the things depth psychotherapy tries to do is to discover and face the truth, --particularly the truths we like to hide from ourselves-- so I am going to talk about one of these differences. Because feminism has come to dominate any discussions about gender, it is uncommonly difficult to talk about male and female differences without people blowing up. You can find these differences played out all over the place, especially in comedy, but in "serious" discussions, there is more heat than light. Doing pro-male psychotherapy and counseling in this atmosphere sometimes requires boiling things down to simple starting points. One of mine: whatever a man is, he is not a boy, he is not God, and he is not a woman. So the differences between men and women are important. Humans are not just generic "persons". They are specific. And one of the most basic specifics is gender. By the way, although gay men have a relationship both to actual women and to The Fe...

One of the realities forgotten in discussions of manhood is the life cycle. This Hindu image, illustrating the passage from birth to death (and for Hindus, to reincarnation), provides a quick reminder that masculinity is organic, that it takes on different aspects depending on a male's age. What is right for one era in life is often not a good fit for another. We need different things from a father and from a grandfather, from a young man facing the challenge of becoming adult and from a mature man starting to see the approach of sundown. The tasks, virtues and pitfalls for males shift and evolve through life. There is not just one static state. That is one of the reasons why I like the image of the constellation to illustrate what manhood is: at differing moments in our growth and development, we need to be guided by different stars within it. It is all a man's life and work, but not every stage is the same. Moving ahead too fast can be as problematic as staying stuck in one p...

One of the frames I find quite useful in working with men is typology. Typology gives a basic map of different character and personality styles of people and of relationships. I use three of these maps. They can help people accept the way they are and try to change things in their lives based on reality rather than some impossible goal. And since couples often come together on the basis of opposites that first attract and later repel, typology can help make clear that partners are not setting out to be difficult or oppositional; they are just build differently. I encourage people to make use of them as far they find them to be of help. The first is the well-known Jungian-based Myers-Briggs typology. The simplest and quickest way to get a handle on this is by taking an online test. But very often you can discover how someone fits into the MB structure just by careful listening and observation. The MB looks for four sets of character biases, on a scale, whether someone is more: ...

I recall reading about a social psychology test some years ago. College students were placed in groups and their behavior tracked. It turned out that some were leaders, some were clowns, some were the outsider-omegas, etc. Not surprising. But then they put all the leaders in a separate group by themselves, all the clowns, all the omegas, etc. and a very interesting thing happened. Each group then replicated the variety of roles that had been observed in the first constellation. Leaders emerged in groups of outsiders, while in others, a former leader played the role of clown, even of omega, etc. Turns out, according to this experiment, that beyond the individual preferences, the needs of the group for these various roles actually drew people into them. I suspect that it is not dissimilar in dyad relationships. Depending on who is in the relationship, even though people tend to have repetitive styles, aka, characters, these can shift with a different mix. One of the standard dynamics of ...

I work with men in therapy, mostly gay men. It's very common to find two kinds of wounds to a male's natural masculine identity when he feels same-sex attraction and/or exhibits significant gender-deviant behavior. First is the ridicule and exclusion, or worse, suffered in childhood and youth by many boys who grow up gay. A sense that they don't belong to the male gender and are defective. This comes from family and peers, etc. It cuts deep because the very object of your deep desire also represents your failure and rejection. Creates a love-hate dynamic with other men, with self and with the very idea of masculinity and manhood: resentment, defense, devaluing, along with idealizing and (often passive) aggression. You can see this in some of the comments. The other wound is self-inflicted. It comes from taking on the "gay" identity as a rejection of "conventional" masculinity.  Having already felt excluded from the circle of men (which is sometimes ...