InnerVentures

Tag: men

  • Masculinity Is Not Our Enemy

    Challenging mischaracterizations of masculinity will help us raise healthy boys.

    Taken from a blog post, Jan 24 2019 in Psychology Today

    Something has happened to our academic culture–the culture that teaches educators how to teach, therapists how to counsel, and parents how to parent–and it is both very satisfying and somewhat frightening.  Satisfying is that our academic culture is waking up to the fact that boys and men in America need our love and support.   Child advocates like myself who are parents of daughters have been saying for years,  “We can’t do much more for our daughters if we don’t help their future husbands–our nation’s sons–too.”   Many people like you have been asking representatives of national organizations such as the National Education Association, American Psychological Association, and American Medical Association to see what is going on with boys and men.

    As I pointed out in Saving Our Sons (2017), despite that there are many powerful men at the top of society, there is also no American demographic group in which males in that group are doing better than females in the aggregate.  While subsections of females are doing worse than males, there are equal or more subsections of males doing worse than females.  Even the World Health Organization made this point in 2015.  White females, for instance, have better health than white males and more access to health resources; they have better aggregate grades, test scores, college graduation rates, post-secondary education; they are safer at home and in school than white males. The list is very long, and the same holds true for comparisons of African American, Native American, Latino American, and Asian American males and females.

    When the American Psychological Association put out its Guidelines for Practice with Boys and Men in January 2019, I was delighted to see its clarity in pointing out male privation–from high suicide rates to depression, anxiety, addiction, and violence.  These are diseases that need treatment, and the APA acknowledged it.  But from the first sentences of the Guidelines, the APA did what so many other organizations do:  fall back on the soft science of “masculinity is the cause of men’s problems” and “removing masculinity is the solution.”  This last couple weeks, I’ve been asked to publicly respond to the APA report.  What follows here is introductory analysis and then one of my responses.  My basic point is this: even by the APA’s definition, “masculinity,” which they suggest therapists help us remove from males, is actually a good thing.

    Masculinity is characterized, according to the APA, by strength, stoicism, aggression, and power.   Like our academic institutions in general today, the APA presents these aspects of masculinity as our nation’s largest male problem.  In reality, however, if boys are to survive and thrive in a complex world, they must work to be strong (resilient, empowered, able to perform, and at appropriate times, stoic in the face of enemies and hardship), aggressive (assertive, motivated, and able to battle against bullies, as well as help us fight our wars both abroad and at home), powerful (successful in work, in life, in leadership, and, when needed, in follower-ship to leaders who are morally sound).   These qualities are intertwined with tenderness, kindness, compassion, spiritual vitality, empathy, fortitude, character, and fatherhood.  We are able to have compassion because we are strong; we are able to live from a position of kindness because we have the power to do so.

    As profiles of school shooters have shown us, the most dangerous male is not one who is strong, aggressive, and successful; the most dangerous male is one who is depressed, unable to partner or raise children successfully, unable to earn a living, unable to care for his children.  The most dangerous man is not one with power but one who feels powerless.  Our culture has focused its media on the million or so males who have a lot of power at the top but, for the most part, forgotten the millions who don’t; these millions live in inner cities and rural farms, gentrified suburbs and city lofts, corner bars and cardboard boxes, gang crash pads and parents’ basements.  They are in constant fight or flight mode in a culture that has abandoned them, and every decade we see their withdrawal from and violence against society, and themselves, increase.

    In The Wonder of Boys (1996), I argued that masculinity is, at its heart, a “husbanding” vision of strength, purpose, honor, power, and compassion that culminates in the art of building a strong enough male self to be able to give that self to others in love and marriage, in parenting and mentoring, in work and life.   Few people were more masculine than Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall–you name it, the men who help us most are each in their own way quite masculine.  If we are going to solve issues faced by everyone today–boys, girls, women, men, and everyone on the gender spectrum–we must challenge academic culture to go deeper into who boys are, and what most people in America see very clearly:  boys need more masculinity, not less; more fathering, not less; more healthy manhood, not less.

    And we must respond when people exploit narrow definitions of masculinity for their own ends.  Gillette did this recently in their now famous 2 minute add (check on You Tube for “The Best a Man Can Get”).  The ad presented men and masculinity in a basically negative light, and presented normal masculine rough housing as part of toxic masculinity when, in fact, rough housing is a crucial tool in brain development.  Interestingly, when Dove and similar companies have created commercials that approach girls’ and women’s lives from a clearly political lens, they have done so by seeking to find the beauty in girls and women, rather than leading with and ending with basically negative portrayals of girls and women.  In taking the opposite course, Gillette asked men to be accountable for bad behavior:  that part of the ad is admirable, and useful; but, like the APA, Gillette does not understand how important masculine development is to human development and survival.  They especially do not understand that above all else, males who seek to be masculine will not countenance violence against women or children.  Masculinity is a protective force against violence, not an invitation to commit violence.

    Masculinity and “masculine norms” can handle academic and social dialogue.  As social forces, they can handle very useful calls for expansion beyond some stereotype of self.   But masculinity is fragile, too, as millions of failing males prove.  It is too fragile to be accused by our nation’s smartest people of crimes it has not committed.  And our sons are too fragile to survive and thrive if those who ostensibly care for them–from academics to businesses to schools to communities–suggest our sons’ biggest crime is their very existence.  As McGill University researcher and co-author of Replacing Misandry Paul Nathanson has pointed out:  This will lead to self-hatred in boys and men, which is very dangerous, indeed.

    Bad men do bad things and some men never grow beyond a small self.  To pretend masculinity has caused these social and personal conditions is to distract ourselves from huge areas of real pain all around us.   Let’s stop treating masculinity as our enemy:  let’s start helping boys to grow into the good men their own personal character and drive want them to be.

    Response to the American Psychological Association Guidelines on Practice with Boys and Men

    Tony was a 14-year-old boy who walked into my counseling office with a lot of issues.  Short for his age and not yet visibly pubescent, he had been diagnosed with ADHD and his parents felt he might be depressed.  He was like hundreds of boys and men I’ve seen in my clinical practice:  if the counselor knew how to work with him as a young male, Tony would work with me; if the counselor didn’t, he wouldn’t.

