This is a continuation of a chat thread I started during the 2026 US Core Group retreat with Thomas Hübl. If you were there, you know what the references are. If you were not there, don't know what US Core Group retreat is and find yourself here either because someone like me sent you here, or you randomly stumbled in, let me offer a little context so the internal references don't throw you off. US Core Group is a group of people who have completed Thomas Hübl's 2 year training in timeless wisdom, largely oriented toward healing personal, family and collective trauma. So we work deeply with some of the darkest personal and social shadows and collective trauma topics we have as a human race. During the January 2026 retreat I got activated, triggered about what felt like a constant bashing of "the white men who colonized this continent." So I started writing, here it is. I am doing this in the tradition of release early, update often. So as you are reading this, bear in mind I will be back to update this article itself, and probably will end up creating new posts that add to what I am starting with. I hope you will bookmark this page and update it once in a while.
01.31.2026 page 1
01.31.2026 page 1
I want to continue a thread I started in the Zoom chat toward the end of the US Core Group retreat. Many of you know I am estranged from my 2 grown children. I have not lived with them for 30 years now so I can’t quite say I miss them, but they have turned their backs on me, and Jenn, my wife in anger; I have not met my granddaughter, and I am not in their lives. There is a hole in my heart and my life that aches, that I sit with every day. Yes, I still live my life, I have much to be grateful for, but this grief accompanies everything: every-single-thing. I have spent hours sitting with what I can take responsibility for in this fracture, thrashing about in my soul, trying to blame someone else, raging at my powerlessness in the face of their rejection. I know the way their mother and I split up did a lot of damage, broke secure attachment bonds and left them with trauma that I am responsible for. I will not hide from that. And also - I feel more than alone, I feel pushed out, exiled. Yes, this has many roots in my own childhood trauma. My father’s judgment, ridicule, shaming and physical punishment still form much of my perception. The pattern is evident - I ran away from my father, they have turned from their father. There is also a collective pattern of which I have become aware: that so many children actively take distance from their fathers especially, as well as from their mothers. I mentor a couple of younger men who cannot talk to their fathers. I pray my son has a mentor. But my situation is not special, it is collective, expressed in my individual situation.
I feel this great generational disconnect of younger people from their parents. Please don’t trivialize this movement. I am a baby boomer; one of my generation’s mantras was to never trust anyone over 30. Ooops. We pushed away our seniors, now we are pushed away. I am pushed away. This can’t be healthy for any of us. This seems to me to be part of the foundation of where the US is socially and politically right now. I am feeling very pushed-away. I am certain I am not alone in feeling this, but I feel alone in it. It is a collective, social phenomenon that leaves a burning, raw hole in my heart. I feel othered and I’m pretty sure it is not just my personal attachment wounds that generate that feeling. I am confident this pain is also in the hearts of millions of men who are like me. I feel like I am opening a channel to the cohort of exiled, excommunicated, ridiculed, angry ‘white’ men in the US. This is the state of being I was touching in the Zoom chat. It is personal for me and I feel it in the collective of men like me.
I speak in the first person as much as I can. I feel like that voice has more intimacy and impact. It is my story with my details. But it is easy to lose the collective viewpoint in an individual story. My story has my particulars to it, but I am seeing the path, experience and feelings are very common, dreadfully common; as a collective experience of exile and anger.
I don’t want to tell my story so I can be heard. I am, after all a white, older man. I am very comfortable telling my story and having it heard. I know I can demand attention, it is my place in society. I also have a beautiful wife who does hear and feel me with great care and intimacy. I have a superb therapist. And I have so many of you who hear me as an individual in pain.
That is not why I write now.
I write now so that you can hear what my kind, my cohort of white men, has to say. I am saying it in the first person to make it more accessible, but I am not writing because I am hurting about this, not because I feel this scream of, "Not all white men!"
In writing here I hope to offer to you a more faithful account of the anger that drove January 6 and drives the war-mongering anti-immigration/Christian superiority causing so much fear and strife in my hometowns of Boston and Albuquerque, and in Minneapolis and NYC and anywhere else.
I speak in the first person as much as I can. I feel like that voice has more intimacy and impact. It is my story with my details. But it is easy to lose the collective viewpoint in an individual story. My story has my particulars to it, but I am seeing the path, experience and feelings are very common, dreadfully common; as a collective experience of exile and anger.
