On the occasion of the showing of the film documentary The Work at the Philadelphia Association

The Work

The showing of the documentary film The Work produced one of the best discussions I’ve experienced at the PA. The evening was well-attended and the ensuing discussion was lively and inclusive, i.e. everyone got a chance to speak.

It provoked particularly powerful feelings for me as it recalled my own experience of standing and participating in similar circles, specifically an incident that happened at the very beginning of a weekend like the one shown.

It was 2001. I was working in Reading gaol - gone now, but back then a young offenders remand prison. I was managing a 12 step treatment programme for young men with drug or alcohol problems. I asked a friend with experience of addiction if he’d be willing to fill the outside speaker slot on our treatment program that week but he said he couldn’t because he was staffing a men’s weekend and needed to prepare. I expressed polite curiosity and he told me it was a Mankind Project weekend (the same guys who facilitated the Folsom prison work shown in the documentary). He described it as a kind of rite of passage for men; but said little else.

Foolishly, I said, ‘I’d like to do that one day,’ despite my inner sceptic having already dismissed such a possibility – judging the event, on scant or nil evidence – as a con for the gullible. ‘Why not this weekend?’ he said, ‘I’m busy!’ I said immediately. ‘Well, if you’re busy, fair enough…but if that’s just a defence - your stock response to anything new – it might be worth thinking about’. Beneath my indignant dismissal of his suggestion, it got to me, because it was true. I recoiled from anything threatening change to me even as I cheerfully urged young men on the prison programme to realise their potential by launching themselves into the unknown of a new way of life. Unusually, I heard myself – almost from some vertiginous distance – saying, ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’

 So, I found myself waiting outside St John's Wood tube station that Friday evening to meet my fellow participants on this strange adventure, full of trepidation and clutching a huge bag of food I’d been ordered to bring for the communal kitchen. There were four of us - a journalist, a healer, and an Italian businessman. All, like me, were struggling to navigate the mysteries of their own masculinity, and often feeling alone and mired in it. By the time we reached our destination, an old RAF station at Sopley in the New Forest, we had all shared our stories and grown a little closer and were looking forward to the adventure ahead though we had no idea what it would be like. Most of our ideas of male initiation rites were culled from The Emerald Forest or A Man called Horse. Little were we to know it wouldn’t be that easy.

We arrived in good time at a rather forbidding pad-locked gate, rang the bell and waited…and waited, our small group growing increasingly nervous against the gathering gloom. Eventually, a man appeared walking briskly down the pock-marked concrete drive from a clump of forlorn-looking out-buildings. The military bearing of his gait seemed in keeping with the iron-grey cropped head, the fatigues and the clipboard he clutched. On arrival at the gate he gave us a peremptory glance and said simply, “Yes?” in a clipped South African accent (which did little to dispel our initial misgivings).

‘We’ve come from London,’ we chorused and enthused as one.  ‘We’ve come for the adventure – together!’

‘What time were you told to be here?’

‘5 o’clock’ we said.

 ‘What time is it now?’

 ‘It’s 4:45pm’ said the healer, hurriedly squinting at his watch.

 ‘Come back at 5pm,’ he said, and turned on his heel to go. ‘OK,’ said my erstwhile comrades sheepishly, ‘We’ll drive round the block – shall we?’ This last muttered ineffectually in the vague direction of our oppressor, as they scurried back to the sanctuary of the car – an attempt to placate.

 ‘Hang on,’ I said, as I felt a cold fury rising through my limbs like magma from a suddenly awakened ancient volcano, long thought dormant. ‘No-one’s going anywhere’. They froze; half-in, half-out of the car. I drew myself up to my full height, squared my shoulders and turned to address our inhospitable host in no uncertain terms – ‘You’, I said with cold authority; but he’d already gone.

