Male Bonding : Center Attempts to Help Men Redefine Masculinity

Seven men sat in a circle beating drums. At the center was an array of burning candles, incense, a ritual Navajo pipe and a stick adorned with feathers. As the drumming grew louder, the men seemed to grow bolder. Suddenly, as if by signal, the rhythm stopped and one of the drummers spoke.

“I have a dream to share,” he announced as the others nodded their heads in understanding.

So it goes on Thursday evenings at Phoenix--A Center for Men, Long Beach’s newest expression of a men’s movement that is making itself felt throughout the country. Among other things, adherents say, the movement is aimed at defining masculinity in a new way.

“Drums have been around for thousands of years,” explained Siavash Tabrizy, program director at the facility, which opened 10 months ago in an office building on Long Beach Boulevard. “They connect you to thousands of years of masculinity and culture. They take you away from your head and allow you to feel.”

In fact, Tabrizy said, one of the center’s missions is to help men do something that does not always come naturally: get in touch with feelings they may have long suppressed.

“Our goal here is to allow men to be free, to grieve over their losses and to feel their pains,” he said. “That’s how they start healing.”

The center grew out of Tabrizy’s experience in dealing with the trauma of having been sexually molested at age 5 by a male relative and, later, from the dissolution of his nine-year marriage. “All of a sudden my childhood memories started coming up,” said Tabrizy, 35. “I realized how shameful I felt about my masculinity, sexuality and pain. I realized that I was afraid of having eye contact with other men.”

As part of his therapy, Tabrizy said, he began chumming around with male friends over pizza and basketball, discovering in the process that it was much easier to talk to them about his problems than to talk to women. Eventually Tabrizy teamed up with Dr. Mohan Nair, a neuropsychiatrist specializing in brain function at Los Altos Hospital and Mental Health Center in Long Beach, and under his direction opened the Phoenix center.

Other mental health professionals also endorse the value of male-to-male psychotherapy. Robert Butterworth, a psychologist with offices in Downey and Los Angeles, said that potential benefits exist for relatively normal men as well as those with serious psychological problems.

“In our society, men tend to not have as many close friends (as women),” Butterworth said. “Relationships between men don’t last as long.”

But recently, he said, men have begun banding together at centers like Phoenix to forge more meaningful relationships in which they can share personal feelings and problems.

“Culturally there’s been a sense that men have been neglected because there’s been so much focus on women,” Butterworth said. “The women’s movement is legitimate; women are saying they’ve been damaged because they haven’t had any power. But now men are saying, yes, but we’ve been damaged by assuming power.

“Because women have changed their roles, it’s time for men to look at their own. What they’re doing is what women did in the 1960s--getting together and saying, ‘Hey, here are our problems and what are we going to do about them?’ ”

According to Tabrizy, many of those problems have to do with the pain of growing up with abusive or emotionally distant fathers; the inability to express, or in some cases even feel, one’s own emotions; confusion over the male role in today’s society, and the dearth of positive role models for men in America.

Many of those themes were explored in a book called “Iron John” published last year by Robert Bly, a poet often credited with spearheading the current men’s movement. Six months ago a Newsweek cover story chronicled the emergence of that movement nationally. And in the past four years, dozens of men’s centers have sprung up throughout the country catering to the psychological and emotional needs of men.

At Phoenix, those needs are met in a variety of ways, according to Tabrizy. Run by a staff of eight counselors, psychologists, family therapists and licensed clinical social workers, the center offers about 20 workshops a week attended by 100 to 150 men. Although some of the groups are free, Tabrizy said, others require fees averaging $20 per session and a commitment of several weeks.

Among the groups offered, Tabrizy said, are workshops dealing with rage, grief, childhood traumas causing addiction, the psychological wounds inflicted by fathers on their sons, massage, hypnotherapy, and relations between grandfathers and grandsons.

One of the more colorful groups is the Thursday night gathering of males interested in exploring the “mythopoetic” aspects of their gender--the way masculinity has been portrayed in traditional mythology and literature. That process involves drums, feathers, animal skins, incense, candles and lots of hugging. The reason for the paraphernalia, according to Eric Dabrowski, the licensed social worker who conducts the group, is to help tap into the collective mythology that has historically defined maleness in many cultures.

“We want to get men in touch with the 3-million-year-old man inside their neurologies,” Dabrowski said, adding that modern technology has robbed them of their heritage. “We’re no longer hunters--today we sit behind computer screens.”

By tapping into what it means to be male, he said, men can rekindle long-lost feelings of security, communion and strength that can then be rechanneled into directions appropriate for the 1990s. “There’s an emerging sense of masculinity,” Dabrowski said. “John Wayne and Rambo are dead; in their place is a masculinity that is spiritual, earthy and connected to the family and community.”

To help bring that about, the group engages in a variety of exercises, including dancing, hugging and making animal sounds. They also share poetry, stories and dreams.

“I dreamed that I was being pulled up the stairs toward the attic,” the man who had been drumming related to the others in the circle. The rest of the dream, he said, was hazy.

For 10 minutes, the group members speculated about what might be in the attic. Their answers varied: old furniture, toys, cobwebs. “I want each of you to think about what you see up there,” Dabrowski instructed.

One man said he identified with the dreamer’s struggle, feeling pulled along with him toward the unknown height. Another said he felt pulled, too, but frightened of what he might find. Then, with great relish, the men moved to the center of the room for a group hug.

“I’ve gotten a lot of male friends out of this,” said Denny Good, 46, a computer programmer from Cerritos who said he joined the group after realizing that his girlfriend’s departure for a weeklong vacation had left him feeling like a “lost child.”

Brian Graham, a 42-year-old mental health worker from Carson, said the group helped fill a void he had felt since age 9 when his father died.

“It’s given me a lot of male validation,” Graham said. “It’s taught me how to relate to men in a healthy way rather than sitting around drinking beer and talking about women.”