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The groups discuss how men are conditioned into the role of provider in our culture, and with that comes an overwhelming feeling
of being responsible for everything that happens in their families. In the Men's Group, we invite men to get in touch with the exhaustion and fatigue that often accompanies this sense of over-responsibility. The groups discuss how men have been discouraged, through humiliation and ridicule, from feeling their feelings throughout their lives, and how this has robbed them of a huge piece of their
humanity. We look at the concept of men's oppression, how men's lives are hostage to military whim, how men become conditioned into the role of perpetrator, and why no man would ever choose this role if they had had a
choice. The Nature of OppressionWe define oppression as the systematic, socially condoned mistreatment of one group of people by another group of people. It basically manifests as a lack of respect. It is a mixture of misinformation and ignorance that has been imposed upon people through the process of social conditioning. Sometimes this has been to participate in acts of violence, or to join in racial slurs or jokes, sometimes this has been to keep silent in the face of injustice. At Group Works we believe that no human being would have ever agreed to take on any aspect of the role of an oppressor if they had not first been mistreated or oppressed themselves, originally as young people, and in a variety of other ways.
At Least A Hundred Principles of Love, Nancy Kline and Christopher Spence |
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Though it is mostly unheard of for
men's' groups to be led by a woman, Group Works has a woman leader with a
great deal of valuable information and empathy to share with men about how they have been hurt culturally. She leads men in uncovering how their identity as males is constantly in question in our society, how if
they show how vulnerable they feel or how tired they are, they are not seen as "real men". 
Group
Works