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Patrick McKenna

Dr. Michael Reichert has made a lifelong career out of helping young boys get in touch with their emotions and unlearn harmful ideas around masculinity. He’s an author, psychologist and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Boys and Girls Lives who has strived to make advocating for boys a primary focus of his work. Reichert spoke with MenLiving’s Patrick McKenna about what spurred him toward his work, helping young men articulate their emotions and the immense power of parents doing “deep listening” has on their sons.


Patrick:
Thanks for talking to me today. I’m curious about what some of the biggest factors that led you to working with boys in their emotional development and where you are now in your career.

Michael:
It’s a question that I’ve thought about a lot in terms of understanding my own motivations. It seems like in research, we have this term that we use called “overdetermined” to describe outcomes that are produced by multiple forces or multiple factors. I think in my case, dedicating a career to understanding and advocating for boys was an overdetermined outcome. I grew up in a family with six children, another Irish Catholic family like yours, and five of them were boys. My poor sister was right in the middle, and I think always felt like she was in a fraternity house.


I was very connected to my dad, who in turn was very connected to his father. The masculine culture within a patriarchal tradition was something that I was very comfortable in and very steeped in. It was only really when I got older and began to see some of the cracks in the structure that I think my heart inclined me to want to understand better how to make men’s lives work better.

Patrick:
Right.

Michael:
I discovered, for example, that my dad had been a lifelong active alcoholic, and that his mom had been an alcoholic. That vulnerability was passed along to a number of my siblings. I began to understand it as a men’s issue that is fundamentally rooted in a developmental understanding of what boys need and ultimately don’t get. What I realized was there was this myth that pervaded the way that male development was conceptualized. This myth said we were essentially independent lone rangers from birth, and that we didn’t need the kind of holding and emotional understanding and attachment we do in fact need. That we males were impervious to what were essentially developmental injuries. Yet that theory of masculinity was challenged by a set of developmental outcomes, whether they are health outcomes, educational outcomes, or outcomes of virtue. What I say is the routine casualties and losses have been a fact of a boyhood that we designed and maintained for generations, and we’ve normalized that. I think I got really motivated by noticing on a very personal level that my family was exhibiting fairly normative difficulties that were largely misunderstood, ignored, and normalized.

Patrick:
That makes perfect sense.

Michael:

Then I had sons, Patrick. I had not just one son, but two sons. I felt like the handwriting was on the wall. It’s like, “Okay, if I had any concerns about male development previously, I definitely wanted to make sure I got it right in my own family’s case.” At that point I was working in a boy’s school, and I just decided when the opportunity arose that I would make advocating for boys getting what they need emotionally a primary focus of my work. I was hoping that it would stand for something to my sons. I wanted to represent to them a voice saying that the same old, same old is not inevitable, we can do better, and it really comes down to making sure in our relationships of nurture that we are providing the kind of attachment experiences and emotional resonance that let boys be known and loved. That’s the catch phrase that I use: that every boy known and loved is the surest recipe for producing a better world.

Patrick:
Absolutely. You talk about this emotional shaping of that happens to boys, and I’ve read in previous interviews you talk about a short essay by George Orwell and how it relates to that concept of men using a “mask” to hide their emotions.


Michael:
Yes. That’s a subject that I’m also very invested in and have done a lot of work with. It’s a narrative about a British soldier during the occupation of Burma and his being called to execute a runaway elephant. His primary worry was that the Burmese people would see that he was troubled emotionally, you know. By having to do his duty.

Patrick:
Right.

Michael:
This young man, enacting violence on behalf of his colonial responsibilities, was registering that there was no room in his life – in the construction of manhood that had been designed for him –   to be an emotional human being. I think the smart observation here is that when we act as if that’s true, what we now know from developmental science is that we actually change our brains. We build in a constant brain growth process that reflects our experience. If we don’t enable boys to exercise their emotional faculties or we don’t listen to them and encourage them to talk about their feelings (and code feelings with language), it’ll be harder and harder for them to develop that skill.

