My Time on a Men’s Team
My time on a men’s team between 2020 to early 2023 exposed me to a whole new world of masculine identity and the crisis men face in our modern society. Men’s teams are organizations of men who meet to support each other in building better lives. While the ideological backing and structure varies across teams, they generally are a place for men to open up about their struggles and pursue personal growth. What started out as an earnest attempt to get support for my own mental health and life challenges turned into an eye-opening dive into a world that is largely unheard of where I saw the best and worst of men. In this essay, I want to talk about the positives I saw during my time on the team, the negatives that pushed me to leave my team, and what I learned about the future of men in society.
A brief history of my time on the team
In 2020, during the midst of the pandemic, I fled from my home in Washington to Massachusetts. I grew up in a violent home and experienced routine physical and emotional abuse from both of my parents. Before the pandemic started, I had begun to work on healing the complex PTSD that resulted from my childhood. Inevitably, being cooped up with the people who failed to provide me a healthy upbringing and deeply wounded me brought me to a mental breakdown in which I developed GI issues, severe insomnia, and debilitating panic attacks that left me wanting to die. Coming to Boston promised salvation. I could finish my degree remotely, set a solid groundwork for my career, and begin a relationship.
Habituating to Boston was not so simple however. I was still an anxious mess, and I was scared to live on my own without the structure of college life around me. Furthermore, I wanted to heal the deep wounding from my childhood as much as possible. During that initial 3 month period, I cried most days and felt fragile and scared. While I was doing therapy, I sought outside support. Eventually I came across a local men’s team. The group intrigued me since I had a poor relationship with my father and a shattered sense of my own masculinity, so I reached out. At my first meeting, I opened up about the abuse I suffered at home and how terrified I was of life, and I was met with kindness and acceptance that felt like a balm to my soul. Naturally, I joined the team.
The initial months were amazing. I felt like I was part of a family that I’d always dreamed of having and felt so much support in finishing my degree and establishing a healthy relationship. I could always count on the men in the team to be there for me. I also began to teach some of what I learned in therapy to the men there. I relished in feeling useful and wanted, so I attempted to become my team’s captain. Even though I was the youngest on the team by a large margin (I was 22 at the time and the median age was in the fifties), I was determined to succeed and help the men heal their underlying traumas and build better lives.
Unfortunately, this is when the cracks began to really show in the men’s team. The first major issue I saw was that the leadership acted in an immature way. I heard lots of gossip about my team’s previous captain to the point where I’d have considered it bullying. It’s darkly ironic that the previous captain had spoken about how he was bullied when he was younger. The transition of captaincy was drawn out and painful, and left me less confident in the leadership’s competence. The next big issue I saw was that some of the older men began to act in a belligerent manner towards me once I’d begun as captain. I came in with a desire to be vulnerable and lead by example so the men could heal their wounds, but some men took my kindness as an excuse to be rude, and then called it their way of teaching me. When I discussed these issues with my mentor, I was told that this is normal. Ultimately, I burnt out between dealing with these problems to the point where I left the team altogether.
My 10 months away from the team were positive. I’d gotten into a great PhD program at Harvard, stabilized my life and my mental health more, and finished up my first big research project. However, I was facing serious struggles in my relationship due to fear of conflict and had gained a significant amount of weight that put me in the prediabetic range. I knew I had to make a change to my lifestyle again and decided that I needed more support from groups of guy friends and men. I cautiously decided to join back onto a men’s team. It was with the same organization, but a different team so that I didn’t have to deal with the individuals who gave me grief on the previous team.
