Yes, Men Hold Hate in Their Hearts. How Do We Heal It?

“Men are yearning for something deeper,” says Sean Harvey, an author, minister, and men’s coach. “Yet, their logical minds can often prevent them from moving from the lies of the mind, to the truth of the heart, to the wisdom of the soul.”

At first glance, Sean’s words seem surprising. Bald, bearded, and hyper-masculine, with a blended New York–Philly  accent, he often hears he’s a Jason Statham look-alike on his best days. He’s also someone who acknowledges that he looks like the White Nationalists and extremists he works with.

“Put me in the right hat and flannel, and I could’ve been right there with them on January 6th,” he says—not as a joke but to illustrate that it’s one of the things that makes it possible for him as a progressive New Yorker to gain the trust of people with different beliefs.

I first met Sean in 2022—in EVRYMAN co-founder Dan Doty’s “Ring of Fire” training for men’s work practitioners. Since then, I’ve watched Sean release his first book—Warrior Compassion: Unleashing the Healing Power of Men—and dive into his specialty: bridge building and de-radicalizing hate in extremist groups and hyper-masculine systems.

The seeds of Sean’s work started when he was growing up, not in the form of warm mentors but through pain.

“The message I carried for so long was that I was a disgusting, ugly, fat, stupid man,” he bluntly recalls, describing being beaten down in childhood and even bullied on his high school graduation day. Like many men, he pushed away his shame in his 20s through no-strings-attached sex and masked his pain behind Wall Street ambition.

It wasn’t until he left Wall Street’s hyper-masculine culture and moved to the “hyper-feminine” energy at EILEEN FISHER—particularly into the role of the Head of Personal Transformation and Wellbeing—that he saw how men were being transformed through feminine energy.

That transition led Sean to begin healing his own wounds. It took him to an artist commune where he “received the call” that he was uniquely designed to do this particular work with men and later to the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, where he was ordained as an Interfaith/Interspiritual Minister. But it was all a prelude to seeing an Army vet flash the White Power sign as they were meditating near a river. That moment made Sean realize how sophisticated neo-Nazis had become in infiltrating our power centers—from the military to law enforcement.

Driven by a pivotal meeting with a North Carolinian police chief in 2020 who wanted to help his officers deepen their compassion, Sean co-founded Project Compassion, a national coalition aimed at bringing more compassionate approaches into hyper-masculine systems, like police departments, federal law enforcement agencies, military security forces, and the Department of Defense.

“My work isn’t about extremists,” Sean emphasizes. “It’s about how many men are on the projected path to more extreme ideologies without even realizing it.”

Sean works with these men by separating their views from their humanity. “Their views are often a reflection of their suffering,” he says. “I’m going to meet them in their suffering, listen for their yearning, and offer hope in the midst of both. Because many of these guys lose hope or are on the brink of hopelessness.”

Glance at any newspaper over the past decade and you’ll see headlines related to hopelessness in men. Men make up 75% of all suicide cases globally, and nearly half of men feel more depressed than they admit. A study conducted by Judy Proudfoot and Andrea Fogarty in Australia found that hopelessness was linked to higher risks of suicide attempts and deaths, with economic factors like unemployment and financial stress compounding the risk.

I’ve seen these struggles firsthand in my executive coaching clients and The Arena Men’s Group. One man joined The Arena—after realizing he’d spent his entire life so focused on career success that he had no close intimate relationships, despite being married with kids. Another joined because he realized he’d never been able to value himself and knew it was crippling him. These men weren’t short on intelligence, commitment, or grit; they were running low on hope.

While communities like The Mankind Project, The Arena Men’s Group, EVRYMAN, Sean’s own Warrior Compassion Men’s Community, Sacred Sons, ManTalks, Mensch, and others provide healthy spaces for men to process these emotions, other spaces exist that validate the darkest thoughts of hopeless men.

Groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, and the Oathkeepers, together with Manosphere communities—Incels, Pick-Up Artists, Men Going Their Own Way, and Men’s Rights Activists—and figures ranging from the extreme, like Andrew Tate, to the mainstream, like Dr. Jordan Peterson, speak directly to the fears and frustrations of many men. Though they differ in tone and message, these spaces can easily become echo chambers of anger, resentment, and victimhood where aggrieved men have their biases confirmed, leaving them feeling seen and heard, but in a limiting, righteous, and often dangerous way.

Sean, importantly, notes that echo chambers are an issue on both sides of the political spectrum and that surrounding ourselves with like-minded people can actually atrophy our cognitive capacity.

“We’re in such a dogmatic rightness and righteousness culture,” Sean says, “that we want to wrong you if your beliefs don’t align [with] ours. What these guys need more than anything is open-hearted non-judgmental curiosity to understand [them].”

For Sean, this comes down to being a bridge builder—taking an active step to engage, hold space, and have the courage, humility, and compassion to interact with those who hold different views.

Sean says bridge building is the next level of facilitation, and it begins with healing our own wounds and being able to embody what he calls Grounded Neutrality—a combination of self-awareness, emotional regulation, and embodied presence.

“So many of our knee-jerk reactions,” Sean says, “come from our unresolved trauma, and so when we can heal those wounds, we can often listen [to ourselves and others] in a different way.”