    After normal intake, the first thing we did together was walk outside, talking shoulder-to-shoulder.  Because the male brain is often cerebellum dependent (it often needs physical movement) in order to connect words to feelings and memories, we sat down only after our walk finished.  By then, a great deal had happened for Tony.

    Once in our chairs, we talked with a ball in hand, tossing it back and forth, like fathers often do with children.  This cerebellum and spatial involvement help the male brain move neuro-transmission between limbic system and frontal lobe (where word centers are). We also used visual images, including video games, to trigger emotion centers, and we discussed manhood and masculinity a great deal, since Tony and every boy yearns for mentoring in the human ontology of how to be a man.

    I’ve seen hundreds of girls and women in my therapy practice.  Few of them needed walking, physical movement, and visual-spatial stimulation to help access memories, emotions, and feelings because most girls are better able to access words-for-feelings than boys and men while sitting still:  girls and women have language centers on both sides of the brain connected to memory, emotion, and sensorial centers while the male brain mainly has these word centers in the left.

    Without our realizing it over the last fifty years, we’ve set up counseling and psychological services for girls and women.  “Come into my office,” we say kindly.  “Sit down.  Tell me how you feel/felt.”  Boys and men fail out of counseling and therapy because we have not taught our psychologists and therapists about the male and female brain.  Only 15% of new counselors are male, leaving 85% female.  Clients in therapy skew almost 80% female—males are dragged in by moms or spouses, but generally leave an environment unequipped for the nature of males.

    Male nature, the male brain, the need to contextualize boyhood into an important masculine journey to manhood are missing from the new American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Practice with Boys and Men (www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf.)  While the document calls attention to male developmental needs and crises in our culture, which I celebrate as a researcher and practitioner in the field, it then falls into an ideological swamp.

    Males, we are told, are born with dominion created by their inherent privilege; females (and males) are victims of this male privilege.  The authors go further to discuss what they see as the main problem facing males—too much masculinity; they call it the root of all or most male issues from suicide to early death to depression to substance abuse to reason for family break ups to school failure to violence.  They claim that fewer males than females seek out therapy or stay in therapy and health services because of “masculinity.”  Never is the skewed female-friendly mental health environment discussed.  The assumption that all systems skew in favor of males, not females, is so deeply entrenched in our culture today, the APA never has to prove it.

    Perhaps most worrisome:  the APA should be a science-based organization, but its guidelines lack hard science.  Ruben and Raquel Gur, Tracey Shors, Louanne Brizendine, Sandra Witelson, Daniel Amen, and the hundreds of scientists worldwide who use brain scan technology to understand male/female brain difference do not appear in the Guidelines.  Practitioners like myself and Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D., who have conducted multiple studies in science-based practical application of neuroscience to male nurturance in schools, homes, and communities are not included.

    Included are mainly socio-psychologists who push the idea that maleness is basically socialized into “masculinities” that destroy male development.  Stephanie Pappas on the APA website sums up the APA’s enemy:  “Traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.”  Our job as therapists is, the authors teach, to remove all but the ideologically sound “masculinities” from boys and men, and specifically remove masculinities that involve competition, aggression, strength, and power.

    How much longer can our society and its professionals pretend we are developing a saner society by condemning the very parts of males that help them succeed, heal, and grow?  In the same way that it is misogynistic to claim femininity is inherently flawed, it is misandrist to claim that masculinity is also thus.

    I am an example:  I was a sexual abuse victim in my boyhood, and a very sensitive boy.  My ten years of healing from the abuse came as much from tapping into masculine strength as it did by expanding my sense of self in the 1970s toward the feminine.  Both are good; neither is zero-sum, but I could not have healed without masculinity.

    Part of the problem with the APA guidelines is that, from a neuro-science point of view, masculinity is not as limited as Pappas’ assessment.  Masculinity is an amalgam of nature, nurture, and culture.  Masculinity—including traditional masculinity–is an ontology in which a male of any race, creed, ethnicity, or kind commits to developing and exercising strength, perseverance, hard work, love, compassion, responsibility for others, service to the disadvantaged, and self-sacrifice.

    What professional in the psychology field would not want to embolden these characteristics?  Most fathers and mothers would want counselors to embolden them because, despite the APA authors’ lip-service to fathering in the document, fathering and mentoring boys in masculine development has been proven one of the most important determinants in child safety, school success, and emotional and physical health.

    Not the erasure of masculinity but the accomplishment of it is required—including inside the counseling office and while walking along the street—if we are to save our sons from the crises outlined in the APA guidelines.  Without counselors and parents understanding how to raise and protect masculine development and the male brain, boys like Tony drift in and out of video games, depression, substances, half-love, and, often, violence.

    The masculine journey is not perfect and expanding what “masculine” and “man” mean to a given family and self is a point well made by the APA authors and an important one.  But trying to hook mental health professionals into the ideological trinity of ideas–

    *masculinity is the problem

    *males do not need nurturing in male-specific ways because men have it all in our society anyway; and

    *manhood is not an ontology, a way of healthy being, but a form of oppression,

    –ignores one of the primary reasons for the existence of our psychology profession—not just to help girls, women, and everyone on the gender spectrum be empowered and find themselves, but also to help boys and men find their strength, their purpose, and their success in what will be, for them, a complex male journey through an increasing difficult lifespan.

    References

    Michael Gurian, How do I Help Him: A Practitioner’s Guide for Working with Boys and Men in Therapeutic Settings (2011) https://www.michaelgurian.com/products/how-do-i-help-him/.

    Amen, D.G., et.al., “Women Have More Active Brains Than Men. August 7, 2017 Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. https://www.j-alz.com/content/women-have-more-active-brains-men.

    Halpern, D.F., et.al., “The Science of Sex Differences in Science and Mathematics.”  Psychological Science in the Public Interest.  August 8, 2007.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25530726.

    Michael Gurian, Saving Our Sons:  A New Path to Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys (2017).  https://www.michaelgurian.com/products/saving-our-sons/.

    Burman, D., et.al., “Sex Differences in Neural Processing of Language Among Children.” March 2007. Neuropsychologia, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.12.021.

    Benedict Carey, “Need Therapy:  A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”  New York Times.  May 21,2011.  https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html.

    Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Boys and Men http://www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf.

    Stephanie Pappas, “APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys.”  APA Monitor.  January 2019. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/01/ce-corner.aspx.