 

With men in general, it’s very important to me that we not buy the stereotype, that we acknowledge the scientific reality, and we begin to provide a different kind of experience for boys and men. It’s an experience that really is very simple, and yet it’s revolutionary. It begins with listening to boys.

 

Patrick:

Absolutely. Like you said, simple but in reality, a real challenge to society.

Michael:
I give a lot of talks to groups of parents now, and I talk about three particular strategies that they can employ with their sons. The first one is what I call “deep listening.” Basically, what I do is begin the talk by challenging them. I say, “Okay, in the course of this last day, or even the last week, for how many minutes did you actually listen to your son? Not listen to his answers to your questions, peppering him about what he learned in school or how he did on that test. Not dominating the moment with your worries or concerns. But really creating a space in which your son feels able to access your attention and your delight and reveal himself to you? For how many minutes?”

When I put it to parents that way, they’re able to acknowledge that probably very few. As a parent myself, I know that finding that kind of space just logistically isn’t easy, particularly if there’s multiple children. But it’s so important that if our goal is for a boy to feel known and loved, the only way that happens is if he has a chance to reveal himself on his own terms, not in some question-and-answer period. He needs to be able to really enjoy the profound validation of a parent being actually interested in whatever he wants to share. That’s how we can expect this all to change.

Patrick:

Agreed. Just being truly heard goes so far.

Michael:

Then it extends from there. I think that your program’s idea of creating a space for men to get real with each other exactly matches the emotional literacy program I began at this boy’s school for 11th and 12th graders, which has now been running for about 25 years. It’s very simple. I’ve basically trained these young men to really listen to each other. It’s not an advice-giving peer counseling program, but a listening peer counseling program. It incorporates in a very natural way the release of emotion. Many boys will find themselves carried away as they begin kind of talking about something that they’re carrying emotionally.

They can offer each other confidentiality and caring and kind of a no-judgment zone in which the goal is to get things off your chest and get them out in the open where you can see them more clearly. When this program started out back in 1991, it was a bit counter-cultural. It took a while to get traction in the school, but it’s become what the boys say is the best program in the school and one of the most popular. I’ll have 40 boys show up voluntarily at lunchtime over pizza, and they will be talking and listening and crying with each other pretty routinely each week. What they say about it is that it is life changing for them for having released some of that tension.

Patrick:
That’s incredible. What are some of the most common things that you’ve heard from those boys that you’ve worked with when it comes to feeling misunderstood or unheard?


Michael:
Well that’s actually the heartbreaking thing about it all. I’ve learned from the years of doing this that the kinds of things that boys keep to themselves are because they pick up the cultural norms that basically tell them that there’s no place where they can really reveal what they feel. These kinds of things they keep to themselves end up being profound.

We had one boy, Malik, who told a story about when he was several years younger, maybe 12 years old. At the time I was getting him talking, he was 17. He had been playing in a neighborhood playground in urban Philadelphia, a rough area where there was lots of street violence. Somebody came along, and I guess had some beef with the brother of the friend that Malik was with. They came upon Malik and his friend and shot the friend and killed him right in front of Malik.

Patrick:
Wow.

Michael:
Malik is talking about this, and this is the first time in his life that he’s really been encouraged to share what that felt like.

Patrick:

That’s devastating.

Michael:
Another boy’s father left before he was born, and he was raised with his mom and grandparents. The year before, he had lost his mom. Every day after school, he was driving over to the cemetery, taking out a folding chair from his trunk and setting it up next to his mom’s grave to talk to her. The heartbreaking thing of it was nobody knew that his mom had died. He didn’t tell anybody. We had another story from a few years back. Essentially, this young man felt believed in. He could really feel the backing and the safety of the room full of his peers. He decided when it was his turn to talk in front of the group that he would use that time to come out as gay. He hadn’t even told his parents at that point.

