What Would We Tell the Women?

Notes on the men's segment of a retreat led by Thomas Hübl.

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Lake at the retreat centre at Oberlethe.

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Resonant World #12

Two things I now know to be true:

• Men are often wary — even scared — of each other.

• It doesn’t take much for the fear to melt, and the healing to begin.

That’s a hopelessly partial summary of what I learned during an intensive three-day men’s group last month — part of a week-long retreat with Thomas Hübl in Oberlethe, Germany, which I wrote about in Resonant World #10.

Nevertheless, it’s the best starting point I can find to start to draw some general principles from the experience, which opened a new vista in my understanding of collective trauma.

A lot came up that was very personal: I felt a newfound sense of connection with my grand-father Charles, a remote, friendless figure who had fought in the First World World War, whom I’d never known; I made contact with an intensely powerful, archetypal feminine energy within me — a glimpse of a dancing Goddess (or Dakini?) that still makes me smile to recall. And I recognised a shadow aspect of myself that I had never seen clearly before: The sense of shame I’ve so often carried at feeling like I don’t measure up to other men is, in fact, the opposite pole of a defence mechanism I’d developed to protect myself at a very young age by making myself superior. It was painful to recognise how this complex had been operating within me, outside my conscious awareness, and also immensely liberating. I choked up tears at the sheer waste and pity of it all, and felt a kind of joyful loosening sensation in the tissues around my heart — could it be that this lifelong pattern was finally starting to dissolve? It almost seemed too much to dare hope. I hugged the man who’d allowed me to see this more tightly — and for longer — than would have been proper in any other context.

So, thank you — to the 60 or so men in the group, and the three amazing facilitators — for creating the space where I could connect with these hitherto hidden dimensions of myself.

I also wondered what this experience might have to say about the biggest questions Resonant World aims to answer: How can we heal collective trauma in a way that could make an appreciable impact on communities, societies, and the planet as a whole?

I think what happens when men gather in safe, skillfully-held spaces, could provide some clues.

Off to war

I tend to enjoy being in all-male groups. So when the men were asked to leave the main hall, I eagerly grabbed my notebook and cup, bid the women next to me a breezy farewell, and made my way to a separate building a good distance away, where we would spend the next few days.

I liked the change in energy from the mixed group — and was intrigued to see what would unfold. Coincidentally, I’d just concluded co-hosting Embracing Change an online men’s group in October, and I had an idea of how revelatory it could be to connect with other men at a deeper level.

So it came as a genuine surprise to me to discover that other men had experienced the separation from the women very differently. It took several days for the suite of responses to make themselves known. Here’s some of what was alive in the room:

• Sadness: A sense that the separation echoed generations of marching naively off to war — to return traumatised, maimed — or not return at all.

• Fear: Feeling threatened in an all-male group that seemed reminiscent of traumatic contexts from the past. This wasn’t a Fight Club, but for some the habit of scanning the room for potential threats was so ingrained as to be automatic.

• Anger: At being told what to do by other men, and at other men for blindly complying.

It was a lot to process — and it all came to the surface from the simple fact of being asked to move to a new area, away from the women.

As I tuned deeper into my own feelings about the move, I recognised a deeper quality to my excitement. I cherished a secret thrill, as if the separation was a prelude to a shared adventure, or even battle. I’ve been a journalist in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’ve written a book about military trauma, so I like to tell myself I’m not entirely naive about the harms caused by war. I wondered if something about the change had brought some deeply embedded aspect of my ancient heritage online; maybe the part that had once chipped flint spearheads and dressed in skins, and for whom the question of whether he’d “made it” in life was meaningless — as long as he was still able to hunt, stay warm and protect his family. I felt alert and alive, and blissfully unaware of the intensity of the less comfortable feelings rippling around our circle.

Looking back, the sheer diversity of our reactions to the mere fact of being temporarily separated into an all-male group underlined the complexity that men hold, and provided a foretaste of the intensity to come.

