The goals of The New Hope Men’s Support Group are the following:
- Increase awareness of psychosocial and emotional stressors preventing them from living healthy lives within their communities.
- Improve men’s behavioral health and mental wellbeing.
- Promote a progressive understanding of manhood.
- Create a safe space where men can discuss risks, challenges and behaviors keeping them from fully participating in their families, jobs, legal system, and community.
The objective of The New Hope Men’s Support Group are as follows:
- Attract: This group is for men and about men. Their story matters because there are underlying themes relating to past experiences that left them feeling empty, confused, and emotionally stuck. Most men grew up in environments that did not properly nurture prosocial skills to interact and connect with others as their authentic selves effectively.
- Educate: Changing values have complicated the choice to be oneself as each generation of men has to confront the gap separating one from the other by suppressing their felt identity. This gap confrontation becomes compounded by men not having a clear-cut script or protocol for behaving in a fast-changing world where gender roles and gender identity are being shaped by evolving ideals that are different from their parents and grandparents.
- Support: Society places unfair pressure on men to successfully carry out stereotypical roles based on generational conversations that do not accommodate changing values for men. Men are expected to be leaders, protectors, and innovators; they are called “kings” by their parents; they are told they are the “man of the house” and to “be strong” very early in life. They are coached very early to fill a male archetype. Meanwhile, they grow up in homes that are not castles and need more resources and role models to be leaders.
- Retain: The New Hope offers this group to men who want to change but feel stuck between the two realities (the one they created and objective reality). Most men come to therapy when they are forced to confront the real possibility of loss, i.e., their romantic partner, family, job, or freedom. However, they quickly become lost when it comes to identifying the specific behavior they need to change the outcome in their favor. They become defensive and deflect from admitting to their role in the problem that brought them into therapy.
- Promote: With more than 25 years of treating men, who are the bedrock of society, The New Hope is responding to the need to address the needs of men because a large segment of the population is struggling and continue living their lives in denial and ignorance of the significance of the impact of the trauma they experienced. In treatment, men make statements like: “I am a man, I am responsible for my actions. Whatever my parents did has nothing to do with this,” behavior that is impacting their home, jobs, families, and other important social relationships. The New Hope is here to meet men where they are because we cannot sidestep the problem affecting the wider society by accepting cliche statements of any kind as an acceptable explanation for unacceptable behavior.
