MKP's New Warrior Training Adventure: why psychologists call it the missing piece in men's therapy
The peer support container that turns therapeutic insights into integrated behavioural change
What’s the difference between a male client who finally breaks through his emotional walls and one who stays stuck in the same patterns for years?
Most therapists assume it’s the quality of clinical intervention, the consistency of weekly sessions, or the strength of the therapeutic alliance. And while these matter enormously, there’s a missing piece that explains why some men transform while others remain intellectually engaged but emotionally distant.
The difference isn’t more therapy—it’s what happens in the other 167 hours of the week when your client leaves your office and returns to a world where emotional authenticity among men is rare, where vulnerability is still confused with weakness, and where he has no male peers practising the very skills you’re teaching him.
Today, I’m going to share why the ManKind Project’s New Warrior Training Adventure deserves a place in your referral network—not as a replacement for your clinical work, but as the missing container that helps your male clients integrate what you’re teaching them.
Let’s walk through why this matters.
Your best clinical work gets undone when men have nowhere to practice emotional authenticity with other men.
You’ve seen this pattern dozens of times in your practice.
A male client makes genuine progress in session—he identifies his emotional patterns, understands his triggers, even sheds tears as he connects with buried grief or anger. You feel hopeful. He seems ready for real change.
Then he returns the following week and reports that nothing shifted. He went back to his usual routines, his usual relationships, his usual ways of managing discomfort. The insight you helped him access didn’t translate into behavioural change because he had nowhere safe to practice his new emotional skills with other men.
Licensed therapist Patti Henry, who has referred hundreds of men to the New Warrior Training Adventure, explains it plainly: the training makes her job easier because it provides a quick and safe method to break through to emotionally walled-off hearts and soften resistance to emotional work. ManKind Project USA
The clinical term for this is “generalisation failure”—when learning in one context doesn’t transfer to real-world situations. But the deeper issue is that most men exist in male peer environments that actively punish the very behaviours therapy encourages: emotional honesty, vulnerability, asking for help, and admitting uncertainty.
The New Warrior Training Adventure creates the peer-support container your clinical work needs to become lasting change.
The ManKind Project explicitly states in their Declaration on Mental Health that participation in their programs is not a clinical intervention and not a substitute for professional mental health services. What it provides is peer support for men—something not typically addressed in most therapeutic settings.
Think of it this way: therapy gives men the map. The NWTA gives them fellow travellers who are walking the same terrain.
The peer support model encourages emotional intelligence practices, empathy, listening skills, and emotional risk-taking in an environment without rigid gender socialisation, competition, or performative masculinity.
Your client spends 48 hours surrounded by men from every background—executives and labourers, young professionals and retirees—all practising the same emotional authenticity you’ve been teaching him in your office.
More importantly, they continue that practice. After the weekend, men are invited into ongoing integration groups where they apply these skills weekly with the same men who witnessed their breakthrough. The Primary Integration Training provides an eight to ten-week facilitated curriculum teaching skills for effective peer-facilitated support groups. ManKind Project
This ongoing peer accountability is precisely what most men lack—and what makes your therapeutic interventions stick.
Rigorous screening and longitudinal research confirm this is a safe, effective complement to clinical treatment.
I know what you’re thinking: “This sounds like group therapy led by untrained facilitators. How is this safe?”
Fair question. Let me address it directly.
All New Warrior Training Adventure applicants complete thorough pre-weekend information packets that are reviewed by a state-licensed physician. Any concerns are reviewed by the ManKind Project USA’s Mental Health Resource Team, a group of volunteer licensed mental health professionals.
The organisation is transparent about who should not attend: men with active substance abuse, suicidal ideation, unstable mental states, or unexamined trauma are not appropriate for these trainings. Additional interviews may be required, including contact with the participant’s professional care providers.
The facilitators themselves undergo years of training. Completion of all Leader Trainings, extensive mentoring, peer evaluation, and facilitation experience are prerequisites to international certification as a New Warrior Training Adventure Leader—a process that takes several years.
But here’s the most compelling evidence: Between 2006 and 2010, the ManKind Project engaged a research team to conduct a longitudinal study measuring men on standard instruments for depression, conflict between work and family, life satisfaction, restrictive affectionate behaviour between men, restrictive emotionality, and other factors. Men were surveyed before participation, one week after, six months after, approximately one year after, and two years afterwards. The results revealed significant sustained improvements more than a year after the training program, with men consistently reporting improved scores on measures of depression, work-family conflict, life satisfaction, and emotional openness compared to their baseline scores.
These aren’t anecdotal testimonials. These are peer-reviewed findings showing measurable clinical outcomes that persist long after the intervention.
The men who benefit most from this referral are the ones you find hardest to reach.
Review your current caseload mentally. How many male clients fit this profile:
Intellectually engaged in therapy but emotionally guarded
Successful externally, but reporting emptiness or disconnection
Struggles with “anger issues” that are really unexpressed grief or fear
Reports his partner says he’s “emotionally unavailable”
Understands his patterns cognitively, but can’t seem to change them
Lacks close male friendships or meaningful male connections
Resistant to vulnerability, seeing it as a weakness rather than a strength
Men typically come to the New Warrior Training Adventure seeking support with issues of confidence and self-assurance, manhood and masculinity, isolation, marriage and relationship difficulties, negative self-talk, lack of positive male role models, difficulty finding direction, confronting the past, learning to set boundaries, accountability, and male shame.
In other words, the exact clients where your best clinical interventions feel like pushing water uphill.
These are the men who benefit most from experiencing emotional authenticity modelled and practised by other men. They need to see that vulnerability doesn’t destroy masculine identity—it completes it. They also need to practice these new behaviours in a male peer environment before integrating them into their daily lives.
Clinical insight without behavioural practice rarely creates lasting change. The NWTA provides the practice field your clinical work needs.
Your therapeutic relationship remains primary. Your clinical expertise remains irreplaceable. But when you refer appropriate male clients to the New Warrior Training Adventure, you’re not diminishing your role—you’re multiplying the effectiveness of your work by giving your clients a community that reinforces everything you’re teaching them.
Over 3,500 South African men have completed this training, with operations in 23 countries and over 1,000 ongoing peer-led groups worldwide, mentoring 10,000 men weekly. Many of them were referred by therapists who recognised that clinical work and peer support aren’t competing interventions—they’re complementary forces that together create the conditions for genuine transformation.
For more information about referring clients, visit the ManKind Project’s dedicated therapist referral page or download their Referral Guide for Therapists. The investment is R6,500 (including 30 hours of integration training), with upcoming weekends in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. Upcoming events.
The men sitting in your office this week are capable of the emotional breakthroughs you’ve been working toward. Sometimes they just need other men to show them it’s possible—and a community to practice with once they believe it.
Written by - Justin Spencer-Young
