On Addiction and Men’s Work: with John Lee
by Reid Baer

John Lee, considered one of the pioneers in men's work, talks often about addiction recovery. Many men credit their work in AA and other programs as the catalyst that got them involved in men's work.

Had it not been for men's work and recovery, I wouldn't be here talking to you now. And all the men's work in the world would not have gotten me to where I am now if I was still into my addictions. Men suffering with addictions to alcohol, drugs, work or sex need to address those issues before they're ready to do men's work. If an addicted man gets involved in men's work, he'll be a better man, but he'll still be an addicted man.

There are all kinds of addictions, including work. If a man works 80 hours a week, he's patted on the back and made chairman of the board. At the age of 50 or 60, he's as addicted to work as my father was to alcohol. He's an empty, shallow man. That's why so many men of my father's generation, who were praised for that addiction, fell apart when it came to retirement. The work process was no longer there to bolster their self-esteem. Yet, there's not a single treatment center in the country for work addiction.

Sex can be another addiction that prevents a man from doing his personal work. The whole act of wooing, courting, dumping, and starting all over again, was what I was told you're supposed to do. This kind of addiction is not so easily treated or seen. Codependency is another addiction. Many men feel abandoned and fall apart if their wife leaves the picture. Addictions to alcohol or heroin are easier to see.

The roots of addictive behavior come from not being seen as children. Self-psychologists talk about this need. In early childhood development, from ages 2 to 4, there’s the applause stage of development. What this means in layman's terms is that children are looking for praise and applause for everything they do and everything they are. But most parents, single or together as a couple, don’t themselves get sufficient praise and applause, and therefore have trouble giving it. When the children don't get it, they are sent away prematurely. This lives on in an adult man as a greedy or as Robert Bly refers to as an "insatiable soul." That's when you can never get enough in adulthood. But you were never meant to get it in adulthood, you were meant to get it in childhood. And so you can never get enough.

Many men, like myself, are trying to contact their anima (Carl Jung's term for their feminine aspect.) In a way, my early exposure to men’s work was a retreat from the masculine. Both my masculine and feminine had been exposed to so much damage. But Jung’s conception was incomplete, because he had not dealt sufficiently with his own masculinity. He had not wrestled with his own father issues, as was depicted in his failure to wrestle with Freud successfully. What Jung did was prematurely move in the direction of the feminine. That's what I try to point out to men: We too often try prematurely to contact the feminine and end up cherishing the false feminine, an imitation, people-pleasing version of gentleness and nurturing. As I explored some of that in myself, with lesser and then greater degrees of success, it allowed me to access my true feminine, to the point where I wasn't projecting all the time. Then, I had to wrestle with that masculine, the distrust of men– the Oedipal stuff.

We also need to address the gold within the shadow of men's anger. First of all, a man shouldn't be shamed for anything in my opinion. It may have been one of the flaws in the early men's movement. In 1989, some of the New Warrior men (now the ManKind Project) would come to my seminars and cut me down. Again, nobody should be shamed, but nobody should have to endure a man's rage either. Adults are usually not prepared or taught to express anger in a clean way. So we tend to regress to an earlier state, a fight or flight state– and what could have been anger in the adult becomes rage. We live in a country full of immature adults– men and women in constant states of regression. We've come to believe that rage is anger, but it's not. Most of us don’t know how to express anger as adults because nobody's taught us how. It takes learning to express good clean anger. I learned it the hard way by raging at the ones I loved the most and doing a lot of unintentional damage.

Modern psychology tells me I'm supposed to get these feelings out, but it doesn’t teach me how to do it. Most often when we think we are expressing anger appropriately, it comes out by way of preaching, teaching, analyzing, criticizing, shaming, blaming, demeaning, demoralizing or judging. If a man says he's going to tell his truth for four hours and he comes back in two months unsatisfied, then there's something wrong with that process. What he did was rage. Real relief comes from adult expressions of anger, the kind that hurt no one, including ourselves– not the ragings of a three-year-old.

Another piece of this is that men get a physical charge and then try to release it intellectually. If I have a knot in my stomach, it's going to be really hard to talk that knot out. Too often, men will converse for hours and never work through the energy carried in their body. But we can learn how to release that charge out of our bodies, and how to express our anger appropriately, as adults.

Excerpted with permission from an interview in the Mankind Project Newsletter, 2005. John Lee is the author of 11 books and has been featured on ABC-TV’s 20/20. You can order The Secret Place of Thunder, or any of John’s other books, numerous audio & video tapes, or for a schedule of upcoming events, talks and workshops, including ones at the NY Open Center, call (678) 494-1296 or see www.jlcsonline.com.