Mud, Sweat and Tears: Welcome to 'Wilderness Therapy'
Well, this is uncomfortable. My palms are sweating, my heart is pounding. Why did I think this was a good idea? I could be at home right now with my girlfriend and my dog, having a beer and watching Netflix. But no. Instead, I’m staring directly into the eyes of a small man with a big, red beard. Andrew – he said his name was Andrew.
I shift my posture. Andrew shifts his, too. Finally, he takes a deep breath and speaks: “If you really knew me, you’d know that I smoke too much weed and use it as a coping mechanism.” He lowers his gaze, embarrassed. When he looks up again, we lock eyes. Now, it’s my turn.
“If you really knew me,” I tell him, “you’d know that I sometimes drink too much alcohol, and it worries me.” My words surprise me. I have never uttered them out loud before. I instantly feel lighter. Andrew smiles, relieved not to be alone in his confession. “Thanks,” he says.
We’re standing in a clearing in Big Sky, Montana. It’s nearing sunset and the clouds are turning purple. From where we are, you can turn 360 degrees and see for miles in every direction. The tall grass gives way to dense pine trees, which in turn yield to snow-capped mountains.
We’re accompanied by 16 other men, paired off just as Andrew and I are. Behind us is a log cabin that will be our home for the next two nights. After that, we’ll trek into the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park, where we’ll walk and sleep among the bears, mosquitoes and stars. We all met for the first time an hour ago.
“Nice work, guys,” says Dan Doty, our group leader. “Get to the edge of your comfort zone, and then go a little past it.”
Dan, the co-founder of Evryman, is 36 years old, bearded and muscular. Give him a cardigan and he could pass for an outdoorsy version of the Dude from The Big Lebowski. The men who have gathered here come from various backgrounds: a woodworker from Seattle, a recently fired hedge fund manager from Manhattan, a medical cannabis grower from Arizona. At least four of them are ex-military. Despite our differences, we’ve all parted with about £2,600 for the same reason: to connect with nature, ourselves and each other.
“Switch,” says Dan.
My next partner is Aaron, who has close-cropped hair and tattooed arms. I will later learn that he spent 14 years in the army, seven of those in remote outposts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I will learn about his parachute accident and his post-traumatic stress disorder. And I will learn how he went from being a weapons and tactics sergeant to working as Evryman’s operations manager. Right now, however, he is just another member of the group.
“Get closer,” Dan instructs. “Reach out and put your right hand on the shoulder
of the man in front of you.”
We do. His eyes well up with tears, and I am suddenly so overwhelmed with emotion that my eyes start to water, too. He just looks so… hurt.
“Finish this sentence,” Dan says. “‘The thing I’m most grateful for is…’”
Aaron and I stare into each other’s eyes. Ten seconds go by. Twenty seconds. The boundaries of my body start to dissolve. I have the feeling of looking into a mirror.
“I’m grateful for my wife and my son,” Aaron says, finally. “And I’m grateful I found this group.”
Times of Trouble
“Men are hurting,” says Dan. We’re sitting in a coffee shop in Bozeman, Montana. It’s two weeks before the retreat, and I’m here to ask if I can come along. “Suicide rates are climbing,” he continues. “The #MeToo movement, sexual abuse… Men are hurting themselves and others. But they are not getting the help they need.”
In Dan’s view, there are two main causes for the pain men are feeling: the repression of their emotions and a lack of deep connections. He knows this because he has seen it in boys. When he was in his twenties, Dan was a wilderness guide who led troubled kids on expeditions – the kind of boys who hurt themselves and each other. The kind of boys who are on a direct path to prison, or worse. But slowly, while sitting around the fire, Dan showed these boys how to open up. And he did this by going first. He talked about being scared.
“It starts a chain reaction,” Dan says. “When one person opens up, it gives everyone else in the space permission to do the same.”