The positives of being on a team were still there - I met kind people who I could open up to and receive guidance from, and I got the support I needed to withstand the hard conversations my relationship needed. The ugly parts of the organization also reared their head again. At the division meeting, a larger meeting where all of the local teams met, I saw one of the leaders speaking disrespectfully to a person in front of the whole group. During my time away, I’d gained a bit of confidence, so I decided to challenge him and point out his hypocrisies in demanding others not interrupt him while he gets to rudely interrupt others. I got a lot of support from the division, both between the leadership and the normal members. However, in the following weeks I saw that nothing really changed. I told my team that I refused to go to any division meetings from then on. I naively assumed the problem was solved, but I saw similar issues in my own team. Older members would shut down my ideas under the guise of having more experience. However, I could clearly see the contradictions in their words and actions. Over time, I began to question whether the team was the right place for me, given that I didn’t really want to end up like any of the more senior members on the team. So when graduate school began, I decided that it was time to leave the team and the organization, and this time for good.
The Good
Despite my not being on a men’s team anymore, I think I got a lot out of my participation on one, things that are hard to find otherwise. The biggest thing that I got was the opportunity to connect with some very good people, people I still look up to and keep in touch with. As I mentioned, I didn’t have a great relationship with my father. I was lucky to meet people who were able to fill in some of the gaps that my childhood left me with. They taught me to be patient and the strength of kindness. Some of these men had very challenging childhoods, which I could relate to. Seeing that they’d become good people filled me with hope that I didn’t have to become abusive like my father and that I could have healthy relationships. Furthermore, these men would be there for me in dark moments when I was lost in flashbacks of abuse. They’d help remind me of the positive aspects of myself and show me that I had the strength to bring myself back to reality. There is also an intangible, hard to put into words aspect of being around people like this. Interacting with wise people can make you better, even if there is nothing particular of substance being talked about. In essence, I was learning how to be.
The presence of older men with life experience also provided something crucial for younger men - structure. A lot of younger men without a strong relationship with their father end up directionless and orient their lives based on their whims and desires. As a result, they struggle with broken relationships, unfulfilling careers, and unhealthy habits and addictions. The team has new members go through the guiding principles of the team and discuss how the principle influences their life. The older men often take on a surrogate father role for these new men, just as they did for me, and can provide advice and motivation to discipline themselves and create a healthier life. Younger men weren’t the only ones benefiting from these elders’ experience - lots of middle aged and elderly men came through who were struggling with challenges like divorce, an ailing partner, or financial troubles. They were able to find some footing in the team to tackle these problems in a constructive manner.
The team addressed a serious problem many men face today by giving people a first chance at being truly vulnerable and cared for. While going to therapy and vulnerability in men is widely accepted in upper middle class liberal circles, it’s still a major challenge for men outside of this narrow demographic. In fact, the vast majority of the men on the teams didn’t come from this background - they were often blue collar, the types who generally don’t go to therapy. I believe these teams are crucial since they offer a mode of healing for these men since the ideas of therapy and mental health are packaged in a way that appeals to their life values. I saw men cry and express deep grief for the first time on the team. They often said they felt isolated and their primary relationships didn’t feel safe enough for them to express these emotions. It’s unfortunate that this demographic is so deeply neglected and that these men are silently suffering.
All of the positives I’ve listed about the men’s team ultimately tie together in one of the deepest needs people have that is lacking in modern society - community. Many of these men were isolated and struggled with their problems on their own unsuccessfully. Once they joined the team, they not only felt the support of the other men, but also a deeper sense of belonging. Relating to other people who had struggles in life and deep childhood wounds gave many men a place that felt truly theirs. I felt the same exact way too; my first men’s team felt like the family I needed at the time when I had just broken away from my biological one. The men’s teams did a good job of engaging this community via volunteering events, gatherings, etc. Men would talk about going on vacation with each other and their long conversations with other men on the team. Their relationships with their families also improved since they now had an external support and didn’t need their wives to be their support 100% of the time. It’s unfortunate how communities have broken down in modern society and people have become atomized. I especially feel this now that I’ve graduated college - I don’t know my neighbors and feel very little connection with the town I live in. My communities are restricted to work at this point. I’ve worked towards building groups of friends outside of work that I can spend time with but I do feel a deep lack of warmth from community that I deeply desire.
