Introduction: The Way Men Heal
This is the first excerpt from The Way Men Heal. I will be posting these once a week for subscribers only. Please feel free to ask questions in the comments section if you have questions.
Introduction
The Way Men Heal
The Masculine Side of Healing
The masculine side of healing is used by both men and women. It is not simply a “man’s” way of healing. It has been my experience that about 75% of men will tend to use what we are calling the masculine side of healing as a primary mode of healing and about 20% of women also use this masculine side as a primary mode. Most people will use both masculine and feminine sides of healing but women seem to use both more easily while men are more likely to rely on the masculine side. It’s not a simple split. Our job is not to pigeonhole people into one mode or another based on their sex, but instead to have tools to be able to see each person’s uniqueness. The goal of this book is to help you see these two modes of healing clearly.
This book is divided into four parts. The first section will introduce you to the basic concepts of the masculine side of healing and tell the story of how I started seeing differences in men and women in their grief. Having been taught in graduate school only the feminine side of healing, the road to seeing the masculine side has been a bumpy ride. We will look at some of those bumps in order to give you a good idea of the nature of the masculine side. We will also focus on some of my mistakes and serendipitous discoveries such as anthropological research on cross-cultural grief, which was instrumental in seeing these differences.
The second section discusses the invisibility of this masculine side. A large part of the reason for so few being aware of the masculine side is its lack of visibility. We will discuss the four reasons for this invisibility and start to understand why most of us simply cannot see it.
The third section will explain the three types of action that men and some women tend to use in connecting their action to their loss. These actions are creativity, practicality and thinking. We will offer numerous examples of each type in order for you to easily spot this sort of healing action. There is also a short section on the inactive modes of healing.
The final two sections will focus on some ideas and tips in helping men or women who use this masculine side of healing. The first section will be for anyone and the later will be specifically for therapists. Let's get started.
The Masculine Side - The Invisible Emotional Pain
In the late 1970s, I had just gotten out of graduate school and was looking for a job at a counseling center. I wanted to finally put my years of schooling to work and start helping some folks. After 3 months I couldn’t find a job. After 6 months, I couldn’t find a job. After 9 months I couldn’t find a job. And after a year I still couldn’t find a job but I got an offer to work at a counseling center for death and dying. I didn’t know a thing about death and dying but I said, “Sign me up!” It didn’t take long to notice some things about the center. One of the first things I noticed was that I was the only male therapist on staff. There were 17 female counselors and one man, me. Then after a while I started noticing that most of the male clients came to me. The women on staff didn’t want to work with the men, they said things like “men don’t grieve” or men “don’t deal with their feelings” or things such as that. “Golden’s a man, he can figure them out.” But Golden couldn’t figure them out. I was saddled with a caseload of mostly men and I wasn’t doing so well. What I had been taught at grad school was to sit and face each other and talk about the past. When I tried it with my female clients it worked wonderfully but with the men, not so well. I wondered if maybe the female therapists were right, there was something wrong with the men?