Mindful Masculinity: 8 Week Boston based Men’s Group- October 10 - December 5, 2023

My colleague Marlo Pedroso and I will be co-leading an 8 week Boston based Men’s group starting this October 2023. Marlo has been running Men’s groups for years, and his work helping men reimagine their masculinities is one of the many reasons I deeply admire his body of work. For more information on this group, please see here or reach out to either of us by email.

From time to time I will be interviewing therapist colleagues with various specializations and backgrounds. The purpose of these interviews is to contribute to public education so that therapy clients are better equipped to find an approach and therapist that suits their unique challenges.

I know Marlo Pedroso as a fellow Massachusetts based Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW) and trauma informed, somatic therapist. Marlo has training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Focusing, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and psychedelic assisted therapy, among other modalities. 

Marlo is an LICSW and licensed to work with anyone in the state of Massachusetts, and you can learn more about him at his website.

Ellis: Marlo, let our audience know a bit about how you became a therapist. Also, what type of psychotherapy do you practice, and which types of clients do you most frequently serve?

Marlo: The simplest answer to how I became a therapist is curiosity and suffering. I'm someone with endless curiosity, always reading and learning, especially in regards to questions of meaning, healing and relationship. I'm an empath and feel things deeply. I'm drawn in by depth, rather than surfaces. 

I have also struggled with my own mental health challenges and childhood trauma. This has led me on a lifelong process of healing. Along the way I've amassed an ecology of practices, frameworks and wisdom that comes from doing my own "work". In part because of this, something in me has always felt attentive to and called to alleviate suffering and oppression. Being a therapist turned out to be a good way to use my gifts and experiences in a way that I believe is of benefit to others. 

I think about what kind of psychotherapy I practice in different ways. 

On one level there are the technical and philosophical frameworks that inform my work. While my influences are numerous, here are some of the most prominent. 

Firstly, I am profoundly influenced by the elegance, practicality and universality of Buddhist psychology. I love Richard Schwartz's map of the internal system (internal family systems, or IFS), and it has been a huge aid in understanding the complex and multi-faceted nature of the personality. Lastly, my mentors Sharon Bauer and Joan Klagsburn have given me the gift of Somatic Focusing as a means of accessing the wisdom of the body and a way to release its trauma.

On a spiritual level, I believe my primary task is bringing my full presence and compassion to bear witness to a person's suffering, and to reflect back the reality that they are fundamentally whole, beautiful and sacred. This goes beyond any technique or modality. In fact, in my experience, when I've over-relied on technique it usually falls flat. 

Most of the people I work with have experienced some kind of trauma or attachment wounds. There's a spectrum of intensity, with some of the trauma being related to social, ecological and economic conditions. I also work with many men, LGBTQ+ people, and individuals invested in building a different type of world. 

E: At some point in your therapist career, you started getting extensive training in what I would describe as experiential modalities - Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Somatic Focusing. What led you to these ways of working? Why are these approaches important to you?

M: All of my experience has shown me that insight and cognitive understanding is not enough to heal, especially with trauma and attachment wounds. I believe only direct experience of something new can change us. But in order to experience something new, we must integrate and discharge painful feelings - such as grief and rage - in a space that is compassionate and loving. 

Mindfulness lays the foundation for being aware of our thoughts, emotions and sensory experiences with greater equanimity and without causing more harm. Without self-awareness no change is possible, but it must be non-judgemental awareness to be helpful. I know of no greater set of technologies than those found in Buddhism for this loving witness.

I've found, however, that mindfulness approaches don't always offer much in terms of what to do with the traumatic material that can arise in this process. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, and Somatic Focusing are trauma-informed approaches that give me and my clients ways to work with and meet painful material. These approaches facilitate and support access to undigested pain and trauma directly, compassionately, and experientially without flooding and re-traumatizing the client. In my experience this is where profound and lasting transformation occurs. 

E: When did you first start doing specific Men’s work, and what inspired you to begin serving this specific population?

M: Once again this is a case of wanting to pass along something I've benefited from. At some point in my healing journey I recognized I had a distorted and painful relationship to masculinity. This limited my ability to connect to the men in my life with the kind of intimacy I wanted. It also got in the way of me appreciating my masculine qualities. My experiences in men's groups fundamentally transformed this for me.  

I end up working with a lot of men. As has been well documented, there is an epidemic of loneliness that is particularly intense for men. I see this in a lot of men I work with. They suffer in isolation, afraid to share their struggles for fear they will be shamed, which sadly happens to many men when they open up, particularly with other men. 

I decided to start a men's circle to provide a space where men could practice sharing openly and bearing witness to each other's pain. Men caring for men. In many ways this is a radical notion. Emotional caretaking is often feminized and devalued in our patriarchal culture. I think compassion comes naturally to all humans, but it gets beat out of men metaphorically and literally.

I find this work is deeply moving and I hope that it contributes to shifting some men away from violence and isolation, towards solidarity and mutual aid. 

E: When we co-lead this Men’s Group together, what do you hope the participants will be able to take away at the end of the 12 weeks?

M: I hope they will feel less alone and less shame about their struggles. I hope they will see and appreciate that there are many ways to express masculinity.

I also hope they come out of it with a respect for the gifts and sacredness of masculinity. Men and masculinity have been maligned, understandably, for the harm we've caused. I believe harmful behavior must be interrupted, but I don't think the problem is men or masculinity. I think it's the lack of mentorship, rites of passage, and outlets for the expression of the gifts of masculinity in modern society. Given that our culture has largely abandoned these practices, the best we can do is try to offer these to one another and to the next generation.