Masculine Healing
“They told me to try to get in touch with my feelings by writing poetry or something after I came back, and I just didn’t want to do that shit.” —Mark, Iraq War Vet
It’s often tough for men to find their way into “healing,” because a lot of the messaging of that world (both said and implied) says that in order to heal you have to become soft and harmless; that “healing” is the purview of femininity alone; that it is your masculinity itself that is the problem.
But in reality, there exists a unique form of masculine gentleness, respect, community, and love that is not simply feminine in nature; that softness itself has a masculine and feminine pole to its existence, and we need both (as well as the many iterations of their combined expression) in the world.
The lack of this, plus the fact that we have no real societal model for healthy male power, makes it hard for most men to engage with the reality that there IS an authentic masculine softness that doesn’t make our eyes roll.
We often can’t even imagine it, because the archetypes we most frequently see are either Chad, the domineering bro; or Skylar, the 130lb barista who writes emo poetry.
For a dude looking for a balanced power of both his soft and dangerous aspects, both of these characters are inadequate.
I’ve worked with men like Mark who could sense that there was something potentially meaningful hiding in a corner of themselves, but felt blocked by the limited options the world allowed them to see.
The invitation of our work together then is not some either/or exchange of soft and hard characteristics, that they are somehow mutually exclusive, but a widening; to become a larger, more expansive, more capable version of yourself, because you are able to integrate a wider spectrum of your humanity.
((For clarification: I’m using the “masculine” and “feminine” terms separately from gender. These are movements within each person that can (and should) be combined in whatever way a person feels is authentic.))