Dr. William Keepin is a mathematical physicist, author, and co-founder of Gender Equity and Reconciliation International (GERI). His book, Gender Equity and Reconciliation: Thirty Years of Healing the Most Ancient Wound in the Human Family, co-authored with Cynthia Brix, describes the origins of GERI and the process it’s developed and uses throughout the world in which men and women meet to share their truth and throw off the shackles of gender conditioning and oppression.
In this Revealing Men podcast, Keepin and host, psychotherapist Randy Flood, Director and co-founder of the Men’s Resource Center of West Michigan discuss Keepin’s work, the evolution and process of GERI, and their common goal of facilitating communication and healing across the artificial barriers of gender. Keepin says, “the basic recognition [is] that both women and men are afflicted by gender injustice and each needs the other for a true and complete healing.”
Excerpts of Keepin and Flood’s conversation follow. Listen to the entire Revealing Men podcast on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
A New Gender Dynamic
Although the women’s movement can be tracked to the 20s (fighting for the right to vote), Keepin notes that it gained speed in the 60s. And then, with the men’s movement in the late 70s and 80s, the two groups developed in parallel, not necessarily listening to one another. “At some point,” Keepin says, there was a recognition that “these two communities need to come together and work together to really transform the relations between men and women.”
He explains, “The essence of what we do is we bring people together for a level of deep truth-telling that doesn’t normally happen out in the society. We go into the challenges and pain together. And through that, we go through a kind of collective transformation — collective alchemy—the idea being that we go into the challenges and injustices together. And then we come through it to another whole kind of reconciliation; a glimpsing of a new possibility for men and women to live together in a whole new gender dynamic.”
This vision is one Flood sees intersecting with the work he and his peers do with men at the Men’s Resource Center. “We are trying to help them [men] heal from some of the toxic aspects of male socialization and how it can be injurious to their full humanity.” He admires that Keepin’s work expands on that by “participating in and creating healing not only for men but for women.”
Identifying Gender Oppression
Flood mentions that the idea of mixed groups—men and women—working together might seem counter-intuitive. Some people ask “How can you heal the injuries of patriarchy and all the things that have happened and the pains that have been inflicted upon women or maybe vice versa? How can you do that, putting them together in the same room?” To which Keepin responds, “Well, it became necessary.” He goes on to share the impetus for GERI’s founding:
“I was working in essentially what I call the mainstream environmental movement at that time. This was largely a group of scientists and lawyers; scientists who were studying the effects. I was a scientist. And lawyers who were looking at the laws and trying to enforce environmental laws on violating corporations and other organizations. (The awareness of climate change was just emerging at that time, especially in the mid- to late- 80s and 90s.) So, in the context of that, within the environmental movement, there were some #MeToo violations taking place. We didn’t have that language then, but there were certain classic sexual harassment dynamics that were happening. And they were totally taboo to talk about, which is the norm. And so, we had this kind of contradiction: Here we were trying to heal and transform our relationship with the natural ecology of the earth, but we had this toxic crisis in the human ecology of the organization that couldn’t be talked about. So a group of us came together to address this issue.”
Keepin explains that he had done work with Stanislav Grof, an early psychedelic pioneer, and other clinical psychologists. Through this experience he says, “I saw the profound shattering experience of sexual violence and sexual trauma in particular as well as gender oppression.” Seeing the signs and symptoms of these issues manifest in their environmental network, Keepin and his peers created “a forum for the truth to be spoken.”
The GERI Movement Grows
An idea for internal, private workshops took hold. Colleagues gathered and experimented with different techniques for working on issues with men and women together. “We could afford to be experimental,” Keepin says, “because we were sticking to a group of colleagues who more or less knew each other.”
The group was inspired by the work being done in post-apartheid South Africa; particularly the truth and reconciliation process. “We were convening forums for deep and painful truth to come out from both the women’s side and the men’s side,” Keepin says. “We realized we needed a truth and reconciliation process for gender as well as for race.”
“You say that the harmful social constructions of gender can only be undone through deep reflection on intimate experiences,” Flood says. “How did you evolve and move to it [GERI] being more intimate, more experiential, more relational, less didactic over time? Or did you start there knowing it had to be deep and intimate?”
“Well, because of the way we started, we started with deep and intimate and a little wildly unbridled!” Keepin responds. “We didn’t really have a theory of how we were going to proceed. We had an awareness of a need to be addressed and we were addressing a challenge within our professional network…We sort of started right in the middle of experiential depth and a raw energy. Our challenge was how to guide that and skillfully put that train on some rails of some kind that would help it go into a skillful direction…. we were sort of dropped into the deep end by virtue of the way that we began.”
