On Men. Round and Round in Circles.
In the circle, we are all equal. No one is in front of you. No one is behind you. No one is above you. No one is below you. The sacred circle is designed to create unity. Dave Chief, Oglala Lakota
Photo
Computing, metalwork, woodwork, forestry, hammer-and-saw bullshit, maybe a few others I can’t recall, sticky Biro on a string, pieces of paper pinned to a cork-board like white feathers, broken vocational promises to add to your CV when entering the future job market, something useful for the machine - tried them all, been shite at them all, a walking calamity of ineptitude as the reports sent fleet foot to my parents inevitably say.
But there’s one that intrigues me.
No idea what it means, just another compulsory wasted hour of my young life most likely.
At the top of the form, a single word.
ENCOUNTER.
Why not?
I scratch my name underneath. Don’t read the small print.
There is no small print.
Who cares - I’ll sit at the back of the class, plot my escape route out of adolescence, carve yet another cock and balls into the desk, plead with time to get a move on.
It never complies.
This is a special school, not as in ‘special needs’, but different to your traditional British boarding school like Eton or Harrow. It’s experimental, which means no one, not us or them, knows what the fuck is really going on except that we are clearly the lab rats - no uniform, no bells, a vague curriculum which we’re supposed to create ourselves. The rules changing randomly, handed down by a drunken, paranoid headmaster until a nervous breakdown takes him and he splits for good.
My dad wanted something hardcore, preferably military, beat some sense into me, but the psychologist charged with trying to figure out what’s wrong with me strongly advises against that. Probably saves my life.
Correction – definitely saves my life.
Experimental or not, it’s still a patriarchal training camp. That’s what the British boarding school system is. They’ve got one job. Forget your mother’s smell, warmth, her face. Forget tenderness. Forget love. Forge men who can march unfeeling into battle, administer colonies, balance ledgers, sign death warrants, all without a shred of emotion, untroubled by homesickness, self-awareness or trivial things like cholera or dysentery.
Or intimacy.
Years later when I trained to run boarding school survivor groups my mentor told me - boarding school kids, prison kids, orphanage kids - same wound, different packaging. It’s just the boarding school kids won’t know they’re fucked up, because they’re told they are privileged.
My mum didn’t want me to go, but it wasn’t her choice. My father wanted me as far away from her parents as possible – working class types. Kind of people who shouted at the Queen when she came on the TV, left wing newspaper readers, voted Labour. Non-conformist. Trouble.
My kinda people.
He thought he could buy me into the upper echelons of society, a place among the elite. Thought an old school tie could bleach the bloodline, or at least the 50% commoner that runs through my veins.
And so, when I enter the classroom for the first encounter lesson, I discover I can’t sit in my rightful place at the back of the class. Nowhere to slouch and disappear.
Because the chairs are arranged in a circle.
Weird.
The chaplain comes in, sits down, doesn’t say a word.
The fuck?
So, we just sit there say nothing too, wait for something to happen. Anything. The clock ticks, increasingly loudly. Time passes. Slow as ever. Silence stretches out like a rubber band ready to snap. Someone snickers, someone laughs, blessed relief, tension spills out, like thunder it slowly fades, flares up again, dies down, more silence…
Tick tock. Tick tock.
The chaplain stands up and walks out. End of lesson.
The end of the most important, defining lesson of my life.
For 3 months we did that, a whole school term, week after week, couldn’t wait for it, each time it got better and better. Chaplain never said a word; the circle showed us the way. Pure instinct. Slowly, like rats figuring out which bottle had water, which had smack, we learned how to talk. A girl I’d known for years but never been brave enough to speak to said she was adopted. A boy I thought was a friend grassed me up for selling my Ritalin to buy weed. Guess there was some kind of confidentiality because the chaplain never did anything about that one.
It was a beautiful thing.
The raw simplicity of a circle of chairs in a room and the space to talk, no training required, no instruction needed. Only lasted one school term but for me at least, it lasted a lifetime. That circle of chairs taught me more about human nature than any book ever could.
And when it was over, I was bereft.
I remember, after, asking a teacher, is it possible… do you think it might be possible to do that? For a job?
Probably not, no... You have to be clever to do something like that.
Yeah, well, whatever…
Fuck clever.
I became a drug addict instead.
But… a seed was planted.
Fast forward and I’m 60. Started running groups for domestic violence perpetrators when I was 30. Since then, I’ve run anger management groups, sexuality groups, grief groups, intimacy groups, training groups, men’s groups, women’s groups, mixed groups, medicine groups, residential groups, short term groups, long term groups.
Sleep deprivation groups.
You name it.
I’ve run a lot of groups.
Fuck clever.
Being raised to believe you’re stupid comes with obvious disadvantages. But it also sharpened my intuition. I might not be an intellectual, but my gut rarely fails me. My biggest mistakes? When I ignore it and assume someone else knows better.
I saw a meme recently that said knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
I was never especially interested in attaining knowledge. Experience is everything to me. I don’t have to learn it. I have to do it - go out and embrace life and take whatever happens and do my best to make it useful.
Give me wisdom every time.
I’m not great on the socio-political end of things, I find big words and concepts confusing and my brain doesn’t hold them well.
That’s why talking circles work for me.
They’re simple.
If I were to try and define the essence of the circles I run, I’d say they are spaces where the patriarchal rules are broken. We don’t ever talk about what it means to be a man. You don’t have to be tough or strong, it’s ok to cry, to share your vulnerabilities, to be broken hearted. To break the machine. And if there is one quality that is present overall, it’s tenderness.
That’s lost in the system we currently inhabit - male tenderness. Imagine that in place of power and domination… it’s what’s on offer if we make some, relatively simple, changes.