I don’t want to tell my story so I can be heard. I am, after all a white, older man. I am very comfortable telling my story and having it heard. I know I can demand attention, it is my place in society. I also have a beautiful wife who does hear and feel me with great care and intimacy. I have a superb therapist. And I have so many of you who hear me as an individual in pain.
That is not why I write now.
I write now so that you can hear what my kind, my cohort of white men, has to say. I am saying it in the first person to make it more accessible, but I am not writing because I am hurting about this, not because I feel this scream of, "Not all white men!"
In writing here I hope to offer to you a more faithful account of the anger that drove January 6 and drives the war-mongering anti-immigration/Christian superiority causing so much fear and strife in my hometowns of Boston and Albuquerque, and in Minneapolis and NYC and anywhere else.
I sense that there is a lot of confusion about how it is possible the US feels so unstable right now. My daughter posted on Facebook in November 2024, “I was afraid for my country. Now I am afraid of my country.” A trite meme, but I get it. How is it possible that “man spewing so much anger and hate” is President, again? I also sense that I am in a pretty open spot to be able to shed a little light on the current situation that might help bring some understanding to our shared field. I could be terribly wrong about how special I am, loaded with my own hubris that I consider myself so special that you might hear me. I am, after all, a white man bloviating as usual. Can you stand my own self-effacing humor? Or no?
And that is the very kernel of what I am trying to explore here. I am a baby boomer, privileged, ‘white’ male. I was born this way. Literally. It was not a choice I made. I am the patriarchy. I am gifted with the grace of being given generations of social superiority without any right to it at all. So, now that I have named that explicitly, can we actually explore it? Does it mean that my (our) {sounds as monarchical as ever!} birth makes me that caricature, that 2D cardboard cut-out of an Ad-Man from the 60s? I know that you know the answer is obviously, ‘no.’ “You know me.” As an individual you probably know me to be a good man. I am. But I am also a white man. I the aggregate, the collective, I am one of those. When you talk about white men, you are talking about me. When you spew your resentment, venom, and hatred of white men, you are also talking about me. You are dumping all that on me. Are you aware of that?
In learning to be anti-racist, I have learned to feel in my body my reaction to someone born in the inheritance of an African woman, and to question my assumptions about her. Perhaps, in a similarly anti-racist way you are willing to feel in your body your reactions to the inheritance of my birth. Me, a white man, who happens to also be the person you know. Am I all that? Or is it possible I have done at least some of “my work?” Is it possible I can slow down my reactions and feel someone else even though I have been trained over generations and thousands of years to not do that?
In learning to be anti-racist, I have learned to feel in my body my reaction to someone born in the inheritance of an African woman, and to question my assumptions about her. Perhaps, in a similarly anti-racist way you are willing to feel in your body your reactions to the inheritance of my birth. Me, a white man, who happens to also be the person you know. Am I all that? Or is it possible I have done at least some of “my work?” Is it possible I can slow down my reactions and feel someone else even though I have been trained over generations and thousands of years to not do that?
As I write, I do feel my fear here. I fear you will dismiss me as a bloviating old white guy. My fear comes in part from my childhood, as one of the little kids in a large Catholic family. I really did not matter, was mostly a distraction from the work of managing such a large household. I got in the way and punished for that a lot. So yes, my fear is inside me, I cannot honestly hold you accountable for my fear. But I ask, can we also extrapolate out a few steps? Can you, even while feeling for my punished little boy, also feel your sense of judgement of me as a white man?
What do you feel when I acknowledge my rank in society? We both know what my rank in society is. You probably know it is unjust, and that many who do not sit where I do are angry about it. But do you know what i know or how I feel about it? Are you willing to hear, to feel that? I fear your judgement here. Is my fear justified? Are you willing to investigate inside yourself whether my presence as a baby-boomer, white man tells you who I am? Can you feel if you make assumptions about me simply because of my appearance as a white man? Do you suspect that you already know how I feel, and what I have to say? Do you think you have already heard from my kind for long enough?
