Other Helpful Websites
Rod Boothroyd’s website with details of workshops for men, and one to one counselling for men and women.
Marianne Hill’s website with details of workshops for men and women, and one to one work.
Marianne’s blog – with hundreds of fascinating articles for men and women a whole range of subjects, including Healing The Shadow, the archetypes, emotional wounding, and how to become a mature adult.
Suggested Reading
How to Be An Adult: A Handbook on Psychological And Spiritual Integration by David Richo
This is a super little book whose title could easily be “How to Be The Sovereign In Your Own Life”. He explains the characteristics of emotional maturity and suggests easy and simple ways to grow beyond the shadows which currently control your behaviour and way of being in the world.
Warrior, Magician, Lover, King: A Guide To The Male Archetypes Updated For The 21st Century by Rod Boothroyd
In this contribution to the men’s movement, Rod Boothroyd explains the archetypes, the concept of the human shadow, and how maturity comes from healing emotional wounds with shadow work.
Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert A Johnson
An exploration of the dark or hidden aspect of the persona – what it is, how it originates, how it is formed, and how shadow work can be used to bring wholeness to the personality.
Robert Bly A Little Book on the Human Shadow
Bly explains how we are born with ‘360-degree radiance’. Our spirits shine in all directions, good, bad, indifferent. Over the first 20 years or so of our lives we learn to stuff the ‘bad’ parts into a bag so that we become well behaved, more polite, and able to manage our anger etc. We also stuff other things in there too, like our ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ sides, our confidence, our greatness and our anger and sadness.
And to explain why these parts are missing, we learn to say things like ‘oh, I’m not really a creative-type person’. Eventually we begin to miss parts of ourselves. Then we begin to lose energy holding on to unreal masks, dragging our shadow bags behind us and emotionally struggling to deal with the changes we feel. At this point we have a choice, we can either reintegrate our shadows within our psyche by means of shadow work, or we can devote increasing amounts of energy to our rigidity, becoming more controlling towards, and intolerant of, others.
Iron John by Robert Bly
Robert Bly suggests how the images of adult manhood given by popular culture are worn out, and that a man can no longer depend on them. Iron John searches for a new vision of what a man is or could be, drawing on psychology, anthropology, mythology, folklore and legend.
Robert Bly looks at the importance of the Wild Man (reminiscent of the Wild Woman in Women Who Run With the Wolves), who he compares to a Zen priest, a shaman or a woodman.
The Drama Of Being A Child: The Search For The True Self by Alice Miller
The author examines the consequences of repression at personal and social levels, the causes of the physical and psychological harm done to children and how this can be prevented, and the new methods at our disposal for dealing with the consequences of infant traumas.
The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects Of Cruel Parenting by Alice Miller
An examination of childhood trauma and its surreptitious, debilitating effects by one of the world’s leading psychoanalysts. Explores the long-range effects of childhood abuse on the body. Miller shows how a child’s humiliation, impotence, and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness. The enlightened guidance of Alice Miller can help you confront the overt and covert traumas of your childhood.
Shadow Of The Stone Heart: Search For Manhood by Richard Olivier
The day that Richard Olivier’s father, actor Laurence Olivier, died marked a crisis point in Richard Olivier’s life. Unable to grieve, he was bewildered by his alienation from the sympathy and support of family and friends. But gradually his involvement with the British Men’s Movement helped him adjust from that isolation to a fuller expression of his grief, the beginning of a process of self-exploration that has changed his life.
This book is both a memoir of Olivier’s often complex relationship with his father and an accessible account of the Men’s Movement. In it, Richard Olivier demystifies that movement, explaining what has often been seen as the confusing approach of its American founders in a way that should appeal to newcomers and sceptics alike.
Coming Home: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child by John Bradshaw
John Bradshaw explains his revolutionary techniques to reveal the inner child. He believes that the wounds we receive during childhood and adolescence can continue to contaminate our adult lives. His methods, explained clearly in this book, help people to reach back to the child inside and heal those wounds.
‘Three things are striking about inner child work,’ says John Bradshaw. ‘The speed with which people change, the depth of that change, and the power and creativity that can result when the wounds from the past are healed.’
Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man by Sam Keen
This book is for men who have experienced their emptiness, loneliness, and longing for connection, but whose ways of dealing with these issues are limited by old ways of being and beliefs which could change if exposed to new information.
Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine Identity by Guy Corneau
An experience of the fragility of conventional images of masculinity is something many modern men share. Psychoanalyst Guy Corneau traces this experience to an even deeper feeling men have of their fathers’ silence or absence – sometimes literal, but especially emotional and spiritual. Why is this feeling so profound in the lives of the postwar ‘baby boom’ generation-men who are now approaching middle age?
Because, he says, this generation marks a critical phase in the loss of the masculine initiation rituals that in the past ensured a boy’s passage into manhood. In his engaging examination of the many different ways this missing link manifests in men’s lives, Corneau shows that, for men today, regaining the essential ‘second birth’ into manhood lies in gaining the ability to be a father to themselves – not only as a means of healing psychological pain, but as a necessary step in the process of becoming whole.
Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being by Philip Shepherd
Radical Wholeness documents the devastation inflicted by lack of mind-body integration on our personal lives and the planet. But the book is also a practical guide for initiating a personal revolution. By finding your way out of the head and reuniting with your body’s intelligence, you can ground yourself in a wholeness of being that feels and supports the harmonies not just of your life, but of our wakeful world.
The Success Principles – 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield
Canfield is the co-creator of the bestselling Chicken Soup for the Soul series. He now describes principles which might allow anyone get from where they are to where they want to be. The Success Principles is about greater confidence, greater power, finding your passion and living with purpose.
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men Edited by Robert Bly
Men and the Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of Men by Michael Meade
Through myths and ancient stories, Meade takes readers through the stages in a man’s life. The initiatory events as detailed in the stories allow for a re-examination of childhood issues from a different perspective. Meade’s writing is clear and concise, as is his obvious commitment to men and their healing. This book is a must read for anyone (not just men) wishing to gain deeper insights into our collective and individual psyches.