Tending to shut down hearts

My well-loved copy

Maybe there was a deeper reason why the separation had stirred up so much: Our ancestors did indeed go off to war, and we still carry their unhealed wounds inside us.

In his essential book War and the Soul, Edward Tick, writes that war distorts a combatant’s soul along all its essential functions:

“…how it locates itself in the cosmos and identifies with moral and spiritual principles, how it views the everyday workings of the world and processes and evaluates experiences, and what its relationship is to its own instincts and the principles of life and death. War stamps the soul with an indelible imprint and makes it its own. The soul that once went to war is forever transformed.”¹

In a predominantly European group, many of us had grand-fathers or other relatives who’d served in the First and Second World Wars, or had been swept up in other traumatic histories — their souls “forever transformed.”

To survive, they’d had to “shut down their hearts” — to use Thomas Hübl’s idiom. Few of them, it seems reasonable to suppose, had much success in opening them up again when they came back — certainly not according to the principles Tick, who spent decades working with Vietnam veterans, lays out in his book: Tell the difficult, painful truths of war, while listening with open hearts; develop a living spirituality by embracing the life-affirming and protective capacities of the warrior; restore relations with former enemies and the dead, and find new and meaningful forms of service to atone for past actions, while contributing to the healing of others. Tick continues:

“Our goal is not just to awaken the soul; that is what childhood religious and secular education is meant to do. Rather, our goal is to grow the soul large enough, to help it become wise and strong enough, so that it can surround the dominating wound we call trauma…The formula for healing the war-wounded is simple: surround trauma with soul. Its application may be the most difficult and important work we ever undertake.”²

Unfortunately, our societies didn’t bother with much of that kind of work, by and large, and so the hearts stayed closed. That made for cold homes for our own fathers to grow up in. And what our fathers didn’t receive from their fathers, they found difficult to give to us. (Jacob Kishere and I talked in depth about this issue for his SenseSpace Podcast, which featured in Resonant World #7).

Of course, this isn’t everybody’s exact story. But the nature of collective trauma is that it creates an atmosphere that touches everyone caught in its vortex. I felt the wars’ legacy alive in me, and alive in other men in the room. And as some of us recognised how this legacy still shaped our lives to this day, casting a shadow over intimate relationships, and presenting in unnamed anxieties; the fear many of us had felt gave way to a depth of trust, openness and intimacy that — were it our default setting — I suspect would have world-changing power.

Barriers coming down

How easily we can help each other to change when we come out of hiding.

This was perhaps the most beautiful part of the experience: Feeling the flow of healing power that’s available when we take time to move into a space where we can feel safe enough to open up about what’s really going on for us. The nature of the issue — health; relationships; family, whatever — is of secondary importance to the balm that holding the pain in shared awareness naturally provides.

As the initial tensions generated by the move into the men’s space faded, this sense of shared vulnerability began to do do its work. Thomas Hübl often draws an analogy between trauma layers and permafrost that slowly starts to “liquefy” as we contact feelings we might have pushed down so deep, we didn’t even realise we had them.³

For me, this process happened almost literally in jolts. There were a few times when I’d be calmly sitting in the circle, listening to another man speak, and — seemingly out of nowhere — I’d feel a powerful rush of emotion, and maybe tears, faster than my mind could interpret what was happening. This is what is meant in group healing work by resonance: My body could recognise another man voicing an emotional signature I also carried much faster than I could figure that out with my brain.

One of the most powerful moments was during a session of movement to music, when I caught a glimpse of an older man moving in time to the beat, looking utterly relaxed and blissful. I recognised at once the grand-father I’d never had; and the essence of a very particular frequency of benevolent, mature, masculine energy that grand-fathers are supposed to provide, and which I’d lacked without even realising. The eruption of sadness and relief I felt was like nothing I could have anticipated. At times, it felt like my grand-father was indeed somehow present, almost tangible in the room, and delighted to see me receive what he’d been unable to provide.

