For Men: The Journey of "Going Within"

In the field of "men's work", i.e., "transformational," "emotional clarity," or "inner work," many insights have been gained over the past few decades. Since the study of the dilemmas facing the contemporary male and the various therapies developed to treat those issues pushed their way into the world's consciousness sometime in the 1970s , the work as a whole has evolved significantly.

Of course "men's work," in one form or another, could at least be traced back to Freud, or even back to the ancient Greeks, Chinese, Persians, Jesus, et al. Some general themes have arisen, however, in several of the different contemporary approaches that tackle the tricky issue of gaining access to and "processing" the modern male's inner emotional world, with the goal of helping men emerge with more clarity and serenity in their lives.

One of the most common therapeutic approaches is to coax or teach men how to actually feel their emotions, with the pre-supposition being that most men are not comfortable experiencing feelings. One obvious conclusion is that men either suppress, deny, or "numb-out" to avoid their feelings.

The most recognizable manner in which men avoid feelings, as revealed in several branches of men's work, is done via an addiction, e.g., to alcohol, gambling, sex, work, excitement, stress, or any other activity that steers men away from what they are experiencing internally. Another "feeling-avoidance" strategy is for men to reside excessively in their minds, thus cutting them off from their emotional world. This is a particularly common motif for men who are taught from childhood forward to chiefly employ Reason and logic, and to shy away from exploring emotional avenues in the experience of navigating their lives.

For many men, the foray into their inner life can be fraught with great resistance and fear, not due solely to the traditional male acculturation as the "strong silent type" (or other mode of stoicism), but because many men sense a great deal of turmoil, pain, or grief awaits them if they allow long-suppressed emotions to be experienced. This is particularly the case if painful, possibly "re-wounding" emotions such as anger, fear, grief, and sadness are to be looked at and touched (and, if successfully treated, "released").

Often the most common techniques for those willing to brave this journey is to guide men to "drop down out of their heads" and inhabit their "emotional body" as fully as possible, and ultimately learn to remain rooted there. The emphasis is on teaching men to become comfortable with whatever feelings may reside within (while not allowing the emotion to overwhelm them), while learning to stave off the familiar strategies of avoiding feeling such as fleeing back "up" into their heads, to what can be a world of relentless and often negative thinking.

There are parallels to this approach to be found in Buddhism and other disciplines, of course (including the strains of Christianity that don't consider the instincts of the body to be avoided and/or sinful), but this particular approach to modern men's work places a strong emphasis on showing men how to identify, access, trust, and "process" feelings, and to remain in the "present moment" as regularly as possible.

The goal is to remove what can often be a life-long, often debilitating accretion of negative emotions that remain largely unconscious to most men, and often causes men to "act out" from a base of long-ignored fear, anger, or unresolved grief, which can often block true joy and self-knowledge.

Patriotism in America

Patriotism has been co-opted by the right-wing and the GOP in America, while their common ideology exposes a deep contempt for Americans.


Tom Brokaw's best-selling tome, The Greatest Generation, honored America's men and women in the late 1930s and 1940s who helped beat back fascism in Europe and in the Eastern Pacific, Southeast Asia, and China. By 1945, Italy's Mussolini was left hanging (with his mistress) from the roof of a Milan gas station, Hitler had shot himself in his bunker, and the Japanese militarists who had led their nation into their fatal confrontation with America were being tried for war crimes.

Fascism (by Mussolini's own definition the marriage of corporations and the state), Naziism, militaristic conquest, state-supported racism, and other strains of right-wing brutality seemed to have been extirpated from much of the globe. With tens of millions of people left dead in its wake, the world seemed poised to bury right-wing insanity forever.

Fascism: The marriage of corporations and government

Fast-forward over a half-century later: in the land of one of the chief victors over fascism, no less than the United States, fascism has literally taken control of the country -- the marriage of corporations and the government strengthens by the year, and America is now in the shadow of the various apogees of democracy during those periods in US history when corporations and the wealthy (though recognized as a threat to democracy from the founding of the Republic) were held somewhat in check.

Today, corporate interests are represented by every Republican and many Democrats on a daily basis in all branches of government. The media is dominated by corporate giants, and the notion that the average American has a voice on the public airwaves, let alone with his vote, is seen virtually as a quaint relic. Two-thirds of US corporations pay no taxes, and many receive billions in outright welfare from the very taxpayers they profit so magnificently from.

Who is a patriot in such a corrupt environment?

Is the American patriot a right-winger/Republican, whose party is populated by dozens of political leaders who avoided the draft during the fight against the "Red Menace" in Vietnam, though to a man they vehemently opposed communism (and risibly continue to insist it is a domestic threat to this day)?

Is it the Republican or corporate Democrat who works against the interests of the vast majority of Americans when doing their political work on behalf of corporations and the wealthy? Is it the right-wing stalwart who dislikes union workers (or for that matter, all workers) and cheers his party on as they work to marginalize blacks and gays, loot the middle class, and whose anti-government mania enabled Wall St. to nearly bankrupt the nation, ruining millions of Americans in the process?

Is it the Tea Party "patriot" (or sympathizer) who hates the US government with a venom outstripped only by al Qaeda? Is it the "sanctity-of-life" gun nut who aids the NRA in supplying guns to approximately 12,000 killers of Americans every year?

Is it the right-wing propagandist spreading hatred and suspicion of the US government and the majority of its people around the clock, paid by corporations to protect corporate interests? Is it Todd Palin, who shortly before his wife was chosen as a vice-Presidential candidate, belonged to a fringe political party that openly avowed its hatred of the US government, and who worked to have Alaska secede from that hated nation, America?

Never.

A true patriot uses his or her vote to forward the interests of the majority, not those of a tiny minority. The latter is of course plutocracy, rule by the wealthy, a system that inevitably collapses under not only its own corruption, but by the historical fact that plutocracies are terribly inefficient, and lead ultimately to economic privation for the majority, since sufficient wealth is not allowed to circulate through the system and propel the economy.

Such conditions prevailed under the Republican-led deregulatory climate of the 1920s, mixed with the same tax-cuts-for-the-rich/wealth redistribution upward that Ronald Reagan kicked off in the '80s, and that found its pernicious zenith under the Bush regime.

The result in the late 1920s, and our current financial disaster, are the outcomes of such policies. Any American who promotes such policies should not be seen as a patriotic American, but one who represents a clear and present threat to the majority of Americans.