Time and time again when I struggled to do the work of love with a male partner who was not changing, I was told to give up on him, to kick him to the curb. I was told I was wasting my time. All this negative feedback made me ponder whether healing places exist where wounded males can go where they will not be turned away, especially when positive

But if as enlightened witnesses we offer the men we love (our fathers, brothers, lovers, friends, comrades) affirmation that they can change as well as assurance that we will accept them when they are changed, transformation will not seem as risky.

Many men use work as the place where they can flee from the self, from emotional awareness, where they can lose themselves and operate from a space of emotional numbness. Unemployment feels so emotionally threatening because it means that there would be time to fill, and most men in patriarchal culture do not want time on their hands.

Both the roots of Will’s pain and also his entitlement to run from it, inflicting it instead, on those he most cares for, lie at the heart of patriarchy—the masculine code into which all boys are inducted.

We live in a culture where it has been accepted and even encouraged that women wholeheartedly stand by men when they are doing the work of destruction. Yet we have yet to create a world that asks us to stand by a man when he is seeking healing, when he is seeking recovery, when he is working to be a creator.

When the doctor finally “unmasks” him, the Hillside Strangler states, “A woman is nothing to me. I can kill her in a minute.” As the trial closes and the white male judge reads his final comments on the case, he tells viewers that the Hillside Strangler was a misogynist, a man who hated women. Yet the judge does not link this misogyny to patriarchy

Only when we courageously face male pain without turning away will we model for men the emotional awareness healing requires.

They argue that working women leave households bereft of homemakers and children without a mother’s care. Yet they consistently ignore the degree to which consumer capitalist culture, not feminism, pushed women into the workforce and keeps them there.

Men seeking help often find it difficult to find support. We ask them to change without creating a culture of change to affirm and assist them.