#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings

Speaker 1 Why do men have a bad reputation with emotions, do you think?

Speaker 2 Oh man, uh, I mean, I think that we

Speaker 2 I think that generally we feel emotions pretty intensely. And so, when our emotions let loose, sometimes it's uh it cannot be pretty, it can be loud, it can be big, it can be intense.

Speaker 2 Um, and so I think sometimes men have a bad rap because of that.

Speaker 2 I think that there's been a few generations of men that have been told not to feel that their best emotional tool is suppression, is repression is just like stuff it down, pour some whiskey over top, you know, light some weed up and just keep soldiering on, right?

Speaker 2 Stiff upper lip, as I think they say in your country.

Speaker 2 And so I think we've gone through a few generations of men who used avoidance as their main tool. with emotions and because of that cut themselves off from some pretty important data and information.

Speaker 2 And And so a lot of men have just, you know, in older generations, haven't been able to speak the language of emotions, of what they're feeling, of what they're going through.

Speaker 2 But I think having worked with men for over a decade, you know, tens of thousands of men from around the world, men feel very deeply.

Speaker 2 I think it's not that men don't feel. I think it's that men feel very deeply.

Speaker 2 And we've, in some cultures, created a vacuum of being able to teach men what to do with their emotions, how to actually traverse through their emotions. So I think those are parts of it.

Speaker 2 I'm curious what your thought is on that, though, as well, because you talk to a lot of people in this space. Yeah, I think you're right.

Speaker 1 We don't exactly have fantastic emotional role models as men.

Speaker 2 You mean Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin aren't the role models of emotional acuity? Exactly.

Speaker 1 Who's the guy that used to be like, ah, and then would hit his wife, like pretend to hit his wife on like some sitcom? Who is that American guy? I'm not from this country. I don't fucking.

Speaker 2 I think that's before my time.

Speaker 1 It very well may be. Yeah.
You know, it was the 50s. It was a different time.
The hands were softer.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, I think

Speaker 1 the role model of the kind of bumbling, unfeeling,

Speaker 1 largely useless, semi-useless, kind of dedicated, but emotionally out of touch man,

Speaker 1 I think that's got a lot to play into it. I think as well, you know, it's it doesn't speak to many of the ways that men like to think about being masculine.
I think one of the most common

Speaker 1 contributing factors when you ask somebody what is a masculine man would be mastery over their emotions or kind of a reliable and controlled emotional state, some version of that. And

Speaker 1 feeling feelings

Speaker 1 seems kind of at odds with that. So

Speaker 1 it's not particularly well portrayed archetypally in the culture. I don't think it is a

Speaker 1 particularly proud thing, either internally or rewarded externally by society. You know,

Speaker 1 for all that the world says we need men to open up more and talk about their emotions, no one has any fucking idea how to deal with a man that's going through a very intense set of emotions because they're either very aggressive or even worse than that, very soppy.

Speaker 1 And you go, I have no,

Speaker 1 most of the time, people have no idea how to deal with that it's scary uh and then if you try to do that and you see as you're unable to regulate somebody else disgusted at your lack of regulation you think okay i'm never doing that again so uh yeah maybe some more elements there yeah i mean i think

Speaker 2 i think a good way to put it is men are not incentivized to open up emotionally uh for a number of different reasons, right?

Speaker 2 I think oftentimes, I mean, I get comments on my YouTube videos all the time, stories from men who did open up to a past partner, to a girlfriend, to a wife, and, you know, were left shortly thereafter.

Speaker 2 Guys being ridiculed, whether it's in the locker room from other men or being ridiculed by a woman who then loses attraction or says that she doesn't like the way that he brought it forward.

Speaker 2 So men just aren't generally incentivized to be emotionally expressive. Men are rewarded for being emotionally intelligent in the sense that they hold their shit together, right?

Speaker 2 That you kind of, you're able to weather through really intense emotional

Speaker 2 mastery.

Speaker 2 Correct. Yeah.
But the, but the way that most men get there is is maybe not the best for their mental and physical well-being.

Speaker 2 Yeah, of course not, because it's denial.

Speaker 1 It's denial because outwardly the, the, the guy that has gone and worked through all of his shit and has completely transcended and included and integrated and alchemized all of the different things inside of him to the point where he can feel it but not let it out until it's the right time and do it in a controlled manner and regulate and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 And the guy that's just fucking suppressing it, like they appear as the same person.

Speaker 1 I got to make a comment on what you said about

Speaker 1 guys that open up to their partners.

Speaker 1 This is a very common, it's like a trite talking point online about like, can you be vulnerable with your partner? So on and so forth. I want to propose kind of a radical solution.

Speaker 1 Um, that I was dating a good bit last year after a breakup, and uh, I did this a couple of times with different pathways, kind of like an emotional shit test very early on during the dating process.

Speaker 1 Because what you want to see is if this person, and this is the same for women too, like, can this person handle a outside of the sort of bound of what would be typically acceptable or typically expected, perhaps not acceptable?

Speaker 1 Can they handle that? So,

Speaker 1 sending

Speaker 1 psychology articles are something, and seeing if they've got anything to say back. It's like that's something that's important to me.

Speaker 1 And maybe you're in the early days of the flirtation stage and whatever, whatever, like sending a side post article about the neurobiology of depression is like not that.

Speaker 1 It's like, hey, this is probably going to become important to me to be able to have a conversation about because it's shit that I'm interested in. So, let's see.

Speaker 1 And the same thing, at least for me, that worked really well was talking about emotions early on. Like, hey, I'm going to open up.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't need to be, you know, like your chronic athlete's foot and the trauma around that or whatever.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 my point being, if you're dating somebody, I think that over-indexing, if you're the sort of person that really wants to do the whole like emotional openness thing, I think over-indexing on that as soon as possible, once you've got past the very, very early stages, just allows you to see, okay, is this person able to like sit with this are they able to hold the space and if they can't sweet like i've learned i'm not now three five ten years down the line opening up and as all of these different videos happen if a guy like once sheds a tear at the final scene of interstellar or something and the next day his wife leaves him for a fucking the dude next door um you kind of get this out of the way nice and early and ultimately what you're saying is Like, it's the problem of your partner.

Speaker 1 If your partner can't fucking see you talk about emotions and open up,

Speaker 1 that relationship is supposed to be the safest harbor that you're ever going to have. You should be able to deal with the darkest, most difficult things in your entire life.

Speaker 1 And for some guys, they don't maybe don't have that much darkness. But if you're a person that does, I think that you need to try and find that out as soon as possible.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that summary is really good. And I'll just reaffirm something that I said.

Speaker 2 I think when we talked about attachment last time I was on, which is that, and

Speaker 2 this is my good friend, uh, Dewey Freeman, who's been a therapist for 40 plus years.

Speaker 2 He's got a saying that the foundation of attachment is going through a hard time and coming out the other side, okay.

Speaker 2 So the foundation of relationship is being able to go through a hard time and come out the other side, okay.

Speaker 2 And the truth about monogamy is that when you're in a relationship with somebody,

Speaker 2 you are inevitably going to go through some type of hardship that whether it's you individually or you as a couple, that really tests who you are, who the relationship is, how your partner shows up, and how you go through that hardship, whether it's emotional or physical or whatever, is going to determine the quality of the relationship and likely the longevity of the relationship.

Speaker 2 And I think the other thing I'll just say is people really underestimate how much they're going to change in the span of 5, 10, 15 years.

Speaker 2 And one of the challenges that comes along with long-term relationships is often that people do evolve emotionally.

Speaker 2 I mean, I can't tell you how many men I've worked with whose wives are going through menopause and they're like, this is a completely different human being. I feel like I don't know this woman.

Speaker 2 And she reports that too. She's like, I don't feel like I know who I am anymore.
I feel like I'm a completely different person. So emotionally, her landscape is entirely changing.
And

Speaker 2 traditionally, when you look at some of the research that's out there, men generally, as they get older, will soften psychologically. So they'll become less harsh, less aggressive, less angry.