    For studies on Fathering, see the Coalition to Create a White House Council on Boys and Men’s meta-study, co-authored by W. Farrell., M. Gurian, M. Nemko, and P. Moore and 34 other scholars, updated, 2017, at http://whitehouseboysmen.org/the-proposal.

    *A version of the second part of this blog was published in The Federalist on 1/13/19.

  • What’s Going On With Men – by Bethany Webster (Womboflight.com)

    What’s going on with men?

    With this massive wave of brave women coming forward with disclosures of sexual harassment across many industries, many of us, men and women alike, are grappling with the sobering reality of rampant misogyny. As a culture, we’re left to ask questions like, why do so many men have the impulse to disrespect, hate or violate women? Where does that really come from? And how do we stop it? 

    As an internationally recognized expert on the mother wound in women, I’m often asked to speak about the mother wound in men. At this time of mass disclosures about sexual assault, I wanted to write a piece exploring how the mother wound is the missing link in our understanding of misogyny. In this essay, I’ll examine how boys develop in the modern world, the unprocessed anger below the surface of the lives of men, the role of privilege and the inner work that both men and women can undertake to transform our situation.

    Oxford dictionary defines misogyny as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.”  To understand misogyny we have to explore the first relationship a man ever has with a woman; with his mother.

    For both girls and boys, the relationships with our mothers are one of the most significant relationship in our lives. It’s impossible to overstate just how foundational this relationship is and how it impacts our wellbeing well into our adulthood. In the first weeks and months of our lives, mother is food, mother is world, mother is body, and mother is self. For both women and men, the mother wound itself is a product of patriarchy, of living in a culture with domination of women at its core.

    “The mother-child relationship can be seen as the first relationship violated by patriarchy.“ ~Adrienne Rich 

    On a personal level, the mother wound is an internalized set of limiting beliefs and patterns originating from the relationship with one’s mother. The mother wound exists on a spectrum, with healthy, supportive mother/child relationships on one end and abusive traumatic mother/child relationships on the other end. Many complex factors go into how one’s mother wound manifests and where one falls on that spectrum. For men, it comes down to the specific dynamics that played out between a boy and his mother, as well as how the father supported or thwarted that primary connection. Because patriarchy—the  principle of domination—can be embodied by either a man or a woman, the mother or father may have played the role of patriarchal parent in a boy’s life. For example, some boys may have experienced their mothers as neglectful or as domineering. Some may have experienced their mothers as victims of their fathers or their mothers as the dominant one and their father the more passive one.

    “Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.”  ~ bell hooks

    As a boy grows today in the modern world, he becomes socialized by his father, by other men, and by society about what it means to be a man. The patriarchal culture of media, education and religion also perform that function. Unfortunately, it’s well-documented that this socialization of the boy involves to some degree learning to dominate others, to shut down his emotions and to devalue women. (See resources below.) This constitutes both a personal and collective trauma.

    Healing personal trauma is central to undoing the patriarchy

    Contrary to our modern world, the history of civilization is full of examples of cultures giving boys the initiatory experience of graduating into manhood through a time of physical trials, which helps them symbolically cross a psychological bridge from the relative comforts of childhood into the rigors of adulthood. In this positive context, surrounded by male elders, some kind of physical/emotional wound occurs, helping the boy contact his inner strength, confidence and sense of responsibility. Today in the modern world, most boys experience wounding but without a positive transformation. There are few official rites, few wise elders and a dearth of male role models outside the toxic status quo.

    The cultural expectation to devalue women, including his mother, sets a boy up for cognitive dissonance about what his mother represents in himself, including the ability to express his emotions, to be vulnerable, to express physical affection, etc. In this way, his mother could be seen broadly as a “lost source” to the boy, and the father, as socializer of the boy into the world of men, could be seen as “severer of the bond” with the mother, with his source.

    For white men, privilege plays a role. In addition to discouraging their emotions and encouraging domination, society gives them unearned advantages that are denied to other groups including women and people of color.  According to American sociologist, Professor Michael Kimmel, privilege is invisible to those who have it.  This leaves white men with a triple wound; an injury to their ability to process their emotions, a blindness about their privilege and a lack of empathy for those they harm. This triple wound in white men has remained relatively unconscious and has caused unspeakable suffering in the world.

    I came across this stunning 1977 quote by Adrienne Rich from her essay in the book “On Lies, Secrets and Silence” which speaks powerfully to the connection between misogyny and the mother wound in men: 

    “Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism—the longing to remain a mother’s son, to possess a woman purely for him. These infantile needs of adult men for women have been sentimentalized and romanticized long enough as “love”; it is time to recognize them as arrested development, and to re-examine the ideal preservation of “the family” within which those needs are allowed free rein to the point of violence. Because the law and the economic and social order are heavily weighted in favor of men, the infantile needs of adult males are affirmed by a machinery of power, which does not affirm or validate the needs of adult women. Institutionalized marriage and motherhood perpetuate the will of male infants as law in the adult world.”

    What’s been happening with the #metoo movement, with women telling their stories of sexual assault and outing their abusers, is that the “free rein” that men have used to dominate women in the home and in the workplace is being increasingly curtailed. Women are less willing to remain the silent projection screen onto which men can project their disowned pain with impunity. And many male witnesses are no longer willing to look the other way.

    Assault as sexualized hostility

    Sexual assault is not about sex, it’s about power. Alexandra Katehakis, a sex therapist and Clinical Director for the Center for Healthy Sex in L.A. describes it this way: “Guys who engage in this type of behavior are incredibly rageful towards females. It often harkens back to childhood abuse. For example, maybe they had mothers who were emotionally abusive or who didn’t protect them from abusive fathers. As some men get older they act out that anger towards women in the language of sex. They sexualize their emotions because they don’t know any other way of comporting themselves.”

    It is as if the inner male child is unconsciously caught between his painful longing for the “lost source” represented by his mother and his cultural conditioning to hate her as a woman. Put another way, men are caught between a natural desire for their full humanity (the ability to be emotional, vulnerable and empathic) and their desire to remain privileged and in dominator mode. The thing is that one can’t have both. To hold on to dominator mode (patriarchy) is to increasingly lose access to your humanity. And to be fully human, one has to forsake the dominator mode, and all the insidious ways it can show up in oneself. No amount of privilege (wealth, power, fame, prestige) will ever compensate for the devastation, to whatever degree, that patriarchy has wrought on the little boy within him. No amount of power over others will ever make up for that lost part of himself. It can only be found through doing the inner work to reclaim it. 

