Peer Counseling for Men
This weekend I attended a Breakthrough Conference in San Juan Bautista California at the St. Francis Retreat Center. I hadn't attended one since I went through Breakthrough training I and II around 2000 AD. Luckily, a friend of mine who went through this human potential training in the late 1980s asked me to car pool with him and to be an ongoing peer counselor during this conference. Even though I probably wouldn't have gone without him asking me to attend I agreed because we would commute from my home and his wife and kids would stay with my daughter and my wife and the two of us at my home and we would commute to the conference every morning and friday afternoon.
I was amazed at the changes and evolution of the Breakthrough Men's conference from when I attended 10 years ago. I found everything much more evolved and professional in every way. I found there about 90 people who had been through the Breakthrough I and II training sometime between the 1980s and the present. I was amazed how helpful it was to me to rejoin a group of men trained in the peer counseling way of Breakthrough and the human potential movement. Amazing changes both spiritually and psychologically take place during a conference like this and I met men at this conference from all over the world. Fred Jealous has really refined his work in connecting men to their goodness and kindness and helpfulness through tried and true psychological techniques of reconnecting men in a healthy way to their kindness towards themselves and all others. It is an extremely powerful and empowering experience after having been through Breakthrough I and II training to experience something like this.
My wife went through Breakfree around the same year that I went through Breakthrough I and II. (I listed the word buttons for both above). So part of the success of our marriage during the last 10 years is this training. Through this training one learns to develop healthy boundaries and how to not be co-dependent with others and how to separate psychologically one's problems from one's significant other so one does not project one's problems on their significant other. IN this way my wife and I learned to prosper in all ways in our relationship and so our 14 year old daughter and all my grown children have two parents that still love each other and who are healthy and happy and still together even after 15 years of marriage and 16 years of living together.
I'm really grateful for the refined experience that Fred Jealous and all the peer counselors have developed over the last 25 years of evolving and developing techniques to reconnect men to their kindness and helpfulness to all beings.
Fred told a story about a documentary being made about a Group of American soldiers at a forward outpost in Afghanistan. He said that when the men were asked why they kept volunteering for duty even though so many died at that post they answered that they went there because it was the only place that they felt somebody had their back and who would die for them if necessary. They were there less to fight the Taliban and more to have brothers there who lived and died for each other. Fred Jealous has developed this same kind of comaraderie without a fighting or warfare situation. For in the end men are all at war with themselves psychologically. What men need is to realize that both they themselves and other men can be their friends and not their enemies. It is to this end that Breakthrough exists and has existed for the last 25 years or so.
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