Speaker 2 And women go in the opposite direction. Generally speaking, women become harder as they get older emotionally.

Speaker 4 And I'm not really.

Speaker 2 Do you have any idea why that is?

Speaker 2 A big part of it is the chemical balances in your body. So as you get older,

Speaker 2 there's less testosterone. And for women, it's the inverse, right? Is that from my understanding, estrogen actually decreases? They have more testosterone in the body.

Speaker 2 And so they become more uh, more hard, I guess you could say, more harsh, more aggressive, more, um, you know, some women become a little bit more angry post-menopause.

Speaker 2 So, you know, we have to be able to ride the emotional waves that are naturally going to come along with everything, you know, losing a job, changing careers, having kids,

Speaker 2 all of that type of stuff is going to induce different emotional states within you as an individual. And it's whether or not you and your partner have the ability

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 sort of weather the emotional storm together. And you have the willingness to be transparent about what you're going through emotionally.
I mean, I lost my mom last year.

Speaker 2 She passed away from cancer and she had a pretty rough battle. She was dealing with addiction up until she got diagnosed with terminal cancer and then got sober.

Speaker 2 uh after she was diagnosed which is a whole other conversation um but you know it was it was tough it was really tough to watch her go through the chemo and the treatments and all of those different, different types of pieces.

Speaker 2 And I think one of the things that my wife was very good at was checking in on me, you know, how are you doing? Where are you at? And my willingness to say, today sucks.

Speaker 2 You know, I don't, you know, and especially after she passed. I mean, the birth of my daughter happened after she passed.

Speaker 2 This was the first Christmas that, you know, since she passed.

Speaker 2 And my willingness to be transparent about this, this is joyful on the one hand right bringing my daughter into the world and having it having another kid but also be very real and transparent about there's part of this that is brutal and there's a lot of grief and there's a lot of sadness instead of i'm fine i'm okay uh let me just have another scotch and i'll i'll feel better which was like my old method you know it's like don't talk about how i'm actually doing and just try and you know glaze over that with some type of substance which i think is what most of us us men do because we feel that

Speaker 2 for better or for worse, our intrinsic value comes from our ability to perform. And so we over-index our performance at all costs.
And we oftentimes see our emotions as a hindrance to our performance.

Speaker 2 It's like I won't be able to perform on whatever it is, right? On the trading floor, at work, in the office, and provide for my family if I'm, you know, if I let myself be emotional. So.

Speaker 1 Yeah, make the case for emotions for me. What use are they? Why are they important?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 just like you have thoughts in your mind, you're, those are sort of like the language of your thinking process. Your emotions are the data of the body.
It's the information of your body.

Speaker 2 And so if you want any real

Speaker 2 truth in your life, you need to acquire as much data as humanly possible. The way I put it to a guy that he's, he's a project manager for a big hedge fund on Wall Street.

Speaker 2 And he kind of asked me the same question: like, why should I care about how I feel? You know, he's like,

Speaker 2 my wife says I should. I don't really buy it.
I don't really get it. And I said, okay, imagine that you are going to buy a stock, right? You're looking at buying Tesla.
This is not financial advice.

Speaker 2 You're looking at buying Tesla. And you don't look at the company's PL statement.
Like, you just don't look at their balance sheet.

Speaker 2 You just buy the stock just because you think it's a good idea.

Speaker 2 That is what going through life without emotional information and emotional data is like. If you ignore your emotions, you're not looking at part of the balance sheet of your life.

Speaker 2 And you're trying to make decisions based purely on rationality and logic, which is already being informed by your emotions.

Speaker 2 So the case for it is fullness, fulfillment, a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.

Speaker 2 If you want to find a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in life, your emotions are going to be part of the data and the information that leads you towards that.

Speaker 2 If you want to have a fulfilling relationship, your emotions are going to be part of the data and the information that helps you choose the right partner.

Speaker 2 And sometimes we're choosing the wrong people because our emotions are all messed up. And we don't know how to sift through them.
We don't know how to process them.

Speaker 2 We don't know how to decipher what our emotions are saying.

Speaker 2 Or sometimes we choose really dysfunctional relationships over and over and over and over and over again because we're ignoring our emotions.

Speaker 2 So there's a number of different reasons, but I'll use a Carl Jung quote to sort of close it off. He said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Speaker 2 And for most of us, for all of us, our emotions are these.

Speaker 2 oftentimes unconscious responses or reactions to things that are happening in our head or things things that are happening outside in our world.

Speaker 2 And so, until you start to become more deeply aware of and conscious to what you are experiencing emotionally, and you're able to regulate that, sift through it, process that, you are just, you're going to be walking through life, love, business, largely blind to a big part of the information of what brings you a deeper sense of aliveness, fulfillment, joy, the whole, the whole kit.

Speaker 1 Where should people get started with sifting through them, feeling their feelings?

Speaker 1 Should we sift through them before we feel them? Do we need to think about them first? Like,

Speaker 1 where do we even begin on this journey? It's page one.

Speaker 2 I always love this because

Speaker 2 the more that I've worked with men, the more that I've realized that we always try and come at emotions from a rational standpoint. You know, it's like.

Speaker 1 There has to be some sort of blueprint, right?

Speaker 1 There's an optimization. There's a worksheet from Andrew Huban for this.

Speaker 2 That's right. That's right.
Huberman's feeling your feelings works. Document.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I was going to make a joke to you before we started about how you've asked me to come on and talk about the topic that most men least want to talk about.

Speaker 1 This is going to be a wildly unpopular episode.

Speaker 1 Except for perhaps amongst all of the girlfriends of

Speaker 1 the women, the guys that need to hear.

Speaker 2 This is one of those referral episodes, right? The opening is going to be like, ladies, refer this to your men.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 That would be a great point.

Speaker 1 If you were a guy that's listening to this right now and you didn't put it on in the car or around the house and your girlfriend's put it on surreptitiously in a desperate attempt to try and get you to fucking listen to it, please comment below because I want to know how many of you are being slowly psyoped by your girlfriend into listening to this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, slowly psyoped or just directly told. Correct.

Speaker 1 Hey, listen to this. You suck.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, where do we begin? I think the,

Speaker 2 you know, the sort of like admitting that you have a problem

Speaker 2 is a good place to begin.

Speaker 1 Actually, yeah, let's get back. Go back from that one more.
Let's, This is a better starting point. How do people know if they have a problem with their emotions?

Speaker 2 Okay, good.

Speaker 2 A couple good indicators. Number one, you have high levels of reactivity.
So reactivity is just something happens in your external environment. There's a stimulus, right?

Speaker 2 Your partner says something to you. Your boss says something to you, et cetera.
And you react. You react from defensiveness or judgment or hostility, aggressiveness.

Speaker 2 You just, you have very little tolerance. So you have a pretty bad temper and you react from that temper quite quickly.
So that, that's a good indicator.

Speaker 2 Another one is, is that

Speaker 2 you are struggling or struggle quite often to just accomplish and do the things that you know you need to do. Emotions can really become a drag on us.

Speaker 2 achieving or moving forward with the things that we want to do. Right.
So

Speaker 2 I think it was Jim Carrey who said like depression is your body's way of saying fuck you. And,

Speaker 2 and so that's, you know, that's another really good indicator that you're sort of tuned out from your emotions. You don't really know what you're feeling, but they are clawing for your attention.

Speaker 2 And how they're doing that is by preventing you from doing the things that you know you want to be doing.

Speaker 2 So a lot of times with guys is if they're cut off from their emotions, they are highly over-indexed on their rational mind. And everything is through the lens of rationality and logic.

Speaker 2 And there's no sense of like, this is how I feel about this. If you ask, like, well, how do you feel about your girlfriend or wife or partner? Like, do you think that you should get married?

