Navigating masculinity is not easy. In fact, it is profoundly difficult, often lonely work. We are flooded every day with messages and ideas about what men are and aren’t, should and shouldn’t be. Many men feel shame or guilt about our masculinity. Sometimes that’s conscious, and sometimes it manifests as defensiveness; it’s the same thing. Many people in relationship with men struggle to understand them, and understandably so.
While my formal education and training is in Education and Biology, I’ve also worked with a lot of men. I ran a series of recovery houses, I’ve been running mens groups for fifteen years or so, and I’ve had the mixed honor of being someone people in my community have often turned to when men have caused harm. From that experience, I’ve shared a bit about my perspectives on masculinity and relationships, and people began asking me for a number of types of support.
Individual Coaching
If you are working on how to exist in a healthy way as a man or in relationship with men and you’d like some support with that, I’m happy to offer my help. Often, this is just the work of helping you clarify what your own beliefs are as opposed to what you’ve been taught, which is tricker than it sounds. Often, it’s exploring values and practices that you wish to embody more, and setting up pathways to actually fulfill those goals. Some people come to me because my words on social media resonated with them and they just want to talk it through more.
Fair warning- growth requires investment, and I’m still a teacher at heart. If you want to work with me, odds are pretty good that I’ll send you TED talks, TikToks, essays, and books for you to reflect on. I often suggest homework, which is entirely voluntary, but many people find value in. There’s no consequence for ignoring whatever I suggest, other than the lack of that growth or understanding. Knowledge is a mirror, and through reading and listening to other bright people, you can get to know yourself far better.
While my work has historically been predominantly with men, I am very happy to work with people of all genders. We all navigate masculinities in one way or another, and if you feel that you might benefit from working with me, I’m happy to talk. I’ve also worked occasionally with couples, which is often more translation work than anything else.
I offer this work on a sliding scale based on income; I ask 1/1,000th of your annual income per hour-long session. So if you make $65,000 per year, I ask for $65/session. If you make $150,000/yr, I ask for $150/session. In addition to that, it is outrageous that our society makes support more accessible based on privilege. One way to think of this is to knock off $5/session for every historically disenfranchised identity you hold (other than income, which is already addressed.) So if you’re a Black Queer person who wants to work with me, knock $10/hr off that original metric. As you consider where you might fall on this scale, please keep in mind that I can’t book back-to-back sessions, and it would be profoundly unethical for me to try. I need to walk the dogs, organize my pre- and post- notes, and generally decompress from a session and ground for the next to show up in a healthy way. This means that a one-hour session takes, on average, two hours of my time. So if someone pays me $40 for a session, I am making $20 an hour, which is not actually a livable wage today. Because of this, I need to average at least $60 per session for this work to be sustainable these days. I work with many people who can’t afford that, but that means that I need to subsidize those sessions with sessions which pay substantially more than that. I share all that for transparency. I deeply believe in prioritizing working with people who can’t usually afford these kinds of services and maintaining a sliding scale. And- as part of supporting that effort to make this work available to more people and making my life financially viable, I ask that you try and pay as high as you can on that scale. That said, if the money is really a barrier for you, talk to me and we’ll see what we can do.
Notice!
My coaching services are currently on a waitlist. If you would like to be added to that waitlist, please email me. Beyond my coaching schedule being full, I have started receiving far, far more communications than I have the capacity to respond to, so odds are good it will be a while before you hear back from me. This is not personal at all. I deeply appreciate every single person who reaches out to me, and I’m working on figuring out how to manage the volume of emails that I receive these days in a way that respects the vulnerability and depth of the communications I receive. I appreciate your patience, and if you would like support on the sooner side, I sincerely hope that you will continue looking for another coach or therapist who has capacity sooner. Best of luck in your work, and I hope we all continue healing.
