'Soften Up Bro': Initiative supports tāne Māori to feel safe expressing vulnerability

RNZ News

4 days ago

Heemi Kapa-Kingi, co-founder of Soften Up Bro
Photo:
Heemi Kapa-Kingi
It is Men's Mental Health week and a Māori clinical psychology researcher is calling on men to challenge Aotearoa's harmful "harden up" mentality.
Soften Up Bro co-founder and a PhD candidate Heemi Kapa-Kingi told RNZ the idea for Soften Up Bro came around 5 years ago when he and a close friend found themselves going through a difficult time mentally.
Talking openly with eachother, Kapa-Kingi said, was "therapeutic, "useful" and "quite pragmatic".
"Based on that interaction [and] experience, we decided to look at how we could generalise that experience for all tāne Māori across Aotearoa, who often find it difficult to talk about emotions, about personal issues and struggles with others.
"The solution they often fall towards is holding it in and letting it manifest in its own way, which is often unhelpful or not useful for the person that's going through that particular experience."
Through the Soften Up Bro kaupapa, Kapa-Kingi has facilitated a number of wānanga looking to give tāne Māori some practical advice and skills to overcome their mental hardship.
The initiative is grounded in te ao Māori values and supports men to better understand emotional well-being and feel safe expressing vulnerability.
The name is a play on "harden up bro", a common phrase which Kapa-Kingi said many men grown up hearing their whole lives.
"[It leads to] difficulty with expressing our emotion, difficulty with vulnerability, difficulty with opening up, difficulty, even, articulating the things that tāne are going through - they're all very common.
"When it comes to the tāne Māori experience, unfortunately, we have high rates of mental health issues, suicidality which are very particular to our approach and, a lot of the solutions are aimed at decreasing those statistics and supporting more tāne Māori are often based on a very Māori cultural way."
Heemi Kapa-Kingi (centre), Soften Up Bro co-founder, PhD candidate, clinical psychology researcher (Faculty of Science) at the University of Auckland.
Photo:
Soften Up Bro
Using indigenuos bodies of knowledge were often the most effective way to break through with Māori and all other populations and cultures, Kapa-Kingi said.
"That is a unique experience of Maori, through deculturation, through loss of identity and reo, loss of family units, things of that nature have definitely influenced our particular experience.
"We can, though, take a macro level look at the whole of Aotearoa and go actually, this is something that is also seen across tāne and across groups where we just find it so hard and so awkward, almost embarrassing in some cases to tell people that we're struggling."
Kapa-Kingi the mentality around "harden up bro" did not exist among pre-colonial Māori who felt free to express themselves openly, particularly in public settings.
"If it wasn't with our tūpuna at that time, it had to come from somewhere else. What we're seeing is that this whole 'harden up' lifestyle and mentality has been borne out of colonisation and Western ideologies, which is often very conservative, very refrained, very composed, and leaves you feeling quite hollow as a being.
"It's really infiltrated a lot of our daily activities and our thoughts over the day, whether that be we seeing someone else struggling so we tell them to harden up and we often tell ourselves that because any display of vulnerability may be seen as weakness and may be seen as an opportunity for others to take advantage of you."
Kapa-Kingi said tangihanga were an example of when Māori men could feel free to use the full spectrum of their emotions.
"Honesty… it's such an authentic time to be. If we use tangihanga as an example, we can grieve openly and can really let a lot of stuff out. The opposite would be no grief process or a short window to grieve and then be left with all these unmet and unrequited feelings, that were never able to be expressed.
"I do think that that's a prime example of what Māoridom does and what a Māori worldview does when it allows that kind of emotional discourse to come out from the deep grief, all the way through to sometimes anger, and then also the relief of being with whānau or the respite you get from being with the people you love."
Through his wānanga work, Kapa-Kingi found some men feel as though they are only allowed to fully express two emotions - happiness and anger.
"They're allowed to show great joy when things are going well, and they're also allowed to express rage. In extreme cases that's towards others, at the risk of others and safety of others. But those are often tied quite deeply with the masculine model of a man.
"If we really look at anger at its core, it's actually pain, it's actually grief, but it takes a lot of time to really let that anger subside to reveal that at its core."
While being angry was not inherently bad, men should take time to unpack exactly where their anger was coming from.
"Anger as it works, is a very invigorating emotion, and it gets you up and gets you doing things. I think in the pragmatic mind and practical minds of men, that's quite useful because it can get you to do stuff.
"But if we don't spend time really understanding what the anger is and breaking down where it came from, which is typically from a point of pain it off, it seems unreal, irrational or unjustified.
"Anger can be helpful, but if it's the only thing you have, it's overwhelming. We should spend just as much time understanding where that anger comes from and, you'll typically find that it's actually pain or sadness."
The way mental health solutions were framed was also important, Kapa-Kingi said.
"If you put it down to something pragmatic, I think men are instantly drawn to the kaupapa because it's seen as a skill, it's seen as something that's useful, something that's applicable to their daily lives. As true as that is, I also wish that it didn't take such a pragmatic framing for tāne to show up for themselves.
"I think that the emotional practise and emotional teaching that we give through Soften Up Bro can [help] just because it's good, just because you need. It doesn't have to be because this will be helpful for my family, or this will be helpful for my partner. I think just showing up for yourself and just having a time for yourself is also powerful.
"The way that we have framed it in the past is that it is skill set, and it is. It does require practise, it does require application, but don't lose sight of who it's for - and that's you."