Culturally, collectively, men want to be free to feel, we want to be free to share and be
connected to one another.
So what this is is really about getting men together out of isolation,
off of the internet and that is the medicine.
I'm in the California desert an hour outside of San Diego and I'm about to spend the weekend with Sacred Sons.
In an era when masculinity is under scrutiny, groups like this have popped up to try
to help men get in touch with their emotions and become better people.
I'm not completely sure what that means but from what I've heard it involves quite a lot of shouting,
some wrestling and a bit of crying.
I'm a pretty basic British guy. I've spent 34 years carefully repressing my emotions.
So I don't think they're going to come out all in one weekend but i'm here with an open mind
to find out how men are trying to become better men.
Hundreds of men have attended Sacred Sons workshops in the past few years.
The group believes men have never been taught healthy masculinity.
They aim to do just that.
The idea of this $1,000 weekend-long course is to help men properly feel
their emotions and to learn to let out things they might otherwise keep bottled up.
One of the first things we had to do was stare another man in the eyes ... for ages.
I don't think I've ever looked a girlfriend in the eyes this long.
It definitely felt uncomfortable, almost sexual.
Oh and we also had to shout.
Let's go!
Taking a cold plunge is supposed to create a sense of well-being.
It's not really my thing. [ __ ] freezing
Non-sexual touch has been found to reduce stress and relax the nervous system but it's something
that rarely happens between men outside sports or maybe a fight. Like the eye staring, it felt very
unnatural.
I'd met Hugo, who's from California, on the first day. He's been to a couple of these things.
He struggles with childhood trauma and worries how it'll affect his relationship with his children.
What do you find effective about this kind of work? — I think for so long I thought I was the only one.
I thought I was the only one that got abused, I thought I was the only one that got beat,
I thought i was the only one that they didn't know how to be a man, didn't know how to be a father,
didn't know how to be a husband, didn't know how to be in the world and then to come here and see
all these brothers working their process around similar things, it makes it OK to feel that way.
This is a place for connection and for confrontation because only men can really
sharpen men in a certain way. So now as you look around this container at all these beautiful men
any men that you feel curious about, I want you to go to that man now, say hello ...
I felt like Hugo and I had connected earlier and when we had to choose a partner,
I pounced.
What we're gonna do is, we're gonna go back-to-back.
Good! Can you go all the way down and up three times together?
No hands. Go!
Again, there was touching and I found my inhibitions were dropping a bit.
I was getting over my anxiety of people watching me or judging me.
Ready and go!
Sacred Sons show a lot of this wrestling in their promotional videos.
I get injured basically every time I do a sporting activity.
So I was a bit worried. Also, I think my opponent had had training.
The point, I think, is that it's OK for men to be aggressive, if it's expressed in a healthy way.
So it seems like there's a few different sort of
practices and ways of thinking coming in to influence what we're actually experiencing here.
What's behind what we're all going through?
Honestly, what it is is a collection
of the practices that have benefited our facilitators throughout our individual journeys.
It's really about getting men together out of isolation, that is the medicine.
The medicine to what?
Statistics are saying men are committing suicide at 3.5 times
the rate of women. Overdosing on drugs, two times more,
and we're the greatest perpetrators of homicide, violent crimes, assault, rape, you know, and
it's on us to change that culture and by us doing the work together and showing up in this way,
giving each other permission to feel, to express and to relate and be intimate with each other,
I think it changes everything, it's changed everything for me and I've seen that in others.
It's a beautiful thing to witness and to hold space for.
It was time to go a bit deeper. Some emotions are too raw to express through words we were told.
We needed to get physical.
Hugo and I had become close. It was really hard to see just how much pain he was feeling.
Here he'd envisaged one of the other men as his childhood abuser. It was raw.
Many of the guys were in tears.
So Hugo, you obviously had a really strong reaction there. What did that feel like for you?
I feel alive.
I spent so many years walking around feeling dead.
And I feel alive, I feel I'm on my body.
Why are you really here? Like, what got you here? What are you wanting and needing from this time?
So go ahead and begin.
I'm always jealous of people who tell each other everything.
I have never been able to do that, it's always just been sort of stuffed down deep inside.
I think part of it is my mum died when I was very young, I was only four.
Just being raised by my dad. He wasn't very good at kind of expressing his emotions about that
so any emotion we had about her
just kind of stuffed it down to the point of not even really asking any questions about it.
It doesn't really work like that I'm realising. So I kind of wanted more of a sense of like,
what I want to do and how I want to be sort of moving forward.
It's the last day. The night before I talked honestly with some of the other men, more openly
than I had for a long time.
It felt good hearing that other people had issues too.
Some of them not so different from mine. I'm not the only one who doesn't always feel OK.
One of our final tasks was to call out a person from the group who we'd got a negative vibe from.
We're gonna have our goodbyes today and there's anything that is like kind of built up within you
through the weekend that needs to be spoken to another man, this is the place to do that.
Neil, one of the Sacred Sons guys picked me.
I felt kind of hurt.
Adam, I judge you as using
your pen and paper as a deflection from opening up. Come on bro, we're here for you.
I can understand it
but I have tried and I think I have struck up some close relationships with people here who
I really love and I can't imagine myself saying that
two days ago ... I love you bro.
It's the end of the weekend, I really wasn't sure this was going to be for me, I had a lot of
reservations, anxiety and instead it's really moved me.
I don't think this would be for everyone but
I think if you could get someone here and have them just show a bit of willingness,
I think most people would get something out of this experience.