Ken Solin

The male specific issues the great majority of men struggle with are related to divorce, dating, relationships, marriage, unemployment, raising children, and their inability to access and communicate their feelings. Each of these issues can best be resolved in small, confidential groups with other men. It’s entirely unnecessary for men to get into individual therapy if they’re struggling with these issues. What I’ve learned over twenty years working with men is that under the right conditions, men are eminently capable of working together to resolve the issues mentioned. Therapists don’t play any role in this work.

Getting into therapy to resolve any of these issues is wrong on two fronts. First, therapy is expensive, but that would be okay if therapy were a reliable, successful solution for men’s issues. It isn’t by any stretch. Second, male therapists don’t know any more about manhood issues than laymen. Male therapists struggle with all the same issues other men struggle with because therapy has no relevance dealing with the issues mentioned. In fact, male therapists’ training in psychology is irrelevant. Men have to assume the responsibility for their own emotional well-being.

Every single man who dug deep and did the work in my men’s group changed his behavior by working through his issues with other men. That’s worth repeating. Every single man who did the work, succeeded. There are no therapists who have anywhere near that level of success dealing with men’s issues. And worse, when therapists lead men’s groups, they are no longer men’s groups, but group therapy instead. Therapists, who lead men’s group, rob the men in that group of the opportunity to resolve their issues together and learn about themselves in the process.

Men’s groups don’t require a leader of any kind, therapist or otherwise. There’s no necessity for leadership because men can succeed far better without one. Leading men’s groups is a business for therapists, and men’s groups should never be about business. A man in a therapist led group pays for each facilitated meeting he attends, and that’s simply wrong. When men share their real life experiences on an emotional level, the results are vastly superior to any psychological help. Men are flesh and blood, not statistics or case studies, and every man in a men’s group should be an equal. When a leader assumes a role of authority, the men in the group become his patients or clients, and considering that therapists don’t know any more about their manhood than any other men, that’s just wrong-headed.

The work men accomplish in small groups of eight is different from group therapy. All of the work is related to men teaching each other what appropriate male behavior means and how to become better men. They accomplish this through the emotional sharing of their experiences. A man going through a divorce doesn’t need a therapist to tell him he’s in pain or that he should focus on how he’s feeling. What that man can benefit most from is hearing from other men who have gone through divorce who can share, on an emotional basis, how they felt, what they did that worked, and what didn’t work. He can hear how other men in his situation handled the devastating fallout from divorce. That man’s pain, anger, child rearing fears, dating, and ex-wife problems, can be best addressed by men who suffered them, worked through them, and moved beyond them. That information is invaluable, and is as available as the next time the group meets. Men have been meeting together in small groups like mine for decades, albeit in small numbers.

Shared emotional experience isn’t the same as advice, because it’s entirely based on what a man feels, not what he thinks. Advice has nothing to do with feelings. Advice is an opinion, and typically begins with the words, “You should”. Advice is the lowest form of conversation because opinions are debatable. A man sharing how he feels is not offering his opinion. His feelings are his absolute truth. No one can argue about a man’s feelings because that information is authentic when it comes from his heart, not his head.

The difficulty is getting men to realize the enormous value of what they already know. Eight, forty-year old men sitting together can share over three hundred years of real life experience. That’s an encyclopedia of male behavior a group can tap. Nothing is as relevant and real as men sharing their stories on an emotional level.

What most men expect or think is true about men’s group is incorrect. Men avoid emotional intimacy with each other because they have grown weary from years of listening to men who typically offer them lots of advice, judgment, and criticism. Men don’t trust each other because of how they have been treated by other men. There’s no trust in shallow relationships. Men learn it’s best to keep their problems to themselves to avoid an onslaught of advice.

Advice has no place in a men’s group. Men join groups to hear other men speak from their hearts, not their heads. There’s too much noise in their lives already to waste time listening to more gratuitous advice. Men want and deserve better. When men belong to a small, confidential group with other men who care about them, they feel safe unloading the emotional burdens that fester in their souls. They learn to open their hearts and speak from a place most men can’t or won’t because they don’t know how and have never felt safe enough to try. They also make authentic friends, and for many men, this is a first.

No man in a men’s group has to face his painful life’s issues alone, ever again. The sense of comfort knowing that seven other men truly care what happens to him and who speak their truths from their hearts to him can’t be quantified. It’s that big. Trust is a huge part of being in a men’s group, and that trust is unbreakable and enduring. The wimpy men are those who ignore their issues and continue to inflict them on everyone around them. The heroes are the men who face their issues and resolve them. That takes courage.

If you’re a man who feels he might benefit from sharing your issues with other men, my website contains information regarding how to join or start a group. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Being a lone wolf is emotional suicide. There’s value beyond your imagination in joining the pack. Join or start a men’s group and become a better man.

I’ve spent forty years being sexual with women, and in that time I’ve rarely been in a relationship that connected my heart with sex. When I was younger, it didn’t take much to become aroused, and sex was entirely physical. And, since I was capable of physical love, I was able to fake emotional love, but faking emotional love made sex an unconscious act. I don’t like to behave unconsciously about anything I do, so faking love took a willingness to let myself off the hook in a manner I doubt I’d allow a woman to.

I had never learned to connect my heart with my body when making love and it’s that inability that finally caught up to me. After being single for twenty-five years, I met the woman I wanted to spend my life with. I fell in love in a manner I hadn’t before. I wanted to give this woman everything. That’s when I discovered my problem.

Learning to blend the physical with the emotional at sixty-six makes me feel like I’ve been living under a rock, because I missed the intimacy lessons around sex entirely. It took me two years to finally fess up to this issue with my wife. She was surprised, especially since I never indicated any such problem existed.

