Most men who find their way here are in some form of crisis. A marriage is failing, or has the quality of two people running parallel logistics. Their children are afraid of them, or estranged from them, or simply not close in the way they once imagined fatherhood would feel. They have built a life around keeping everyone okay and have lost track of what they themselves want. Something is breaking, or has broken, and the strategies that got them this far are no longer working.
What is breaking is not their life. What is breaking is survival courage. It is the kind of courage that formed early, often before they had words for what they were surviving, and that has been running the operating system underneath everything since.
Survival courage is real courage. It kept them alive. It built the patterns that held them together: the vigilance, the achievement, the not-needing, the holding it together alone. But it was shaped for the world of their early life, the one they were originally answering, and it carries a cost when it is asked to run a marriage, a fatherhood, a friendship, a life.
Survival courage is what keeps a man’s heart at a distance from his wife, because her closeness reads, somewhere beneath language, as a threat. It is what causes a father to parent through intensity and authority rather than presence and mentoring. It is what produces the Nice Guy, the man who keeps everyone happy at the cost of never knowing what he wants, and never letting the people around him feel the weight of who he actually is.
The crisis a man arrives in is not a failure of his life. It is the predictable cost of living from survival courage in a life that is asking for something else.
The work this practice does is the slow movement from survival courage to thriving courage. Not the elimination of the first, but the seeing of what it was for, and the deliberate building of a different kind of courage underneath it. Courage that does not require a threat to organize around. Courage that can rest. Courage that can want things. Courage that can let a wife be close, a child be seen, a self be known.
I’m Jon Holmes. I’ve spent twenty years sitting with men in this passage. The work draws on Jungian depth psychology and the older wisdom traditions that predate the language we now use for them. It is unhurried. It is serious. It is not for everyone.
If something here is recognizing you, you are at the threshold this work begins at.
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