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Chapter 1- Hardwired

Most men today are burnt out and don't know it. Whether a success or a failure most men suffer from the symptoms of burnout: depression, anxiety, lack of motivation, chronic physical ailments, fatigue from overwork, addiction to alcohol, compulsive sexual activity, regular bouts of anger at home or at work. These symptoms are not acknowledged even to ourselves because we, men, have been taught to numb ourselves to any feelings that will keep us from our objectives We are taught to be warriors until we die, gloriously, anonymously, or somewhere in between. We are taught that the mission is more important than life itself, our life.

In fact, men need a mission. We have been taught to be warriors over the span of thousands of years. We have been bred and trained to be focused, intrepid, vigilant, goal directed. We are good at getting things done no matter the cost. The best warriors fight and die for an ideal. The worst fight only for themselves.

We are also good at taking orders and being trained by older men. We are are willing to fulfill the mission statements of our companies, organizations, communities because we are also following a deeper programming. We are also fulfilling the mission of manhood just as warriors for millenia have searched for their manhood. In our society being a man is being a warrior. We are taught that the ideal we are fighting for is the welfare of our beleaguered family and society. In a real sense men are on a war footing emotionally most of their lives. Being a good man is being a good, lifelong warrior.

Training Manual

The truth is that we have been betrayed by the very men who have trained us. Our bosses and generals, our political and spiritual leaders have unknowingly betrayed us. The modern way of achieving manhood in our society is not working for us. We have been using a training manual for manhood that is flawed and out of date. We have been intrepid in fulfilling our job description only to find out there's been a mistake. Our training has been inappropriate and the mission ill-conceived. Men are being burnt out by the mission. Burnout is modern battle fatigue. And we are suffering a pain that our mission won't allow us to admit.

Some men feel the pain as the 'failure of success.' They have done it all right. They accomplished the mission. They have reached their objectives only to find themselves unsatisfied and vaguely frustrated. They find themselves king of a non-strategic hill.

Other men only partially fulfill their mission, but keep trying courageously while questioning their own skill and integrity. They are not gifted in their assigned training yet never question where that training manual came from. They are taught not to question the mission, only themselves. They are frustrated men, angry at themselves, sometimes taking it out on the loved ones whose welfare they are supposed to protect.

Still other men just give up and leave their manhood and self-respect behind. These are the casualties of this nonsensical mission.

The most compelling evidence for the depth of this unacknowledged burnout is in men's health statistics. The human psyche works in such a way that emotional pain that is not consciously dealt with goes deep into the unconscious. If the pain is driven deep enough it ends up in our bodies.

Herbert Benson, a Harvard physician and founder of Harvard's Mind/Body Medical Institute, estimates that 60-90% of all physician office visits in the United States stem from stress-related conditions. Psychic pain often leads to physical breakdown and men's bodies are riddled with deeply driven psychic pain. As a result men, today, live an average 7-9 years less than women. In 1920 the figure for men was one year less. Warren Farrell, author of The Myth Of Male Power, points out that a boy infant, as of 1991, is only half as likely as a girl infant to live to age 85.

Men lead women in 8 of the top 10 causes of death. One of those causes is suicide. Aaron Kipnis, author of Knights Without Armor, points out that men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women. He points out that men's suicide rates increase with age as men suffer more burnout and have less capacity for joy and spontaneity. Suicide is the ultimate symbol of men burying their pain.

Health statistics also show other symptoms of burnout. Men are 3 times as likely as women to have a drug or alcohol problem which may explain the reason that men are more than twice as likely as women to have chronic liver disease. Addictions are a major sign of a man struggling with the pain of burnout. As we will see, addictions are also a major way men treat the most significant sign of burnout. This is an under the radar, low level depression that slowly drains a man of any natural, good feeling.

