Crucible Project Cult? Part 13 of 13: Risks of Group Participation

At long last, the final post of 13 addressing key cult behaviors relative the The Crucible Project and The Crucible Weekend.

13) They fail to adequately consider the "psychonoxious" or deleterious effects of group participation (or) adverse countertransference reactions.

Basically, this aspect of cult behavior revolves around leadership not considering the harmful effects of group participation. I debated the risk to my "Man Card" on this one and decided to opt for information over pride: I looked up countertransference. Countertransference is where an analyst/therapist is effectively "triggered" by something a patient says.

While I can see how this definitely applies to cults, I do not see evidence of this in The Crucible Project as a whole, and particularly not on The Crucible Weekend.

I'll start with countertransference. The Crucible Weekend is not a group therapy retreat. The specifics of the definition here don't apply. That's fine, what about the intent here: does leadership consider bad things happening to participants on the weekend? There are several key components of this:

1) Leadership and their role
As I've blogged before, leadership on The Crucible Weekend is servant leadership, where leaders hold

Bible & Prayer: Cornerstones for The Crucible Weekend

themselves to a high standard (God's) and invite staff to call them out and bring up concerns. When was the last time you saw this at your job, school board meeting, political rally, etc.? In addition to serving the staff, leaders are of course focused on the participants on the weekend. After all, there is no weekend without men who come. And there are no more weekends if men leave worse off than when they arrived.

In the same blog I wrote about the months-long preparation that goes into The Crucible Weekend. There is a lot of preparation, intention, and most importantly prayer involved here. Leadership sets the tone in any organization, and here men "walk the talk". Atypical in most organizations, I'd argue.

2) Money
This isn't a multi-level marketing scheme where leadership lines its pockets with alms from the poor, or presents a life-long curriculum [read: revenue stream]. There are no ancillary products (shirts, etc.) participants buy to increase revenue. Fees for the weekend are modest. I do not get paid as a staffer on the weekend: my reward for staffing is not monetary. There's very little to do with money.

3) Safety
Setting aside the specifics of countertransference, what happens if men get upset/triggered by something someone else says?  There are tools, time, prayer, and a collective will on the part of staff to address it.

What happens with men when something "hacks them off". When a man is "triggered" by something, there are a whole menu of options for dealing with & expressing what's going on inside:

• physical release like fighting, yelling, throwing things, breaking things, exercise, driving fast (mostly bad options I know)
• covering it up/checking out through drugs, alcohol, video games, or some other pursuit
• taking it out on the people around them, intentionally or unintentionally
• obsessing about it: it becomes the dominant theme of any & all conversations for some period of time

There are many more things men can do; I think this is an illustrative list. What is missing, on purpose, from this list:

• figuring out what the issue is (at the core)
• resolving the conflict
• addressing the issue

Flowers won't do the job

In my own men's group, and sometimes on The Crucible Weekend, sparks fly between men. After all, it takes iron to sharpen iron: flowers won't get the job done. And by sparks, I mean some level of conflict, not fist fights or mixed martial arts. The difference between this happening on the street or at work vs. on The Crucible Weekend is that there's a way to work through the conflict/trigger to separate the component parts, to figure out what the issue is & resolve the conflict.

Addressing the issue is really up to the individual. Here's an example.

Backstory
There's a guy I know who is having a lot of conflict and chaos at work. Management is behaving

Really, really stuck

inconsistently, there are favorite employees who can do no wrong (and ironically, they do little work while they're doing no wrong), communication problems everywhere, and gulf between what senior management can expense and what front line employees can purchase in the way of tools/training to do their job. Sound familiar/reasonable so far?

He's Stuck
So this guy I know can NOT stop talking about work. Ask his wife, small group, friends, kids, neighbors. Sometimes he successfully avoids the subject; sometimes someone asks and it all comes pouring out. He's stuck. He knows he's stuck, but doesn't know what to do with it. He sees himself snapping at his kids and wife, spending more & more free time in some alternate reality (video games, alcohol, the internet, etc.) trying to get away, a break, a respite.

Now What?
If this guy were in my men's group, we would work through a technique or two we learned on The Crucible Weekend to separate out the component parts of this swirling mess. He'd be able to get a sense of the issue(s) underneath it all. If the issue involved sparks flying with another man in our group, he could address & resolve the conflict. This is radical: most men I know burn the relationship or walk away when there is serious conflict.

The man could also ask for help in addressing the issue. He could ask to be held accountable, to be encouraged, etc. by the other men in the group as he goes about the business of addressing the issue. The other men in the group can't have difficult conversations with this guy's wife, parents, friends, etc. They can't *make* him find a good Christian counselor, handyman, mechanic, mentor, get a new job, etc.

I've been the guy above. So have many of the men I know.

If you've been "stuck", you know how hard it is to get "un-stuck". The truck driver above isn't going to get out of there by himself. And the truth is, God built us to be in community, not islands unto ourselves.

If a group of men can teach me how to get "un-stuck" because they believe the glory of God is a man fully alive, then certainly they've considered the risk of me being in a circle of men. And I'm living proof they have the tools to address whatever comes up when sparks fly.