COMMUNITY4RCE

My passion for wanting to help men, boys, and mums raising boys, MEN2BE, comes from my own difficult life experiences, especially during my school years. On the outside, I appeared confident, popular, able to look after myself, even academically able. However, inwardly, I was haunted by fear, doubt, a sense of isolation, and crushing shame. Those years were agony and far from easy. 

What made these feelings worse was the belief that I was the only one, perhaps in the whole world, who felt this way. I wanted to talk to someone about what was going on inside me, but I guess I was too scared to take off the mask, unless it was the right person, at the right time, in the right place, and on my terms. It never happened. As a result, the scars of those internal conflicts remained hidden and buried within me. 

After my school years, and after finding purpose through my faith, I began working with young people who exhibited challenging behavior. I came to believe that, like me, their behavior was often a mask, an armored shell that says to those on the outside “stay away,” but underneath means “I’m fragile, afraid, and vulnerable, and therefore hiding. Please find me.” 

I spent 10 years working with and supporting young people from many different backgrounds, including those at risk of exclusion, young offenders, disengaged young people, and those often considered difficult. I designed and led programmes and projects such as the Exploration and Time Out Project, Summer Activities for Young People, Strengthening Families, and The Prince’s Trust Volunteers Programme, including The Prince’s Trust European Challenge Programme. I also spent two years working in a local high school that had recently been placed in special measures. I worked with year 10 and 11 students who had been left behind after a number of young people had been moved into alternative provision, having been labelled as unmanageable. 

As my journey continued, two work colleagues and I started a company which, due to its success, developed into an alternative provision school. I soon learned that working directly with young people and running a school for young people are miles apart. Therefore in a bid to to deepen my understanding, I changed direction and trained in therapeutic practice for three years. It was during this time that I discovered “THE ME” behind the mask I wore. The intense self-reflection encouraged through my studies helped me uncover parts of my childhood that shaped me as a boy, and were still shaping me as a man and father. 

That sense of fear, isolation, and shame shaped in part by an absent father from the age of 2, and an overwhelmed single parent mother of 8 children who did her best, began to make sense of my behaviour, my thinking, and some of the poor choices I had made and were still making in life. 

Today, with more than 30 years experience, I not only work with young men, including those with additional needs such as autism, OCD, anxiety, and social and emotional difficulties, I also support their mothers. Sometimes it is as simple as helping them build an understanding of where their son ends and they, as individuals, begin. Oftentimes, mums have lost themselves in the almighty task of raising a boy into a man, a “MEN2BE,” single-handedly. 

As they support their sons, they can become so focused on what their son needs that their own needs and sense of self get lost along the way. Part of my role is to help mums understand their sons, while also helping them reconnect with themselves, to recognise that supporting a boy as he becomes a man doesn’t mean losing who they are in the process. 

There are also a lot of men out there who, like me, still have a wounded child inside. Men who have tried many ways to silence the inner child’s call for help, to be seen without any judgment. I want to help them too. I believe behavior communicates something underneath, so my approach is to create a safe, non-judgmental space… to Reach and Relate to that buried part and, once discovered, Challenge and Empower it. 

I believe this can be achieved through Men listening to other Men, Men learning to listen to themselves, and Men listening to and supporting young MEN2BE, alongside the Mums doing their best to support them. 

If we want to help the next generation of men, we have to be willing and prepared to look honestly at ourselves first. 

Sometimes just being willing to take off the mask is that beginning.