A Deep Yearning in Men
In order to move in a “skillful direction,” the group delved further into research. Bishop Tutu’s principles of truth and reconciliation proved helpful. As did a better understanding of the women’s movement and the men’s movement; “the history and the beauty of what was happening,” Keepin says.
“What we have discovered,” he says, “is that the vast majority of men that have come to our work (many thousands over the years), are deeply yearning for a different way of relating to the feminine, both within themselves and with women in society, and they don’t know how to do it. …The majority realize that they are sort of participating in some system that they didn’t ask for, and that it is also hurting them. …And so, they are yearning for something different, but they don’t even know where to start and they’ve had no modeling. [They] are actually hungry and thirsty for a different gender dynamic. That, to me, has been very, very inspiring. “
“I discover that in our [men’s] groups, too,” Flood notes. He paraphrases the late bell hooks who stated that “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”
“We call it ‘the feminine,’ Flood says, “and then it gets associated with the gender binary. We concretize it into ‘I’m acting like a woman and that’s a sign of weakness.’ Somehow, you have to introduce a revision for men that this is their humanity. Reconnecting to our hearts, reconnecting to our humanity, being full, full human beings. That’s the work that we do in trying to bust out of this gender binary that we’ve been stuck in.”
Seeing Gender Oppression in Men and Women
GERI workshops feature an exercise called “Silent Witnessing.” The exercise is conducted in different ways, with different questions, depending on the type of group and gender composition taking part. In one format, men and women are seated facing each other on separate sides of a room. They are close enough to see each other clearly. A series of questions is asked to one group and then to the other. The idea is to see how many questions both groups stand up for.
Keepin offers this example: “When we ask questions about abuse, … physical abuse, sexual abuse, childhood abuse, these kinds of issues … very often as many men stand for these questions as women. That’s very surprising. When we ask questions about being afraid to speak to the other gender—speak your truth—for fear of reaction either from the other gender or from other members of your own gender group, men stand for that as much as women do.” He says that everyone expects women will stand for these questions. But it’s not expected when men do. “Women,” he says, “don’t realize how much men are self-suppressing to try to fit within the norm.”
“One thing we have found in every culture we’ve worked in for over 30-plus years, everywhere we work,” Keepin says, “women typically have the view going into the work that [they] are the ones who are suffering. ‘We are the women. We’re the oppressed ones. Men have all the advantages. They’re doing okay. We’re very grateful the men are coming here to learn about our problems.’ That’s how they see it going in.”
He continues, “And everywhere we’ve worked, women are astounded to learn how much men are suffering in all this. They did not know that.”
Male Liberation from Gender Conditioning
“It’s like men are socialized to suck it up and to not talk about it,” says Flood, tipping his hat to Terry Real. “If you talk about it, the pain that you endured, then somehow, you’re being sensitive. You’re being weak. You’re complaining. Buck up and soldier on!
Flood continues, “I always think the extent of the pain that men inflict on others often is the extent of the pain that they carry. It’s not always proportionate, but oftentimes if you can give men a forum to talk about their pain, they’re less likely to externalize it and pass it on to others.”
Because men don’t often have a safe space to talk about these things, Keepin thinks they internalize so much that they aren’t aware of their own suffering. He says, “I think many men often think, ‘well, I’m kind of weird because I don’t really fit in and I’m suffering internally. But these other guys seem to be fine, so I guess I’m the problem.’ And so one thing men discover in men’s work is, ‘No, We’re all suffering in similar ways.’ That is profoundly liberating in itself.”
Acknowledging Each One’s Pain
Keepin shares a story from an advanced program in South Africa about a woman who had been brutally raped and was soon going to face her attacker in court. She came to the GERI program to process her experience. She told her story from the viewpoint of a witness. Keepin describes the response, “When she finished, there was pin-drop silence in the room. I guarantee you none of the men in that room had ever heard a story like that and very few of the women had heard another woman speak at that level of authenticity.”
The first person to speak up was a young man in his 20s. “I don’t know how to be a man anymore. I feel traumatized.” He had truly listened and taken some of the woman’s pain onto himself. Keepin notes that part of male socialization is to not know, care about, or even be aware of how women are impacted by a man’s ways of being. This man cared. And that was a gift to the woman.
“When we experience the pain of the other as our own pain,” Keepin says, “then that transforms us both and creates a bridge across our hearts in which we have a new level of intimate connection. … And that bonds us at an emotional level and opens us up to a transformation in each of us.”