What I’m trying to say with these stories is that the isolation and loneliness of the man box that we impose on boys is so confining and so suppressing of this critically important human function of getting things off your chest. When I talk with the boys, I tell them if we don’t get things out in the open off our chests, we are in the echo chamber of our own minds. Anxieties become haunting, anger becomes rage, and sadness becomes depression or thoughts of hopelessness and worthlessness. We’re not built to keep our upset feelings in some lead-lined vault as if we are impervious to them. It’s just the opposite; we are emotional creatures, and we require a relationship with somebody where we feel safe in order to get them off our chest.

What I feel very optimistic about is that this is changing. I think it’s changing dramatically. For the program at this school – just to use that one data point – to go from being kind of a small program on the sidelines of school life to the most popular program in the school, is, I think, a reflection of how the culture is changing.

Patrick:
That’s definitely a good sign. So, to you, what kinds of practical things can fathers do to better their connections with their sons? What specifically helps blossom a boy’s emotional spirit and their ability to feel connected to their emotions?

Michael:

You know, I do a lot of encouraging with dads to recognize that we carry this unacknowledged sense of duty that we need to train our sons in the code of manhood, and that we do that at the expense of having a good relationship with them. It’s just the opposite. For a boy to become a good man requires a strong, secure attachment, and fathers have as much to do with providing that as mothers. Relationship is not relegated to the realm of femininity or gender. It’s universal. Our kids need parents who hold them, love them, and know them. Dads have to play that part because there is a special way that sons look to their dads. They look to their moms in special ways, too. But for a dad to focus narrowly on how well the boy is learning to perform the duties of manhood really confuses the hell out of the boy and makes him think it’s all about performance. It strips his life in a certain sense of joy.

There’s a lot of what’s called role model theory, where a lot of dads believe that they need to be a good role model for their sons, and that their job in some ways is to cookie cutter out a boy that resembles those same qualities. A lot of what I do is disabuse fathers of that myth and show that our job is not to stamp out from one generation to the next a certain type of man. It’s to get behind the boy that we have, the person that he is, and enable him to be strong in who he is.

Patrick:
I want to talk about these men’s groups – like MenLiving – that are popping up more often around the country and the world. What do you think these men’s groups do to help create that culture of openness that can lead to emotional resiliency?

Michael:
Sure. I have a lot of experience with not just these emotional literacy groups for young men, but also a lot of experience with men’s groups. I, myself, was involved in men’s work for decades before I started working at that school and launched that program. I think that the fundamental recognition that there’s something systemic that happens to men that robs us of this critical aspect of our humanity and isolates us in this horrible way from each other is a critical step. It’s a step in making the world a better place, in ending sexism or male violence, and certainly a fundamental step in ending the problem of suicide and self-harm.

There’s a lot of additional ways that men hurt ourselves besides ultimately killing ourselves. We tend not to really make much of a fuss about the rates of unwise risk taking and substance abuse. But I think there’s a lot of unacknowledged self-harm and self-destructiveness that men act out toward ourselves that has its proof in this way that we’re cut off from the relief of getting connected to somebody else who understands what we’re feeling.

Patrick:
I agree, it’s so critical. If you were to lead a meeting for a men’s group like Men Living, what would be the biggest sentiment that you would want to get across to other guys?


Michael:
One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is the place of domination in male conditioning. I think that it is in our experiences of being dominated by the structures of society, by adult men, and by our age peers. The threats of violence, the bullying, the peer policing that goes on – all those various manifestations of essentially somebody trying to get on top of us – I think they are the root in so many ways of the larger social problems that created this term toxic masculinity.


To understand how incompatible the experience of being dominated is with our human nature and how it feels like an invalidation, a fundamental disrespect or a disregard is so important. I think what I would want men to understand is that telling the stories of our experiences with domination is a key to beginning to liberate ourselves from the way that we treat ourselves badly and tend to treat other men or our sons badly as well.

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