Speaker 2 There's a lot of rational explanation that won't necessarily tell you at all how they feel. So there's a disconnection from

Speaker 2 oftentimes a physical sense of what's happening inside of them. So when you say, what do you think about this? And can you feel it anywhere in your body?

Speaker 2 There's generally no sense of like, yeah, I feel anger here in my chest or I can feel sadness in my gut or I feel shame here.

Speaker 1 It's like a nervous system decapitation.

Speaker 2 Correct. Yeah.
Yeah. It's a complete disconnection from the body.
And

Speaker 2 another good one is what I call emotional constipation, you know, where somebody really has a hard time expressing,

Speaker 2 experiencing, or even acknowledging that they are feeling something, whether that's because there's a threat to them or they've just been conditioned not to.

Speaker 2 So emotional constipation is another really big sign that somebody's pretty cut off from their emotions.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's

Speaker 2 funny, the

Speaker 1 desire, the masculine urge to try and reverse engineer emotions mentally and be like, no, but I must be able to think my way out of this.

Speaker 1 Is this a thinking problem?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 I'll give you Einstein for a second, then I'll answer your question directly. He said, the rational mind is a faithful servant and the intuitive mind is a sacred gift.

Speaker 2 And we've created a culture that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. And so in psychology, there's something called the rider and the elephant.
And the rider is your rational mind.

Speaker 2 And in the West, in our culture, we've largely over-indexed that rider who's on top of the elephant. And the elephant is your intuitive mind.
It's your emotional body.

Speaker 2 It's your physical body, which has a tremendous amount of power, a tremendous amount of information.

Speaker 2 There's actually more information being sent from your body up into your brain than from your brain down into your body, which is the work of Bessel van der Koch from The Body Keeps the Score.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 2 so, you know, I think in some ways we've been conditioned to really

Speaker 2 over-index that rational mind because there's safety in it, right? There's safety in not having to really understand what's happening in our body.

Speaker 2 And for a lot of men, what they feel internally is intense, right? When a guy feels anger, it feels intense. It feels like a threat.
And so,

Speaker 2 and he's been told not to be dangerous. He's been told not to be a threat.
He's been told not to, you know, not to scare people and not to raise his voice and, you know, be a good boy and comply.

Speaker 2 And, you know, some of these things can really shut a man down from feeling his emotions. Don't cry, et cetera.

Speaker 2 So it's less of a thinking problem and it's more a lack of modeling what it looks like to feel your feelings.

Speaker 2 We've gone through generations of men where they just literally were not taught to feel their feelings or they were actively taught to suppress what they were experiencing.

Speaker 2 And I don't know if it was on your show, another show where I talked about, you know, going through World War II, where all of these sayings came out of World War II, like man up, you know, was to go get into the tank, right?

Speaker 2 Suck it up. I don't know if this is 100% true or not.

Speaker 2 There's like different accounts of it, but suck it up meant when you were in the plane and you puked into your air mask, you literally had to suck it back in and swallow it and continue fighting.

Speaker 2 And so there's all of these adages where men have been put into horrendous situations that require them for survival purposes to deploy disassociation, to literally disassociate from what they are feeling in their body.

Speaker 2 You know, if you're having to go and kill the enemy, you in some way have to disconnect from your emotional body and and become hardened. It's just a rational thing.

Speaker 2 It's like either I kill them or they kill me.

Speaker 2 And so there's many, many different examples of social conditioning, environmental conditioning, just historical pieces that have led to us as men really having to shut down our emotions.

Speaker 2 But to get more directly to it on the individual level, and maybe make this more practical for the individual,

Speaker 2 I think that for a lot of men, it feels like a threat. It's It's like

Speaker 2 there's a threat to their relationship if they open up and are emotional. There's a threat to their ability to perform if they open up and are relational.

Speaker 2 And there's just a lack, again, of being taught how to feel what's happening inside of them. And when that happens, you just go into your head.
You just live in your thoughts and you're constantly...

Speaker 2 just in the in the mode of perception, right? So the way I like to look at this is that your senses are how you perceive reality and your your emotions are how you experience reality.

Speaker 2 So, there's your perception of your partner, there's your perception of the ice cream, there's the perception of how your burger smells, and then there's the experience, the direct experience of that relationship, that experience that you're going through at the party with your friends or eating the ham, you know, the hamburger at the burger joint.

Speaker 2 There's the experience of that, and that's where emotions really come into play.

Speaker 2 And for a lot of men, we just sit in the seat of perception and explanation versus our direct experience because sometimes our direct experience is highly intense or it's very challenging, it's very threatening.

Speaker 2 And we've not really been taught what to do with that. Okay.

Speaker 1 Teach us what to do with that. How do people get started to feel their feelings?

Speaker 2 Okay. First place, 100% is awareness.
So you need to start to develop body-oriented awareness. I call it your DFE, your direct felt experience.

Speaker 2 So with every single emotion, you can think of any, every single emotion as a specific charge, like an electrical charge. And every charge has

Speaker 2 a very specific experience somatically or physiologically in your body. So for example, if you get angry,

Speaker 2 you might have some heat start to build up in your chest, or you can feel your hands start to get a little agitated. Maybe your feet start to tap, right? Some people like bob their feet up and down.

Speaker 2 Your face might start to get flushed. Your breathing might start to get tense.
But every emotional charge has a very specific somatic or physiological response. Shame, grief, sadness, etc.

Speaker 2 So if you're wanting to develop emotional mastery, where you need to begin is just asking yourself the question, what somatic experience or what physical experience accompanies each emotion.

Speaker 2 And as men, this might start with just having some awareness of saying, I feel angry right now, or I feel sad right now, or I feel happy right now.

Speaker 2 And just beginning to have some awareness that you are feeling what you're feeling.

Speaker 2 Because again, depending on how, you know, nervous system decapitated you are, like that expression, or how emotionally constipated you are, how backed up you are, just developing that first awareness of being able to acknowledge, ah, I am feeling something is a really, really important step for the majority of men.

Speaker 2 So we need to start there. Do you want to add anything in or ask anything before we keep going?

Speaker 1 You're on a roll. Let's keep rolling.

Speaker 2 So once you've developed that awareness, then you need to be able to learn what to do with each emotion. And every emotion is a little bit different.

Speaker 2 I think one of the main emotions that men contend with often is anger. And for men, anger is usually the emotion that we deploy.

Speaker 2 It's the emotion that we reject the hardest because maybe we've been told, you know, don't feel that, don't experience that.

Speaker 2 And so, what you want to start to do is to use your breath because your breath is the modulation dial of your nervous system, of your autonomic nervous system specifically.

Speaker 2 And your emotions are largely being produced in your autonomic nervous system between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.

Speaker 2 You're oscillating back and forth between those two, and it's sending data and information up into the brain, to your hypothalamus and amygdala, and they're determining threat response and all those types of things.

Speaker 2 But what you want to start to do is to bring awareness into your body by using the breath.

Speaker 2 And so getting more and more attention on your inhales, on your exhales, and beginning to locate where do I actually experience that emotion in the body.

Speaker 2 So, and being able to, being able to really detail it, right? So when you feel anger, what does anger feel like in your body, right? So for me, I kind of feel like the Iron Man

Speaker 2 power core in my chest, like light up. And then the angrier that I get, the more it just starts to pulse out through my chest, into my arms, down in my legs.

Speaker 2 And if it reaches up into my head, then I know I'm screwed. That's when it's just like, there's definitely a cause for a pause there because your emotions can hijack your brain, right?

Speaker 2 Your emotions can hijack your communication and how you're interacting. So begin to very...

Speaker 2 as much as you can with as much detail as you can, describe the physical experience of your emotions. Describe what it's like when you feel anger.

Speaker 2 Describe what it's like when you feel sadness or grief or joy or frustration, whatever it is, embarrassment. Really begin to describe what happens.
Does your breath start to slow?

Speaker 2 Does it become constricted in your throat?

