Back in America

If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Welcome to Back in America, the podcast. In the second episode of my interview with Chris Tyler, we talk about his experience working with victims of domestic violence. Chris is now a student in social studies and works with abusers. This conversation brings us on the topic of masculinity. Today you are a graduate student and you work two days a week at the Lutheran settlement house. Yeah, I work 18 hours a week, I think is the hour requirement. So the Lutheran settlement house mostly deals with the victim of domestic abuse. As we prepare this interview, you were telling me that what you would really be excited about doing would be working with other men.

What is it that draws you to masculinity and to working with men? Oh boy, here we go. If you're listening to this, Corin, this is for you, a friend of mine, we talk about this a lot. When I first started thinking about domestic violence, which like most people, I was aware of it, but hardly ever thought about it before social work school. And my placement last year was at the district attorney's office in Philadelphia, which was mainly like policy level work, which is great. And I hardly ever had contact with actual clients, which some of my cohort in school was getting, and I was kind of jealous. I sought out opportunities for myself. And one way was to go to the domestic violence waiting room.

There's a waiting room in the courthouse for people who come that morning who are going to go to court later for whatever reason. And domestic violence cases are heard on certain days. So some mornings you can go there and there'll be an inordinate number of women who are waiting to go for a domestic violence hearing. And I would just go there for a couple of hours and just talk with them. People I'd never met would never see again for the most part. Just kind of on the spot crisis counseling, like how are you feeling today? Have you been to court before? Do you know what to expect?

I didn't give them legal advice because I'm not a lawyer. Can't do that. But just emotionally just help them because it's scary. It's a giant courthouse and they might be facing their abuser again in court. It's weird. Everyone around you is a lawyer anyway. And I immediately started thinking then about how obviously it's really important to help these women and men. There are men who are victims of domestic violence as well.

To help the survivors is very important. And it just became very clear to me that the abuser, without getting insight into what's leading him for the most part to abuse other people, without that insight, he's going to go out and recreate that again. He's going to find another relationship where someone will tolerate that behavior. I don't know if anyone studied the rate of people spontaneously waking up one day and being like, oh my God, I've been an abuser for years. I'm never going to do it again. And they actually stop.

It's probably happened to someone in human history, but I'm going to guess it's very rare. For the most part, you need some kind of intervention. And locking people up for that achieves some ends, I'm sure. And that way, the incarceration does. But you're also part of this massive system of incarceration, which you know about and lots of people know about. And it's very fraught and problematic and not rehabilitative for the most part. So what are we doing about that? And then fast forward to I'm working at Lutheran Settlement House and discovered that there's another organization in Philadelphia called Mannergy.

And their whole work is working with men who have been abusers, who are mandated to attend this group to some degree, some different degrees of being mandated sometimes by their partner who says, you know, if you don't go, it's over or a court or something like that. And so they do a 10 week series in group. If they're fit, they get screened for a couple of weeks beforehand to make sure that they accept what they've done and want to make this change and seem to be a good fit. So I've gotten the incredible privilege to sit in on a couple of these groups and see their facilitators work with these groups and see these men engaged in various stages of their 10 weeks of work. And it's amazing. And do you believe that we can turn an abuser into a gentle person?

I saw some guys in these groups who are coming out the other end of their 10 weeks and who are clearly much more aware and contrite. You know, they're very sorry. And they have this kind of the guys at the meeting I saw who there was one guy in his last week and a couple of guys who are, you know, maybe week seven, eight or nine close to the end of their time. And just the way that they can articulate their own journey is amazing. And so I think so. I think I tend to think of it as now as developing secure attachment as an adult for some kind of wound. You know, people, my boss at the DA's office used to say, hurt people, hurt people. Right.

Great phrase. And if we don't think we can heal that hurt, then no, the initial wound. But if we can and I think we can, then I think there's hope for everyone. And so abusers, I mean, the guys who are seeking help to stop that behavior and are willing to have the courage to see that the behavior has roots, that it goes back in time.

I think as long as you have that courage to go to the difficult places, then yes. And I think what Menergy is doing and what I've heard, you know, other groups are doing around the country and around the world are helping people to understand that these wounds are there, that they're deep, that they're real. And that they're often, I think from everything I've studied and seen that they're passed on. You know, intergenerational trauma, I think, is very real. You know, if you come from a family that had a lot of trauma when you were growing up and part of that trauma was either witnessing abuse yourself and it was normalized. It was somehow portrayed as okay, that it was accepted, that it was covered up, that no one talked about, which is another way of normalizing it and making it okay. If you saw that, or if you just had your own wounding and no one was there for you and you grow up and you become angry naturally, you feel let down maybe by your parents, by the world, by society. There's just so much frustration there and those feelings are all real and they're tied to experiences that are real for you.

