For Yiannis Rerakis, life didn’t follow the script. Raised in a traditional Greek-Australian household where discipline, legacy, and silence often walked hand-in-hand, his journey toward manhood wasn’t marked by ease.
It was carved by rupture, loss, and ultimately, awakening.
“My upbringing was very Greek,” he tells Neos Kosmos. “Church, Greek school, family-first, respect-your-elders… all of that. I even started kindy without speaking a word of English. I only spoke Greek. My yiayia and Papou raised me while Mum and Dad worked in their business.”
Yet, under the structure and strength of Greek values, emotional expression was conspicuously absent.
“There was this unspoken rule: be strong, don’t feel. Vulnerability? That wasn’t a thing,” Rerakis says.
“What I’ve come to learn is real strength starts where the mask ends.”
It’s this ethos that now guides his work with The ManCave, a preventative mental health organisation delivering emotionally intelligent education to teenage boys and men across Melbourne. His mission is simple- help men become emotionally fluent, spiritually rooted, and socially responsible.
The difficult journey
It wasn’t a clean journey to get here. At 15, Rerakis’s world unravelled, things fell apart.
A messy parental divorce cracked open his sense of safety. What followed was a silent war within.
“Growing up, I had no emotional support around me. When I asked my family who I could talk to, they told me to go to a priest. That was it. There was no space for emotions… just silence and survival.
“I was suicidal in my mid-twenties,” he shares.
“It got to the point where I gave myself two options, end it or heal.”
Choosing life though didn’t mean instant clarity – it meant years of self-work, psychologists, spiritual guidance, and confronting generations of internalised pain.
“It took me years to realise that asking for help wasn’t weakness. It was the beginning of becoming a real man,” he tells Neos Kosmos.
The catastrophic turning point
Then came the crash in Crete — sudden, brutal, irreversible.
“I had a micro-sleep on the freeway. Woke up two metres from a barrier. The car was a wreck, but I walked out without a scratch.”
That was the turning point for Rerakis. “Something shifted. My music changed. My clothes changed. My thoughts changed. Even my taste buds. I started questioning everything. It took another year, but I finally asked for help.”
He entered the world of personal development while expanding his own psychological and mental awareness. That led him to his teacher and now-friend Rena Harvey, alongside whom he has worked with, holding space predominantly for women as well as mixed-gender retreats.
It wasn’t until his healing journey led to the first men’s retreat bringing back rites of passage that redefine the male role in today’s society, The Warriors Way.
“It was profound. Life-changing” Rerakis says.
“I was invited to participate by my sister who connected me to the Greek Australian men’s work facilitator, Apollon Evangelos and to the Warriors Way co-founders Adam Pipakis and Jarrah Volpe.
From participant, to co-facilitator, Rerakis was fast recognised for his presence, and potential. Through Volpe, he connected with The Man Cave.
Now, further along his path, he’s guiding teenage boys to unlearn toxic ideals and reclaim a healthier, truer sense of manhood—starting by dismantling the “Man Box.”
“The Man Box is the invisible cage,” he says.
“It’s all the things we’re taught: don’t cry, don’t talk, dominate, be rich, be wanted, be hard.”
But what if masculinity isn’t about being hard?
“At The Man Cave, we challenge those narratives. We say, you are enough. You are allowed to feel. You are not alone,” he stresses.
This work is especially personal for Rerakis, who’s been unpacking generations of Greek pressure to be a ‘man’.
Blessings and scars of the ‘Cretan Alpha Male’ archetype
“For over a year, my psychologist and I focused on the Cretan alpha male,” he says.
“It was embedded in me. This idea that unless I acted like the stoic, powerful, emotionless Cretan man, I wasn’t worthy.”
It went beyond behaviour, it impacted legacy.
“I grew up watching my dad and my uncle compete for my grandfather’s attention and approval on who is the most proud Cretan…” he says.
“Under the right lens this can be amazing, given the richness of values and cultural heritage yet can become toxic when performance or how we are perceived by our kin becomes more important than integration.