Flood brings up a story from Keepin’s book about a Vietnam veteran who has the courage to talk about an atrocity he committed as a 19-year-old during that war. For years he carried grief and trauma for what he had done. When he finished telling his story, an Asian woman (not Vietnamese) walked over to him, held and comforted him. Keepin recalls, “For her to do that for this man … he was just sobbing. And so incredibly released afterward, as we all were.”
“And this one thing that our work has taught me,” Keepin says, “is the capacity of human beings to heal these deep, deep wounds, if we can but simply create the right context, have the skillful support, and move in and through these challenges together.”
The Evolution of Men’s Work
“Men discover in our work what it’s like to walk through the world as women,” Keepin says, “and, they realize ‘I want to create a different world. This is not okay with me that it’s this way. The greatest male privilege is not any of the social advantages that are afforded to men in this gender injustice system. The greatest male privilege is to actually deconstruct that system and create a new system of gender equality across these different categories.”
Flood references the mythopoetic movement of Robert Bly; how it brought men together to talk about men’s issues. “The criticism,” he says,” was they were in a space to talk about their own pain, but they weren’t, at that point, yet talking about the pain they were passing on to the women; they weren’t doing that other work.” The GERI movement, he says, “evolved that and provided a space for what Robert Bly was trying to do with the men, which is important work. And then to bridge that into working with the women and the pain that they passed on. Being able to have the capacity to hear their pain and take that in. That’s the beauty of your work.”
Empathy is the Enemy of Violence
The work that’s being done to break down gender barriers and open communication, notes Flood, has a wide-reaching impact. He cites studies that show that the best metric to assess a nation’s level of peacefulness is its level of violence against women. “When you have less violence toward women,” he says, “I think that says something about the consciousness of the men in that country. The enemy of violence is empathy and connection to our own hearts. If there’s less violence toward women, there’s something going on in that culture. It’s a metric of health, I would imagine.”
Keepin talks about his experience. “What we’ve learned in our work is that much of the conflict that takes place between men and women in the home is them trying to heal the larger cultural and social gender dynamic as it plays out in their particular relationship … One of the principles of our work is that we need to heal this at the level where it emerged, which is in communities and groups, in the culture, and in society. That’s why it’s so important to bring groups of women and men together.”
That, he says, brings clarity and resolve to change. “And then what happens is we realize that we have all been betrayed by this system. And we’re all basically sitting with the shackles of gender oppression … we see that across the gender divide, we see it within the gender categories and across the gender categories … After a few days of it, we all come to realize, my God, we’ve all been betrayed in different ways and it’s by a system that none of us want.!”
Eliminating Gender Conditioning and Oppression
There are ongoing academic research projects to determine the effectiveness of the programs and vision GERI offers. “One of the things the researchers concluded (that was music to my ears),” says Keepin, “was that these kinds of transformative programs should be mandatory for all students entering the university environment!”
“I’m not saying it would solve everything,” he continues, “but it would increase their awareness. It would help them take more responsibility in their social interactions and engagements with one another.”
As the conversation ends, Flood and Keepin highlight the spiritual and sacred aspects of the work they do. Flood highlights a quote from Keepin’s book that describes how, as people share their truth with one another, each person’s heart is pierced by the truths of every person in the group. “In the group therapy I do with men, I see this happening in the room. I call it a sacred space when I’m doing this group work.” Keepin refers to it as an “invisible network of light linking our hearts.” “God. Or the Holy Spirit. Something,” says Flood. “This is a spiritual moment when these transformations happen.”
“We realize that each one of us is this living soul in a human body,” Keepin says. “What a blessing when we can tell these stories that link up our hearts in that way and enable us to see that deeper truth of our shared humanity across the differences.”
One Last Thing – The Deepest Truth
Keepin says he’s often asked why, as a mathematical physicist, he’s immersed himself in issues of gender oppression and conditioning. His response is “Science is a quest for truth. The deepest truth is love.”
“To me, this is working on systematically developing an effective practice of love and a science of love,” he says. To which Flood responds, “The science of love. Let’s keep at it!”
For more information about GERI and William Keepin’s work, visit GERI’s website. If you want to participate in in-person or online men’s groups at the Men’s Resource Center or access our counseling, coaching, and consultative services, contact us online or call us at (616) 456-1178. Also, feel free to contact us if you have questions about this segment, ideas for a topic, or would like to be a guest on the Revealing Men podcast.
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