Speaker 2 Do you start to feel like you're closing down in your chest and you're collapsing? Do you feel like you want to run? Like what actually accompanies that emotion?

Speaker 2 And then once you have that emotional awareness, you can move into beginning to understand if or what that emotion is trying to tell you.

Speaker 2 So every emotion, again, can have some important data and information that it's trying to relay, right? Maybe a boundary has been crossed in your relationship. And this is what happens all the time.

Speaker 2 So I'll give a good example that maybe is going to help guys.

Speaker 2 Anger is necessary for setting boundaries, just as an example. So if you're disconnected from your anger and you think that your anger is a problem, very likely you have piss poor boundaries.

Speaker 2 You get walked all over. You do not have any like real sense of no, or I'm not okay with this, because your anger is an alarm system sometimes that a boundary has been crossed.

Speaker 2 So being able to identify, oh, I feel heat in my chest, I feel heat in my face, I can feel like I'm angry, then we can create a little bit of space from the anger.

Speaker 2 So it's not I am angry, because that's usually where we're acting and responding from that place, but we create a little bit of a pause from awareness of the emotion, the sense of the emotion, a little bit of space.

Speaker 2 And then is there something that we want to communicate or express?

Speaker 2 Not from that emotion, but maybe that something was crossed or somebody overstepped a boundary or that you felt embarrassed about something or whatever it is that the emotion is

Speaker 2 trying to alert alert you to so that's a good sort of breakdown of what you can begin to do with your emotions there's there's more that we can get into for for all those but that's a kind of a good like four step uh what you do but the key to it is building awareness and then the last step that i'll give you is to build some tolerance so for a lot of men there's a very low tolerance of threshold and so grief starts to come up or sadness starts to come up and there's zero room for it and so they shut it down immediately.

Speaker 2 And anger starts to come up and they have zero resilience to it. And so they just explode externally.
And so part of what we need to do is we need to actually sit with our emotions.

Speaker 2 We actually need to sit with them in them, if you want, not wallowing in them, not feeling sorry for ourselves, but we actually need to give ourselves time to feel into what it's like in our body.

Speaker 2 Because for a lot of guys, it's like, I don't like how I'm feeling. And so I want to get away from this as quickly as humanly possible.
I don't like my anger. I don't like this sadness.

Speaker 2 I don't like this grief. I don't like this frustration.
I want to shut it down as quickly as humanly possible. Men, I'll give another example with anger.

Speaker 2 Men that struggle with anger, one of the best things that they can begin to do is to sit in the anger when it arises.

Speaker 2 So I give guys that have, you know, not like rage issues, but anger problems, low temper, what we'll start to do is, okay, when you feel angry and you feel that anger at like a two, because again every emotion has a charge and then it also has an intensity so a good way that i like to think about this is label the charge and label the intensity okay i'm feeling the charge of anger how intense is it it's a two okay i'm feeling the charge of anger it's a it's an eight okay well if it's above a seven it's probably cause for a pause because that means that your prefrontal cortex your your cognitive functions are starting to become impaired and you are likely not going to respond properly so that would be a good cause for a pause.

Speaker 2 And then you go sit, and with anger, specifically, I call it the fire meditation. You sit in that anger and you just breathe and you just notice what's happening in your body.

Speaker 2 Because for a lot of guys, anger hasn't really been a safe thing. Maybe you grew up around a parent who was angry and abusive or violent or hostile.

Speaker 2 And so, anger feels like a visceral threat in your body. So, you have to begin to condition your body to have a higher tolerance for feeling some of these emotions.

Speaker 2 And what that will do is it will slowly over time, train your brain to know, I can be angry and that can be safe, or I can feel grief and that can be okay, whatever the emotion is.

Speaker 2 So charge and intensity and then sitting with the emotion to actually build some level of tolerance around it.

Speaker 1 Can you just take us through that process, those four steps again?

Speaker 2 Yep. So number one, develop awareness, have some awareness around the charge that's in your body.
And that charge is just your, whatever the emotion is, right?

Speaker 2 Whatever, whether it's anger or grief or sadness, et cetera. Number two, after you have the basic awareness is label the experience of the emotion, of the charge in your body.

Speaker 2 So I feel the charge of anger in my chest and label the intensity of it. So I feel the charge of anger in my chest and it's a five, right?

Speaker 2 And then step number three is try and describe it as much as humanly possible.

Speaker 2 Grab a journal, grab the notes app on your phone, whatever it works for you, and just try and write it out as much as humanly possible.

Speaker 2 And then number four is try and identify what the emotion is wanting to express.

Speaker 2 So a good prompt for that is, you know, if my anger had a voice, what it would say is, or if my sadness had a voice, what it would say is, and give that emotion some level of expression.

Speaker 2 That doesn't mean, just very important caveat, that that you are going to launch whatever the anger says out at somebody else it means that you're going to write that down you're going to reflect on it and you're going to this is what a lot of therapists say process what is maybe relevant or important about what that emotion is saying most people just throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to emotions it's like well my emotion is saying this and so i'm either going to vomit it all over somebody which is not emotional intelligence or i'm going to ignore it entirely that's not emotional intelligence We want to feel it.

Speaker 2 We want to be able to identify it. We want to feel it in our body.
We want to be able to sit with it.

Speaker 2 And then we want to be able to parse through if there's relevant information and data that our emotions are actually bringing up to us.

Speaker 1 How, where do people get stuck the most, and how do they get stuck the most during this process?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 for men, where they get stuck is

Speaker 2 usually in the permission stage.

Speaker 2 It's actually giving themselves permission to feel their feelings because there's a whole slew of what-ifs that usually come along

Speaker 2 for them.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 2 just giving themselves permission to say, okay, I don't know how I feel most of the time, or I am emotionally constipated. I am disconnected from my emotions.

Speaker 2 Because for a lot of guys, what they say is, yeah, well, so what? Like, I don't feel my feelings. What's the big deal?

Speaker 2 It's like, well, if you don't feel your feelings, then no one else around you can feel you. They can't interact with with you relationally.

Speaker 2 They don't know whether you're really happy or sad.

Speaker 2 And most of the time, what people get from men when they're around them is you're angry or you're just not there.

Speaker 2 So the permission stage is a big place where guys get angry.

Speaker 2 The second stage is the tolerance stage.

Speaker 2 It can be really challenging. for you to build up any level of tolerance, especially because the majority of men are carrying around an intensity inside of them that is very hard for them to manage.

Speaker 2 So, some men, the intensity that they're feeling is

Speaker 2 way too much energy. And that's, you know, we label that as anxiety in today's culture.

Speaker 2 So, for some men, they're carrying around so much energy in their body, whether it's because of trauma or it's because of life circumstances, or it's just their natural state.

Speaker 2 They just naturally have a tremendous amount of energy internally that they don't know how to deal with that energy. For other men, it's a lot of anger.

Speaker 2 For other men, they have a lot of grief and sadness. And when they really start to try and build tolerance around it, their natural mechanism of, I don't want to fucking deal with this.

Speaker 2 So let me just have another drink, you know, open up the web browser and watch porn and jerk off and get rid of this feeling is so intense.

Speaker 2 And that's what most of us have been conditioned to do. Most men have been conditioned to deal with their emotions by jerking off and watching porn, smoking weed,

Speaker 2 you know, drinking alcohol. All of those things are wonderful for hitting the reset button or numbing out what you're feeling.

Speaker 2 So, developing tolerance is a really, really big challenge for a lot of men because when you start, you feel like you suck.

Speaker 2 There's just no, it's like, you know, it's like I took my son skiing for the very first time and he's never been on skis. So, he sucks, you know.
I mean, he did pretty good, all things considered.

Speaker 1 Probably about as good as me on skis, I feel.

Speaker 2 I mean, he's three and a half, so he's, he's figuring it out, But you're starting at a place of lacking competence. And we as men hate lacking competence.
We hate lacking competence.