The Bad
Now that I’ve talked about what was so good about the teams, you may be wondering why I ultimately left. Many of the issues that led me to leave echo the problems men face in today’s society and common character flaws men develop due to conventional socialization. However, there was a more insidious side to the teams that spoke to the precarious position people who have trauma and mental health struggles are in and the people that prey on them.
First and foremost, I left because I experienced some level of bullying while I was on the teams. I also witnessed many instances of bullying that went unchallenged that left me doubtful in the leadership in making the teams safe enough for people to be vulnerable. In the instance in which I challenged the leader at the division meeting, said leader used words such as “immature masculine” and “cunty” towards me. Later I was told by somebody that “cunty” was just jargon used on the team. Similarly, some men could become really nasty when an argument started. Those arguments looked like classic schoolyard bullying instances where one person would consistently put down the other person. While those arguments would be cut short and the person being put down would get a chance to express how they were hurt, there was little disciplinary action taken towards the bully. I also saw more covert bullying in the form of gossip. The teams had a standard that if you had a problem with a man, you should talk to them honestly about it. However, people would speak negatively of others all the time over private phone calls. Shockingly, the leadership team was most guilty of this poor behavior. The most stunning example of this sort of gossiping was when I was trying to become captain for the first team that I was on. Much of the leadership continuously complained about the previous captain and at certain points scapegoated him for their own failings. As that captain was leaving, he expressed how the bullying triggered past wounds for him and made him want to leave. Unfortunately, he ended up staying even though the bullying was never properly addressed.
Seniority privilege was also a problem on the team. Many men who had been on the team for a long time took their status as a license to be more forceful and domineering than necessary. It was the unhealthy older men who did this the most. They could become quite rude and attempt to “put you in your place” if you said something they disagreed with by lording over you with their seniority. If you questioned their thinking, they’d evade giving you an actual answer by telling you that you haven’t spent enough time on teams or that you’re immature. This is not only intellectually bankrupt, but potentially harmful since many younger men come onto the teams looking for guidance and a surrogate father figure. The damaged older men go out of their way to provide that guidance, but often the dynamic becomes unhealthy. In one instance, a senior man routinely spoke rudely to a younger man with autism. If the autistic man spoke up when the senior man didn’t like it, the senior would tell the younger man to “shut the fuck up” forcefully. The younger man continued this relationship because the senior man not only provided some modicum of guidance, but also matched the younger man’s pattern of abusive father figures.
An unfortunate thing that I saw on the team was an indirect diminishing of femininity and women. When people became nurturing and caring instead of direct and forceful, they called it “mothering”, and “mothering” was looked down upon. While the idea of “mothering” makes sense in some cases, where one person is enabling the unhealthy behavior of another, I think men would label too many things as mothering. This is ironic since most of the growth happened when these men were able to be vulnerable and self-nurturing, which are traditionally feminine traits. In fact, most of these men needed to embrace their feminine side, which reflects the notion of the anima from Carl Jung’s philosophy. This forced schism between the masculine and feminine was constant, as men would talk about what men should do in a relationship as opposed to the role women play in a relationship.
While the problems I’ve just mentioned are in line with a lot of the unhealthy male behavior that you’d expect, there were more insidious and darker issues that were in line with negative aspects of cults. The organization I was part of started with a person named Justin Sterling and his seminars on male/female relationships. While this wasn’t advertised on the website when I joined, people would often talk about the “Sterling men’s weekends” and things they learned from these seminars. The Sterling philosophy was the unspoken ideology of the organization I joined. Naturally, this philosophy started to smell fishy when I saw the poor behavior of people on the teams, so I tried to learn more. On the internet, I found that Sterling is a narcissistic man who preys on people with trauma and ends up teaching abusive and incorrect ideas of healthy relationships. In fact, there were several accounts on the internet about how his programs are cult-like. If you’d like to learn more about the cult-like nature of Sterling, take a look at this link. Furthermore, the women’s programs perpetuate victim-blaming attitudes as can be found in this link. The author of the review states that Sterling made a woman’s sexual assault her own fault. While the individual men I men during my time on the teams didn’t have these sorts of awful views, I saw bits and pieces of Sterling’s unhealthiness in their attitudes. Given the cult-like nature of Sterling, I believe many of the men on these teams came during a time of desperation and felt the safety in Sterling’s philosophy and became true believers. This is a characteristic of how cults recruit.