And for me to say, to judge from the outside and say, oh, sure, you had a tough childhood, but that doesn't make it okay. That's both true and dismissive of someone else's experience. And instead, I want to meet that person in that experience and say, okay, tell me more. Yes, it's not okay to be abusive to your partner. And the rage that maybe you have that's coupled with insecurity, that's coupled with thinking that this is an okay strategy. It's very childlike in a sense. You're imagining that this strategy is going to somehow work. You know, when a three-year-old has a fit and a tantrum, it's in some ways borderline, almost like pre-conscious because they're so young.

But it is like a strategy. They're like, okay, I'm going to freak out and I'll get what I want. Kind of works, but it also is an untenable situation because your parent has to help you get calm and relate to you in order to understand what's really going on. What do you really want? What's the frustration? To unpack that situation and really meet you, you have to first help the child calm down. And there's some psychologists who think of adults as just grown children in terms of our needs. And I like that.

It's durable in a lot of ways, that viewpoint. And I think for this insecure attachment, I think it's very true. So guys who are abusers, if you can get to that wound and meet them in that wounded place and then hold a safe space long enough and in the right ways so that they can bring their child back to life, and their adult mind now, which has the ability to self-soothe, the ability to see the story in a big picture, and the ability to monitor and regulate their behavior, which are adult functions. You can bring those back to map onto your own childhood experience, which is much more embodied, maybe pre-verbal, but early stages of being verbal, these deep emotional wounds that you've been carrying, you can parent yourself. And you can do, I think you can do secure attachment on yourself, I think is where it ultimately has to be done. And then people like Mannergy are making the outer space safe enough to hold you accountable, which you need to be to grow, but also not attack you and not hold your past mistakes over your head. Instead, say, OK, let's face things just as they are in a safe way and in a way that's oriented towards healing.

Would you say that a lot of the issues about masculinity comes from society and the way masculinity has been depicted in the traditional culture of what a man should be? Yes. And how do we sort of debug that myth? How do we make people understand that what we've been raised in believing isn't actually what life should be about?

Great questions. I started my journey with inquiring about and working with masculinity back in California. For me, masculinity presents as an energetic quality of being. And it just arises like I wake up in the day and it just like shows up in my gut in maybe how I think and how I look at problems. And a lot of people have written about this. I've been influenced by a couple of people in general, but that energy, I think, can easily turn towards aggression and can also be. Frustrated and masculinity seems to be much more prone to easily express itself through aggression, you know, and not to say that, like, feminine energy can't be aggressive or can't express itself through aggression. But masculinity, testosterone, these like have maybe a greater tendency to do that or an ease of having that be how you express yourself.

And you can't address the crisis of masculinity simply by adopting femininity. No, masculinity is not toxic. Masculinity can express itself in toxic ways. And we see a lot of that. You know, we see it in the White House. We see it elsewhere. And those models are always bad because they'll put ideas in some people's heads. But you can't just switch to feminine instead.

You know, I tried it a little bit. Doesn't really work. And Robert Bly says that throughout the 20th century, we really grew to see that. You know, like there's a lot of guys who wanted to express masculinity, but they rejected the soldier archetype after World War II. It was like, oh, man. And then definitely after Korea and then definitely after Vietnam. Just like don't want to do that. A lot of us reject kind of the corporate, the cog in a big machine, you know, where you make money and you have a house in the suburbs or whatever, or in the city or wherever you are.

But you don't really like your work, but you just do it for 40 years and then you retire one day and you play golf and you just had some job at a desk in some big office building. Like, and all it was was about bringing in money and keeping the boss happy. Like you don't want to do that.

You don't, you know, in the 70s, there was some effort to embrace femininity again as like a cure, like, oh, we need to embrace just a whole other way of being, you know, just let go of masculinity. Doesn't really work. So we're rejecting these things, these possibilities for expression. And yet the energy is coming up. And so it calls on us now to be creative, to find out a way to channel that, you know, and with maybe like young boys. It's, you know, a question, but you can address it maybe a little more easily. You're like, oh, you can climb trees. You can do like ultra competitive sports.

You can find these ways to express yourself as a child. And then as men, how do we do that?

Is a really big question.

In the third and final part of this conversation, Chris dives into the notion of privilege. How can white educated men deal with the reckoning of their privileges? Chris also discusses the difficult topic of reparation to the African-American. As often in this podcast, I ask Chris where I think this country will be in five years from today.