Speaker 2 And so you have to be willing to be in a place for a little while where you are almost frustrated with the process because, you know, if you're somebody that is dealing with anger and you're angry.

Speaker 2 And you keep losing your temper at your girlfriend or your wife or whatever, and you're trying to develop some tolerance for it so that you have a higher threshold of not losing your temper, it can be very frustrating at first because for a while, you're going to sit with your anger and

Speaker 2 you sit down, you're angry, you set a timer for two, three, four, five minutes, just something manageable at the beginning. And you're going to feel

Speaker 2 well, probably at first you're going to curse me for giving you this exercise, which is what inevitably happens. But then you're going to feel like it's impossible.

Speaker 2 Because for the majority of men, that intense emotion that they're carrying around inside of them has overpowered them constantly throughout their life.

Speaker 2 Their depression, their anxiety, their anger, their rage,

Speaker 2 their embarrassment, their shame.

Speaker 2 It's dominated them to some degree. And what you're really trying to do is sit with the enemy.
For most men,

Speaker 2 their intense emotion that they're carrying, they've perceived it as the enemy. It's the thing that they do battle with, again, whether it's depression, anxiety, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And so there's this inner civil war that's constantly happening with that anxiousness that they're like, fuck you. I hate you.
I don't want to feel you. Or, God, this anger is ruining my fucking life.

Speaker 2 It's ruined my marriage. It ruined my career.
I hate this part of me. But by sitting with it, you over time are starting to build a relationship of acceptance, of acknowledgement, of understanding.

Speaker 2 You can even start to sit with like, well, where did this emotion, where did the intensity of this emotion come in the first place?

Speaker 2 So, that inflection point of starting to try and build tolerance is really hard for a lot of men.

Speaker 2 For me, as an example, I'll just use myself. I have a tremendous amount of energy, like energizer bunny level energy.

Speaker 2 And so, beginning this process was really hard because I had a lot of anger and I had a lot of intensity and just a just a boatload of energy.

Speaker 2 And so, sitting down with my anger, when it would pop up and it would come up and it would usually show up in, you know, my intimate relationship or close friendships, it was really hard at first because that's where, you know, my inner critic would start to spin up and I'd be shit talking myself and this is ridiculous and I want to do this.

Speaker 2 But that's really the place where you start to reconcile with this intensity that's living inside of you that's oftentimes keeping you away from the people that you love, creating distance from the goals that you want to achieve, et cetera.

Speaker 2 So, those are the places where guys really get hung up.

Speaker 1 Talking about maybe the other side of the fence, energetically from an emotion standpoint, stuff like sadness, anxiety, shame, depression.

Speaker 1 Is there a different way that guys should think about trying to feel those?

Speaker 2 Energetically,

Speaker 2 you know, things like anger and anxiety and panic and fear, they're often very externally pushing, where things like grief and sadness and depression, they're very,

Speaker 2 it's like an anvil on the chest.

Speaker 2 Let's talk about the anvil one. Yeah, one's more implosive, one's more explosive.

Speaker 2 I like this quote that says that grief is praise. Grief is praise because it is the natural way that love honors what it misses.
That's Martin Prechatel.

Speaker 2 I like this notion because for many of us, for many guys, and I won't speak for guys because we hate that, but for many guys,

Speaker 2 we've been taught you're weaker for grieving, you're weaker for being sad, you are, you're weaker

Speaker 2 if you deal with depression, and that compounds it. The hiding of your depression and your grief will compound your grief and your depression for sure.

Speaker 2 It's the surest way to have more grief and more depression. So what we need to do is start to express, right? So for the explosive emotions, we need to begin to slow.

Speaker 2 We need to begin to slow our breath. We need to begin to sit with them.
We need to be able to understand that we can trust ourselves when that really intense emotion starts to come up.

Speaker 2 And sometimes that means that you are labeling it, right?

Speaker 2 So I'm in with every man that I ever work with, I say you have to determine what a cause for a pause is for you if you're dealing with those explosive emotions.

Speaker 2 And that cause for a pause might be that you have a physical response or that you say something in your relationship and then you say, you know what, this is cause for a pause.

Speaker 2 I need to pause because I'm getting so, whatever you want to say, angry or dysregulated or unable to communicate. With the heavier emotions, it's the inverse.

Speaker 2 Those heavier emotions almost want to cause you to be inebriated. You know, they want to slow down your movement to such a degree where it feels like you can't do anything.

Speaker 2 And with grief specifically, I'm going to speak to grief first.

Speaker 1 Just on a point there, I think a lot of people will think, well, no one's died, why would I be grieving? How does grief show up in ways that we might not realize it?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Oh, man.
I mean, there's so much that you can grieve.

Speaker 2 I like to say that we walk through life with grief and gratitude hand in hand all the time. I mean, grief can be about.

Speaker 2 grief can be about the the not just the loss of a person or the death it can be a transition you know you might be transitioning in a career you may have you may have gotten a promotion and you're not working with the same people anymore and you're grieving the loss of the team that you were working with i mean uh

Speaker 2 grief grief really is tied to transition so any type of transition that you experience there's likely going to be a grief that comes along with it and you know it can it can even be i mean I'll give you an example that this might sound strange, but I reached a point in my life five, six years ago where

Speaker 2 this is before my son was born, where my, I, you know, I was married to this wonderful woman. My career was going really well.

Speaker 2 And I had this very unique type of grief, which was, holy shit, I made it. Holy shit, I didn't die.
I didn't kill myself.

Speaker 2 I didn't get dragged underneath the weeds of alcoholism or drug addiction or, you know, some of the heavy shit that I was dealing with.

Speaker 1 I reached escape velocity.

Speaker 2 I reached escape velocity. And there was a really type of,

Speaker 2 it wasn't elation. It wasn't happiness.
It was a type of grief that I had been carrying in me of like, holy crap, I didn't know if I would actually reach this point. It's fascinating.

Speaker 2 And I think that people experience that a lot. And so grief isn't just about loss.
Sometimes grief is about achievement.

Speaker 2 You know, I mean, I've worked with NFL athletes and NHL players and rappers, heavy metal artists.

Speaker 2 And sometimes their greatest grief comes when they win the award, when they win the Stanley Cup or the, you know, the, I'm like blanking on the NFL one. Clearly, I'm Canadian, right?

Speaker 2 I'm like, whatever the fuck. All hockey references.

Speaker 2 But sometimes the grief comes in those moments where you achieve the thing

Speaker 2 and the effort that you've been carrying around and everything is, you know, comes out. So

Speaker 2 grief is a very specific one where it needs expression and it needs witness.

Speaker 2 There's almost no way around it. I like to say that grief that's not witnessed is not processed.

Speaker 2 So if you have grief of a former relationship, a marriage that's ended, a relationship that's ended, and you will not let anybody see that grief, you cannot fully process the ending of the relationship.

Speaker 2 And this is why people stay in this space. Why can't I let them go? How come I can't move on from the relationship? Well, you haven't actually let anybody see you grieve.

Speaker 2 And we've, in our culture, made it very strange to to deal with grief because, I mean, we have all these sayings now, right?

Speaker 2 It's like, oh, you know, his friend got diagnosed with cancer and he gave me the ick. You know, he was crying about his friend getting diagnosed.
I saw this meeting the other day. It was exactly this.

Speaker 2 And so I think we have this, we have this social stigma around people grieving.

Speaker 2 And we want it to be over quite quickly. And so usually for people, they hide their grief instead of express it and expose it.
And it needs that, you know, in

Speaker 1 needs to be done relationally with somebody else.

Speaker 2 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Whether that's, you know, that, whether that's with, you could do it with a therapist or a psychologist or a coach, counselor, but ideally, you're doing it with people who love you and who know you and who can

Speaker 2 witness you through that. You know, there's again, it's this notion that grief is the natural way that we honor what love misses.

