Hello all.
It’s been quite a while (ten years) since we’ve had a weekly way to touch base directly as a group for Upgraded Members, and it’s taken until now for us to have our ducks in a row with a new way to communicate.
If you haven’t upgraded, consider, this button:
In the past, we used a phone teleseminar service, and it was both intimate and discovery-laden, with new ideas springing out of our discussion.
I miss it, and many other guys do, too, so after testing out our new app for members, it appears we can now meet by live-streaming video weekly as a team.
As you know, upgraded members automatically get access to the encyclopedic Romantipedia.com (which I wrote for ten years).
Not only that but thus far (maybe not much longer), we are grandfathering you into all the coursework from Men’s Psychology at the Courses site (which is also directly on the app):
So this new service will be our way of taking questions about your coursework (and Romantipedia) and bringing back those lively weekly discussions.
You just go to the app that has the courses and click on “Community,” where you will find Meetups under a button. We convene every Sunday at 8:30pm Pacific time for 90 minutes (flexible to your needs). And taking votes on a different day and time that can accommodate both Europe and Australia.
Get the app at the Apple Store here if you are a member:
The direct link to this week’s Meetup is here:
What We Will Use
As you can see above, Hero’s Journey offers us more than just a way of writing perfect screenplays for Hollywood.
After 30 years of helping men and women, I have come to realize that there is a missing item for them both. That often is the “needle in a haystack” single item they cannot locate in standard therapy and which would solve their problems (once they’ve used all the other conventional techniques and still suffer quite a bit).
It’s a “fourth imprinting phenomenon” called INITIATION.
You know the other three because Attachment Theory is a hot topic today—the automatic behaviors we picked up from connecting with our parents at a young age: attachment (formerly called the Oedipus by Freudians, which enables us to feel deep attraction and yearning for another human), Bonding (to be able to feel love), and Identification (to want to grow up to be just like our mother or father and to make them proud)…
…but THEN WHAT?
We often feel lost and confused trying to navigate the world.
That’s because the formerly anthropological/sociological construct was thought to be relegated to ancient history and primitive cultures, where we have placed it.
When instead, it’s a necessary part of our psychology that makes us wholly equipped to operate in the adult world with all its complexity today.
We no longer have rituals for it, yet it still exists every time we experience a challenge, obstacle, struggle, or even trauma.
Joseph Campbell’s “Monomyth” of “The Hero’s Journey” offers us a roadmap to follow our initiation process into fully mature masculine or feminine adulthood, with all the skills, strategies, and tactics to handle anything that comes our way.
It’s a way of taking the terrible things that happen to us and harvesting them into lessons that grant us access to psychological tools we didn’t even know we possessed.
This is the new model we propose for Men’s Psychology and Women’s Psychology. The Hero’s Journey won’t be a constant, literal topic in our discussions, but we will always keep it in the back of our minds as we start a teamwork process each week.
We hope you enjoy, and if you haven’t yet become a member, do so here, below, and see you every Sunday (literally):
Wonderful Dr. Paul, thank you for offering the Hero’s Journey, I really excited about learning more. G
Be sure to see this as a prequel! https://open.substack.com/pub/menspsychology/p/masculine-instincts-and-the-heros?r=1fkptn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web