ABSTRACT
Fred, you made a move in one of your groups this week that I’d like to better understand. It was a move with M, who raised how he feels like a failure all the time. He gets up in the morning and second guesses everything he’s doing: “That’s not good enough,” “I’m going to fail,” and so on. You invited him to work with you in the group by way of supporting you. At one point he said he wasn’t sure how to help the group, and you replied, “I help the group—you help me.” And then someone said that that might make him feel like a sap, because he wouldn’t be saying “his own smart thing.” This referred back to the week before when you had raised with the group people’s resistance (men’s in particular) to being a “sap,” to being giving to people they love in ways that they might perceive as unmanly.
