The Crossing
A Men’s Group for Navigating Separation and Divorce. Elwood, Melbourne.
Men have been sitting in a circle talking about men’s business for thousands of years.
We are just continuing the tradition.
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Daniel Lichtman ∙ Registered Psychologist, Melbourne
“Why this might be different”
Fifteen years working as an attachment-based couples therapist has given me a rare depth of understanding of relationship dynamics, and heavily informs the way I now help individuals cultivate healthier, more satisfying relationships.
Some men are still working out whether to leave. Some are in the middle of it. Some are rebuilding on the other side.
Almost all of them are doing it alone.
A relationship ending, or the slow realisation that it needs to, takes apart more than the relationship itself. It can take the daily rhythm of your kids, the house, the shared friends, and the future you assumed you were walking toward. It can also take something quieter. Being a husband, or a partner, the person someone comes home to, is a large part of how a man knows himself, and when that role goes you can be left genuinely unsure who you are without it.
It tends to land at exactly the moment men go quiet and pull inward, often because the people who would have listened were tied to the relationship in question.
Some separations are reasonably amicable. Others are bitter, drawn out, and fought through lawyers and a difficult ex. Most sit somewhere in between, and almost none of them run in a straight line. This group is for men anywhere on that road, married or not, and whatever the relationship looked like. The man who knows something has to change and cannot see how to move. The man in the thick of it right now. And the man who got out a while ago and is quietly wondering why building a new life is harder than he expected.
What It Is
A small, closed group of eight men who meet in person each week in Elwood, led by registered psychologist Daniel Lichtman. It runs as a structured block of ten weekly sessions, long enough to do real work and contained enough to commit to while the rest of your life still feels uncertain.
It is not a venting circle, and it is not a place to relitigate who did what. It is a facilitated space to grieve what is ending or has ended, to understand your own part without drowning in blame, to handle the practical realities like co-parenting and a difficult ex without losing yourself in them, and to work out who you want to be in the life that comes next. You will be in a room with men at different points on the same road, which means you are neither the furthest behind nor the only one still standing in it.
What the Group Makes Room For
Different men arrive carrying different things, and the work follows where they are. Across the block it tends to move through three areas, often all at once.
The grief and the sense of it
Letting yourself feel the loss rather than outrun it and making sense of what happened without rewriting it as entirely their fault or entirely yours. For the men still deciding, this is not about being talked into leaving or talked into staying. It is about getting honest enough with yourself to make a decision you can stand behind, and then to act with some integrity rather than drift.
The practical rebuild
Co parenting that holds up even when the other parent makes it hard, keeping your kids out of the middle of the conflict rather than pulling them into it, putting a social life back together that is your own again, and facing the parts that feel like starting from scratch.
The honest look forward
Noticing the patterns you carried into the relationship that ended, and staying steady and self respecting when an acrimonious ex or a family court process is doing its best to provoke you, so the next chapter is genuinely different rather than the same story with a new cast.
Why a Group Rather Than Individual Therapy
Individual therapy is valuable, and for many men it is the right place to start. A group offers something different. Separation isolates men in a particular way, and sitting in a room with others going through it cuts straight through the sense that you are uniquely failing at this. The shame loosens. You get honest reflection from men who have no reason to flatter you and every reason to understand you. And you see, in real time, that there is a way through, because some of the men in the room are further along it than you are.
Continuing On
The Crossing is where you steady yourself and find your feet. For some men, once the hardest part has passed, that becomes the start of deeper work rather than the end of it. Those men often continue into The Accountability Project, the ongoing men’s group that takes on the patterns underneath, and the two run alongside each other for exactly this reason.
About The Facilitator
Daniel Lichtman is a registered psychologist based in Elwood who works with high performers on relationships, emotional patterns and personal growth. His approach to facilitation is warm and direct, and men in the group can expect to feel both genuinely supported and, at times, genuinely challenged. His work draws on Schema Therapy, EMDR, ACT, Gestalt Group therapy training and attachment based approaches. He has been regularly facilitating men’s groups since 2004.The Details
Format: Closed group, 8 participants
Location: In person, Elwood, Melbourne
Duration: 10 weekly sessions, 90 minutes each, with the option to continue into a second block
Medicare rebates available for eligible participants with a Mental Health Care Plan
You do not have to work this out on your own. Get in touch to find out about the next intake.