    A man can find this “lost source,” not in the form of physical women, but in the form of exploring what it means to reclaim what the mother or the feminine represents within him, such as the feeling function, the world of emotions, the experience of deep connection within himself and a sense of authentic belonging with others. However, in order to access these vital capacities that have been in shadow, men first have to engage with the child within who is angry that there has been little payoff for forsaking these vital aspects of himself. 

    It’s easier to project rage onto a “mother substitute” or the “father substitute” out there in the world. Male privilege permits men a blindness to their mother and father wounds while the world burns. However, it takes courage to retract those projections and process the anger about the inner patriarch, the archetype of the cruel, unfeeling father, that granted him access to the world of men at the massive cost of disconnection from his true self, the innocent boy who came into this world capable of expressing empathy, emotionality, and vulnerability. The anger belongs with the patriarchal father (personal and/or collective), the “severer of the bond,” who betrayed the boy, who socialized him to give up a vital part of himself to be accepted in this world as a man. The anger also belongs with the mother who was unable to protect him from this patriarchal wound or who may have inflicted it herself. (See my article here about how patriarchy passes through the mother.) When men can direct their anger there, to where it truly belongs, things will really begin to shift.

    “Misogyny is a son’s outwardly projected rage on a mother who was unable to protect him.” 
    ~ Gabor Maté

    At its core, for men and women alike, the task of healing the mother wound is ultimately the same: to de-couple one’s inner and outer life from the lamination of “mother,” so that one’s full potential can be fully accessed and actualized.

    In his book “Under Saturn’s Shadow”, author and Jungian analyst, James Hollis brilliantly encapsulates it this way:

    “When we remember that patriarchy is a cultural contrivance, an invention to compensate for powerlessness, we realize that men, contrary to widespread opinions, are more often the more dependent sex. The Marlboro man, the rugged individualist, is most ambushed by his inner feminine, for he is most in denial. Whenever a man is obliged to be a good boy, or conversely he feels he must be a bad boy, or a wild man, he is still compensating for the power of the mother complex. 

    I do not say it is a man’s fault that he is so vulnerable, so dependent; that he is merely human. What is his responsibility is to recognize how deeply any child needs positive mothering and how much the pattern of that need sets his psychic life in motion and continues to operate beneath the surface. He may pretend to adult empowerment, hold the reigns of government or the purse, but the lines of stress reach deep down into his relationship with his mother. Men must grasp and accept this fact, and then take responsibility for it, or they will continue to play out infantile patterns forever.”

    Healing the mother wound for men involves removing their projected rage off of women and processing it towards its true target… with patriarchy itself and to the very specific traumatic events of their childhood in which that played out. 

    To do this deep inner work, it’s crucial that men get support from other men who have already done a significant amount of work on this journey themselves, including professional support from male therapists skilled in this area.

    Broadly speaking, men’s inner and outer work involves:

    1. Processing the anger about the parent (mother and/or father) who betrayed him by making him give up vital parts of himself in order to be considered a man in this world. Grieving about what that has cost him.
    2. Being honest about his life. Acknowledging his secrets and and taking responsibility for his actions.
    3. Finding that lost inner source within him and working to re-claim it. Connecting with the child within him.
    4. Feeling genuine remorse about the ways that he has harmed other people and the earth by acting out his pain in unconscious ways, both personally and collectively, while taking empathic actions on a consistent basis.
    5. Finding community with other conscious men who are on this path of reclamation and reconciliation.

    In the long-term, men must commit to the long-term inner work. And in the short-term, men need to experience real consequences for their actions.

    Shawn Vestal explains that it’s not for a lack of training that men sexually assault in the workplace. “It’s not about what men don’t know. It’s about what men have known too well: That we can get away with it. That it will be excused, hidden, justified and rationalized, and no one will be called to account.” In other words, until men have sufficient integrity to not sexually assault, real consequences must come into play at work and in relationships that halt the toxic behavior. Basically men need a global intervention, a resounding, societal “no” to wake up to the realities they’ve been oblivious to.

    To support this process, as women we have to say no in every way possible to the raging boy within the men in our lives, be they friends, colleagues, brothers or husbands. Back to Rich’s quote, women have to withdraw from the ways that we have over-functioned or mothered men. We have to “withdraw the breast, the lullaby and the constant attention associated by the infant with the mother.” That way, men can feel the full magnitude of their predicament, which is the beginning of lasting, meaningful change.

    Only by men feeling the painful gap of what women are no longer willing to do for them, will they experience sufficient motivation to finally step in and fill that gap from within themselves, which includes increasingly: 

    • Taking responsibility for their emotions, feeling them and processing them. Getting support.
    • Having sex as a way to connect, not a way to feel powerful
    • Soothing the little boy within him when he’s triggered
    • Differentiating between the pain of the past from what’s happening in the present
    • Becoming aware of his projections and seeing the women in their lives as people, not as objects
    • Centering and amplifying the voices of those who are marginalized, while listening and learning from them

    As women we must keep using our voices and speaking out about male abuse of power every chance we get and amplify the voices of other women who are enduring male abuse, particularly the voices of women of color and indigenous women.

    As women we must stop:

    • Catering to their illusions that come from an ignorance of their own privilege
    • Staying quiet to avoid conflict
    • Internalizing their projections from their disowned pain
    • Minimizing our feelings in their presence
    • Accepting crumbs of respect instead of what we truly deserve
    • Giving our power away in the form of emotional caretaking
    • Giving time and energy to men who refuse to do their inner work

    The truth is that women are very limited in how they can help men in their healing. We can hold space but we can’t do the work for them. It is their journey and they have to want it for themselves. In the meantime, let’s expand our awareness of our value outside the male gaze, prioritize our own inner work, and heal our own childhood wounds. Let’s hold strong boundaries with those who are not doing their inner work and spend more time with those who are. True sisterhood is a crucial source of nourishment for these times.

    Harnessing our anger as fuel for wise action

    The more we contact the truth of our worth as women, the more rage we will feel about the devastation toxic masculinity has caused. Our anger is an essential tool in this time, to sharpen our refusal to be compliant with oppression of any kind, including internalized misogyny directed at ourselves, and for white women, a refusal to be patriarchal to others, and specifically facing how we have facilitated the oppression of men and women of color.

