My long-time friend and colleague, Steve Horsmon, founder of Good Guys 2 Great Men, invited me to speak to a group of guys who have been involved with their program for some time. He said in an email,
“Our topic is about the importance of CONNECTION. The men would love to hear what you think, feel, and advise around this topic specifically for men who are looking to improve their experience of life and to be more conscious in how they are living. I know you could talk for hours, but a 20-30 minute conversation with all of us would be fantastic.”
As Steve knows I have been helping men and their families for more than fifty years. Trying to share something helpful in 20-30 minutes was a challenge. I began by sharing these thoughts. It has been said that the two most important days of our lives are the day we were born and the day we found out why.
I was born on December 21, 1943 (for those who don’t want to do math that makes me 80+ years old). The day I found out why occurred November 21, 1969, the day I held our first son, Jemal, in my arms shortly after he was born. I made a vow to him that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where fathers were fully healed and involved with their families throughout their lives.
I started working in what has become the field of gender-specific healing and men’s health shortly after I graduated with a master’s degree in social work from U.C. Berkeley in 1968 (I later went back to school and earned a PhD in International Health and did my dissertation research on men and depression, which was published as a book, Male vs Female Depression: Why Men Act Out and Women Act In.
I write regular articles for those who subscribe to MenAlive.com and have written seventeen books including international best-sellers Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Male Menopause, and The Irritable Male Syndrome. I offer private counseling for a few clients who need, and can benefit, from my unique skills and experiences. I also have created a number of self-guided courses including “Navigating the 5 Stages of Love,” “Heal The Irritable Male Syndrome,” and “Healing the Family Father Wound.”
I have found that there are six relationship successes that all men hope to achieve during their lifetimes. I said they all require a great deal of learning and support, which is why the first rule in my book, 12 Rules for Good Men, is “Join a Men’s Group.” Men don’t necessarily address these six issues in the same order I did and we often address each one multiple times in our lives before we achieve ultimate success:
- Becoming a Great Father.
Whether we have biological children of our own, acquire them when we marry someone who already has children, or we mentor children in other ways, we must learn to be great fathers. For me it began immediately after Jemal was born. Up until then, my main focus was on work and my vision of being a great father began and ended with being a good provider and role model.
But with Jemal’s birth, I took two weeks off from work and stayed home to connect with our son. I helped with diapers, feeding, and late-night rocking to help him to sleep. But I learned a life-lesson about being a dad when my wife decided she needed a break from mothering after Jemal was a year old and went on a week-long “vacation” with a girlfriend.
Although I had practiced the basics, I always knew my wife was there and I believed that women had some special mothering gene built in to tell them what to do in every situation. I knew that men didn’t have that build-in wisdom. So when my wife left, I felt terrified. But when you are alone with a one-year-old, even for a week, you figure things out and I learned that neither females nor males have any genetic wisdom, but we can all learn to be great parents. I learned I didn’t have to parent like my wife. I just had to learn to do it my way.
My wife and I now have six grown children (including an African-American daughter my first wife and I adopted when Angela was 2 ½ months old), seventeen grandchildren, and three great grandchildren. Our daughter has gifted us with a great deal of wisdom, including the challenging and beautiful realities of life and what it means to be a father, grandfather, and great grandfather to African American progeny.
- Finding Your Calling and Taking It to the Limit.
I’ve learned that the old idea of “do what you love and follow your bliss” has serious limitations. My career and later my calling evolved over time and began with a promise I made to my children and had little to do with finding a job I loved. My first job was working with drug addicts. I created a residential treatment program called “Our Family.” It is not too far fetched to recognize that my developing commitment and skill to be a great father translated to my work in the world.
After five years founding and directing what became a successful residential treatment program for men and women with addiction problems, I applied for and was hired as one of first County Drug Abuse Program Directors, where I worked with local government and private sector community members to develop a whole range of programs in San Joaquin County.
As my two children got older, I eventually joined a men’s group to get support for the stresses and strains of trying to balance being a great dad with doing work that was meaningful. My work has continued to evolve just as my children have grown and changed and both have been enriched by my men’s group.
- Connecting With Your Tribal Brothers.
In Indigenous communities throughout human history when young boys reach a certain age, traditionally between age 10 and 12, they are taken from their mothers and are initiated into the world of men. Once they complete their initiation into manhood they go on to take their place in the tribe having been tested and successfully passed a test that allows them to feel confident in who they are.
