The Emotional Headlock

                I belong to this little men’s workout group.  We go out to public parks and schoolyards in the morning and do pushups and jumping jacks in the pre-dawn gloom.  After the workout, we sit in a Circle of Trust, tell each other our names (we have goofy little nicknames) and say a prayer together.  Afterwards, that day’s leader (we trade it off) writes an e-mail listing who was there, describing what we did and making sport of whatever funny thing might have happened.   I have been doing this for about two years.  There are other men in the group who have been doing it for five years.  On Saturdays, some guys bring their teenage sons.  Once in a while, a guy brings his dad. 

                It only takes an hour to do this, but this hour has become a pretty important part of my day and this group an important part of my life.  It’s funny how I could not see that I had a hole in my life until this group filled it for me. It’s like not knowing you were hungry until after you ate dinner.  Maybe, men trick themselves into not seeing how empty some part of their life is because we are afraid that we would be powerless to do anything about it.  We like to solve problems.  Why bother thinking about a problem that we cannot fix?

                We have noticed a  certain pattern of resistance in men that we invite to the workout for the first time.  They say it’s too early in the morning, that they already belong to a gym or just started with a new personal trainer.   And they procrastinate—“hey, I want to do it, but I need to get in shape first.”  To which we respond, “but that’s the point Brother; to get in shape.  Why would you want to get in shape before you come out to get in shape?  Would you take a bath before you took a shower?  Just come out.  Stop stalling.” 

I think the foundation of this resistance is that existential emptiness that we men trick ourselves into ignoring.  If the emptiness does not exist, than there is nothing that needs to be done about it.  So, joining the group is in a sense an attempt to do something about the emptiness and thus a tacit admission that it does exist.  Tough step to take, at least it was for me.  I needed somebody to drag me along, which is sometimes the only way to overcome that new-guy resistance.  We call it the Emotional Headlock.  It’s not complicated.  You just make yourself such a persistent pain in the neck to the guy that he comes out just to shut you up.  We have found that it usually takes multiple headlocking sessions, and that it often takes more than one headlocker.  With me, it took three different guys working on me separately.  What underlies that kind of persistence?  Assurance.  First, that the group works—it fills the hole.  Second, that the guy you are headlocking needs it as much as you did.  Makes you kind of bold.