Not long ago, fictional TV reporter Murphy Brown attended the meeting of a men’s group at which participants banged on drums and expressed their feelings.
She wasn’t impressed.
But “men’s work,” with or without drums, is a subject of considerable interest to thousands of American men, including many in the northwest suburbs who have participated in groups such as the New Warrior Training Adventure and the Men’s Room.
Dick Levon, a Mt. Prospect clinical social worker and Men’s Room member, says successful men “reach a point where they stop and think, `I’ve achieved this … why do I feel so bad?’ They feel something is missing.”
“No one is teaching men how to be caring men, with honorable values,” says Gregory Baldouf, a professor at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines who teaches a course for men called “Moving Toward Conscious Manhood: Being a Man in the ’90s.” “That’s because men largely don’t have relationships with other men. They’re scared of them, are in competition with them and don’t trust them.
“Much of the violence we see in our culture,” Baldouf says, may be attributed to “the absence of strong, wiser men in our culture” who act as role models.
Baldouf’s course, which he has taught for six years, is the only one of its kind in the area, though there are more than a hundred nationwide, meriting an umbrella organization called the American Men’s Studies Association, based in Northampton, Mass.
And men’s studies is just a small part of “men’s work,” which encompasses organizations such as the Men’s Room, the New Warrior and the Chicago Men’s Conference, which organizes annual meetings on men’s work.
The men’s movement (most who are involved say there is no one movement, but many) began roughly in 1974 with the publication of Warren Farrell’s book “The Liberated Man.” A 1982 New Age Journal interview with Robert Bly, poet and author of the book “Iron John,” gave impetus to the idea of males investigating their masculine identities, with further interest spurred by his interview with Bill Moyers on PBS several years ago.
Men are led to men’s work organizations and activities by friends or therapists’ referrals. One issue that brings them in, Baldouf says, is confusion about how to react to “male-bashing.” “Things are being said about men (you wouldn’t say) about (any other group), such as men can’t feel; men are insensitive; men can’t commit.”
Baldouf also says very few men are satisfied with their relationships with their fathers. Much of men’s work is “healing the father wound.”
The men in his course are “a hodgepodge. We get cops and truckdrivers, Ph.D.s and lawyers,” Baldouf says. They come to connect “with other men, to form friendships and talk. There are few avenues for men to do that other than the locker room or bar. Once men know it’s okay to talk, there’s an outpouring of honesty.”
Another forum for encouraging male friendship and talk about, as Baldouf says, things other than “sports, sex and work,” is the Men’s Room weekend.
Hoffman Estates resident Dick Levon has participated in the organization’s weekend retreats. He explains why he thinks men have such a hard time communicating with each other:
“Men are socialized to disconnect. We’re the ones who are responsible for committing acts of violence, both pathological and to serve and protect. In order for violence to occur, there has to be an empathetic disconnection-to be able to see a human being as not having worth to anyone.
“The disconnection also comes,” he continues, “with the encouragement to compete. Someone has to lose, or be beaten, so you have to become emotionally uninvolved.”
As a result, he says, men eventually experience “a deep loneliness and isolation, a craving for closeness and intimacy.”
The Men’s Room, in which Levon has been both a participant and leader, conducts weekend retreats several times throughout the year in Lake Delavan, Wis. Between 15 and 20 men gather to focus on their relationships and communication skills. The weekend costs about $500.
Men of all ages participate, from their early 20s to their 70s. “The older men do mentoring with the young,” Levon says. “The younger ones get clear as to where they’re going; middle-aged ones address midlife crises. What’s at the heart of it is the need for deep emotional connections.”
William Rainey Harper College in Palatine had an organized men’s group several years ago that disbanded for financial reasons. However, a program may be started again, according to the college.
Men’s groups are, of course, not new. Service organizations and business-oriented social clubs were traditionally male, but their function was not to examine the nature of masculinity.
Where they do share their feelings is at the meetings of another group specifically devoted to men’s work: the New Warrior.
Each month the group sponsors weekend “training adventures” outside Chicago that cost about $550.
It’s not traditional survival training, says director David Lindgren of Evanston; it has to do with the “inner battle.”
David Iverson, a 50-year-old insurance agent in Barrington, took the warrior training in 1987 after reading an interview with Bly.
“There were things I could relate to, and it sounded like something I wanted to do.” He, too, believes there is a lack of male role models. “You have the wimpy, co-dependent model or the macho pound-on-your-chest model.”
The weekend involves talking about a concept such as “trust,” doing an exercise, then discussing reactions, such as what it’s like to be trusted, to trust someone else, not to trust and so on.
“It gets into where you live,” Iverson says.
Keith Berndtson, a Park Ridge physician, went on a New Warrior weekend “not knowing what to expect” and wanting his brother, who suggested it, “to justify why I should do something so wacky.”
He was struck by “the incredible depth of commitment of the men who staff the weekend” and his own discovery of “a way to open up new ways of thinking about your emotions. The initiation process is rejuvenating.”
He was concerned about the “gradual extinguishing of the uplifted feeling” he had and has been grateful for the “integration” groups, or follow-up meetings, he has attended once a month for 4 1/2 years.
Iverson says he sees men come out of the New Warrior weekend and the follow-up as “more complete in terms of their whole being. They relate better to their loved ones and their work environment.”
As for men’s work in general, Oakton’s Greg Baldouf says: “Men’s relationships tend to improve. Their communications skills improve.” And as they come to know who they are, some men get divorced, he said.
We “help plug a hole so they can go into the community and make important emotional connections (with other men).”
Men’s work seems to be answering needs of men young and old, but particularly those of middle-age. Iverson says that as men get into their 40s, they take a “gut check.”
“They’re not sure this is what they want to do, and instead of going blindly on, they begin looking at things,” he says. “Even with higher salaries and nicer cars, something is missing.”
———-
More information about the New Warrior Training Adventure is available by calling 312-927-7467; for the Men’s Room, 708-492-0335.
