For the past 25 years, I have led and co-led an ongoing women’s therapy group for “Adult Children of Narcissistic Families.” In these families, the needs of the parents took precedence over the needs of the children. A child in this type of family is asked to provide and/or be whatever the parent needs in order to feel whole. As a result, this child becomes an adult with such personality traits as a lack of self-confidence, a chronic need to please, difficulty being assertive, a vulnerability to depression, and she often has great difficulty identifying and acting upon her own feelings, wants, and needs. Group therapy can be of tremendous help in recovering from such a childhood and in building self-esteem and a sense of self.

For over 20 years I have also led and co-led men’s therapy groups. The current group, which has been going for 3 and 1/2 years, in entitled “Men in Relationships.” As men, we continue to struggle in our relationships with women, as Peter Marin observed 40 years ago, in part because we are isolated from the support and nurturing, in Marin’s words, of “a community of loving male comrades.” Often, absorbed in our roles as worker and husbands and fathers, we don’t even know how to locate such a community.

As men, we were not socialized to share our struggles and our “quiet desperation,” in Thoreau’s words, with other men. Terrence Real, in his book, I Don’t Want To Talk About It, writes, “Men are not supposed to be vulnerable. Pain is something we rise above.” (p. 22). As we encounter problems—often in the relationships that matter most to us—we are hesitant to voice our pain, and lack a community of comrades who can resonate with our situation and provide us with much needed support and encouragement. Most of the men in the current group have been dealing with such issues as affairs by themselves or their spouses, or with divorce or the consideration of divorce. The group provides a much needed sounding board as each member grapples with these life challenges.

My work with men in groups has been very much influenced by the work and writings of Terrence Real. As he says, only recently have we begun to understand the ways in which the male role socialization process in our culture is inherently traumatic. The definition of manhood involves “standing up” to discomfort and pain. Linguist Deborah Tannen, who analyzed women’s “rapport talk” versus men’s “report talk,” found that a vital component of conversation among women was what she called “trouble talk,” which invites the listener by opening up about one’s own difficulties. For men, however, the cultivation of a stance of invulnerability, and shame around exposing weakness, together conspire to cut men off from the potential healing that is found in sharing and in community. A men’s group offers the opportunity for men to explore our shared dilemmas rather than continuing to manifest such behaviors as irritability, dominance, and emotional unavailability, which push away those whom we love and need.