    “One oppresses what one fears.” ~ James Hollis

    Healing from patriarchy requires that every privileged group actively confront their ignorance and cultivate sincere empathy for how their privilege has caused harm to others.

    Allowing oneself be emotionally affected by the depths of horrors that have been perpetrated by our privilege is a necessary but often avoided step in creating real equality between people. Just as white women need to endure the experience of feeling genuinely horrified about the ways in which we have, knowingly or unknowingly, facilitated white supremacy onto people of color, white men have to do the same about how their ignorance, afforded by privilege, has collectively caused an unspeakable amount of pain in the world to women, people of color and the planet itself.

    “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” ~ James Baldwin

    May this ever-rising tide of female anger be followed by a commensurate wave of brave men willing to explore their inner terrain, to embrace the abandoned boy within and to process the legitimate anger and grief about what patriarchy has stolen from them: their full humanity. Collective change will occur when enough individual men change.  May men take full responsibility and humbly embrace this raw, necessary discomfort as the medicine they need to heal their personal and collective mother wound. And may women refuse to allow the behavior of unconscious men to define them.

    © Bethany Webster 2018

  • What’s Going on With Men? The Mother Wound as the Missing Link in Understanding Misogyny

    What’s Going on With Men? The Mother Wound as the Missing Link in Understanding Misogyny

    by BethanyWebster

     “The Bewildered Pursuit” by Andrew Salgado

    What’s going on with men?

    With this massive wave of brave women coming forward with disclosures of sexual harassment across many industries, many of us, men and women alike, are grappling with the sobering reality of rampant misogyny. As a culture, we’re left to ask questions like, why do so many men have the impulse to disrespect, hate or violate women? Where does that really come from? And how do we stop it? 

    As an internationally recognized expert on the mother wound in women, I’m often asked to speak about the mother wound in men. At this time of mass disclosures about sexual assault, I wanted to write a piece exploring how the mother wound is the missing link in our understanding of misogyny. In this essay, I’ll examine how boys develop in the modern world, the unprocessed anger below the surface of the lives of men, the role of privilege and the inner work that both men and women can undertake to transform our situation.

    Oxford dictionary defines misogyny as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.”  To understand misogyny we have to explore the first relationship a man ever has with a woman; with his mother.

    For both girls and boys, the relationships with our mothers are one of the most significant relationship in our lives. It’s impossible to overstate just how foundational this relationship is and how it impacts our wellbeing well into our adulthood. In the first weeks and months of our lives, mother is food, mother is world, mother is body, and mother is self. For both women and men, the mother wound itself is a product of patriarchy, of living in a culture with domination of women at its core.

    “The mother-child relationship can be seen as the first relationship violated by patriarchy.“ ~Adrienne Rich 

    On a personal level, the mother wound is an internalized set of limiting beliefs and patterns originating from the relationship with one’s mother. The mother wound exists on a spectrum, with healthy, supportive mother/child relationships on one end and abusive traumatic mother/child relationships on the other end. Many complex factors go into how one’s mother wound manifests and where one falls on that spectrum. For men, it comes down to the specific dynamics that played out between a boy and his mother, as well as how the father supported or thwarted that primary connection. Because patriarchy—the  principle of domination—can be embodied by either a man or a woman, the mother or father may have played the role of patriarchal parent in a boy’s life. For example, some boys may have experienced their mothers as neglectful or as domineering. Some may have experienced their mothers as victims of their fathers or their mothers as the dominant one and their father the more passive one.

    “Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.”  ~ bell hooks

    As a boy grows today in the modern world, he becomes socialized by his father, by other men, and by society about what it means to be a man. The patriarchal culture of media, education and religion also perform that function. Unfortunately, it’s well-documented that this socialization of the boy involves to some degree learning to dominate others, to shut down his emotions and to devalue women.  This constitutes both a personal and collective trauma.

    Healing personal trauma is central to undoing the patriarchy

    Contrary to our modern world, the history of civilization is full of examples of cultures giving boys the initiatory experience of graduating into manhood through a time of physical trials, which helps them symbolically cross a psychological bridge from the relative comforts of childhood into the rigors of adulthood. In this positive context, surrounded by male elders, some kind of physical/emotional wound occurs, helping the boy contact his inner strength, confidence and sense of responsibility. Today in the modern world, most boys experience wounding but without a positive transformation. There are few official rites, few wise elders and a dearth of male role models outside the toxic status quo.

    The cultural expectation to devalue women, including his mother, sets a boy up for cognitive dissonance about what his mother represents in himself, including the ability to express his emotions, to be vulnerable, to express physical affection, etc. In this way, his mother could be seen broadly as a “lost source” to the boy, and the father, as socializer of the boy into the world of men, could be seen as “severer of the bond” with the mother, with his source.

    For white men, privilege plays a role. In addition to discouraging their emotions and encouraging domination, society gives them unearned advantages that are denied to other groups including women and people of color.  According to American sociologist, Professor Michael Kimmel, privilege is invisible to those who have it.  This leaves white men with a triple wound; an injury to their ability to process their emotions, a blindness about their privilege and a lack of empathy for those they harm. This triple wound in white men has remained relatively unconscious and has caused unspeakable suffering in the world.

    I came across this stunning 1977 quote by Adrienne Rich from her essay in the book “On Lies, Secrets and Silence” which speaks powerfully to the connection between misogyny and the mother wound in men: 

    “Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism—the longing to remain a mother’s son, to possess a woman purely for him. These infantile needs of adult men for women have been sentimentalized and romanticized long enough as “love”; it is time to recognize them as arrested development, and to re-examine the ideal preservation of “the family” within which those needs are allowed free rein to the point of violence. Because the law and the economic and social order are heavily weighted in favor of men, the infantile needs of adult males are affirmed by a machinery of power, which does not affirm or validate the needs of adult women. Institutionalized marriage and motherhood perpetuate the will of male infants as law in the adult world.”

    What’s been happening with the #metoo movement, with women telling their stories of sexual assault and outing their abusers, is that the “free rein” that men have used to dominate women in the home and in the workplace is being increasingly curtailed. Women are less willing to remain the silent projection screen onto which men can project their disowned pain with impunity. And many male witnesses are no longer willing to look the other way.

