Shedding Armor

I am an unusual man. 

My therapist says I deliberately go out of my way to find trouble. He may be right.

I have twice been fired from positions in private schools. In both cases, I stood up to bullies in positions of leadership and said,

 “No, I will not comply with your policies. I will not humiliate children or demean their teachers.”

In both situations, I fooled myself into believing that I didn’t really care about losing my job, that I was only concerned with children. My emotional armor was ten feet thick. 

You may know men like that. 

Men who pretend that everything is “fine,” while under the surface, they are simmering like smoldering volcanoes.

My armor was so impenetrable that I never took it off, except to go to sleep. My armor not only protected me from others, but it also isolated me from them. My loneliness was crippling. 

It got to the point where I was in excruciating emotional pain. I ached for connection.

But loneliness doesn’t heal itself. 

When I turned 67, I gave myself a birthday gift.

I sat down at my computer and searched for “men’s groups for emotional support.’ One of the results was  “The ManKind Project (MKP).” 

MKP’s mission is to cultivate kindness and brotherhood amongst men. Given that men are largely responsible for most of the violence in the world, fostering kindness is a potentially life-saving mission.

My search revealed a free four-week introduction to MKP. I had nothing to lose and everything imaginable to gain. 

The four men who facilitated that training via Zoom were an odd bunch. One looked like he just walked out of Folsom Prison. Two looked like Ivy League lawyers. And one could have been a rabbi or a priest. What they had in common was that they were phenomenal human beings. 

I knew after the first session that MKP would become my emotional and relational anchor. When the four weeks were completed, one of the facilitators referred me to a man in South Florida who ran a weekly online MKP meeting. Those meetings are called ‘iGroups,’ short for “Integration Groups.” 

The iGroups are designed to integrate all aspects of a man’s emotional ecosystem. We do this intimidating and difficult work in the presence of other men. iGroups are safe places for men to shed their armor. To open up to other men who will not judge them and who will embrace and support them. 

I know of no other community where men can shed their armor and allow other men to see them for who they truly are.

For someone like me, whose armor weighed around 3000 pounds, to have a space where I could peel that weight off my shoulders was liberating. After meeting with the men in this iGroup for 10 months, they encouraged me to dig deeper and attend an initiation weekend called the New Warrior Training Adventure (NWTA).

It wasn’t required (MKP is not a cult), but for men whose armor was welded to their psyches, men like myself, the NWTA experience promised to be transformative. I signed up. 

I am bound by confidentiality rules not to reveal what happens during these weekends. Suffice it to say that men arrive wearing every conceivable type of armor you can imagine, each hoping to shed at least a few ounces of it.

I arrived and was asked about my armor.

What did it look like, and what did I want to happen to it? What was the risk if I chose not to take off my armor?

There was only one rule - “Tell the truth.”

I had spent ten years in the military as a naval aviator. I had spent a week in SERE School (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape, a simulation of what it is like to be imprisoned in a POW camp. I thought I was mentally, physically, and emotionally ready. I was wrong. 

In SERE School, we all wore armor. Actually, we wore several layers.  The last thing any man or woman would have done would have been to take off their armor or even talk about its existence. At my NWTA, armor was ALL we talked about.

At SERE, I learned that I could endure tremendous amounts of fear and physical pain without falling apart. At my NWTA, falling apart was part of the plan.

Think about why armor, the kind that knights wore, was designed. Its purpose was to allow the knight to enter battle and return alive. It shielded him from spears, arrows, and swords. But what if there were no weapons to confront? Would you still need armor?

We may not don metal plates and wield maces and long bows, but men do seem to need to wrap an invisible cloak around themselves. Not to protect their bodies, but their hearts and souls. 

I walked into my NWTA with armor that numbed the pain of loneliness and despair. I fortified my armor with hefty amounts of alcohol. There was one problem.

It didn’t work. 

The poisoned-tipped arrows of loneliness always found a way to penetrate to my core.

The alcohol sabotaged my sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night, in a dark room, alone and sweating. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I sat there and wept.

When the leader of my NWTA announced that there was just that one rule - “Tell the truth,” I knew this was going to be gut-wrenching. 

It was.

I shed my armor in front of my brothers and exposed my vulnerability while trembling like the leaves on an aspen tree in the wind.

“I hide my loneliness and shame so that you won’t see it,” I told them.

Then those men did something that ignited a firestorm of healing in my chest.

They held me. They loved me. They accepted me for who I was.

For me, emotional pain is far easier to hold when it is witnessed and accepted by others, people I trust.

Pain loses its grip on my psyche when I am held accountable for doing something about it. Doing something while other people have my back.

Isn’t that what we all want? To know we are not alone as we confront our pain and our fears?

Don’t we all want to experience the joy of being celebrated when we break out of our emotional prisons?

If I offered you a key to escape it, would you take it, or has your prison become a comfortable place to hide? I hid in mine for 50+ years.

My prison cell was where I went to abandon myself. It was a cold, dark, and frightening place. 

When I realized I had the opportunity to grasp that key and free myself from my imprisonment, I took it.

Making that decision to walk out of that place was fraught with fear. I was 67 years old and venturing into an unknown world. A world of joy, friendship, and meaning. 

One day, months after my NWTA weekend, an MKP man held me by the shoulders and looked me in the eyes. He said the words I had been starving to hear for decades.

“I love you, John. I am so glad you are in my life, and I treasure our friendship.”

I had stared down loneliness with action.

I had shed my armor, and I felt free for the first time in my life.

I write about the prisons we live in and how to walk out of them, one courageous step at a time. Join me in the conversation by subscribing below.