Only in the past few years have men stepped forward to point out the fact of men's burnout and to question its cause. Men with backgrounds as diverse as sociology, theology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and even poetry have started to speak out on the problems of our manhood training manual. Psychologists are now looking at what we now consider healthy human behavior and comparing that to typical male behavior in the business and social world. Medical doctors are now questioning the health statistics that show how supposedly satisfied men are prematurely dying in droves.

A New Movement of Men

Answers are now emerging that address the problem of widespread male burnout. A movement is forming, though it is more like a guerrilla movement. Small uprisings are happening spontaneously as men in small groups start to question their mission and their trainers. To be sure this movement comes about 30 years after the start of the feminist movement. And its direction is still not clear. But this movement is much more pervasive and advanced than many men realize.

Men have started meeting together to share their frustration and pain. The movement shows up in men's councils, men's groups, men's weekend workshops. It also shows up in male gatherings such as the Mankind Project, and in the stadiums that host Promise Keepers. It shows up in the growing amount of men's literature that I hope to acquaint you with. It even manages to creep into the fabric of our society with jokes about "drums and spears" and men "going native in the woods."

Common to the whole men's movement is the questioning of the modern cultural meaning of manhood. Along with this questioning is a deep searching for new rules of conduct that embody healthier standards of male behavior. Burnout itself shows the inner conflict most men have. This movement is starting to show that the problem is not the man but the mission. The problem is not performance but ignorance and betrayal.

Men of the Movement

In the men's movement there are many different perspectives on men's growth and behavior. Men like Sam Keen, David Gerzon, Warren Farrell, and David Gilmore write from a political and social perspective. They are looking at the big political picture and the social training men are given about their roles. They then look at the political, social, and environmental effects of a power structure controlled by these kinds of socialized men.

There are also men, like Robert Bly, Michael Meade, Aaron Kipnis, Malidoma Some, and James Hillman who come more from the mythopoetic tradition which has an anthropological as well as literary base. These men write about the basis of culture itself, its underlying beliefs embodied in cultural myths. They believe in the need for creating new, healthier mythic ideals for our Western culture. They are looking for the new paradigms of manhood that go far deeper than changing the power structure.

I will be drawing heavily on both these branches of the men's movement. However, I will be adding the psychological perspective that is from my background as a psychotherapist that has been working with men for 30 years. This perspective describes the internal dynamics of men's growth. I will be portraying a developmental psychology that emphasizes the healthy stages of psychospiritual growth men must go through. From this perspective I will share with you the thoughts of men such as Carl Jung, Robert Johnson, Robert Moore and David Gillette, Scott Peck, Terrence Real, William Pollack and even Sigmund Freud.

All these men and others will be presented in this book. They are the pioneers. We owe them a great deal of gratitude. They are the modern guerrilla leaders fighting for all of us. I feel like I am standing on the shoulders of giants in writing this book.

My eyes were opened at a weekend workshop led by Michael Meade and Malidoma Some. They easily recruited me once I heard what they had to say. They touched something in my heart that I knew was true but had no words for. Their message changed my life. I can only wish the same to those who read on.

Sudden Brothers

One common tenet that links the many branches of the men's movement is that men need each other in order to grow. Some men talk of this need manifesting in father hunger. Others talk of each man's need for relatedness. Still others talk of the brotherhood that emrerges in times of good teamwork and shoulder to shoulder intimacy.

I was talking to a man recently who had just been told by his wife that she wanted a divorce. He was seeking counseling for the first time in a state of anger and confusion. He told me he just needed my help briefly to get through this crisis, maybe a month or two. Then, he said, he would be able to figure things out on his own. It was then I felt compelled to tell about this foundational idea of the men's movement. He won't be able to do it alone.

He was uncomfortable and then angry when I told him. I then asked him not to take my advice as a personal criticism. No man can do it alone. We're not weak or cowardly in accepting this fact. Men are not made that way, even though that flawed training manual says differently. The self made man is a myth. Men are made to grow with other men. Men are made by other men.

