Return to the Fire: To Remember What We've Long Forgotten

By Jody A Grose

Return To The Fire explores the dynamics that have impacted men’s souls while offering a road map toward healthy masculinity. Shunning the circular reasoning of popular self-help models, this book unpacks the historical, cultural, and psychological underpinnings influencing men’s daily behaviors. Using personal and clinical experiences, myths, and Jungian archetypes, Jody invites inward reflection on one’s experiences and beliefs. Thus welcomed into a space of blessing and inward healing, readers will gain fresh understanding and compassion, thereby bringing hope in transforming how boys are raised and men live in relation to themselves, their relationships, and the planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: May 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9781662947827

Book preview

SEPARATION

1: Cultural and Historical Influences

The first requisite is that men become conscious of the fact that they are grievously wounded.

–James Hollis

When viewing how men are commonly portrayed in movies and television or as athletes or politicians, several negative themes emerge. These portrayals often show men as self-centered, arrogant, abusive, unscrupulous, and emotionally immature perpetrators of objectification through which the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of women has accrued throughout history. Such perceptions of masculinity are commonplace, as all-too-vividly revealed by the #MeToo movement. To understand how we arrived at this place as men and as a culture, we must step back to take a historical view. My purpose here is to provide a larger context for what has led to the dynamics we see today, unpacking the roles and influences that laid fertile ground for negative male behaviors. To be clear, I am not delving into the complexity of all the strands that have influenced male patterning; I am acknowledging some of the fundamental factors impacting today’s men. Further, I am not giving a free pass for the negative behaviors and perceptions regarding men but rather focusing a lens to sharpen our understanding of them. My hope is that we can change the culture whereby men seek and find their internal courage and the external support that opens the possibility of transforming men’s experiences from isolation, shame, competitive mistrust, betrayal, and emotional immaturity toward brotherhood, compassion, trust, support, full expression, and blessings that foster integrity, responsibility, and accountability as the true embodiment of mature masculinity.

Important within this inquiry is making the distinction between behavior that is learned, modeled, and sanctioned by the culture and mature masculinity, which is best understood through the masculine archetypes. Without this distinction, we are left with the current phrase toxic masculinity, which is a conflation of ideas at best and a destructive indictment of men at worst. Archetypal energies offer images and energies rather than a formula of behavior. Men behaving poorly represent mature masculinity only inasmuch as they are expressions of the shadow aspects (see Chapter 2).

According to psychologist Carl Jung, these archetypes are as follows: King, Warrior, Lover, and Magician. Each will be discussed throughout the book. Archetypal energies are patterns of thoughts and feelings forming a mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors and are found cross-culturally regardless of religion. In every man, there is a feminine subpersonality called the Anima, while every woman has a masculine subpersonality called the Animus. Using the archetypes has been very useful in my work with men as they explore where their inner work needs attention. Further, archetypal energies offer images and energies rather than a formula of behavior.

One of the challenges and opportunities we have is to shift from a judging/blaming approach to a compassionate view in pursuit of understanding. From the dawn of time, men have had the distinct roles of provider and protector. Since women were more vulnerable physically, especially during pregnancy, to ensure the survival of the family and the species, men needed to provide and protect. This dual role had a clear benefit for women, as well as significant costs to both women and men, and required at least two attributes. First was the willingness to kill, whether for food or to neutralize threats from rival tribes to resources, land, or kin. This ability to kill, necessary for survival, led men to be detached from feelings and, by extension, their bodies, setting a precedent still hardwired into men today. Since emotions are stored in our bodies, this detachment interferes with men’s ability to access their rich inner lives. Unexpressed feelings hijack our lives. Second, modern medical studies show that the corpus callosum, the pathway between the two brain hemispheres, is significantly larger in women than in men, giving women more access to both sides of the brain. Men have a biological orientation to the left side of the brain, which is responsible for logic, analysis, detail, and fact-oriented, numerical reasoning, while women tend to be more right-brained, making them more creative, free-thinking, intuitive, able to see the big picture, and more in tune with their emotions. This evidence should neither be dismissed nor meant to draw a stark conclusion, yet it is