Speaker 2 And that's a very important part of human nature. Oftentimes,

Speaker 2 what we end up doing is we defer grief. We try and push it down the road,

Speaker 2 and it turns into a slow depression. So, grief needs to be witnessed

Speaker 2 and it needs to be expressed. You need to be able to say,

Speaker 2 I'm grieving the loss of X, Y, and Z, or I'm grieving

Speaker 2 the movement and the space of my life. I'm grieving the transition into this place.
And to have somebody that can witness it and actually reflect back, like, yeah, I get that.

Speaker 2 That's terrible.

Speaker 3 um and

Speaker 2 so having people in our lives that can do that is important i think with things like depression um expression is important being witnessed is important but there's also a kind of um

Speaker 2 pressing out that's required like you actually have to begin to move outside of the confines because depression is this thing that kind of closes in on your heart on your mind on your emotions on your thinking and it really becomes the this like weighted blanket that you can't get out from underneath of.

Speaker 2 And so sometimes you need the expression of, I'm feeling this way, you need to be witnessed, but you also need people who maybe are going to say, let me help you up.

Speaker 2 So sometimes part of depression is saying, I actually need help. I need you to help me get out of this funk because I don't know what to do.
You know, it's like being caught in

Speaker 2 quicksand. It's like you probably need somebody to help get you out of the quicksand.
That's really what depression is emotionally.

Speaker 2 So, part of depression is asking for help, asking for support without falling into the trap of

Speaker 2 obfuscating the responsibility to the other person.

Speaker 2 Because oftentimes, what happens with depression is this victim mindset sets in: I'm worthless, I can't do anything, I'm not able to get out of this.

Speaker 2 And then there's this, I need a savior to come and get me out of it. So, we can ask for help without actually,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 causing somebody else to do that to pull us out. And I think with something like depression, there's just no way around it.

Speaker 2 Working out, like, go to the gym, go to the gym and work out and work out ruthlessly.

Speaker 2 You know, at first, it might feel like just getting your ass to the gym once or twice a week is like everything that you can do. But with something like depression, that's really going to help you.

Speaker 2 Doing breath work is very, very helpful for things like grief and depression and sadness. A lot of the times, our emotions, we have all of these psychological barriers to getting into our emotions.

Speaker 2 And sometimes things like breath work and psychedelics can shut down what's called the default mode network, which is our thinking mind, and it can access our deeper feeling body much quicker.

Speaker 2 So you can do breath work to, you know, like the intense Wim Hoff or holotropic breathing, those types of breath works, if you do them long enough, can really help you to access a lot of that emotion and get it out.

Speaker 1 It's so bizarre if you're sort sort of deep in a breath work practice like that and there's just this thing starts bubbling up and you're like what the are you like why are you what are you doing that you're here like i'm just breathing i'm i do this all the time i literally have done this since i was born and this very weird particular pattern of it has caused this reaction to happen yeah yeah well that's the your body keeps the score but you know i mean that's why i say that emotions are the language of the body right is that they're trying to express something they're trying to speak something And sometimes it's

Speaker 2 from a time in your life, it's nonverbal.

Speaker 2 You know, you might be going through something that has no memory attached to it from when you were one or two or three, or you're, you know, you're expressing grief that you never dealt with or processed from a breakup or that you never worked through properly.

Speaker 2 And you go into breath work, and all of a sudden, you know, like you said, it bubbles up and goes. So, so those are some, those are some helpful ways to move through things like grief, sadness,

Speaker 2 and depression. But we could get more granular with them, but those are some high-level ways.
I think

Speaker 1 one of the

Speaker 1 common or most likely criticisms that I'm anticipating is that men have this desire to be consistent and reliable, and there is an expectation of mastery of your emotional state among men, from other men, from your partner.

Speaker 1 How do you think about balancing that desire for mastery

Speaker 1 with a desire to not suppress emotions? You know, people don't want to feel ashamed about the things that they feel.

Speaker 1 And what you've said, there's this great story about Tiger Woods, where he had a bunch of inefficiencies in his swing, and he was good, but he was never going to be great.

Speaker 1 And one of the problems was that he had, I think it was too much movement on his back swing, and he needed to, from the ground up, rebuild his entire swing.

Speaker 1 But the problem is, he wasn't even starting playing golf from

Speaker 1 well, yeah, he had to get rid of all of the habits that he had brought in and make himself purposefully worse before he was then able to reach the next level that he was going to go to, while also having all of the expectation on him and all of the comparison internally and externally of his previous performance.

Speaker 1 And, oh my God, he's fallen off. He's gotten worse, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I imagine that

Speaker 1 it's a tough sell to get guys to think, okay, so you're saying that I'm going to actively make myself worse for

Speaker 2 an

Speaker 1 undetermined, as yet undetermined, perhaps sort of infinite amount of time, and it's going to suck. And

Speaker 1 I'm not going to be rewarded for it until who knows how far down. It's like, it's like ordering an Uber and having no idea when it's going to arrive.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? What an analogy. So, yes, that is what I'm saying, for better or for worse.
That is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 And I'm very clear when men come into work with me, because I seem to attract a lot of like finance guys that are hyperlinear.

Speaker 2 They're very good at what they do, hedge fund owners, you know, guys that are Wall Street traders.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 2 they've lived in their brain for very, a very, very long time. And they, they inevitably say, but I don't, I don't want anything to suffer.
I don't want to slide back in any way, shape, or form.

Speaker 2 And it's like, well, then

Speaker 2 you're just, you are going to no matter what. Like the consequence of not feeling your feelings is that you will inevitably sabotage in one way or another.

Speaker 2 So either you take the reins and you actively move into a position of potency by saying, I'm going to try and address this,

Speaker 2 or those emotions will inevitably be a downfall for you in some way, shape, or form.

Speaker 2 They just can't not.

Speaker 1 Guys have a fear of the loss of power.

Speaker 2 Right. Yes.

Speaker 1 Like I'm powerful. I'm competent.

Speaker 2 I'm in control.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 this thing

Speaker 2 stops all of those from happening. Correct.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 you mean emotions stop you from having power?

Speaker 1 It stops you from feeling powerful, at least in the first instance, as you start to go through things.

Speaker 1 I'm aware that, you know, the gold standard is to get to the stage where you use your emotions to inform you so that you're significantly more powerful. I mean, my, my reframe around this

Speaker 1 very much as a white belt at feeling feelings and, you know, like the hopeful,

Speaker 1 wide-eyed desire to like actually make it to somewhere appropriating the top of the mountain

Speaker 1 is that I

Speaker 1 don't see

Speaker 1 denying yourself of your weaknesses to be any kind of strength.

Speaker 2 Correct. That

Speaker 1 suppression isn't strength. That denying yourself of it,

Speaker 1 of what it is that you're feeling isn't strength. And that

Speaker 1 true power to me is feeling the thing and being able to show up anyway.

Speaker 1 Like, that's what courage is. Yes.

Speaker 1 And the goal that everybody's trying to get to is to like, you know, like fuck experience the fullness of the

Speaker 1 human the human world and your inner landscape and not to nerf your way through this like weird self-programmed autism in a desperate attempt to

Speaker 1 be able to fucking increase your on your profits by 20%.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, and who knows how you might perform, how you might increase profits afterwards living more fully.

Speaker 1 And even another question on top of that, who knows if you wouldn't give a single shit about the profits, given that you're now, you now have direct access to the thing that you were trying to do in any case, which is an enjoyable emotional state.

Speaker 2 Correct. Well, this is, I think, what you're talking about:

Speaker 2 there is an intersection between feeling your feelings and finding a purpose. You unequivocally cannot find a deep sense of purpose.
I mean, maybe not unequivocally.

Speaker 2 There are very, very, very, very, very few cases that I have ever come across of men that have found deep meaning and purpose, purpose, and fulfillment in life who are shut off from their emotions.

Speaker 2 It requires you to go through the territory of the unknown, which is your emotions.

