An insight on healthy manhood
“We need to keep all good things that are there about being a man, but also leave all those that need to change”
Ted Bunch
March 8, Women's Day, let's talk about men.
I often thought I had to take a step back in speaking publicly about this issue - the masculine, fatherhood - as if it weren't my job to talk about it because I'm not a man.
In contexts of educational and clinical work, I welcome and listen to boys, men and fathers, and we walk a piece of the journey together towards the change that they choose to undertake, to create a better life.
Sometimes a client gets a Phoenix tattoo because he feels he has emerged from the ashes. A 'masculine' language to describe a change? It might be, and for sure this is how I would like to feel when I emerge from the ashes of a me who has experienced pain, in different forms, and has arisen stronger from it.
(Albus Dumbledore would also have something to say about it, but that's another story).
When I can listen to and accompany men on a path of psychological support, often the essential step is their willingness to expose one's vulnerabilities.
This is also true for women in therapy, still, it happens differently: for example, in my experience it is often a woman who calls, or invites her partner to contact me for professional support.
In times of pandemic we have seen an increase in requests for help to anti-violence centers, loneliness growth, but also new spaces for fathers and sons sharing their daily life. Even in this context, the possibilities to get to know each other, to discover oneself, to create opportunities for education,... do not just happen, they must be identified, chosen and shaped.
I wonder, how many fathers have chosen to live this time also this way, perhaps sharing the hardships, the malaise, or creating new games and finding opportunities for dialogue with their children in Distance learning? Maybe even to go through some kind of 'uncomfortable' dialogue?
How many couples will have (re)discovered the importance of using deep listening and loving speech (as Thich Nhat Hanh says), hugged when in sorrow, found a little complicity and respectful ways of managing a private daily life with their own personal spaces based on a precedent, perhaps taken for granted, kind of balance, also made of rhythmic distances?
Among the potential good fruits of the mud that is the pandemic, today I choose to take the opportunity to dare to speak aloud about masculine, fatherhood, education, and I do it starting from the work of an American organisation that I discovered years ago, when founder Tony Porter stunned the audience of TED with a very powerful, and upsetting, talk.
He spoke of experiences that are contextualized in a place and a time, which Porter does not fail to emphasize, but which bring to light some aspects of the ‘socialization of man’ that the A call to men organization calls 'the man box'.
March 8, Women's Day, let's talk about men.
No woman wants to be locked in a box. No man wants to be locked in a box.
Yet culturally this happens, and we don't even notice - most of the time - the expectations we end up to meet. For this reason, sometimes we do not take responsibility for our actions.
When we are faced with our limits and vulnerabilities, or we find ourselves commenting on news, stories and behaviors made public by social networks, it is necessary to understand that we are not defining whether it is the man who is worse, or the woman, or the one better than the other.
It is not a war in which whoever defends themselves best wins, often with violence, verbal or otherwise.
We all have aspects of masculinity and femininity within us, but even before recognising this, let's look at each other in the eyes and help each other grow new generations who will be more capable of dialogue, of being in the very difficult and vital territory of conflict, who will be able to reconcile in respect and to find themselves back in love.
Starting this week, throughout the month of March, I will post interviews with key figures in the context of healthy manhood.
I will also propose a game for fathers and their children (write me at info@giovannafungi.com to receive the game).
All this so that March 19 will be Father's Day, as well as the day of men, boys, of the child who will grow up with the possibility - given to him by the other men and women of his young life - not to lock himself in a box in which society will define him as the 'usual' male, hence losing that look of confidence towards all the possibilities that exist.
This will not happen, if the community, the circle, the village will support him.
And for Father's Day, I found the manifesto song, which deserves to be listened to and sung, because fathers do so much when they support their children, lost under pressure and a sense of helplessness, a fixed mentality (C. Dweck) and the old, bitter, fear of failing and of losing love.
Watch Caparezza masterfully act Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development in the video, and sing along his poewrful message!
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