Davis Community Men’s Talk Circle

A Project to Address the Maturation of Masculinity

By P. Gregory Guss

Three years ago, a pilot project titled the Davis Community Men’s Talk Circle was started in Davis, California, as a free service to address the profound patterns of male isolation that occur for men of all ages. As a social work clinician, I have seen firsthand the deleterious effects of isolation in men’s lives. Isolation contributes directly to depression, job dissatisfaction and loss, increase in violence, numbing behaviors and alienation from loved ones. Moreover, isolation fuels male suicide, which is at an all-time high for boys, men and our elder males.

Our Community Men’s Talk Circle project draws from the wisdom of a 25-year ongoing annual men’s conference, held in Mendocino. The Elders at this conference structure the talk so men can enter the deep and painful ills and the subsequent judgments of themselves, which they have carried alone. The men attending come to feel a great support, a deep trust, a brotherhood and a safety affording them a way to utilize the communal experience. Their vulnerabilities, now shared by others, deepens the possible that they don’t have to go it alone anymore! Here the needed healing from years of exiled pain begins.

This has been our model, in bringing the Talk Circle project to the men of our community. Each month we intentionally create a Sacred space, where our Circle, our container for our talking, welcomes men to talk aloud and discover. Men often surprise themselves, as aspects unbeknownst are revealed which they did not expect to share. But this soon becomes a known and valued process, affording men a communal unfolding, revealing new feelings, new insights, while clarity is advanced. This work requires that Sacred space must be created, drawing a significant distinction from how men typically relate to one another, as in the masked cautionary jokes, or the blind-eye to dismissive behaviors toward others, or the impulse to fix another man’s experience; all of which are recipes for an unsafe environment, prohibiting any deep and important talk to root.

The Talk Circle is designed as a primer, for men who have never done men’s work before. The Circle is larger in number (17 to 22 attendees), in contrast to a traditional men’s group (smaller, 5 to 8, and with greater expectations to share). The Talk Circle intentionally allows for men to ease their way into their held-back experiences; being invited to talk, only as they feel ready. To further underscore emotional safety, this project holds an open-door policy regarding attendance, furthering to lessen the rigors and demands of the intimacy that usually arise from small and weekly men’s group work. The Talk Circle also fosters the option for men to begin their own support group. Contrary to belief, the inherent deep hunger for men to talk communally, once initiated and structured, is almost unstoppable.

The Talk Circle utilizes a five man committee for planning and sharing the duties with each monthly event. Responsibilities include establishing ground rules, underscoring confidentiality, calling in the five directions including the inward direction (toward our hearts and our truths), providing some music and some poetry (the language of the heart), and monitoring the group’s process ensuring that men’s voices of their internal experiences will be both heard, seen and witnessed. As men gain a new familiarity in their sharing process, they cultivate skills toward new and potentially meaningful friendships for themselves.

The Talk Circle meets monthly, in donated space (Davis International House); it is open for all men, ages 18 years and older. Two licensed clinicians serve on the committee, helping to ensure emotional safety and assist in group process work.

This project is part of a new paradigm of community men’s work. One that is unique, in its structure to create a culture that is relational and not competitive; a departure from our current known sense of masculinity. Ours is a community project whose intent is to welcome men to know their interiors, thus promoting a maturing of our masculinity from what is described as our current boy psychology, toward a man psychology. Our hope is to afford men a reclamation in their lives of wholeness, of vitality, of tenderness, and of stewardship. We strive to nurture creativity as integral to the aging process, and embrace the honoring of our Elders, whose resources are currently underutilized and often discarded. The Talk Circle fosters a culture of honoring our differences, as our differences lead us into our humanness and our ability to connect.

Creating such Communities is not only very doable, it is teachable, affordable and would be a significant developmental asset both for boys growing up, and for men throughout the course of their lives. It is a significant antidote to the stark aloneness (nonrelational pattern) that our male culture has inflicted on itself for generations. Men are too often unaccustomed to being in such groups, and do not know that emotional safety is possible. Talk Circle gatherings powerfully foster experiences that welcome men into greater connection with themselves and then with others.

Our hope is to share this model with other social workers or mental health workers who might choose to begin a Talk Circle in their own community.

More information is available regarding this project by calling (530) 758-2794.  Also visit www.redwoodmen.org. For Facebook search Davis Community Men’s Talk Circle.

P. Gregory Guss, LCSW, (BA, Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont; MSW, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California), a psychotherapist for 33 years, specializes in family, adolescence and men’s work,  and practices in Davis, California.  As a community organizer, he developed and coordinates the Davis Community Men’s Talk Circle project, and sits on the Redwood Men’s Conference Planning Committee.