Sending the healing back

In his book Healing Collective Trauma: A process for integrating our intergenerational and cultural wounds, Hübl references the idea of retrocausality — a concept used in philosophy and quantum physics which posits that certain effects may precede their causes — which lies at the heart of his healing work.

“If proven, the theory of retrocausality could mean that influences from the present or future are able to act on, and thereby change, the past,” Hübl writes. “From the mystical perspective, this is an essential principles of grace and is always true. The future indeed has the power to rewrite the past.”⁴

Could it be that the layers of grief that I was uncovering, and the moments of tender joy I was experiencing, were indeed sending healing back through my ancestral line?

Lying in bed at night, I noticed a tingling in my chest and abdomen. It felt like something was shifting inside of me; frozen parts coming back to life.

And I won’t lie: This heightened energy had an undeniably erotic charge to it, as if the level of life force flowing through me had been amped up — and I couldn’t stop thinking about my wife.

In War and the Soul, Tick recalls that Freud that the Greeks saw Eros, the God of love, and Thanatos, the personification of death, as twin aspects of the one life force. After the retreat, trying to make sense of the experience, I wondered if this ancestral healing work had led to some deeper rebalancing in my system. Perhaps the heavy energies of Thanatos that had cast such a long shadow over my family throughout the past century had found their rightful place, and given Eros more room to breathe.

And if this was the case, would it make me a better husband? Lover? Creator? Friend?

The Return

Feeling more connected within myself after three days in all-male company, I didn’t feel any great sense of urgency to return to the mixed group. When the time did come, I found myself wondering: “What would we possibly tell the women?” How to convey the depth of experience of meeting other men in this new, more precise and vulnerable way; and how that had changed my sense of the possible, and how I felt in my body?

It turned out words would be secondary to the energy that erupted as the men and women returned to the same hall.

It felt to me as if two tsunamis of information had raced into the space between the two groups, and crashed in a foaming eruption of insight, connection, and revelation that found a unique expression in each individual — but also formed a coherent, unified whole: A new quality of realisation over the depth and complexity of the wounds and beauty, grief and love, that both men and women carry, had instantaneously become available to the entire group — downloaded in a flash.

And that’s a moment that will take the rest of my life to unpack.

I’d like to close this edition of Resonant World with a quote from this powerfully reflective meditation When The Man Leaves The Room, by fellow retreat participant Jaden Ramsey, from his excellent newsletter, Awake In the Dream:

“Find your brothers and begin to let these things stir in you. Talk about it. Build resonance and trust with each other through a consistent aim of transparency. There’s no method, tool, technique, or protocol for this. It’s something we must develop on our own and it starts by taking responsibility for the wound. All while knowing that true masculinity is of course always in us and trusting in the intelligence of life to walk us through the layers to return home. 

It’s time that we take care of each other in this way and realize that any separation is already a symptom of our longing, numb hearts. I pray that we may give ourselves to this process. That we can consciously choose whether to stay or leave. That we become what the world needs from us at this moment.” 

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When the Man Leaves the Room

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Collective Trauma and Climate Change

Sharing a brief clip from my discussion on the connections between climate change and collective trauma with Kosha Joubert, chief executive of the Pocket Project nonprofit, for the organisation’s COP27 programme. And do check out the full conversation between Kosha, Nora Bateson, and myself here.

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It’s a massive boost when I receive donations to support Resonant World, which I produce on a day a week I have reserved for freelance work. Contributions help to make this project sustainable — and do often literally pay for the coffee that fuels each edition. Thank you to all those who have generously donated.

1. Tick, Edward, War and the Soul: Healing our nation’s veterans from post-traumatic stress disorder. (Wheaton, Il: Quest Books, 2005), p. 285

2. Ibid. p. 286

3. The drawback of the permafrost analogy is that the thawing of actual permafrost due to the climate crisis is really bad news.

4. Hübl, Thomas, Healing Collective Trauma: A process for integrating our intergenerational and cultural wounds. (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2020), p. 8