Dan went to his first men’s group in 2009. “It fucking blew my mind,” he says. There’s no strict definition of a men’s group but, in essence, it’s guys sitting around in a circle, talking to each other about their lives: the good, the bad and the in between. “Some guy at a dinner party invited me to his group, the Brotherhood NYC. So, I went. At that point in my life, I was feeling lost, but after that very first group, I knew I needed to keep coming.”
After leaving his job as a wilderness guide in 2010, Dan became a producer and director of the Netflix hunting show MeatEater. Eventually, his passion for men’s work eclipsed his day job. When his son was born in 2016, it inspired Dan to act. “I want my son to grow up
in a world where he can be himself,” he says. Five months later, he started Evryman with his friends Sascha Lewis, Lucas Krump and Owen Marcus.
Evryman’s first retreat took place in December 2016 in Massachusetts. Twenty-five men attended. Since then, nearly 1,000 participants have joined Evryman groups or participated in its retreats. Evryman wants to “get a million men in men’s groups all over the world”, Dan says. The organisation supplies men with the tools and the structure they need to start their own group, wherever they may be.
Whether men want those tools is another matter. Getting them together to talk about their feelings can be a hard sell, especially if they have to shell out a couple of grand for the privilege.
“Some men resist the idea of talking about their feelings, and they will avoid it at all costs,” says Dr Edward Adams, who is the president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities. In the 1960s and 1970s, male baby boomers started to grapple with their repressed emotions, just as the women’s liberation movement was picking up. To support women – and themselves – men needed to do a new kind of work that had nothing to do with physical labour.
And so began half a century of trying to define masculinity, involving everything from drum circles and sweat lodges to “character stories” built around Jungian archetypes. It’s not a new topic, but it has a new urgency.
Adams believes that men are currently at a “danger point”. “Without connection to each other, men tend to lose their sense of identity, and their sense of compassion for themselves and others,” he says. “But some guys think this kind of work sounds too soft and not manly.”
I can relate. I’m luckier than most: I’ve had a best friend, Jason, for more than 20 years; my dad hugged me and told me he loved me; I have a long-term partner of 10 years, a wonderful, intelligent woman. Staring into the eyes of another man while blubbering like a baby is, frankly, right at the bottom of my to-do list. If I’m honest with myself, though, I crave more connection in my life. I can be self-centred. I can get wrapped up in appearances and become overbearing, talking over people. I’m not proud of it. Maybe I do need to connect with other men more often. But will doing it with strangers help?
We stand. Dan gives me a hug and starts to walk out of the door, phone in hand.
“Wait,” I say. “What about the article? Can I join the retreat and write about it?”
He looks at me. “Yes,” he says. “But you can’t just be a fly on the wall. You have to jump into the shit with the rest of us.”
Truth and Daring
Eight of us sit in a circle, shaded from the mid-morning sun under the roof of the porch. It’s day two, and this is our “small group”. There’s Chris, an antiques dealer; Bob, an IT guy; Foster, a leadership coach for Fortune 500 companies; Kris, a former talent agent who is going back to school for his MBA; Craig, a former police officer who now instals sensory-deprivation tanks; and another Chris, who works at a food co-op. We’re also joined by Blayne Doty, Dan’s dad. Each man gets 30 minutes to be the focus of the group.
Craig kicks things off. “You don’t know my story, so I just want to share that quickly. At the expedition last year, we sat in a bigger circle with everyone. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but when it came time for me to talk, I just fucking … exploded.”
Craig tells us about his life leading up to last year. He had an emotionally distant father. Craig cheated multiple times on his first wife. He tells us about the terrible things he saw as a cop on patrol in Utah, “shit you can’t unsee”.
“During last year’s retreat, the level of rage I felt was unlike anything I’d ever felt in my entire life,” he says. “I was shaking. I had no idea this shit was in me this deep.”
After the yelling and the crying and the purging had stopped, Dan had instructed Craig to stand up and walk around the circle. “He wanted me to look each man in the eye, so I could see the support surrounding me.” But Craig could barely meet their gaze.