It was in my men’s group that I started twenty years ago, where I finally learned how to talk about what I was feeling in my heart. I learned this with other men who were similarly challenged. We helped each other learn how to speak what was in our hearts and not just what was in our heads. We were equals in terms of being equally challenged men.

I’ve never attempted to share what was in my heart with a woman, especially around sex. But my wife and I both fell in love in a way that made us feel nothing was off the table. So I brought it up with her recently and expressed my fear around trying to feel something in my heart while still being able to have my body perform. I opened my heart and made myself vulnerable to an extent I never would have in the past.

My wife was surprised, and I think in some ways, relieved, because I don’t think my sexual act was holding up very well. She sensed something wasn’t quite right. So the trick now is to learn, with my wife’s help, how to connect my heart with sex. What I know is that while physical intimacy never frightened me, emotional intimacy always terrified me, because it involves being vulnerable. That goes against everything I learned as a boy in a violent, angry home, where vulnerability would have had disastrous results. There was no trust in my boyhood home, and absent trust, an open heart would have been dangerous.

Is my problem unique? Not at all, because I’ve heard men talk about this for decades. I just never connected the discussions with my issue. I listened while keeping an emotional distance. I disconnected my heart from the conversation and I failed to learn any lessons. I was that frightened.

Now I’m learning to connect these two vital components to love-making. The first step was to share my problem with my wife. We have the kind of marriage that allows for total honesty without fear of repercussions. Trust has never stood in the way of any of our issues. My wife honors my shared problem and wants to work with me to help me make the connection that will deepen the intimacy between us.

This isn’t simple or easy, and I don’t want to suggest otherwise, but it is essential if I hope to finally get it right in a relationship, and I do want to get it right because I feel I’ve lost something because I haven’t. I’ve missed a significant benefit from being in love. Can old dogs learn new tricks? Absolutely, and so can young dogs.

Younger men might consider learning this lesson because it will deepen their relationships and give their relationships endurance and the potential for longevity. The first step is honesty and openness, and that requires both partners to be willing to make themselves entirely vulnerable without fear of potential consequences. Nothing said in openness and honesty can ever be brought up and used as a weapon in a moment of anger. Once trust is breached, the opportunity is lost forever. I could never give a woman a second chance to hurt me after she used my shared issue as a weapon.

Can men learn to connect their bodies with their hearts? Of course, and my only regret is that I waited so long to admit how important this actually is to me. Is it important for other men? It is, if they hope to be in an authentic relationship with a woman.

I would appreciate hearing from readers, and I welcome any comments.

For too many years, the most frightening thing I could think of was to become emotionally intimate with a woman. Physical intimacy was never an issue because, in my mind, it had nothing to do with commitment or any other implied consequence. Not surprisingly, I was in one relationship after another. I was too blind to understand why.

When I hit my fortieth birthday, my fear that I would never be in a permanent relationship became so real that I felt compelled to dig deep and find out why I was so phobic about intimacy. All I knew for certain was that each time I became embroiled in a new relationship, I began looking for the exit sign. I was so frightened by the potential consequences of opening my heart, that I froze up and ran. I was determined to find a woman who didn’t require emotional intimacy to be in a relationship.

The bad news is that I finally found that woman. The good news is that I finally “got it” about intimacy. I met a woman who had no need for intimacy and no need for commitment either. She just wanted to have sex, hang out, and go home. We had wild, monkey sex in every room of my house. I was thrilled for a while. Then it hit me, I was starving for a woman to hold me gently and make me feel warm and fuzzy. What I was missing became palpable. It finally hit me that I couldn’t have what I needed and wanted unless I was willing to give the same in return. What I’d held back, emotional commitment, was on the table now for the first time in my life.

I told my story to my men friends, most of whom had worked through the same issue in their lives. I was afraid. Actually, I was terrified. I had grown up in a home where trust didn’t exist, and worse, whenever I tried to trust anyone in my family, I ended up hurt and disappointed. I buried the idea that I could ever trust anyone as a boy, and spent the next several decades bumping up against my fear.

One of my friends suggested that before I could ever find love, I would have to love myself. That was hard to hear, and even harder to imagine doing. I didn’t like myself all that much, let alone love myself. So I sat with the idea of self-love for a few months until it wasn’t so difficult to imagine that I was in fact loveable. I began to see my inner hero more clearly, and he wasn’t fearful of intimacy. He was my best vision of myself and I began paying attention to him.

But the hardest lesson was actually trusting a woman not to break my heart. I had tried to tell my story to a woman I’d been involved with, but instead of honoring what I’d told her about myself, she chose to use it against me in an argument. That set me back a while, but I was determined not to let one bad experience ruin my opportunities.

I began dating women who I thought were potential life partners, wives. The difference was immediately noticeable because each appreciated my willingness to open my heart and trust them. While none became the love of my life, I could feel in my heart that I was on the right path.

I finally did meet the woman I feel I was meant to be with and we married shortly after we met. That was four years ago, and while we’ve had our share of marital issues, trust has never been one of them. My wife is an authentic friend, which means that if I ask her for advice, her answer has nothing to do with what’s best for her, and everything to do with what’s best for me. Sometimes I’m amazed at how willing she is to help me even when that help works against her best interests. That’s a trusted friend in my book.

Here’s what women need to know. Men are terrified of being hurt, and making themselves vulnerable is a part of that fear. I know that women probably have the same fear, but that doesn’t seem to prevent them from being intimate. Once a man suffers the pain of a broken heart, he becomes wary of ever sticking his toe in that water again. But men can be drawn out of their emotional shells that protect them. They can become vulnerable and intimate with a woman who’s willing to understand their fear, and who will gently draw them out. Building trust takes some amount of time. If you’re willing to be patient and a good listener, your relationship will take root and grow.