Andrew Gaertner attended the October 2021 online Midwest and South USA Men’s Workshop, led by Tim Jackins, and was inspired to write about his experience for a wide-world audience. The following are excerpts from what he wrote.
A Few Good Men, Crying
It can sound unusual to talk about men’s liberation. What do men need liberation from? Especially white, middle-class, educated, heterosexual males with unearned privilege, like me?
I recently attended an online men’s retreat. It was a chance to learn from a well-respected teacher about what it means to be a man and how to use that understanding to become a better human.
Such retreats are called “workshops” because we do a lot of work. We participate in classes and take turns listening to each other, in pairs (“sessions”) or in small groups. We give each other our full attention. When feelings come up, we are encouraged to express them. Then we can think more clearly.
Despite our not meeting in person, I could feel the good attention of the men. I had several powerful sessions.
HEALING FROM HURTS
Healing men’s hurts is key to ending the cycle of oppression in which we men reenact our hurts—on ourselves, other people, and the environment. If we can heal our hurts, everybody wins, including us.
To hurt another human, a boy must have had his natural release of emotions blocked. When I was growing up, I learned that boys don’t cry. I had a hard time with this because I was a “crybaby.” I would cry about an injury when playing soccer. What hurt even worse than the physical pain was my shame at their having to stop the game for me to cry. Learning to control my tears was a way to survive and avoid embarrassment; it was a rite of passage. I felt like I could finally live my life, but at what cost?
Crying is the release of the hurt, not the hurt itself. Without the crying, the hurt stays in place. Then the next time something happens that reminds us of the original hurtful situation, we tend to flip into a reaction based on what happened previously instead of drawing upon the full range of possible actions. Over time, we live in progressively smaller “boxes.”
Our society devalues emotion and uses that to oppress everyone. If a woman is very emotional, she may be called “hysterical” or a “bitch.” Black people learn to control their emotions around white people to avoid the “angry Black person” trope. If anyone laughs or weeps uncontrollably, people get concerned and try to stop them.
We can only show emotion in certain circumstances. We can show fear at an amusement park or at a scary movie. We can laugh at jokes, but not too much. We can cry a little at funerals and weddings and some movies. Other than that, we must “bottle it up” [hold it in] in order to appear “sane.” There is more latitude for some groups than others; men tend to be particularly “bottled up.”
Later hurts accumulate on top of the early ones. We figure out a way forward, and we stick to that way. It isn’t the full range of possibilities. It is like we are on a leash. If we don’t go to the edge, we can have a pretty [quite] good life. But the leash makes it hard to take emotional risks—to risk caring about someone or something.
Our unhealed hurts can take out the “high notes” and the “low notes” of our lives. We don’t feel the lows, but we also don’t have the highs. We settle for the grey middle tones.
We had to limit ourselves back then. It was a survival strategy. But now we have the tools to go after [pursue] all of life’s possibilities. We can remind each other about what is real and what is possible.
OVERCOMING ISOLATION
Isolation starts early. After being connected to our mothers in the womb, we come out expecting connection, and few of us get enough. Now we face existential threats from the climate crisis, unfettered capitalism, racism, genocide of Indigenous peoples, and more. None of these threats can be faced alone. We need to fight through our isolation and solo functioning and reach for connection. We can push through them, find ourselves and each other, and work together.
We were asked to try to trust the other men at the workshop to “have our backs” [to care about and support us].
RACISM, HOMOPHOBIA, ANTI-SEMITISM, SEXISM
We talked about the following in relation to our lives as men:
Racism—ending racism will not only make life much better for Global Majority and Indigenous people; it will give white people more space to be themselves.
Homophobia is not only a problem for LGBTQ+ folks; it is a problem for all of us. We all deserve to have a wide range of possible “selves.”
Anti-Semitism hurts not only Jews; it hurts everyone by keeping in place the systems that underlie oppression. Ending anti-Semitism improves all our lives.
Sexism is not only a problem for women; it limits and damages our lives as men. Males are taught to dominate everyone, including each other, by means of violence, threats of violence, and the suppression of emotional expression.
Men have been made confused about sex and relationships. We want caring but are told that we can only have it in a sexual relationship. When we finally have the one caring relationship we are allowed, we often have unrealistic expectations, and women tend to sacrifice themselves to stay in a relationship with us.
We discharged on our earliest memories connected to sex in any way. Our first encounters with sex form the basis for our later confusion. We can begin peeling back the layers of hurt and recover rational relationships.
We scanned our relationships with women, talking about each one for about twenty seconds before moving on to another. The goal was to get a “bird’s eye view” of our interactions with women.
Expressing our emotions helps us heal from the effects of racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and sexism.
THE “PINCH”
Society is collapsing around us. It has been built on exploitation and unsustainability. Its internal contradictions are putting a strain on every sector. Many communities are already experiencing “post-apocalyptic” conditions. The forces that attempt to manipulate us are becoming more and more blatant. People are increasingly reacting with flashes of irrationality. As men, we are especially susceptible to having our hurt-based reactions—defensiveness, separateness, domination—kick in [occur] when we are “pinched” [pressured]. We are conditioned to act as enforcers in the escalating irrationality.
We can fight our conditioning by being open with each other about how we were “pinched” in the past, for example, by economic hard times or by being isolated.
REVOLUTION, TOGETHER
As society collapses, more men will be pushed from being compliant into a state of rebellion. Anyone can be pushed into forceful opposition if they are pushed hard enough.
Perhaps we can go back to that early time when we decided to stop objecting to what was going on [happening]—for example, when we stopped having “tantrums”—and make a different decision. But our opposition needs to be constructive. We can have our tantrums in sessions and then use the attention we gain to organize and work together to create a new society.
If we can remember that we are basically good, loving, intelligent humans, we can realize that our hurt-based actions are not us. We can notice the essential humanness of other people. We can look someone in the eye and show them how pleased we are with them. We can give someone a real hug. We can listen without interrupting. It is an act of revolution to truly see another human being.
Glenwood City, Wisconsin, USA
(Present Time 206, January 2022)