So, I was left spluttering in impotent rage, shot by both sides, feeling equally bullied by the para-military and betrayed by my companions, and, as the fireworks of rage began to dim, an increasing sense of bleak loneliness, and, if truth be told - shame. As I climbed back into the awkward silence of the car to sit in sullen misery, unable even to make eye contact with the others, something else arose within me that implied something extremely uncomfortable – the sheer familiarity of it all – that sense of exile, injustice and muffled rage was mine, no-one else’s…little to do with the actual detail of what had just happened. Ditto, the perverse comfort derived from that sense of absolute aloneness. A man had simply told us to come back at the designated time and my fellows had agreed to do just that. The rest was my projection – one I’d made earlier. Unusually, a thought came to me that I needed to be there, that this was ‘the work’ - and it broke the dam. My whole body changed as that stiffness flowed out of me. I suddenly knew I was in the right place and was eager for more. The rest of that weekend didn’t disappoint though the specific detail  must remain a secret as  we were asked to respect the content of the weekend and were given the simple reason, ‘Don’t spoil it for the men who come after you’…  because it is a kind of story – an odyssey of sorts. Some of it about finding compassion and acceptance for that lost, furious boy and welcoming him home.

Today, when I conjure the memory of that moment of arrival, I cannot help but imagine it - more farce than tragedy – not so much King Lear and his fool out on the stormy heath – or even Hamm in Endgame flushed with the grandiosity of his own misery – but more Withnail and I under the pounding rain, Withnail beseeching the farmer – ‘Are you the farmer? You must help us; we’ve come on holiday by mistake!’

What I learned that weekend and on similar groups and weekends over the following years has informed not just my practice but how I live. For me, the experience had the opposite of a shelf life. Rather than wear off it grew deeper with the years. Something happened that allowed me to cast off the mind forged manacles of my cynicism and faux world-weariness, the contempt prior to investigation that is always companion to a fear of life, and simply surrender and embrace the weekend. I still remember it with great affection and etched-in intensity. It gave me something I hadn’t experienced previously. There was something about finding oneself in a circle of 60 men that left no hiding place but paradoxically exuded safety – a sacred place where the shadow could fully manifest and be assimilated.

I hasten to add I didn’t leave there shrived of my stuff, I didn’t ‘go clear’ or whatever, but I left there having re-discovered my courage, with a respect for honesty and accountability and a little more acceptance of my own frailties (which of course were commonplace and shared by practically all the other men there, the same fears and doubts, the same acting out; I was not alone – who knew!).

I’m told the Masai, who still practise rites of passage in order to initiate young men into adulthood, have a saying – ‘Uninitiated men will burn down the village – just to keep warm’. After working with men in prison for many years that same absence of any guidance is a constant trope that confirms the truth of this, hence my support for initiatives like ‘The Work’. If you haven’t already seen it, and you’re interested in group work outside the confines of traditional therapy, the therapeutic value of one human helping another, then I urge you to go and see it. 

A Footnote

The other aspect of it which felt particularly relevant to the PA for me was it also recalled one of the great regrets I experienced on the PA training – the loss of the experiential group when I moved upstairs from the introductory course to the training proper. In the introductory year our seminars on Heidegger, Freud, Buddha or whatever were preceded by an experiential group facilitated by Marie-Laure Davenport, a vastly experienced therapist with a great knowledge of groups. It gave us a safe space where we could show up and say how we felt, explicate and explore dynamics and challenge each other in a respectful way.

Consequently, we could hear and engage with the following seminars with clarity because we’d cleared all the psychic debris of that particular day and the group had an idea of where we were as individuals, what difficulties we were facing in our own lives outside that space.

Proof of the efficacy of this system is that I remember the content of those seminars, from Joe Friedman on Leslie Farber to Paul Gordon on Heidegger – with greater recall than much of the stuff we discussed upstairs in later years. Those discussions seemed more alive, somehow. I have come to the conclusion that an experiential space is essential for a training that revolves around community and holds that our distress or joy is contingent on our immediate environment as well as our history. Individual supervision and therapy are only a part of this work. There isn’t a professional environment I’ve worked in over the last 25 years that hasn’t understood this and begun and ended the day with some sort of formal check-in and check-out. It keeps the decks clear of resentment and allows us to best serve others. Enough for now, more of these matters later…  

Nick Mercer February 2018