Men's coach celebrates gender differences

SANDPOINT — The topic of gender has always been explosive. Over the centuries, it has been a subject of supreme interest as the pendulum swings back and forth and the sexes strive to work out their roles at any given time.

According to coach Erin Brandt, the pendulum, in our contemporary world, has swung too far away from the male side of the equation, to the detriment of men and women alike.

Brandt currently is embarked upon a national tour of men’s groups, where she shares that idea and encourages her audiences to explore new ways of addressing a balance that, when well-executed, resembles a dance as much as anything. No wonder, then, that Brandt was partially spurred in this direction through her earlier work teaching partner dance.

The dance floor, as it turned out, was a kind of crucible for working through relationship issues.

“All of that was lots of touch and lots of listening and lots of ‘gender stuff,’” she said. “It was also figuring what’s gender stuff and what’s just leading and following.”

Subsequent training in the fields of coaching and transformational leadership brought an understanding that she was intrinsically well-suited to communicate with men — a point her male colleagues brought up as they suggested she put that natural talent to use.

She did just that over the past few weeks, as she led sessions with a pair of men’s groups in Sandpoint.

In a way, Brandt’s message feels like someone had pulled out a copy of Gender 101, blown decades of dust off its cover and opened it up for a new generation to peruse.

“Guys in my generation and after me have no training in how to be a man — they have no idea,” she said.

That said, her audiences are made up of a broad demographic, similar to what she encountered during her Sandpoint sessions. Acknowledging that the very subject of gender relationships and roles can be a minefield, Brandt schedules her workshops directly through existing men’s groups and arranges her travel itinerary accordingly.

“I never advertise my classes on Facebook,” she said, “because all I get is wounded, feminist blowback.”

Brandt points to historical context to put things into perspective. With the advent of the Industrial Age, men left the farm to go to work in factories, she said, leaving virtually the entire job of raising children up to women. The pendulum, she noted, swung accordingly into the realm of matriarchy and things fell out of balance. Over time, according to the counselor, the very idea of masculinity has taken on a pejorative bent, “so that masculinity itself is portrayed as being responsible for rape, war and violence.”

Along with a historical framework, Brandt holds out a developmental outline based on the work of David Deida, an author who writes about the sexual and spiritual relationship between men and women. One of his points is that there are stages of development, which start at an almost instinctual level and evolve to one of healthy interaction and understanding.

Stage I, Brandt explained, is founded upon the approach of “Me Man, You Woman,” where “the man needs to be right and the woman needs to be told she’s beautiful.” Stage II, meanwhile, moves into a realm where the relationship is one of “Hey, we’re all equal.” Equality, however, can be confused with sameness.

“That’s where we’re at now,” said Brandt. “But isn’t it nice to have differences between roses and lilies?”

Which brings up Stage III — the place this men’s group specialist seeks to introduce in her classes. It is, she shared, the stage of understanding that the differences between the sexes are not liabilities, but decided assets.

“It’s understanding so that we know how to work with the differences and celebrate them,” said Brandt, adding that stronger communication is a natural offshoot of understanding.

“I coach men on how to have better communication with women,” she said. “I’m teaching predominately Stage II guys how to get to Stage III.”

Brandt’s work in Sandpoint was especially productive, she pointed out, because the men’s groups here already had developed skills on how to express feelings and had a shared commitment for putting their feelings into action. Further, the members hold one another accountable for their personal growth.

“They were some of the best groups I’ve seen anywhere,” she said. “It was a rich audience for me.”

As part of her message, Brandt tells class members that she has a theory about men, one based on her idea that men have an innate kind of “superpower” that can be developed and put to use.

“My theory, which may or may not be correct, is that men actually have a little bit of a superpower in healthy, secure attachment,” she said. “It’s what fathers do best. Mothers might hover on the playground and say, ‘Don’t get hurt,’ where fathers tend to sit back and say, ‘Go play — if you get hurt, come see me and we’ll fix it.’”

Brandt equates that “healthy, secure attachment” to being a positive force in relationships and child raising alike.

“I want to teach that skill,” she said. “The skill of being the solid mountain, of being the rock.”