What do you feel when I acknowledge my rank in society? We both know what my rank in society is. You probably know it is unjust, and that many who do not sit where I do are angry about it. But do you know what i know or how I feel about it? Are you willing to hear, to feel that? I fear your judgement here. Is my fear justified? Are you willing to investigate inside yourself whether my presence as a baby-boomer, white man tells you who I am? Can you feel if you make assumptions about me simply because of my appearance as a white man? Do you suspect that you already know how I feel, and what I have to say? Do you think you have already heard from my kind for long enough?
Page 2
The above words are the preliminaries to what I want to say. But to say them we must be done with what I have said above: we have to be complete in the thought that your judgement of me as a “white man” is based in factors that are outside my control. If your mind jumps in here and says something like, “You have to control and let go of your clinging to power, your sexism, your racism, your superiority and colonialism” then we are not done with the preliminaries yet. If you are still willing and able to reduce my words and actions, my presence in the room to my inherited superiority complex, you are not dealing with me; you are dealing with a projection of me as a character. We are dealing with the internal structures in your mind and heart that tell you who I am because I inherited white skin and a British name and all the prerogatives that go along with those facts. If we were discussing the same internal structures in my mind and heart, we would be talking about my racism, my sexism, my judgements of your sex, skin, culture and birth circumstances. We would say that you had no control over your birth circumstances, and no control over my judgements of how you appear to me. In the same ways, I have no control. This simple observation that I was born the same way as anyone else should put us on level ground together, if we can hold our judgements in check. We can both practice the hard meditation of feeling our physical responses to the appearance of the other, and being responsible for those responses, rather than letting our past decisions about each other continue to form our relating with each other.
To come back to anti racism: right, I inherited unexamined, unconscious ways of being and moving and speaking in the world that assume, as a descendent of Anglo and Celtic people that I can do and say things that reflect an ‘innate superiority.’ These are inherited, I did not choose them. Even if my parents strived to teach me the opposite, some of these are passed down from generations and are completely unseen. To make them conscious enough to examine, and then dismantle in my being, is the work of anti racism. I don’t say this to posture as an ally. I say it here to set a common understanding of what I have learned is included in my programming, so that we both can feel what is present in modern society and understand together that this programming is real in me and in my kind. To complete these preliminaries I think we need to be able to understand together that even though it is true white men created the structures to dominate power and access to resources centuries ago, and they succeeded at that; trying to clump the descendants of those conquerors into the same bucket lacks nuance. It actually lacks humanity. And it lacks a humble willingness to see white men as human, worthy of engagement.
Page 3
I believe when someone names “the white men” they are naming the programmed automatons living unquestioned in their lives.
Please stop reading right here.
I acknowledge my urge, a burning need to exclaim, “Not all of us!” “Not me!” Do you feel that, too?
That defensiveness is not my goal. I know you know, not all of us. This is too much writing for that! Page 3 is the meat of this essay. I’m nervous to continue on here. I’m exploring new territory on the page that will be live when I click the save button. And it’s midnight. Saved by the bell. Please come back and find page 3 again.
To come back to anti racism: right, I inherited unexamined, unconscious ways of being and moving and speaking in the world that assume, as a descendent of Anglo and Celtic people that I can do and say things that reflect an ‘innate superiority.’ These are inherited, I did not choose them. Even if my parents strived to teach me the opposite, some of these are passed down from generations and are completely unseen. To make them conscious enough to examine, and then dismantle in my being, is the work of anti racism. I don’t say this to posture as an ally. I say it here to set a common understanding of what I have learned is included in my programming, so that we both can feel what is present in modern society and understand together that this programming is real in me and in my kind. To complete these preliminaries I think we need to be able to understand together that even though it is true white men created the structures to dominate power and access to resources centuries ago, and they succeeded at that; trying to clump the descendants of those conquerors into the same bucket lacks nuance. It actually lacks humanity. And it lacks a humble willingness to see white men as human, worthy of engagement.
Page 3
I believe when someone names “the white men” they are naming the programmed automatons living unquestioned in their lives.
Please stop reading right here.
I acknowledge my urge, a burning need to exclaim, “Not all of us!” “Not me!” Do you feel that, too?
That defensiveness is not my goal. I know you know, not all of us. This is too much writing for that! Page 3 is the meat of this essay. I’m nervous to continue on here. I’m exploring new territory on the page that will be live when I click the save button. And it’s midnight. Saved by the bell. Please come back and find page 3 again.