The drug dealer, the ducking and diving political leader, the wife beater, the chronically "crabby" boss, the "hot shot" junior executive, the unfaithful husband, the company "yes man", the "holier than thou" minister, the gang member, the father who can never find the time to attend his daughter's school programs, the coach who ridicules his star athletes, the therapist who unconsciously attacks his clients "shining" and seeks a kind of gray normalcy for them, the yuppie....all these men have something in common. They are all boys pretending to be men!
They got that way honestly, because nobody showed them what a mature man is like. Their kind of "manhood" is a pretense to manhood that goes largely undetected as such by most of us. We are continually mistaking this mans controlling, threatening, and hostile behaviors for strength. In reality, he is showing an underlying extreme weakness, the weakness of the wounded boy.
These boys disguised as men are running families, companies, communities, and countries and completely unequipped.
The crisis in mature masculinity is very much upon us. Lacking adequate models of mature men, and lacking the societal cohesion and institutional structures for actualizing ritual process, it's "every man for himself." We just know we are anxious, on the verge of feeling impotent, helpless, frustrated, put down, unloved and unappreciated, often ashamed of being masculine. We just know that our creativity was attacked, that our initiative was met with hostility, that we were ignored, belittled, and left holding the empty bag of our lost self-esteem.
In this episode, I break-down all four archetypes acknowledging why each is important for us men to step into our healthy and mature masculinity.
This book is a must-have. I highly recommend for all the men out there. A cliff-notes for how to take radical responsibility and create new possibilities in all areas of life.