Yiannis points to how out of “all the things” he has done, and “strived for” his Papou -“the patriarch of the family”- praised him only after a Cretan dancing performance.
“That’s when I was seen -when I was loved- not when I cried. Never when I was lost.”
Despite the pain, Yiannis doesn’t reject his heritage, instead he reclaims it, and has pride of carrying it forward as part of an evolving contemporary man, who also embraces and preserves tradition.
“My mum’s from Sparti. My dad’s from Crete. I come from warriors. There’s strength there, resilience, honour,” he says.
“When I go back to my village, I feel the land, the power in it. That fuels me. That grounds me.”
Yet, he’s honest about the harm.
“Greek men are told: work, provide, don’t feel. We’re moulded to please our parents, take jobs we hate, live lives we didn’t choose. And then we blink, we’re 60, wondering where our joy went.”
In spite of the traumas of our ancestors and their “shadow” aspects, Yiannis believes that we also carry their “medicine”. Their talents and their endurance in the face of adversity that helps us not only survive, but thrive when embraced.
His antidote, finding the practices that keep his mind-body and spirit regulated and radical self-responsibility.
He grounds barefoot every morning. He breathes. He journals, he sits in silence.
“I sit with my soul. My psihi. I also see my psychologist. I do the work.”
Missing rites of passage
What society lacks, Rerakis builds, through his men’s circles. He curates modern rites of passage, experiences of challenge, reflection, and accountability.
“Men don’t become men by default,” he says.
“They earn it, and in Western culture, we’ve lost that. So they stay boys in grown-up bodies. And unhealed men burn the village down just to feel something.”
He’s not speaking in metaphors.
“We are told as men that the only emotion we can have is anger. Men don’t cry… men fight, men this, men that. And our anger when not processed and expressed raw is seen as -and can be- dangerous and toxic.
“The biggest killer of men under 45 in Australia is suicide. The biggest killer of women? Domestic violence, usually by a partner.”
To him, healing men is not just about inner peace, it’s about collective safety.
“We are the greatest threat to ourselves, to each other, and to our families, the women, the children, animals… anyone vulnerable – unless we heal.”
Rerakis wants his men’s circles to utilise the transformational power of community. They are both therapy and ceremony.
“Sometimes there’s crying. Sometimes there’s rage. But always, there’s transformation.”
He’s seen it time and again: “A man expresses emotion for the first time in front of another man, and he walks taller. His chest expands. He breathes differently.”
And it doesn’t take years. “Sometimes it happens in one session. That’s the power of safe space.”
Having the conversations that didn’t exist
When asked if he’s noticed change in the Greek community around mental health, Yiannis nods.
“Ten years ago, this conversation didn’t exist. Five years ago, it barely existed. Now? I sit down with my dad and talk about mental health. My brother, my cousins. We check in.”
Rerakis doesn’t romanticise things either.
“Forget the grandparents, they can’t comprehend it. But our parents? They’re starting to get it. They’re warming up to it. And that gives me hope.”
He believes the real change starts at home. “Kids need to learn from zero to ten that it’s okay to feel. That’s how we shift the stats.”
When asked what he’d say to a young Greek-Australian man feeling lost, his message is direct.
“Brother, it’s okay to not be okay. But it’s your responsibility to get help.”
He likens healing to fixing a car.
“If your car breaks, you take it to the mechanic. Your knee? Physio. But your mind? We do nothing. That’s got to change.”
He urges men to seek support: clinical, spiritual, or community-based.
“You’re not alone. What you’re going through is more common than you think. And the moment you realise that, things start to shift. I still see a clinical psychologist to this day, regularly. Especially as a space holders I need to keep my mind and nervous system in check.”
For Yiannis Rerakis, masculinity isn’t about abandoning heritage, it’s about evolving it.
“It’s about standing rooted in who you are, while reaching for who you could be. It’s about becoming a man not through conquest but through connection.”
