Ridgewood’s Men in Transition group—not to be confused with a Men in Transition support group for teenage fathers in Minnesota or Men in Transition for jailed inmates in Texas or Men in Transition for men going through divorces in Seattle—is for men who have been laid off from their high-paying Manhattan jobs in business and finance.

On the second floor, in a plain room with gray carpeting, six men pushed smaller tables together to form one large conference-room-size table and took a seat. Usually, there would be more, explained the group’s founder, Paul Anovick, guessing that a few members had awoken in their dark homes and assumed the meeting was off.

Mr. Anovick (or “Coach Anovick,” as he calls himself on his Web site) is a Man who Transitioned a few years ago from a career in TV broadcasting to become a motivational speaker. Coach Anovick, dressed in a cheery yellow cable-knit sweater and jeans, is a man of medium height with arched eyebrows, a sharp nose and a round face. He is 64 but looks 54 and has the energy of a 44-year-old. “So Rob, why don’t we start with you today?” he began.

Rob, 44, sitting across the table from Coach Anovick, was also wearing jeans, and a light black jacket. (The men asked to be identified only by their first names so that potential employers would not find this during investigatory Googling.) “I went last week,” Rob said, but then began talking anyway. A year ago, Rob was laid off from a marketing job and has since been consulting for a California-based e-commerce company, but he’s growing frustrated; his new employer keeps extending his contract but won’t give him a permanent position.

“So why are you negotiating with these guys?” asked Coach Anovick. “You’re negotiating because you don’t have options. But even when you don’t, you have to believe you have options. Negotiating from a position of strength is often in our heads and in our hearts.”

Phillip, 66, who, like Rob, is from the nearby town of Saddle River (median family income: $152,169), and who used to be the CEO of a small Manhattan bank, had a question for Rob: “Let me ask you: What is your family prepared to sacrifice?” Phillip was the only one dressed in a suit and tie.

“I’ve thought about all of what you all just said, and I think I have a tendency to make things look worse than they are,” Rob said. “To answer your question, I don’t want to move my family out to northern California if it’s not going to work out.”

“Well, that’s a good thing,” said Coach Anovick. “Sometimes by identifying what you’re not going to do, you can focus on what you will do.”

IN THE FALL of 2008, shortly after the fall of Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns, the pastor at St. Elizabeth’s began to pray for members of his congregation who had lost jobs. Coach Anovick, a member of the church, suggested he could provide more than spiritual support. He scheduled the first Men in Transition meeting in January 2009, right around the time experts reported that 82 percent of those laid off were men, while the proportion of working women had barely changed. Three men showed up. “A lot of that catharsis took place in the first half of ’09 with the finance guys,” Coach Anovick said. “They had this shared experience of losing the routine of their lives, like not going to the train station or standing in the supermarket at 9 a.m. and then not knowing what to do.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate has barely moved in the past month, but the objective of the group has become more optimistic: to look ahead, get jobs and, one hopes, become men who are no longer in transition.

Bonnie Jacobson is an Upper East Side psychologist, many of whose patients are former Wall Street men. She screamed delightedly when I told her about Men in Transition: “It’s beyond belief!” Group therapy is the best kind, she said, but men usually have trouble signing up for these sorts of things. “It’s about shame,” she said. “Men have been trained to keep their private vulnerabilities to themselves and to be Eagle Scouts and this is the opposite of Eagle Scout. This is more like Oprah!”

Twenty-eight laid-off men have cycled through the group at one point or another, including traders from the New York Stock Exchange and Alliance Bernstein; a Morgan Stanley financial adviser; and a vice president of public-sector and infrastructure banking at Goldman Sachs. Some have graduated, gotten jobs and returned as alums to tell their stories.

Coach Anovick called the group’s exclusion of women a “comfort factor.” “Men have a more difficult time speaking about unemployment, particularly in Ridgewood, where the finance guys are the primary breadwinners,” he said. “It’s a challenging, humiliating experience, and they said they wouldn’t be comfortable speaking with women in the room. In my experience, this is not something women struggle with. They can just get together for the first time and really put it out there, talk about their feelings and what they’re going through. Men would never be able to do that. Even when it’s only men, they have difficulties.”

