Charles Bethea

So in the case of King's Men, the mud and the bro talk kind of ease them into the much harder work of engaging with the difficult feelings that we all as humans have and experience.

I thought that was a really nice way to conceptualize what was happening, and it wasn't something that Brendan King or any of these guys had told me.

It was the good fortune of talking with an anthropologist who was like, oh, yeah, those are symbols at work here.

These guys are working with symbols, and that's why this works and why this in the right hands can be a useful approach to doing something like therapy.

The other thing that I personally came away...

from this, again, rise experience, which I found to be the more effective of the two that I watched, was the words brother and brotherhood get thrown around a lot.

I mean, these guys that I was talking to prior to visiting camps were constantly referring to me as brother.

And I'm rolling my eyes like, come on, like, we're not brothers here.

We're not bros even.

Like, we don't know each other.

It feels disingenuous.

It's false.

And after those three days at Rise, I saw the guys calling each other sometimes brother and I heard King calling him brother.

And I started to like think about brotherhood as something that while it can be cliched and when it's used the wrong way or disingenuously.

or too much, there is something really important.

And of course, this also applies to women and sisterhood.

But in the case of men, brotherhood is really important just to sit with other men as we become adults and we become separate from each other and we have busier lives.

It's harder to sit down and just listen to the problems that we're all going through, big or small.

So I left that being like, you know what?

I should probably work on my own.