Men need brothers and close friends, fathers and mentors, elders and wise male counsel in order to find their true manhood. I can remember when I first started attending men's workshops and meetings. When men started sharing their frustration instead of their elation, their failures instead of successes, I palpably relaxed and had the strongest feeling of coming home. I felt like I had unexpectedly come to a place where I was deeply understood and accepted. I felt like I belonged. I felt totally supported in my broken manhood. I knew I needed more of this in order to survive and grow.

There is a term in the movement called "sudden brothers." This term was coined because many men experienced a feeling similar to mine. This feeling has been reported in meeting after meeting where men who were strangers have come together, feeling and describing an instant, special bond toward each other. I now understand that term in my gut. And I understand how that feeling can have a profound effect on men's motivation to do men's work.

Elliot Engel, a professor from North Carolina State University, wrote in Newsweek that men have "been raised with positive male images that only sanction either standing alone or standing together as a team." Men coming together to share brokenness instead of victory is deemed unmanly. Sports or corporate teams, to fulfill the approved male mission, are the only ways of male connection. Men are left to share their full range of feelings only with women, usually mothers or wives or girlfriends, if they're shared at all. As Elliot says, "In our society it seems as if you have to have a bosom to be a Buddy." As a result , too many men look to women for what they need from brothers.

We are cut off from relating to other men in meaningful ways. There's no room for shared feeling or true brotherhood in the modern male manual. There's no room for sharing what men need to share in order to mature. As we will see, brothers and elders are crucial to our hopes of becoming men. We are all cut off from our brothers and the family of men. We are all cut off from the source of our own manhood.

Hardwired

I believe that all men have a deep yearning and need for this feeling of brotherhood in order to deal with the seriousness of our lives. This need is so strong because it runs deeper than any one of us realizes. It goes deeper than our recent experiences or even our lifetime experience. It is as if we are experiencing some of what men have experienced since family bonds first started, since fathers had sons, and brothers wrestled with brothers. Many men speak of a genetic feel to it because it runs so deep.

This yearning for brotherhood is one example of the deep feelings that men have when they first come out of their goal-oriented numbness. Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who studies mens' spiritual growth, emphasizes that what he is saying about these issues, men already know in their souls. Men are not surprised by what is said in many men's gathering because they already have a sense of the rightness of it.

Both Robert Moore and Sam Keen, using a computer analogy, talk of this knowledge being in the hardware of every man. They talk of men being wired in specific masculine ways. We are wired to need brothers. We are wired to need older men. We are wired to yearn for a manhood we have not found in modern society. Yes, we're probably even wired not to ask for directions.

Men accused of numbness take note. Men who feel numb take note. The numbness is in the software. Men are hardwired to feel strongly. The deep, passionate aliveness is in there.There is a powerfully strong inner life of compassion and conviction in every man. The problem is in the program. Men are yearning to feel this aliveness and passion. Women yearn to feel that emotion in their men.

Enter Psychology

These hardwired feelings can be explained psychologically by the theories of Carl Jung, Freud's contemporary and main disciple. Jung broke with Freud's theories on some important points. One of those points had to do with the sudden brother feelings. Jung theorized after exhaustive research that there is a part of our psyche that is not immediately available to our awareness or experience. This unconscious part of ourselves is formed not only by our personal experiences, which was Freud's insight, but also by the accumulated experience of humanity as a whole. With this universal part of our psyche we can personally experience the essence of what every man and woman has experienced who has lived before us. Jung called this part of our psyches the collective unconscious.

In the case of men, we feel so strongly about connecting to other men because connecting with other men in meaningful ways, both our peers and older men, has been a primal need in the mystery of manhood since the beginning of humanity. This hardwired need resides in our collective unconscious. It changes at literally glacial, millennial speed.

Any software resides in our personal unconscious, our personal history and training. In the case of modern man, faulty software is a product of the modern training manual. Garbage in, garbage out. The important point here is that the software can be changed in a lifetime or in an intense time in life.