For a deeper layer of transparency, my waitlist is not purely linear. When I have an opening, I start with the people who contacted me first, but that is not the entire decision making process- there are two other variable that I consider. The first is this: if I work entirely with people whose work is much heavier, such as people with strong patterns of violence, then my own mental health starts to deteriorate. But if I work entirely with people who’s growth is largely “lighter,” for lack of a better word, then my work starts to feel really ungrounded and disconnected from the very deep wounds that I’m committed to healing in the world. So in order to both stay in touch with the deep wounds that I’m committed to healing and also keep this work healthy and sustainable for me, I intentionally maintain a client base doing a diversity of types of personal work. There is no past or work that will exclude you from working with me or prioritize you on my waitlist, but I consider these pieces relative to the rest of the people I’m working with at any given point in time. On this note, sometimes within the first few sessions, it becomes clear to me that I’m not a good fit for a given person, usually because I can’t see a meaningful pathway forward or because I think that the work I do is likely to increase the risk of them harming themselves or others. In these cases, I will refer them to other professionals who I think are better suited to support their growth at that time. Far more often, it seems to me that someone would benefit from concurrent support, such as DBT or IFS therapy. I am not any kind of therapist, and while deeply personal, my work is more about worldviews and sociology. Many people find my work powerful and helpful, and many even describe it as therapeutic- but it’s not therapy, and despite my best efforts to weave emergent awareness of patterns between personal and cultural, the work I do can be dangerously easy to intellectualize. So I often suggest that people do formal therapy alongside working with me, and I often see far faster and more holistic growth in people who follow this.
The second is financial. I am not independently wealthy, and it sometimes seems that people think my work is far more lucrative than it is. As I mentioned in the Sliding Scale section, I prioritize working with people who can’t typically afford support, and that means that I also need to prioritize working with people who can pay enough to subsidize that work. I intentionally maintain this blend, and when I have the capacity to take on a new client, I balance these two pieces in consideration, working from the top of my waitlist. There is no financial situation that will exclude you from working with me, but because most of my clients at the moment are working and middle class, I would prioritize a few clients who could pay me a lot, because it would dramatically increase my capacity to work with a long list of much less privileged people who I would love to be able to work with, so offering as much as you can actually afford is a service to the community of people who are trying to do this work. The people who are at the top of my waitlist today contacted me about a year ago, and that gap is only growing. That said, many people contact me about a specific situation, or in a particular time in their life, and by the time I get back to them with an opening, they have moved on; so my waitlist is not actually as long as it appears to be.
For those who read all that and still feel motivated and patient enough to want to be added to my waitlist, it would set us both up for success to include a brief summary of your past, present, and the work you’re focusing on today, and also what you can afford to pay per session. I look forward to hearing from you, and appreciate your work and your patience.
Support@HealTheCycle.com
Men’s Group Work
Largely because I love it, and partially because of how long my individual coaching waitlist has gotten, I’m in the process of developing some facilitated group offerings for men. These will be online, closed groups of 5-10 men, sharing experiences and growing alongside one another for a set period of time. I’ll be present in each group, and provide some frameworks, questions, mirroring, and support.
Online work is hard, especially for those of us with neurodivergences. I struggle a lot with online spaces, especially group ones. It’s easy for me to be present in person, and much harder for me to be present online. The work we’ll be undertaking will be personal and challenging, and far more than a work meeting or online college course, having any members in these groups who are not present and invested would be harmful to the group and the people in it. So these groups will have clear and firm boundaries, including a firm on-camera policy, a private space, phones off, and consistent attendance. This is not work to be done while gaming or driving, or in the background. That said, there will be invitations to these spaces which may be unconventional, such as handcrafts. Things like carving, doodling in a paper notebook, small quiet physical hand games like Rubix Cubes, knitting, bonsai, shelling beans, and other non-distracting things will be more than welcome. In my experience, things like this help people be much more present.
These groups will involve meeting other men in ways that the culture doesn’t normally make space for. The men showing up to this work will have something in common, which is a desire to heal, and connect with other men for healing. So we’ll be talking about our pasts, what we’re facing, what’s hard, what’s working, and actively supporting one another towards the future we’d all like to live in. Starting off, each meeting will be two hours with a ten min break in the middle. That time will go by very fast, and this might feel tight; most in person men’s groups I’ve been a part of have been longer than this, but for an online format this is about as long as I can imagine being present on a screen, so I think starting here will make sense, and if groups want to talk about a longer meeting, that’s always a possibility. Meetings will be available on a sliding scale, probably starting at $15 per meeting.
Each group will be a commitment of at least a few months of weekly meetings, with the possibility to extend the group, and invite in other members. This work is personal, so while diverse groups are important, I also want to make sure that I’m setting each group up for success by meeting with the interested guys one on one first so that I can place everyone in groups that are well suited to where everyone’s at. On this note, the main barrier to this at the moment is my coordination. There’s been quite a lot of interest, but setting up the meetings with guys and then organizing polls to find a time that works for enough interested men to actually start is just something that I’m slowly working on.