On a similar note, I saw a lot of bad advice and pseudo-therapy being given out to men who came to the teams out of desperation. Because the teams had the underlying Justin Sterling ideology, any advice given to men was heavily influenced by that ideology and was often very bad. On my first team, one man was struggling with a relationship and relied on the men on the team for help. The more we learned about the relationship, the more it seemed that his fiancé was emotionally abusing him. The situation was unhealthy and dramatic and was well outside the scope of what untrained professionals should be attempting to navigate. However, some people on the team went out of their way to “solve” his relationship issues, usually in unsuccessful manners. There was lots of advice given to him about finding internal strength and resolve and trying to be a “mature man”, but I think we overstepped our role and should have asked the man to go to a therapist much sooner. Over the course of a year, we spent several meetings entirely dedicated to his relationship issue, making very little progress. At the same time, we saw not only his relationship deteriorate, but his mental health decline and the rest of his life fall apart. I gently suggested seeing a therapist early on both because I have had success with a therapist and because I intuited that the man had some underlying childhood trauma that needed to be tackled, but he was resistant and assumed that the team would be enough. During my time on the teams, I’d met several people who seemed to think that being on a team was sufficient for helping them deal with their problems, when in actuality they needed more support from a therapist. I think this is a problem with men in general regarding avoiding therapy, but the teams enabled this avoidance by promising more than they could deliver. At the end of the day, it was just the blind leading the more blind. The kinship and relationships were not a substitute for professional help.
The Future of Men’s Mental Health
Men’s mental health is a complicated challenge to solve. On the one hand, it’s clear that men are facing an identity crisis within today’s society as a result of social and economic progress, and previous ideas of what it means to be a man are becoming vestigial. On the other hand, men are becoming increasingly isolated and there are not many resources out there to help men with their challenges in a way that meets them where they are emotionally. In fact, men are 3.5x more likely to die by suicide compared to women and 2x more likely to overdose on opioids [1]. Despite the negatives that I listed, I believe that men’s teams are generally a good thing and that the world needs more places like them. Men benefit from being around other men and learning to create strong male bonds. Places such as the gym, martial arts clubs, and sports bars have traditionally served that role. However, men’s teams have the added benefit of facilitating a focus on relational growth, which is very lacking in these previous spaces listed. What are the options currently available to men?
During my time in college, I saw attempts at creating places for men to work on their emotional challenges and have that relational growth. However, this was taken from a feminist perspective, and the purpose of these groups was “unlearning toxic masculinity”. While many feminists may have good intentions, phrases such as “toxic masculinity” and “patriarchy hurts men too” often shuts men down. Nobody wants to hear that something so fundamental to them is toxic, and most men who are not upper middle-class don’t get the plethora of benefits that college age students claim men get from patriarchy. Most working class men want to support their families while also being able to relax, but life is challenging and makes that hard. We also know that serious mental illness is highly correlated with income [2], so we need a more nuanced approach to men’s issues than what is being promoted by the average progressive. Therapists need new approaches to work with men as well. Given that men on average are avoidant in their attachment styles and are not socialized to express emotions, the current therapeutic culture can be very off-putting. Men tend to benefit more from themes of leadership and strength as opposed to the softer vulnerability and delicateness therapists emphasize. Men also generally don’t enjoy focusing on oppression and their victimhood, which a lot of modern left centers itself on. Another issue that I think the left wing and feminist ideology neglects is that there are fundamental differences between masculinity and femininity. Boys need to learn how to be men from other men, not women. Despite left wing gender deconstructionist philosophies, gender expression is still something people care about and has some biological basis. This extends to the diminishing of the role of the father in modern society. We have seen that in lower income neighborhoods, there are poorer outcomes for children in fatherless homes in the realm of education, criminal activity, and other factors. For example, the Institute of Family Studies found that kids are on average safer in married families than unmarried families in unsafe neighborhoods [3]. While it is understandable that the role of fathers has been called into question, clearly fathers are still needed in families.