Jung, in talking of the collective unconscious, went on to posit that there were certain universal, emotional experiences that repeated themselves so often throughout history that we naturally yearn for these familiar patterns in our lives. He called these patterns archetypes of experience. For example, why are our social structures often developed around a single, male figure at the top of a hierarchy? These may be kings, presidents, bosses, coaches, gang leaders. We often refer to them as father figures. The archetypal experience of having a father as head of a family or clan would be lived out in these structures. We would be reacting to a deep need for a father archetype when we react to a male leader figure.

Since men archetypally search for an experience of father, and men have had the historic political power to create social structure, many of our political structures are based on a patriarchal or father model. This is the model of a man at the top. And most men react archetypally with loyalty and obedience to that top man. Men have an archetypal yearning for male leaders that will give society direction just as they have a deep yearning for a father who will give them personal direction. If women had the political power, there is a good chance they would create a political structure based on a different archetypal experience.

Another example of an archetypal experience relates to why men react so strongly to the assignment of a mission. Men have the archetypal experience of the warrior in their psyches as a result of thousands of years of training and participation in war. Men are often like a war horse waiting only for the war trumpet to sound. Leaders who understand this hardwired warrior personality can motivate us to their own ends by appealing to our martial instincts, as well as our needs for father. By installing and manipulating our software they can control the warrior in each of us and thus our behavior and mission. Good warriors don't question the mission. Many men felt manipulated in this way in their Vietnam experience.

This warrior archetype is probably built on an even deeper acrhetype, that of the hunter. Hunters especially ancient ones, had to work in teams, be extremely focused, put emotions aside, and work silently and give signals in order to accomplish their goals.

Warrior and hunter, protector and provider. These are deeply hardwired roles that every man feels at some level. They are good and useful to society. For many men the problem resides in how the software, installed by modern patriarchs, affects those roles.

Archetypal experiences reside in our collective unconscious. They can come out in different ways in our behavior and attitudes. Usually we react to an archetype by acting out an archetype. We can react to an archetype, for example, by being loyal to the father archetype in the boss. We then act out an archetype by feeling inferior and obedient to that boss, enacting the boy or puer archetype. When a man enacts the boy archetype he feels and acts like a little boy, mostly obedient and loyal. The first part of this book explains how most men unconsciously act out the boy archetype with disastrous results.

We can also enact many different archetypes in our lives without realizing it. For example, we can be both fathers and boys at different times in the same day. For example, most men are trained to be fathers at work and boys at home. This is why many men are much more comfortable at work than at home.

It is not necessary to understand this theory of archetypes as much as it is necessary to be aware of how we are affected by them. If we start looking at human behavior from an archetypal viewpoint it is not as random as we might believe. There are many archetypes that affect us intimately every day. If we don't realize their existence and power we are not really free men. We end up reacting to powers we don't understand. We end up going on missions we haven't freely chosen. We end up feeling like boys in men's bodies.

Initiation

One of the archetypes that Jung named was the archetype of the initiate. The initiation experience has formed men over tens of thousands of years. Rites of male puberty initiation have been performed throughout most cultures for most of history. These rites were the formal process of a boy becoming a man. Adolescent boys for millennia have universally yearned for manhood through these rites. Tribal elders in countless cultures have realized their duty to guide boys into finding their manhood through their initiatory traditions.

As Mircea Eliade, author of the book Rites and Symbols of Initiation, writes that "to gain the rite to be admitted among adults, the adolescent has to pass through a series of initiatory ordeals: it is by virtue of these rites, and of the revelations they entail, that he will be recognized as a responsible member of the society". He goes on to say that for indigenous peoples "a man is made-he does not make himself all by himself". He cannot do it alone.

The strong reaction to my workshop experience makes sense archetypally. Coming to a workshop with other men and wanting to learn about serious issues of manhood can trigger the archetype of the initiate. I felt just like other young, frightened but eager adolescents as they went in groups to start the rites of their own manhood. Most men at the workshop experienced the same archetype of the initiate and felt that yearning and call. Most men experienced the call in communion with other men as initiatory brothers. Most men experienced a quickening that came from deep inside.