This group of boys and later men are forever bonded. They will eventually find a mate and have children of their own, but the bond they make as boys continues on throughout their lives. One of the great tragedies of modern life is that most of us have never been initiated into manhood. The result, as Robert Bly, describes in his book, The Sibling Society.
“This is not about siblings in a family,”
says Bly.
“We’ll use the word sibling as a metaphor, a lens, bringing into focus certain tendencies, habits, and griefs we have all noticed.”
Bly goes on to address a problem of males who have never grown up and are perpetual children, though they appear to be adults.
“Adults regress toward adolescence and adolescents—seeing that—have no desire to become adults…Perhaps one-third of our society has developed these new sibling qualities. The rest of us are walking in that direction.”
I found a different direction when I joined a group of guys following a one-day workshop led by the psychologist Herb Goldberg, author of the book, The Hazards of Being Male. Our group has been meeting now for many years and we’ve learned to become a band of tribal brothers. My wife, Carlin, says that the main reason she feels we have had a successful 44-year marriage, is because I’ve been in a men’s group for 45 years. I wrote about our journey in my book, 12 Rules for Good Men.
- Finding and Keeping Your Soul Mate From Here to Eternity.
The idea of finding our soulmate has become somewhat of a cliché, but it is very real in my life. If you visit my website, MenAlive.com, you will see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.” Carlin and I had both been married twice before and had children from our previous marriages when we met, fell in love, and eventually got married.
Like all couples, we’ve had our challenges, not the least of which has been to learn to blend two families together and deal with our ex-spouses. She has been in women’s groups and my men’s group has been a great gift in helping me grow up and how to be a true partner in life.
Last year, Carlin slipped on a wet sidewalk and broke her hip. The repair surgery was successful, but she suffered a stroke when her blood pressure dropped too low during the surgery. She is doing well, but we are both getting older. She is 86 and I will be 81 in December. The great gift of our long and beautiful relationship is learned to be caregivers as well as caretakers for each other as we face the challenges and lessons that are with us every day as we face the realities of disability and death as well as the joy of living every moment to the fullest while we are here.
- Standing Up To the Destructive Dominators When Your Time is Called To Act.
My friend and colleague Riane Eisler wrote a powerful book some years ago called The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future, in which she describes two systems that have been part of human existence for the last ten thousand years:
“The first, which I call the dominator model, is what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy—the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The second, in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking, rather than ranking, may best be described as the partnership model. In this model—beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female—diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority.”
Depending on what period of human history we are born into, we all must make decisions about whether we will go along with the crowd or stand up those in the world who would dominate and destroy.
Being born in 1943 during World War II, I experienced the battle between freedom and partnership and a totalitarian model of domination that had occurred with the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. I came of age when my own country got embroiled in Viet Nam and I became a war protestor. Most recently I recognized the dangers of a man who was voted out of office, but refused accept the election results, and now wants to be the next dominator-strongman.
I first warned about the danger in an article published on May 7, 2016 titled “Why Donald Trump Will Be Our Next President.” Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned about the danger in her book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, published in 2020. She said, “For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. They promise law and order, then legitimize law-breaking by financial, sexual, and other predators.”
- Becoming the Man You Were Meant to Be.
Throughout our lives, each of the first five relationships help hone who we are as men. They help us become our true selves. From the moment of conception we have within us ancestral elements from a line of women and men (biologically, in the form of an X chromosome which we receive from our mothers and a Y chromosome we receive for our fathers). There are ten trillion cells in the human body and everyone is sex-specific, with either an XY set of chromosomes if we are male and an XX pair if we are female.
Together, all six of these challenges determine whether we will be good enough men or great men. Most of us aspire to greatness but have struggled with one or more of these six challenges. We often seek “work-life balance,” but really tend to separate these six and try and attend to one while neglecting another.
But all are non-negotiable and we must find ways to attend to all six. I received guidance on how to do this from an unlikely teacher—an old Native American woman who was a master basket weaver. Here’s what she taught me. She described weaving a beautiful basket as being a metaphor for a full and successful life.
Think of each of these six life challenges as one strand in the basket. It’s impossible to weave multiple strands at the same time; we need to attend to the strand that requires our attention without losing awareness of the others. Every strand will get our attention—just not all at the same time. I know I give attention to where I am most needed, knowing that I will then move on to the next strand when it attracts my attention. The basket holds my life as I strengthen individual strands. I’m no longer on a teeter-totter—I am weaving my life into something whole and lovely, powerful and meaningful.
I hope you have found these ideas helpful. You can send your feedback to me at Jed@MenAlive.com. Come visit my websites, www.MenAlive.com and www.MoonshotforMankind.org
