I once quit a Men’s Group because the rules about the way we would engage each other seemed to become a shield rather than an enabler of connection and support. The group had been really important in my life for two years. Meeting every Monday, we used some process tools from the Mankind Project (MKP), but were not strict about the format, letting each week’s volunteer facilitator to guide us. We benefitted from many of the participants being skilled in facilitating specific processes that we might want to use to become unstuck with an issue in our lives. But over time, the MKP ideas and processes began to structure all meetings. Once that occurred, I noticed a couple of men participated in a different way. Previously we had been gathering as trusting friends wanting to both help each other and benefit from each other. The processes for our meetings were secondary to that. But now, some men were not expressing a brotherly sensitivity, but rather a desire to know the processes, do them correctly, and that we should all be committed to that. One man said he wasn’t with us to be friends but to do ‘the work’. At that time, I pondered whether to express a ‘withhold’, as they call it in the MKP, and probably dominate the rest of that meeting with exploring and releasing my feelings about his approach. Instead, I guessed that the group had shifted and people wanted more of the processes. I now wonder if that was a mistake. Both myself and the co-founder of the group quit soon after.
Continue reading “On Sociocracy: if we won’t escape patriarchy with new rules on meetings, then how?”