Speaker 2 They're the things that are the battlefield that you're really, if you're honest with yourself, most men are afraid to go into.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 2 that loss of power that you're talking about,

Speaker 2 I don't, are you familiar with Richard Rohr? He's a like a Franciscan,

Speaker 2 I think he's a Franciscan monk. He's quite old now, but he has this great saying where until a man experiences a journey of powerlessness, he will always abuse power.

Speaker 2 And the real essence of what initiation used to be,

Speaker 2 men, boys used to go through initiation processes that

Speaker 2 put them into the realm of being a man. And part of that initiation was you were powerless.
You got thrust out into some experience where you literally could not dominate it. You couldn't conquer it.

Speaker 2 You couldn't overcome it. You had to experience what it was like to move and be in relationship with something that was bigger than you, that could conquer you, that

Speaker 2 you are somewhat powerless against. And that's really what I've been talking about in terms of developing that tolerance with your emotion, right?

Speaker 2 If you are a man who has this really deep darkness inside of you that's heavy, that you know, feels like it's overwhelming you constantly. It's like, well, that's a type of an initiatory experience.

Speaker 2 You are up against something that you feel powerless against. Same with your anger, same with your anxiety, same with whatever it is, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, fill in the blank with whatever emotion feels like it's too much for you to handle.

Speaker 2 And so, the formula isn't to just ignore any of your emotions. You will not find a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in that.

Speaker 2 The formula is to move into and actively choose that state of powerlessness and for a period of time, not forever, not to wallow in it, not to be like, I'm a helpless, useless, you know, human being.

Speaker 2 But if you look at any of the great myths out there, like the Odyssey or the Iliad, they go on a journey of powerlessness. That's what it's all about.

Speaker 2 It's about you venturing out into the unknown, being put in powerless position after powerless position and learning something extremely useful about yourself.

Speaker 2 And so as men, Part of how we develop a deeper sense of maturity and mastery in life is that we begin to put ourselves in positions where

Speaker 2 we feel those feelings and those emotions inside of us that feel overwhelming, that feel like they're going to collapse our life.

Speaker 2 And I see this all the time in guys where it's just like, I've been holding this grief or this anxiety at bay for years, and I feel like it's about to blow absolutely everything up.

Speaker 2 And I'm afraid to let myself feel it. And that's the space that you have to enter into because in that is, again, it's all the data and the information.

Speaker 2 I mean, you you read somebody like Marcus Aurelius, what he's really talking about is there, like, he is one of the most emotionally adept writers that I've ever come across.

Speaker 2 And he's just talking about his direct experience of reality, of existence, of ruling a kingdom, of going to war, of loving, of women. Like he's talking from a very emotionally experiential place,

Speaker 2 but it's

Speaker 2 very processed in a way where you can tell that there's a maturity there, that he's been working on his emotions for a very, very long time.

Speaker 2 It's not that he's completely disconnected from them, it's that he's built such a deep relationship to his emotions and to his experience that he's able to articulate life in a way that draws all of us towards it.

Speaker 2 So, yes, you will likely feel a loss of power. No, that's not sexy, but you will likely learn, you will learn something about yourself that you know is missing right now.

Speaker 2 That's been my experience, that the thing that you think is missing in your life, whether it's in your marriage, your relationship, your sex life, your finances, your sense of purpose, it's in this place of going into our emotions and feeling cumbersome and like a beginner and sort of fumbling around at first for, okay,

Speaker 2 I'm going to let myself

Speaker 2 express rather than explain. Maybe we should talk about that difference, but I'm going to let myself feel my feelings and see what happens and be honest about what I'm experiencing.

Speaker 2 You know, Jordan Peterson says, tell the truth and it'll take you on an adventure. Well, part of your truth is that you are feeling something.

Speaker 2 And being honest about what you're feeling is brutal sometimes. It is fucking brutal.
But man, does it take you on an adventure?

Speaker 2 And man, can it lead you to a deep sense of purpose and meaning and love and connection in life that far surpasses anything that your rational mind can conjure up? Anything.

Speaker 1 Talk to me about that explaining, expressing dichotomy.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 when we live, this is okay. Most men,

Speaker 2 we live in explaining. This is where the term mansplaining comes from, right? We love to explain things.

Speaker 1 It's never manspressing.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 2 There's the hashtag that's going to come out of this, manspressing.

Speaker 2 We're going to popularize that.

Speaker 2 But we live in, we love to explain. We love to explain how things work.

Speaker 2 Again, it's the over-indexing on the rational mind, and it creates a ton of challenges in our relationship because what women are really asking for is express what you want, express what you're experiencing, express what you desire.

Speaker 2 And we try explaining it to them. And that's, it's like speaking two different languages.
So to explain something is to say, this is how it works. This is why I think it's a good idea.

Speaker 2 You know, this is how it's going to unfold. It's, it's really the how.
It's really the what, what things look like, what things sound like, et cetera.

Speaker 2 It's expressing something is more about your, again, your DFE, your direct felt experience.

Speaker 2 So when you went through that, when you had that conflict or that argument with your girlfriend, what express what you experienced? You know, were you disappointed?

Speaker 2 Did you feel frustrated with how the conversation went? Because you've had this conversation time and time again. Like what were you actually experiencing from your first person subjective experience?

Speaker 2 What happened inside of you. And the more that you can express, the more that you're tuning into that other data set that is equally as important as the what and how things are going to unfold.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's interesting.

Speaker 1 I remember you saying, we never really encounter the world. All we experience is our own nervous system.

Speaker 1 And yeah, this,

Speaker 1 if you're not getting to the point where you can tap into what you're feeling,

Speaker 1 you're even another step away from experiencing the world.

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 2 You're always in the position when you're trying to explain everything and you're just in your rational mind,

Speaker 2 you're one step away from the actual experience of your reality. So that means you're one step away from the experience of the love and the joy and the frustration and the anger and the whole

Speaker 2 thing. And so this is why for a lot of men,

Speaker 2 it's a very safe place to be. You can operate from that place.
But I think for a lot of guys, this is where the disconnect from their life comes, right? It's like, I, I don't like my life.

Speaker 2 I feel like something's missing. I feel like some, you know, feel miserable or, you know, there's just something not quite right.
I have the passionate.

Speaker 1 I'm not fulfilled.

Speaker 2 I'm not passionate. I'm not fulfilled.
I don't have those things. It's like, well, because you're not actually letting yourself experience life because experiencing life can be challenging.

Speaker 2 You know, I

Speaker 2 was going to tell a story about you, but I won't do that. I was going to talk about our dinner.

Speaker 2 Here, I'll couch it this way, if that's okay. And you can always cut this out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I remember having dinner with you at a point in time where you were in a rough state. And I really appreciated

Speaker 2 how much you were grappling with this exact question. I could see you explaining what happened.
I could see you explaining what was going on and why the decision, you know, was that it was.

Speaker 2 And I could feel from you, I could experience from you the undercurrent of how hard it was for you. And that all of that, you were letting that slowly come to the surface.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 2 when

Speaker 2 people let themselves experience and feel,

Speaker 2 we are able to connect to them more deeply. It was, I really felt much more close to you in that moment, closer than I had ever felt to you before, because all of you was there.
It wasn't a concept.

Speaker 2 I could actually feel like, oh, there's what Chris is experiencing about this

Speaker 2 moment and time in his life. And it really has an effect on him.

Speaker 1 What are some of the ways that people can notice or protect themselves from slipping back into the cerebral world? Like if you've spent your entire life...

Speaker 1 intellectualizing, reflecting your way through, you know, there's a four-step human process for me to, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 How can we stop our brain coming in and sort of clamping that down or explaining it away or coming up with some nice theory about it?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So ask yourself if you're explaining or expressing. Start there.
Start with that as number one. Am I explaining what happened or what I think is going on?