    Assault as sexualized hostility

    Sexual assault is not about sex, it’s about power. Alexandra Katehakis, a sex therapist and Clinical Director for the Center for Healthy Sex in L.A. describes it this way: “Guys who engage in this type of behavior are incredibly rageful towards females. It often harkens back to childhood abuse. For example, maybe they had mothers who were emotionally abusive or who didn’t protect them from abusive fathers. As some men get older they act out that anger towards women in the language of sex. They sexualize their emotions because they don’t know any other way of comporting themselves.”

    It is as if the inner male child is unconsciously caught between his painful longing for the “lost source” represented by his mother and his cultural conditioning to hate her as a woman. Put another way, men are caught between a natural desire for their full humanity (the ability to be emotional, vulnerable and empathic) and their desire to remain privileged and in dominator mode. The thing is that one can’t have both. To hold on to dominator mode (patriarchy) is to increasingly lose access to your humanity. And to be fully human, one has to forsake the dominator mode, and all the insidious ways it can show up in oneself. No amount of privilege (wealth, power, fame, prestige) will ever compensate for the devastation, to whatever degree, that patriarchy has wrought on the little boy within him. No amount of power over others will ever make up for that lost part of himself. It can only be found through doing the inner work to reclaim it. 

    A man can find this “lost source,” not in the form of physical women, but in the form of exploring what it means to reclaim what the mother or the feminine represents within him, such as the feeling function, the world of emotions, the experience of deep connection within himself and a sense of authentic belonging with others. However, in order to access these vital capacities that have been in shadow, men first have to engage with the child within who is angry that there has been little payoff for forsaking these vital aspects of himself. 
     
    It’s easier to project rage onto a “mother substitute” or the “father substitute” out there in the world. Male privilege permits men a blindness to their mother and father wounds while the world burns. However, it takes courage to retract those projections and process the anger about the inner patriarch, the archetype of the cruel, unfeeling father, that granted him access to the world of men at the massive cost of disconnection from his true self, the innocent boy who came into this world capable of expressing empathy, emotionality, and vulnerability. The anger belongs with the patriarchal father (personal and/or collective), the “severer of the bond,” who betrayed the boy, who socialized him to give up a vital part of himself to be accepted in this world as a man. The anger also belongs with the mother who was unable to protect him from this patriarchal wound or who may have inflicted it herself. (See my article here about how patriarchy passes through the mother.) When men can direct their anger there, to where it truly belongs, things will really begin to shift.

    “Misogyny is a son’s outwardly projected rage on a mother who was unable to protect him.” 
    ~ Gabor Maté

    At its core, for men and women alike, the task of healing the mother wound is ultimately the same: to de-couple one’s inner and outer life from the lamination of “mother,” so that one’s full potential can be fully accessed and actualized.

    In his book “Under Saturn’s Shadow”, author and Jungian analyst, James Hollis brilliantly encapsulates it this way:

    “When we remember that patriarchy is a cultural contrivance, an invention to compensate for powerlessness, we realize that men, contrary to widespread opinions, are more often the more dependent sex. The Marlboro man, the rugged individualist, is most ambushed by his inner feminine, for he is most in denial. Whenever a man is obliged to be a good boy, or conversely he feels he must be a bad boy, or a wild man, he is still compensating for the power of the mother complex. 

    I do not say it is a man’s fault that he is so vulnerable, so dependent; that he is merely human. What is his responsibility is to recognize how deeply any child needs positive mothering and how much the pattern of that need sets his psychic life in motion and continues to operate beneath the surface. He may pretend to adult empowerment, hold the reigns of government or the purse, but the lines of stress reach deep down into his relationship with his mother. Men must grasp and accept this fact, and then take responsibility for it, or they will continue to play out infantile patterns forever.”

    Healing the mother wound for men involves removing their projected rage off of women and processing it towards its true target… with patriarchy itself and to the very specific traumatic events of their childhood in which that played out. 

    To do this deep inner work, it’s crucial that men get support from other men who have already done a significant amount of work on this journey themselves, including professional support from male therapists skilled in this area.

    Broadly speaking, men’s inner and outer work involves:

    1. Processing the anger about the parent (mother and/or father) who betrayed him by making him give up vital parts of himself in order to be considered a man in this world. Grieving about what that has cost him.
    2. Being honest about his life. Acknowledging his secrets and taking responsibility for his actions.
    3. Finding that lost inner source within him and working to re-claim it. Connecting with the child within him.
    4. Feeling genuine remorse about the ways that he has harmed other people and the earth by acting out his pain in unconscious ways, both personally and collectively, while taking empathic actions on a consistent basis.
    5. Finding community with other conscious men who are on this path of reclamation and reconciliation.

    In the long-term, men must commit to the long-term inner work. And in the short-term, men need to experience real consequences for their actions.

    Shawn Vestal explains that it’s not for a lack of training that men sexually assault in the workplace. “It’s not about what men don’t know. It’s about what men have known too well: That we can get away with it. That it will be excused, hidden, justified and rationalized, and no one will be called to account.” In other words, until men have sufficient integrity to not sexually assault, real consequences must come into play at work and in relationships that halt the toxic behavior. Basically men need a global intervention, a resounding, societal “no” to wake up to the realities they’ve been oblivious to.

    To support this process, as women we have to say no in every way possible to the raging boy within the men in our lives, be they friends, colleagues, brothers or husbands. Back to Rich’s quote, women have to withdraw from the ways that we have over-functioned or mothered men. We have to “withdraw the breast, the lullaby and the constant attention associated by the infant with the mother.” That way, men can feel the full magnitude of their predicament, which is the beginning of lasting, meaningful change.

    Only by men feeling the painful gap of what women are no longer willing to do for them, will they experience sufficient motivation to finally step in and fill that gap from within themselves, which includes increasingly: 

    • Taking responsibility for their emotions, feeling them and processing them. Getting support.
    • Having sex as a way to connect, not a way to feel powerful
    • Soothing the little boy within him when he’s triggered
    • Differentiating between the pain of the past from what’s happening in the present
    • Becoming aware of his projections and seeing the women in their lives as people, not as objects
    • Centering and amplifying the voices of those who are marginalized, while listening and learning from them

    As women we must keep using our voices and speaking out about male abuse of power every chance we get and amplify the voices of other women who are enduring male abuse, particularly the voices of women of color and indigenous women.

