THE GROUP
problem, others rededicated themselves to ally-
ship, still others acknowledged that they had
some real work to do before they could become
e≠ective allies and so set about the process of
increasing their emotional intelligence.
Evryman aims to provide a space for guys
to work on those skills, to learn how to express
anger, shame, joy, and love. It doesn’t claim
to be the panacea for solving relationships
between men and women. It definitely doesn’t
claim to have the answer to #MeToo or to Brett
Kavanaugh. It doesn’t even try to define what
masculinity is. It keeps that open-ended. It’s
up to the individual members to define what
masculinity means to them.
What Evryman does claim is that it can help
men become more than “emotional third grad-
ers” and start building the tools necessary to
even join the broader conversation. That is,
in part, why the groups are all-male. At first
this aspect of it made me skeptical. Isn’t it all
too typical of men to try to solve the problems
created by gender inequality in a room that
excludes women? The reality, I think, is that
many men actually aren’t yet ready to have an
adult conversation with women about these
issues. And that whatever happens in men’s
group is the work men need to do before they
come to the table.
SOMETIMES I FORGET that my body is as much
me as my brain is. Sometimes I behave like
my body is a fleshy robot, the sole purpose
of which is to carry my very important brain
around. But as the renowned PTSD specialist
and author of The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel
van der Kolk, M.D., told me, “We have a brain
in order to make sure our body is okay. Our
body is not an appendage of our brain. We are
our bodies.”
His book examines how emotional expe-
rience is stored in the body and how an
unresolved trauma—a sexual assault, for
instance—can wreak havoc on your physical
and mental health. That might help explain
why so many of the men van der Kolk worked
with who had survived abuse from priests
had become bodybuilders. They physically
bulked up to protect themselves against future
attacks, however unlikely, because deep inside
they felt unsafe.
My Evryman meeting begins with a med-
itation. That’s how we “drop into our bod-
ies.” Deep breathing stimulates the vagus
nerve, which slows the heart rate. The vagus
nerve a≠ects the parasympathetic nervous
system—when that’s activated, you feel
relaxed and good things like laughing, crying,
sex, and play happen. Deep breathing helps
“I just have this anger that keeps recurring,”
he said. “I feel like something new triggers it
every week. I feel like I’m holding a lot of shit.”
“Where?” someone asked.
“Where is this shit, like, in my body?”
Brian said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“It’s mostly in my stomach. I feel it in my
solar plexus too. It’s a mix of that anger and
then fear. I have a true fear of disappointing
myself and those I love. I’m afraid that by the
time I die, I will not have lived up to my poten-
tial, my projection of what my life should be.
It feels good to say that out loud. It’s related to
my dad, being a failure in his eyes.”
Brian hunched over and started to growl.
“What’s that?” someone else asked.
“I’m feeling this stuckness. Not being seen
or not being heard. And then, like, acting out.”
“What do you need to say?”
“I’m good enough. I’m good enough. I can
do it. I’m doing my best. I’m doing my best.
I’m competent. I’m capable. Listen to me. Just
listen to me. See me....”
He paused and then went on, “I never felt
that secure as a child. I didn’t feel like my
father really saw me. My mother, while she
gave me physical love and attention and words
of a∞rmation, she didn’t really listen or hear
my needs, my emotional needs....”
He cried, took a deep breath, exhaled, and
then said calmly, “I feel like I’m seeing little
Brian, my child self, and I’m just holding him.”
I asked him about all this stu≠ a few
weeks later. We met for lunch in a park in
Manhattan’s financial district. As we balanced
take-out bowls on our knees, I asked him if he
consciously tried to be di≠erent from his dad
when he was parenting his own children. He
said that wasn’t exactly it, that when he’s par-
enting, he’s too in the moment to be thinking
so theoretically.
“There are times when I get angry and
I take it out on them by yelling,” he said. “I’ve
been too physical with them. And that hurts
to know that you’re replaying what you don’t
want to happen.”
That’s why he’s in Evryman, he said. “I want
to grow not just for my sake but for their sake.”YOU KNOW HOW early on in Fight Club,
Edward Norton goes to group-therapy ses-
sions for melanoma, even though he doesn’t
have cancer, to get those big, juicy moments
of emotional release? That’s how Evryman
hooked me. In group, I could drop right into
my experience; I barely had to talk for two
minutes before I noticed whatever feelings I’d
been sitting on all day had risen to the sur-
face. I cried. I screamed into pillows (a little
self-consciously). And I listened as other guys
did the same. I stopped seeing my therapist.
It helped that the group was free and psycho-
therapy, which wasn’t covered by my insur-
ance, was stunningly expensive.
Evryman wouldn’t want me to suggest
that men’s groups are a good replacement
for individual therapy. But as my therapist
himself pointed out, the group was perform-
ing a similar role in one crucial sense: It was
like exposure therapy for vulnerability. I got
to practice being vulnerable and being seen,
in all my flaws, by other humans. That’s atyou gear shift out of the sympathetic nervous
system, which is the one that’s triggered when
a car horn blasts in your ear, your cortisol
spikes, and you jump into fight-or-flight mode.
(The noise pollution of urban life is particu-
larly triggering.) Reaching a parasympathetic
state is crucial when you’re trying to identify
and express your emotions.
During an Evryman group session, the
main question is “What are you feeling?” fol-
lowed by “Where is that feeling in your body?”
If, as a hypothetical, one of the guys
launched into a narrative about his former
boss, the one who fired him a month after he
had missed work when he got sick, and how
this boss had made him feel small and impo-
tent, the group would listen for a while to get
the basics of the story. Then someone in the
group would stop him and ask, “What are you
feeling?” He would respond with something
like “It makes me really angry.” And then
someone else would ask him, “Where is that
anger in your body?” And he would take a deep
breath and then say that he felt it as muscle
tension in his chest.
Then he’d start to go back into the story
about how this boss knew he had fallen
behind while taking time o≠ to get better but
had never given him the chance to make it
up. But before he could get too far along in
the story, someone would stop him again and
say, “Hold on. Can you take a few deep breaths
and feel into that tension in your chest?” And
then, instead of doing what any of us might
normally do, and rationalize all the reasons
why his boss had good reason to act like a
dick—protecting the bottom line, etc.—he
would be forced to actually feel his own anger.
Sit with it. Not explain it away. Then he might
get really angry, in a way that an observer in
the group might not have seen before, and he
might let out a scream of a primal volume and
tenor. And that release would, hypothetically,
free him up to feel the hurt that was hiding
beneath the anger.
It’s this somatic mind-body dynamic that
makes Evryman more compelling to me than
psychotherapy. Not only does it challenge me
to listen to my body, to use my body as the
conduit for emotional experience, it also pro-
vides me with a space to experience my own
experience. That sounds like a tautology, but
it’s not. It’s actually quite rare.
Feeling these feelings—both the emotions
that are coded in our society as “good,” like joy
and love and sadness, and “bad,” like anger
and shame—is what Evryman is all about. As
van der Kolk writes, “Agency starts with what
scientists call interoception, our awareness of
our subtle, sensory, body-based feelings: the
greater that awareness, the greater our poten-
tial to control our lives. Knowing what we feel is
the first step to knowing why we feel that way.”
I watched these dynamics play out one
evening as Brian shared about his dad. What
follows is a good example of what Evryman
guys call “doing the work.” After the medita-
tion round, Brian volunteered to go first. He
started by telling us how just an hour earlier
he really didn’t want to come. He said he really
wanted to just numb out by watching movies
instead. Then he told us how he didn’t feel
seen or loved by his father, who he said was
physically and verbally abusive.