For thousands of years, even until today in some cultures, the process of undergoing these rites was as significant as anything the man would do in his whole life. The results of the rites were the possession of his full manhood. Manhood meant full and equal participation in the life of the community, with access to all the values and the power that community had to give. This manhood also included the responsibility of carrying on the values, this sacred trust, to the next generation. Most importantly these rites gave, and still give in some cultures, what many men yearn for. They gave a sense of internal peace and rightness to a man's life.

Modern Initiation

Today we have no rites that truly give us a sense of manhood. We are deprived of an authentic manhood training manual. We do have rituals that have some archetypal flavor to them. Getting one's driver's license is one. Being able to drink is another. Graduating from high school or college has some sense of accomplishment, and graduation gives us some new social rights in the job market. Marriage is another. The closest is probably boot camp in the military. Yet we will see how that rite, as well as the others, leaves so much to be desired as a rite of manhood.

How about cigarette smoking and manhood? A 1995 New York Times article about the marketing of cigarettes, especially to young men, quotes a marketing guru. Alan Brody talks of the cowboy as the modern warrior and the Marlboro man as the ultimate man. He goes on to say that "we as a society have abandoned tribal initiation rites and cigarettes are a substitute; kids want to prove themselves and play the role of adults. When you rob people of something they want, marketers find a way to give it to them."

How about sports and manhood? Sam Keen says that "for many boys, making the team and winning a letter in high school is a kind of first rite of initiation." It is clear that our society does believe that what a boy learns in sports will prepare a boy for the real world of manhood. And so many successful business executives use sports analogies in talking of their business plans. They make "end runs" around their competitors, "slam dunk" a sale, hit a "home run" strategy in order to be "winners". Our cultural models of manhood reside in the NBA and the NFL. Unfortunately our cultural models of manhood are boys, not elders, who have no idea of what manhood is about. Yet many other young boys, and many older ones, satisfy their yearning for manhood by idolizing them.

So how do we become men today without any rite of initiation? Is this lack of a true rite the reason men are burnt out? How do we become mature men inside? These are the questions to be addressed in this book. And they take us into the modern realm of psychology as well as the ancient realm of ritual and spirituality.

I believe the initiation archetype, and the yearnings of the initiate, still hold a key to a modern understanding of a man's path to maturity. There is something hardwired in all of us that still motivates us to find something more about being a man. There is something that tells us we haven't gotten it yet.

Ancient elders still have something to tell us. Their teachings are so powerful because they are part of our own deep history. Because they are archetypal their teachings also keep recurring in our history in the words of modern elders. The teachings of ancient and modern elders occur today in forms that go unnoticed by a society of uninitiated men. The heart of the teaching is unchanged throughout the centuries. Fortunately, elders are still there waiting to teach.

This book will describe a modern psychospiritual process of becoming a man based on clues from ancient and modern elders. It describes a modern process of initiation. This book is not meant to be a self-help manual but an invitation to initiatory ordeal. As we go through the process of the initiatory ordeal I hope you will feel a deep connection. From that connection I hope you find the motivation to go through your own initiations.

Any initiation ritual puts one's whole life on the line. This is serious business. Initiates throughout history have faced the real possibility of death. Some initiates did die in their ordeal. Now, as in previous times, manhood does not come easily. The issues brought up in this book are painful, difficult issues. But the rewards are also invaluable.

The emerging men's movement, described in this book, can be seen as the genetic, hardwired, archetypal part of every man erupting again on a larger and larger scale. It is really a modern form of an ancient movement. The collective unconscious is again flexing its archetypal muscles, attempting to initiate men today. Elders are speaking today like they have spoken for thousands of years. I believe there is a hardwired part of all of us that wants and needs to listen.

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