But if you want to create that change, there’s no point in just telling men (and women, they are indoctrinated to accept this shit too) to stop being so patriarchal - you have to incentivise them.
You want to know why suicide rates are sky-high among men?
Why they fill the prisons, the graves, the psychiatric hospitals?
Why they burn out, overdose, crash cars, batter wives, ghost their kids?
Because from an early age boys are socialised to reject vulnerability, empathy, and tenderness, resulting in emotional repression, dissociation, violence, and suffering. The patriarchal system offers them two options - dominate or disappear.
Be tough.
Be unfeeling.
Be dead inside.
Win. Always.
Be right. Always.
Don’t cry. Ever.
Don’t break.
Ever.
So, what do men do? They drink their feelings. They smoke their feelings.
They fuck their feelings, gamble them, bury them beneath achievement, choke them with violence.
Girls are taught to suck all this up, to be agreeable, to accept subordination, to limit ambition, that looks are more important than inner confidence or autonomy and that unless they suppress their anger and assertiveness they won’t be attractive to men.
And if you say - guys, how about dismantling the patriarchy? Women don’t like it… I know you get paid more and hold all the power, but we’d like you to give all of that up please, ‘cos the ladies think it’s unfair.
Good luck with that.
But show them how it harms them. How exhausting it is to maintain. How the loss of tenderness doesn’t make them hard. It makes them brittle.
Show them it’s killing them.
To the tune of around 1,278 a day, every day, by their own hand. That means about 1500 since I started writing this post. 1500 lives lost. 1500 families devastated.
Forever.
Drink that in.
Suicide accounts for more male deaths than cancer or heart disease.
Wake men up to those facts, and we’re in with a chance.
The solution?
Talking circles in all schools from kindergarten up.
It would change society.
Profoundly.
Child abuse. Bullying. Domestic violence. Depression. Suicide. All feed on silence. Imagine how the stats would change if we created spaces where kids could talk. Imagine the long term impact on divorce rates if we taught children how to communicate.
Don’t need doctors, don’t need professors, don’t need clever bastards with degrees or clipboards. Don’t even really need training beyond good intentions and some simple guidelines. See, they call it a magic circle for a reason. Because it has its own intelligence. Sit humans in a circle (even better if you can have a fire in the middle, but I get the health and safety nazis would get all wet about that one), and an ancestral memory is awakened. A part of us goes – we have always done this. There is no hierarchy in a circle, everyone is equal, everyone is seen.
Take talking circles into schools, just one hour a week, our culture will change.
One hour a week.
And unlike a lot of cultural change, it can happen quickly. Teach 5-year-olds how to share their emotions and in 10 years…
They will be teenagers.
I was terrified of girls when I was a teenager. The vulnerability in that girl in the encounter group who shared the pain of adoption – and believe me, she was the hottest girl in the whole school, hottest girl in the whole world – took her from the pedestal of untouchable, unattainable (and therefore hated) goddess, and made her human in my eyes.
Imagine that - boys re-humanising girls.
People ask me about the structure of my groups. There is none. Other than the routine.
Every other week.
Always.
It amazes me.
Every other week. 4 groups in total. They’ve all been going for years, many with the same participants since day one.
Monday – 15 years.
Tuesday – 11 years.
Wednesday – 22 years.
Thursday – 25 years.
They come in, sit down, say if they need time or not, share for the next 3 hours, go home.
Rinse and repeat.
This is why I offer mentorship rather than a training program. There is no formula to teach. If there is a training program, it’s to be in one of the groups. All of the guys I work with are capable, if they so desired, to run a group. Shit, I learned group dynamics by being in a rock and roll band. We’ve all been in groups somehow, somewhere.
The buzz for me, what keeps me coming back week after week, year after year, is their skill, not mine.
I have blind spots. You can work with me individually for years and I’ll still miss things.
But in a group…
Someone will spot it. There’s real safety in that.
And that’s the buzz, when one of them sees something I missed, and I go – well damn. That’s brilliant. I would never have seen that.
That’s still a high. And believe me, once they’ve been doing it for a decade or so, they’re as good as me, sometimes, often, better.
That’s the buzz.
Oh, and one other thing. I’m the leader. I tried dismantling that once, but it didn’t end well. A group needs someone at the tiller, in my experience, but the lighter the touch the better. I like to think my groups are mostly non-hierarchical collectives where everyone has a voice, where everyone is taken seriously, where equality is modelled and practiced.
Those are about the only rules we’ve got, so far.
So… I don’t know how we bring about this change. I don’t know how we bring this into schools, how we make this normal. Expected even.
But someone does. Someone out there. That’s why I’m writing this. It can’t come from one person, one politician, it has to come from society - if you’re a teacher, talk to me. If you have kids in school, talk to the school. It has to be a collective thing. Like a circle. WE are a circle, and this is a message in a bottle, thrown into a stormy sea.
I hope someone finds it.
If you are interested in learning how to run a men’s group, contact Nick Duffell, a man with a rare balance of knowledge and wisdom who runs a men’s facilitator training in London. They only happen every few years because guess what – there’s not much demand.
He should be run off his feet trying to deliver this work.
But there’s not much call for it.
Next one is in 2026.
https://www.genderpsychology.com/facilitation-training
He also runs men’s groups, they’re great, I should know, I’ve been in one for 10 years.
Other resources:
bell hooks (African-American author, feminist, and social activist)
The Centre for Gender Psychology (Nick Duffell)
Men’s Work UK (Theo Youngstein)
Father Lessons (Mark McBennett)
Make Me a Man – The Director’s Cut (Men’s work film by Mai Hua & Jerry Hyde)
The Feminist On Cell Block Y (Californian prisoner who studies and organizes around feminism and toxic masculinity with his fellow young incarcerated men)
I love this.... brilliant!
That’s a very powerful piece, Jerry. Thank you!