One large question that comes up any time we talk about men’s work is around boundaries- who is welcome, and what is a man? After many years of running mens groups and trying various things, here’s where I’m at- if the primary gendered work that you identify as doing is the work of masculinity, than you’re likely to be a good fit for a men’s group. If the primary gendered work that you identify as doing is femininity or non-binary, than you’re likely to feel like a tourist in men’s spaces, and we’d all likely be better off if you sought out spaces more aligned to that gendered work.
I also deeply understand that, and why, many men feel uncomfortable with trans men in men’s groups. Regardless of what you think of that discomfort that many men feel, I don’t believe that those men should be excluded from men’s work. This is just one of the many reasons that I prefer to meet with guys one-on-one- it gives me a chance, in private and without judgment, to discuss these kinds of questions. This way I can place everyone in groups that will support their healing. Putting guys who feel that they can’t do their work around trans people in a mens group with a trans person is unlikely to feel healing or safe for either of those people.
If you’re interested in this work, please email me. I’m putting together an email list for this in particular, and I’ll be happy to add you to it so that you can stay informed. If you’re a skilled web developer/data manager and you feel excited to help with coordinating any of this, also please email me. Your support would make this happen a lot faster, and I’m happy to talk about what compensation and reciprocity would look like to value your work. Making online group work smooth would likely involve a set of logins, scheduling polls, firewalls, paywalls, and various other things that are way beyond my skill set (which basically starts and ends with what you see on this website, that I barely manage to keep functioning on my own.) To be clear, while I appreciate other amateurs who might want to help, I’m looking for a professional web developer, with a portfolio and references. If that’s you and you think this sounds exciting- please email me.
Support@HealTheCycle.com
P.S. I’m working to expand my work. I’d love to publish a book, and offer more opportunities for men to engage, ranging from the online men’s circles I mentioned to men’s wilderness trips. All that work is slow going, because we’re poor. If you’d like to support this work, I’m not too proud to accept help to accelerate and energize this. Feel free to join my Patreon here:
https://patreon.com/WatchfulCoyote
Thank you!
Harm Reduction & Community Accountability Support
A large part of my work that I remain deeply passionate about is supporting people and communities who are working to address harm in their communities. I’ve been on the receiving end of a number of community support and accountability processes, ranging from my alcoholism to the harm I caused women in my communities. As someone who is “out” as having that history and doing that work, a lot of people turn to me for input and support around other men who are causing harm. Despite having more experience than most people, I claim no expertise at all. It’s incredibly hard work, and the recidivism rate is horrifying. There is no magic bullet, and most efforts to support harmful men in becoming less harmful still just end in community fractures, and never get where we wish they would. Given how pandemic these issues are in all our communities, there is a stunning lack of support for it, as evidenced by the fact that people so often turn to me, a stray biology teacher with a history of harm. Regardless, at this point, I’ve tried to help a lot of men face the fact that they’ve caused harm, ranging from making jokes that make people uncomfortable to serial rape. I have enough experience in those efforts with failure, and some occasional successes, to be able to see some trends, and occasionally offer helpful input. If you’re working on addressing these issues with a man (or anyone) in your community, the lack of meaningful resources and support can be brutal, and lead to a lot of very common and easily avoidable mistakes. I address some of these elsewhere on this site, but if you’re looking for some individual support around that work, I do offer this, and because it is often on a shorter time frame, I can often fit this in ahead of my long personal coaching waitlist. As part of my continued healing work around the harm I’ve caused, I happily offer this kind of support free of charge. If your community wants to pay me something for that time as an act of support for my work with less resourced individuals and communities, I won’t say no, but I don’t ask for any payment for this.
Here are some resources that offer support to men. I have not worked with all of these programs, so I can’t vouch for them completely, but their outward-facing presentation looks good.
Online Men’s Groups- these offer online men’s groups that seem very easy to jump into, and can connect you with more resources:
I also recommend seeking out another coach or therapist. Therapists can only work in their state, and I don’t feel comfortable recommending coaches that I haven’t worked with personally, but there are many excellent ones out there, and I hope you find exactly the right person to connect with!