Initially the Men’s Support Group was a forum for communication, but in the year following their first meeting, it became so much more. A typical meeting held in the facility’s chapel began by lighting a candle mounted on a wooden log that, if viewed from above, resembled the shape of a heart.  Group members sat facing the flickering flame of the candle with leadership passing from person to person each week

The group belonged to each participant equally and it was commonly agreed that they would only get back what they put in. They experienced the atmosphere as highly charged, sacred and spiritual.  Somehow, the language of long ago, buried in the recesses of their psyches, found release and expression. Although they were aware that they sat in a chapel on the sterile gray grounds of a prison, they felt as if they were sitting in a dark cave around a raging fire, sharing stories of times past. Stories of personal defeats and successes. Stories of love and loss. Stories of fear, rage, hate, and self-hate.