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If you’re like me, you grew up with an incomplete example of embodied masculinity.
Chances are, if you were lucky enough to have a father in your life, he fell into one of two categories: either he was the typical example of male machismo, seemingly devoid of emotion, never, ever cried, and demanded you ‘man-up’ when your very normal childhood traumas threatened to break you down. Or he was soft, gentle, tender and kind, but also subservient to the powers in his life and seemingly incapable of asserting boundaries, whether his own or someone else’s.
Now of course, this a broad, gross generalization. And of course, every father, my own included, occasionally displayed at least shreds of characteristics on the other side of the fence, so to speak.
But largely, in my experience leading men’s groups, male role models — fathers or otherwise — fell into one of these two categories.
But when children are presented with an incomplete idea, it is human nature to seek further information in order to make sense of the world in which we live. So as children — as boys — we did exactly that. We sought further information.
We, at the age of developing independence, around ten years old, began to look for the opposite, requisite balance to whichever half-baked mode of…