Grounded Neutrality is about moving from acting out of knee-jerk reactions to making choices based on thoughtful responses. When wounds go unhealed, this is more challenging, and people often react, thus setting off a cascade of further reactions in those around them—like a row of dominoes. What follows is everyone reacting out of wounding rather than making intentional decisions.

“A lot of what I see,” Sean says, “is we’re walking around just throwing our wounds everywhere. And my wounds are tapping into your wounds, and we’re activating each other. If we act in a knee-jerk reaction, we may be creating more harm than good.”

Look at our world. It’s filled with these reactive feedback loops. As Sean says, “Chaos is stirring.”

From wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and Myanmar, to the demonization and othering rampant across social media, there are countless examples of how wounded reaction is causing more reactive behavior in the world. It’s perpetuating generational trauma, inflaming unhealed wounds, and reinforcing a culture of domination and win/lose mentality. Instead of curbing global knee-jerk reactions, we are, in many ways, exacerbating them.

“We react to chaos, uncertainty, and fear,” Sean says. “And many of us aren’t good at dealing with fear.”

Grounded Neutrality is Sean’s antidote to this, and it starts by healing our own wounds and looking at our own shadows.

“There’s no complicated, complex answer,” Sean says when I ask what this entails. “I’m teaching common sense practices that aren’t commonly practiced. The challenge is that so many people are afraid to look at their wounds.”

At the core, unhealed wounds are often about deep-seated angers that aren’t voiced. When Sean works with extremists, he talks directly to their anger. “What’s the hate you’re holding?” he asks, wanting to understand what’s beneath.

With many progressives, however, working with anger—and thus reaching those unhealed wounds—can be more challenging. “Progressives may have not gotten in touch with their anger,” he says, “because they want to be the nice guy, the good guy. So they may not even know the demons that are within them.”

He says we need to be exploring the following questions to discover what that anger and shadow self is:

• What is unhealed?
• What is unresolved?
• Where is this coming from?
• What’s in my history that’s causing me to react?

Love, Sean asserts time and again, has the power to transform how a person sees the world.

When working with hate group members he makes it clear that he has no agenda. “I [only] hold a stand of love for [them],” Sean says. “I want these men to understand what it’s like for another man who’s not like them to love them.”

He uses the analogy of a stray dog being taken into a loving home to illustrate love’s power to transform men who’ve experienced hell. His approach echoes Eli Saslow’s phenomenal book, Rising Out of Hatred. The book tells the story of Derek Black—the godson of David Duke and son of the founder of Stormfront—and his journey to escape White Nationalism. Central to Black’s transformation was the willingness of his friends—especially those who were Jewish and Black—to listen non-judgmentally and engage with care and love.

In nearly a decade of men’s work, I’ve seen how much men crave being loved, seen, heard, and understood. Some of the most powerful moments have been men sharing their deepest pains or longings and simply having the group hold them—sometimes physically and sometimes in silence. Recently, as we’ve explored the origin stories of our political beliefs, one man shared so deeply about his political perspective in a way he never had before that everyone saw him not as the 55-year-old man he is but the 8-year-old boy who had to flee his country to America. These men don’t need agreement, simply appreciation. As I look at the divides in our country, one missing piece is a deep compassion for one another and the ability to accept that multiple experiences can be true at the same time. Rising out of hatred can be a slow, painstaking process, which makes Sean’s work even more important.

In a society that relates to men as providers who should suck it up whenever they encounter hardship, there’s little emphasis on truly listening for what men are yearning for. This leads men to shoulder the burden alone, holding their grievances within and not believing others will understand them or that they’ll look weak by sharing—it also leads men into dangerous Manosphere communities where grievances are inflamed instead of supported. Given this, perhaps, the antidote to the anger, fear, and rage that is rampant around our world is nothing more than the simple listening and acknowledging that what men—or any group—want is valid and understandable.

Every human being wants to be valued, understood, and deemed worthy. Too often in our society, we spend our time discounting the worthiness, intelligence, and value of others. We diminish and belittle those who are different, while giving ourselves—and our identity—supremacy. But, we all matter, regardless of our beliefs.

Bridge-Building is about honoring the simple fact that because we exist we have worth, and seeing beyond someone’s beliefs to the human beneath them.

When we start with love and seek understanding, we can overcome even the deepest of prejudices and hate—though it may take some time. Whether you seek to be a bridge builder like Sean—or myself—or simply want to create more understanding in your community, family, or friend group, healing your own wounds, learning how to embody Grounded Neutrality, and listening for everyone’s yearning is a powerful starting place.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once wrote: “Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.”

Similarly, true healing is never something we arrive at. It’s not a destination but a practice, an ongoing reaching. Like Tantalus stretching for the apple, the work of healing—both personal and collective—is never realized. It’s about movement. Each step forward matters, even if the final vision remains just beyond our grasp. The real transformation isn’t in reaching the ideal; it’s in the stretching itself.

Sean’s bridge building work is one way for us to continuously reach for the tantalizing apple of healing, possibility, and mutual understanding. For those of you moved by his work, the invitation is clear: bring love to the people in your world—especially those whose perspectives differ radically from your own. Meet them in their suffering, listen for their yearning, and offer hope in the midst of both. This is not easy when our core values and belief systems are challenged. But having the difficult conversations and learning to appreciate our differences is paramount to healing. True transformation comes from love, and in a world polarized by division, your willingness to seek understanding can be a powerful force in bridging divides. And, remember, when men heal, societies heal.

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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Photo credit: iStock