“I didn’t want to come at first,” said Steve, 44, from Mahwah (median family income: $111,714), after the meeting. Steve, who has longish black hair and glasses, was laid off two years ago as a director of business development at a marketing firm and has since been consulting. “I guess it’s a guy thing. I originally called it ‘miserable men,’ because I thought that’s what Men in Transition was: a bunch of guys who were talking about how miserable they were. I didn’t want to be with a bunch of losers. Nothing personal,” he said and briefly looked in the direction of Barry, from Ramsey (median family income $104,036), who used to work for a major financial services company.

Steve was surprised to find that many of the men were actually kind of alpha. “There was a guy here who had something like 30 traders working for him on the floor of the stock exchange,” said Steve. “He was on the board of directors. This guy was a major player, and he didn’t know how to start over. So it’s nice to come here and hear everyone’s stories.”

Sometimes, the subject matter drifts over to wives and mortgages and children and tuition and soccer coaching and lawn-mowing and pet care. But not often enough, in Steve’s opinion. “I think that’s the biggest thing that’s missing,” he said. “It’s still somewhat of a taboo subject. When Phil asked Rob today about his family, Rob didn’t really answer the question because I think for Rob that’s still something that’s not up for discussion. It would be great to have a professional therapist come in and talk about dealing with this stuff.”

BACK AT THE MEETING, Barry, a quiet man with deep-set eyes and brown hair who has only been coming for about a month and calls the meetings “sessions,” was telling the group about his recent meeting with a recruiter in Manhattan. “He says the market is opening up, but the roles they’re placing are primarily lower level and lower compensation,” Barry said. He was especially concerned about a question posed to him by the recruiter, who, while looking over Barry’s experience, asked, “What are you?”

“When someone says, ‘Who are you,’ it’s almost insulting,” Phillip offered.

“Actually, he said, ‘What are you,’ which is about the brand,” said Coach Anovick. “Did anyone see that story last week about Desiree Rogers?”

“She let in those people into the party,” Rob said.

“Yes, but she didn’t get fired for that reason,” said Coach Anovick. “It was because she did a magazine interview and referred to the Obama brand. She is a Harvard M.B.A., sharp as a tack, she is inside that administration and clearly they are focused on the Obama brand. I go down this path because that is what I do; I develop people’s brands.”

Phillip, the former bank CEO, was next. He talked about working as a consultant and not necessarily looking for a permanent job. “I have this argument with my wife,” he said. “She is petrified—she would rather see me in a job than doing what I’m doing now—but I have to tell you, I am having way more fun and doing far more interesting things than running a bank. What I’m getting at is, it’s a very liberating thing.” (Rob and Barry pointed out that they were in a different situation, as they both have young children.)

By the time the conversation came around to Steve, the marketing consultant, he seemed prepared. “I’ve got five fronts right now, and they are all very active,” he assured the group. He spent an hour and a half with a headhunter in New York last week; a major cosmetics company has been in touch; he has had two interviews with a local marketing firm; he finished a consulting assignment for another company; and he’s been working with the inventor of a product called PetWashSpa. “You put the dog or pet inside and it’s connected to a water source, so you can keep the water contained and reach in from either end,” he later explained. “It eliminates the mess when you bathe a dog in the house.”

At a little over an hour into the meeting, Rob was getting antsy and was swinging back on his chair, catching himself with his feet each time it was about to tip. Soon enough, the meeting ended and the men walked out to St. Elizabeth’s parking lot and got into their cars to go back home. Someone said that the nearby town of Paramus was flooded. Rob rushed off to catch a flight to California to meet with the company he hoped would finally hire him. A few weeks later, I called Rob to see how it went. He said it was a work in progress and that he didn’t have anything to report just yet.

ialeksander@observer.com