    As women we must stop:

    • Catering to their illusions that come from an ignorance of their own privilege
    • Staying quiet to avoid conflict
    • Internalizing their projections from their disowned pain
    • Minimizing our feelings in their presence
    • Accepting crumbs of respect instead of what we truly deserve
    • Giving our power away in the form of emotional caretaking
    • Giving time and energy to men who refuse to do their inner work

    The truth is that women are very limited in how they can help men in their healing. We can hold space but we can’t do the work for them. It is their journey and they have to want it for themselves. In the meantime, let’s expand our awareness of our value outside the male gaze, prioritize our own inner work, and heal our own childhood wounds. Let’s hold strong boundaries with those who are not doing their inner work and spend more time with those who are. True sisterhood is a crucial source of nourishment for these times.

    Harnessing our anger as fuel for wise action

    The more we contact the truth of our worth as women, the more rage we will feel about the devastation toxic masculinity has caused. Our anger is an essential tool in this time, to sharpen our refusal to be compliant with oppression of any kind, including internalized misogyny directed at ourselves, and for white women, a refusal to be patriarchal to others, and specifically facing how we have facilitated the oppression of men and women of color.

    “One oppresses what one fears.” ~ James Hollis

    Healing from patriarchy requires that every privileged group actively confront their ignorance and cultivate sincere empathy for how their privilege has caused harm to others.

    Allowing oneself be emotionally affected by the depths of horrors that have been perpetrated by our privilege is a necessary but often avoided step in creating real equality between people. Just as white women need to endure the experience of feeling genuinely horrified about the ways in which we have, knowingly or unknowingly, facilitated white supremacy onto people of color, white men have to do the same about how their ignorance, afforded by privilege, has collectively caused an unspeakable amount of pain in the world to women, people of color and the planet itself.
    “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” ~ James Baldwin

    May this ever-rising tide of female anger be followed by a commensurate wave of brave men willing to explore their inner terrain, to embrace the abandoned boy within and to process the legitimate anger and grief about what patriarchy has stolen from them: their full humanity. Collective change will occur when enough individual men change.  May men take full responsibility and humbly embrace this raw, necessary discomfort as the medicine they need to heal their personal and collective mother wound. And may women refuse to allow the behavior of unconscious men to define them.

    © Bethany Webster 2017

  • Men’s Rights of Passage

    Exposed chests
    drip fresh blood
    to the earth below.
    The mirror smashed;
    red dark cave of
    grief and despair.

    Alone together – in silence,
    sweet surrender.
    Let this death sink in.
    Scars on the inside
    release the puss
    of ancient wounds unseen.

    Transition through
    my cut skin,
    symbolic yet real,
    take my body down,
    slowed and released
    from its habitual pain.

    Stories worn thin
    no longer serve;
    innocence lost
    to abandonment
    overwhelm,
    devoid of love.

    We are victims again;
    no perpetrator now.
    Bitter-sweet grief
    of our choosing.
    Trust the shared
    safe circle of men.

    Purging the blocks,
    releasing emotions,
    rage, fear and hate –
    Welcome the death.

    Out of oblivion
    we begin life anew.

  • More Support, Less Sport!

    Sport, spectator sport at least, is a serious ‘weapon of mass distraction’, to borrow a phrase from Lewellyn Vaughan-Lee. Men particularly are attracted to sport as a form of escape, where perhaps women might go shopping.

    Sport provides a relatively controlled outlet for men’s need for a sense of belonging and for some form of combat as an outlet for aggression. It fulfills a need; its better than going to war! it can even be therapeutic.

    But all of this, in my humble opinion, is part of an epidemic in modern men, to reach out for anything that focusses attention on the relative safety of their outer world, to dampen, hide and escape from inner pain. There is a huge need for us men to stop running for our chosen form of addiction, whether it is sport, gambling, alcohol, drugs, sex, porn or any combination of these. We need to face the truth of our collective pain and personal woundings. Sport plays its part in this escape and the denial that lies beneath it.

    I need to say here, that I was a keen sportsman at school and I learned a great deal about team spirit, tactics, co-operation and courage. I learned what its like to win and what its like to be a loser. I learned that it is not always about winning or losing, ‘but how you play the game’. I learned about the killer instinct that is needed to be at the top of one’s game; and I found that I didn’t have enough of that.

    I now see my interest in sport was a combination of enjoying the agility of my body and its thrilling hand-eye coordination, along with the regular opportunities it provided for me to gain the approval of my peers and teachers, avoid the misery of shaming that the non-sporty boys were subjected to, and to prove myself to be manly; thus enhancing my fragile self-image; something that all teenagers desperately need. I can’t speak for the girls, but I would imagine their attitude to sport might be similar in some ways and different in others.

    Our culture holds up the most successful sportsmen as heroes. As role models they can play a useful and effective role in helping young people to find their way along the treacherous path to healthy maturity. These sporting role models promote, strength, dedication to a goal, loyalty, teamwork, bravery etc. But it is a path with little room for tenderness, vulnerability, compassion, empathy, emotional intelligence and spiritual depth. I can understand why many women are bored, dismayed and angry at their partner’s dedication to sport at the expense of their commitment to their relationship and family, as an avoidance of facing and dealing with their wounds and multiple fears, be it of intimacy, as a result of early maternal abandonment or engulfment ( I suffer from both), fear of exposure, weakness or disassociation.

    There has always been a small minority of men who, either driven by the need to heal their trauma, or directed by some inner light that they have brought with them from a previous life, become seekers of truth; to know and accept their inner world, to heal their wounds, and thereby grow and then serve humanity in some way. It might be through a powerful calling to engage in many years of spiritual practice, it might be through psychological depth work. It might be through a combination of these paths. Either way it stems from an inner calling of the soul.

    In fact we all have it and it is based on love. Love of life, of others and crucially of ourselves.

    We just need to ‘re-member’, but that can be a hard one. Our society doesn’t as yet acknowledge that we all have an inner calling, let alone honour and respect, then nurture it to enable everyone to find their true path in life along with the sense of fulfillment it brings.

    I’m not suggesting that everyone has crippling inner pain and wounds to heal. Many people’s true path in this life is related to a gift or talent that is very much rooted in the outer material world. The world of sport would be an example of this. Society relies on most of us to find satisfaction in practical jobs in a day-to-day world.