Does this mean that the right wing is any better for men? Not at all, in fact I’d argue that it’s far worse. Traditionalism has deeply failed men in that it turns men into nothing more than meat puppets whose sole value comes from their productivity. We can see this by the right’s glorification of war and patriotism, which is responsible for sending thousands of men, usually in the lower income brackets, into combat where they risk their lives. These men feel some sense of accomplishment for putting their lives on the line, but men shouldn’t have to risk their lives for self-esteem. Furthermore, many of these men come back with PTSD and are abandoned by the neglectful veteran care policies of the government [4]. Right wing policies also routinely cause economic suffering for lower income men. Right wing models of policing also decimate the black community in the US, where we know that black men are not only targeted by the police disproportionately but also are incarcerated at a higher rate [5]. Traditional conservatism places too strong of an emphasis on the differences between men and women, neglecting that many of these differences are socialized as opposed to being innate. This ends up forcing men to amputate their emotional lives and objectify themselves. Ultimately, this leads to unsatisfying relationships with women. Since they are forced to ignore their own emotional lives, they do the same with women and thus focus on more superficial traits of women such as their looks. Traditionalism also places such an intense taboo on sexuality that many men develop complexes around sex that can lead them to acting sexually aggressive, especially when combined with many of the misogynistic attitudes embedded in conservative thinking. There is a reason so many Republican politicians have histories of sexual assault. These are not men we want to uphold as ideals of masculinity.
I believe teams can take the best of both worlds - create a place where men can congregate and be in touch with their masculinity without shame while working through unhealthy patterns they may have been socialized into that cause them to suffer. There need to be better checks of power on these teams. Ideally, they’d be run by a professional who is trained in handling complex interpersonal dynamics. While these teams shouldn’t be group therapy, a professional who is trained in facilitating group therapy would be effective. These teams also shouldn’t promise too much. There are certain classes of problems that should be relegated to psychotherapists and men’s teams should stay clear of them. I think that if a group can meet these conditions, it would be an excellent space for men to develop healthy and intimate relationships with other men and get support for meeting the challenges of life.
One thing I would love to see in future men’s teams iterations is some effort in improving relationships between men and women in a more direct manner. In recent years, we’ve seen the number of men involved in the dating pool dwindle and a simultaneous rise in charlatan gurus such as Andrew Tate selling bad advice. Men who struggle with their relationships with women could use the men’s team as a support and advice board for talking to women, learning from healthier older men in successful relationships. Furthermore, I can see teams of men and women coming together and being vulnerable about the challenges each gender faces in terms of interacting with others. I believe there is a severe empathy gap between the two sexes and this needs to be bridged somehow. Men can benefit from learning about some of the challenges that women face in our society, especially in the context of dating. I know that for myself, one of the most fruitful times in my learning to date was actually just making platonic friendships with women and trying to learn what dating and relationships was like for them. Similarly, I think women could benefit from learning about how patterns of action men take are actually coping mechanisms for pain and isolation. I do believe that our society lacks empathy for hurting men, and the only way to move past this is to have men express their struggles in a healthy manner.
Ultimately, I think there’s a future for men’s teams. I think they can be instrumental in helping to solve the mental health crisis among men. I know I benefited from being on them. Let’s just be careful about the dynamics that develop on these teams and who’s running them.
Sources
[1] https://meetmonarch.com/health-resources/articles/therapy-101/why-arent-more-men-in-therapy
[3] https://ifstudies.org/blog/even-in-unsafe-neighborhoods-kids-are-safer-in-married-families/