“I was so ashamed,” he says. “But I locked eyes with a guy across from me, and the love pouring out of that man changed everything. It gave me permission to forgive myself.”
Just like that, Craig’s story starts the chain reaction that Dan talked about. Foster talks about his son, how he lost him for eight years to a methamphetamine addiction before he got clean: “He taught me about what I can control and what I can’t.”
Chris, the antiques dealer, talks about his father and his daughter: “My dad taught me that crying was for little girls. I was taught never to show emotions. Now, I get inspiration from my four-year-old daughter. She has so much passion and fire. I see my younger self in her.”
I open up about what it was like to grow up poor. I talk about how I barely graduated from high school, and how that made me try so hard to be successful. “I always feel like I have to perform,” I say. “I feel like I have to do whatever I can to impress you. I want to know what it feels like to stop trying so hard.”
After I finish, Bob looks at me. “Nate, you don’t have to say or do anything to fucking impress us,” he says. “We all accept you as you are.” It’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
Once More with Feeling
In the woods, there are burned trees next to new ones. There are distant mountains. Patches of snow. Bear tracks. One day, I count 37 mosquito bites on my arms and back. Conversations are overheard, joined, then abandoned.
“The best porn is when the girl actually gets off and has a crazy orgasm, right?”
“Shitting in the woods is complicated. You’ve got to plan your shits out here…”
What do you expect? We’re men. But the chit-chat about sex and shitting is tempered with real talk. We ask questions. We learn about each other. Every evening, we sit around the fire and watch the flames lick the wood. We sleep under the stars, talking conspiratorially, like kids at a sleepover. Every morning, we pack up camp, eat breakfast and start walking.
It’s day four of the retreat and Andrew is sitting on a log, crying. I walk over to him and put my hand on his shoulder. We sit together.
“I’m not ready to be a father,” he says, between sharp intakes of breath. Andrew tells me that he and his wife are adopting her sister’s kids. Their father died and their mother is not in a position to take care of them. They need a family. They need a dad.
“I’m so scared that I’m going to fuck them up,” he says. He is crying so hard that he’s shaking. The physicality of it all surprises him. “What’s happening?” he says. “I need to lie down.”
I help him to the ground. A few other guys come over. Dan bends down and puts his hand on Andrew’s chest. He speaks in a quiet but firm voice. “You’ve been holding this shit in for so long, Andrew. Let yourself feel it. We’re right here.” We sit there and let Andrew cry. I’m taken aback by the intensity of the experience.
After a few moments, Andrew starts to get his bearings. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you.” His crying turns to soft laughter. “Holy shit,” he says under his breath. “Holy shit.”
Later, on the trail, I catch up with Dan to ask him what happened. “Andrew’s been wound so tight but being out here in nature with us opened him up,” he says. “He has likely never allowed himself to feel that deeply.”
I look behind us. Andrew is walking up the trail, smiling and looking off into the distance. He looks like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
Starting Over
The day I get home, my girlfriend of 10 years breaks up with me. I barely have time to put down my backpack. I honestly did not see this coming.
We sit on the couch and talk for three hours. She tells me that, for the past year, she has felt like she’s had one foot in and one foot out of our relationship. I tell her how much I respect her, and that I support her completely. It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. Then, she’s out of the door to stay with a friend for the night. She will later tell me that this conversation was the most open and connected she has ever felt with me. She’ll tell me that a wall came down, that there was no ego.
A couple of hours later, I get a text from Charlie, one of the guys from the Evryman retreat. He tells me he’s taking an extra week off before he heads back home. He’s going to drive through my town and wants to know if I want to hang out.
I tell him what happened, and he responds immediately: “I’m sorry, man. Take care of yourself for the night. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
I turn off my phone, sit on the couch and do what Dan taught me: I check in with myself. I close my eyes and breathe deeply. I allow myself to feel my emotions fully. I allow life to move through me.
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