    I am referring to the need for individuals, men and women, to take responsibility for their emotional health and intelligence, consciously working with it. There is help out there, but only on the fringes. It is still considered by the mainstream a thing to do when there is a crisis, usually by less fortunate, un-together people with problems. Without time and money to pay for private training or psychotherapy, the help does not go beyond patching people up and sending them back to work in order to pay their mortgage and their taxes.

    The cultural view that prevents this changing is underpinned by the rigid denial that takes Mr Average off to his football match or sends him down the pub to drown with alcohol the unsettling feelings of dissatisfaction with his life, the hurt and private shame that sit just below or on the periphery of his consciousness and which his conditioning tells him must be kept hidden and out of sight at all costs. He might allow himself the thought from time to time: ‘there must be more to life than this?’ But its a question that threatens, that carries fear with it and which all too often triggers the denial response and the illusion of safety that accompanies it, leading back to whatever distraction works best. I speak about this from experience!

    So I come back to my starting point. The problem is everywhere and although it is deeply entrenched, the potential for change is huge. There is a growing trend among women in the western world to do their inner work. This is supported by women’s natural tendency to be more relational, more willing to share problems and vulnerabilities, more motivated to get out from under thousands of years of oppression by men and the patriarchal systems men have created. We are entering a third generation of women willing to do this work for themselves and for the cultural benefit of their gender. Its a minority of course, but women are streaks ahead of the men.

    The women are longing for men to step up, do their inner work and meet them. But even when men respond, there is a valid fear in men that in facing their gentleness and vulnerability, they need to reveal their weakness and women can feel very threatened at the loss of the strong man they have become dependent on at their side, even if it is only temporarily. It is a double bind for men. Codependency is rife in our culture.

    Now its time for men to pick up the batten – to use a sporting phrase – and do the inner work, that is crucial to their healing and conscious awakening – moving up to the third stage in David Deida’s terms. As men we to need to learn to share our inner realities and support each other in this process. It is necessary for the natural death of the old paradigm, that is anyway crumbling, so that a new and more conscious MANkind can evolve.

    This call is a call to myself. I too am implicated in this process, as someone who has been stuck in Deida’s ‘second stage’ for too long, soft male, comfortable with feminine ways, but missing the dynamic energy of the integrated masculine. Without it, humankind, stuck in the destructive patterns of dominator patriarchy, will surely destroy the very ecosphere that has supported human and all other life on this planet since the beginning of time.

  • Every Man Needs a Shed

    I have spent a lifetime building and enjoying sheds. It all stems from my den-building childhood on a farm in the 1950s. Fond memories of secret tunnels in ditches where the weeds were over my head. Spaces under hedges, a posh den in a disused chicken house, with the sign ‘The Club’ over the door. Then there was the tree-house my dad helped me build in a yew tree, from where I could see the whole garden while hiding in the dark green foliage.

    These special secret places were the fuel for rich fantasy and adventure, sometimes with my sister or a friend, but most often on my own. It was in these places that I felt free to really be myself and to be creative without being observed or disturbed, and herein lies the key to my adult shed habit.

    It is no secret that men need a shed; somewhere to go and just be themselves without being observed, away from feminine interference. For me it is somewhere I can be master of my own kingdom, where I can make a mess without criticism. I can make things, repair things, store things that have no place in the house and most importantly it is the place to keep and arrange my tools along with all the jars and boxes that accumulate over time; screws and bolts, brackets and wire and string; offcuts of wood and all the leftover bits from DIY jobs that I can’t bring myself to throw away.  I love to be amongst it all and know that with my hands, my tools and the right materials, I can tackle most DIY jobs.

    But for me its not just the need for a shed to disappear into, its also the fun and labour of creating one. Chalets, garden rooms, dog kennels, goat sheds, retreat huts, compost toilets, store sheds, workshops – I’ve built them all and I’ve enjoyed them all. And what has been the most satisfying thing in their conception and their construction, is that in many cases I have used recycled and ‘found’ materials, letting the design of the structure dictate its form and appearance. Doing it this way creates a quirkiness and individuality that is so much more satisfying than an off-the-shelf shed, although I have nothing against buying a flat-pack shed. They are much quicker and easier to erect of course.

    Although I have been an enthusiast throughout my whole life, I firmly believe that a shed is an essential accoutrement for anyone in their retirement years. Most young men want to use their spare time for sport, for socializing or for getting out and about. For many men the thought of spending hours in the garden or tinkering in a shed has little appeal. But as we get older and particularly following retirement, the whole of each day may involve being at home with the wife or partner for the first time, after years of being in a relationship. This is when a shed becomes an essential and very healthy option for the man of the house as well as for the woman, who may not want him under her feet all day and be happy to see him disappear into his den in the garden.
    And for the man living alone, recovering from illness or depression, there is still great benefit from having a shed, where you can get away from the TV and computer, make and leave mess, learn a new skill, lose yourself in some new hobby, undergo a DIY project, develop a money-making enterprise, or just to do nothing at all and cogitate, dream and watch the world go by.  

    Of course some sheds are really garden rooms, studios, writers’ or artist’s garrets. Whatever they are they are, by my definition, sheds; and in my case they are for seriously practical use on the one hand and they are places of refuge on the other. Although I haven’t actually gone through with it, I have always included an imaginary sign on the door of all my personal sheds, which reads ‘NO GIRLS’, and I have often jokingly shared this fact with friends. There is a part of me that means it of course; my sheds are no place for women. I need to have my refuge, however much I love and get along with the fairer sex – and I do. But in as much as women need to have time away from men, us men need to have our sacred spaces outside of the shared accommodation of the home.  

    A final anecdote about sheds: Some years ago, while living in Herefordshire with my then partner, we became known as the Buddhists who lived on the hill. A friend came by one day when i was building a store shed for our logs and he said in his lilting Scandinavian accent, “Now I know what you buddhists mean when you talk about ‘shedding your worldly goods’; you build sheds to put them in. Ha Ha Ha!” 

    Amongst the variety of shed projects and shed indulgences that I have been responsible for, I have made my living as a wood carver, furniture maker and antique restorer, setting up several professional workshops from which to ply my trade, two of which were homemade sheds. I welcome feedback and personal anecdotes from any shed enthusiasts or tentative shed converts reading this article.