Speaker 2 Or am I expressing what I'm actually experiencing? Am I expressing what I'm actually feeling about

Speaker 2 the divorce, about the shit at work, about the stuff that's happening with the kids? Am I actually expressing what's going on? So just start to notice the difference

Speaker 2 because when you're explaining something, there's no emotional connection. There's almost none.
Like there's no feeling sense in your body. When you're expressing something,

Speaker 2 how I feel it, how most people describe it is that you actually feel as though you are communicating with your body involved in some way, shape, or form.

Speaker 2 You can actually feel your body as you're communicating. You can feel joy or, you know, a little bit of nervousness or whatever it is that you're experiencing as you're expressing.

Speaker 2 So just begin to ask yourself because what you want to do is you want to catch the pattern of falling back into just explaining your way into oblivion.

Speaker 2 So that's number one: is ask yourself, am I explaining or expressing? And move towards expression. Correct.
Number two is create as much time as you can, ideally 30 to 60 minutes a day, of

Speaker 2 untasked cognitive time. So, this might be

Speaker 2 unstructured cognitive time. It might be stream of consciousness journaling, where you just write out whatever is happening inside of you.
This is such an incredible exercise.

Speaker 2 I give it to all my clients. Doesn't matter how much money they have, how successful they are.
I give it to every single client, or how, or how not successful they are, you know, et cetera.

Speaker 2 You can do,

Speaker 2 you can go for a walk for 30 to 60 minutes with no music, no audio book. We clutter ourselves so heavily.
Most of the men that I work with have very little unstructured cognitive time.

Speaker 2 And so at the very end of the day, they're laying in bed scrolling through social media, trying to drown out the emotional information and data that's rising up to their mind, right?

Speaker 2 Instead of replaying that embarrassing conversation where you approach that girl and she was like, no, I'm not going to give you my phone number.

Speaker 2 You try and drown it out by doom scrolling through whatever your social media platform is. So have 30 to 60 minutes of unstructured cognitive time.

Speaker 2 Stream of consciousness journaling, going for a walk, lay in bed for 30 to 60 minutes. Give yourself an extra 30 minutes.
Go in bed. Assume that it's going to take 30 to 60 minutes.

Speaker 2 And maybe just write down some of the things that you're experiencing.

Speaker 2 The last thing I would say is involve people in your life.

Speaker 2 If you're in a relationship, one of the best ways, and even if you're not, you can get your buddies on board with this, is to have other people point out when you've moved into explaining versus expression.

Speaker 2 Now, this isn't to say that explaining isn't, I just want to put this caveat in there, doesn't mean that explaining isn't relevant or important for your life.

Speaker 2 There are some things that you absolutely need to explain at work and in board meetings.

Speaker 2 So make sure that you're not diminishing it entirely. But have other people who are going to support you.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, I asked you how you were doing today and you started to explain to me what happened. You know, how are you actually feeling about that? So have other people that are in your corner.

Speaker 2 They're going to help you move towards that expression and communicating emotionally versus staying stuck in this rigid space. I found that to be really helpful, especially with army guys.

Speaker 2 I've worked with a lot of like former Navy SEALs and military, and sometimes that accountability can be very, very helpful, especially for guys that

Speaker 2 they're trying to break a mold that they have been conditioned to to move against, right? Because if you're in the military, you're really meant to shut off.

Speaker 1 Yeah. How much can men do all of this stuff by themselves?

Speaker 2 Some of it. You know, some of it you can do by yourself.

Speaker 2 I really am a strong advocate for whether it's a men's group or a community of men that are doing some type of work like this because you

Speaker 2 can rapidly, I mean, it's like the trading bros on Reddit, right? It's like, I don't know if you've ever been into like the trading forums on Reddit. Have you ever gone down that rabbit hole?

Speaker 1 Does Wall Street Bets count?

Speaker 2 Yes, sure. Yeah.
Why not? But like, that's a community of men that have a mission and they can,

Speaker 2 you know, you can go sideways sometimes, but they can really support one another.

Speaker 2 And so if you find a community of guys that are supporting one another in this endeavor, it's going to help you, you know, exponentially when it comes to this because you're going to have other guys that are speaking this language, that are supporting you with this,

Speaker 3 that are,

Speaker 2 you know, that are, that are witnessing you in the, in the challenge and the process that you're going through.

Speaker 2 So I think for a lot of guys, they'll benefit from being in some type of community or group

Speaker 2 because our tendency is to do it solo, right? We were like, we want to lone wolf all of this. And what I found is that most men,

Speaker 2 they try and like, I'm going to take myself away from society and away from relationship. And I'm going to go work on myself.

Speaker 2 I'm going to go into monk mode for 12 months and I'm going to come back this perfect, pristine human being.

Speaker 2 And that's not the case. You know, you need interaction with other people.
And the point of doing this work oftentimes with other men is to work through some of the volatility that can come up.

Speaker 2 It's like you're going to get into a men's group and inevitably one of the guys is going to piss you off. Right.
I mean, he's, he's, you're going to get frustrated.

Speaker 2 He's like, he's talking about the same shit, you know, every single week. He's complaining about the same stuff.
And the point of it is to voice and to express, I don't like this about you, right?

Speaker 2 Or to confront that part of you that would normally just keep quiet and sit back or would check out and tune out. So a big part of it is about doing that work amongst other men.

Speaker 2 I mean, you could go down the iron sharpens iron path, but it's

Speaker 2 just too cliche for me.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Sadly, I am in a couple of group chats called Iron Sharpens Iron, which shows just how fucking basic me and the other guys that I'm with are.

Speaker 2 No, they're beautiful.

Speaker 1 Anything else to say? Anything that we haven't included here that's mandatory listening?

Speaker 2 I mean, I think there's just

Speaker 2 the statement, I almost want to say the cliche thing, which is like,

Speaker 2 having emotions doesn't make you less of a man. Feeling your feelings doesn't make you less of a man.

Speaker 2 Being able to feel your feelings and articulate them properly actually makes you more of a man. And that's the standard now.
That's the gold standard. And I would say it always has been.

Speaker 2 If you look at the Stoics, they were just men who learned to be logical, to be hyper-logical, but to also express emotionally.

Speaker 2 Most of them were poets and playwrights and musicians, and they figured out how to express.

Speaker 2 And so if you want to find a deeper sense of purpose, I'm really trying to make a case for it because I get messages from men every day. I sent you one the other day who feel

Speaker 2 broken, who feel like they can't articulate what they're feeling, who are on the verge of taking their own lives, who have suppressed their own emotions from the people in their life for years and are in really bad places.

Speaker 2 And my mission is to really support men like that.

Speaker 2 And you don't have to be in a bad place to start to feel your feelings. You don't have to be fucked up or broken to start feeling your feelings.
You will unequivocally be better off for doing so.

Speaker 3 Um,

Speaker 2 but man, I just wish that,

Speaker 2 yeah, I mean, I just wish that this was more normal because I, I get emails and messages every day from men who have cut themselves off from their emotions and find themselves right at the brink, you know?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 yeah, it's heartbreaking because I see so many men. I can't not look in men's eyes and not see their pain.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, I just wish that more men would share what's actually going on with them so they didn't feel so bloody alone in the world.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man. I mean, I know, I feel like there is a corner being turned.
It's so hard because.

Speaker 1 The thing that you're working on is the most important thing in the world while you're working on it.

Speaker 1 So I'm seeing this everywhere. You know, I'm seeing the C-bum meme

Speaker 1 reels of him talking about how he's embraced this thing and it made him a better champion and better father and a stronger man and all the rest of the stuff.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Alanda Boton's fucking following me around the internet at the moment with you all emotionally. And the same with your stuff.

Speaker 2 But I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't care. Frankly, I don't care.
I think that it's an optimal way for a

Speaker 1 particular subset, perhaps a majority, perhaps all men.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to say that it is, but I I certainly know that for somebody that has a constitution that's like mine, and that I'm not that much of an outlier, there must be a non-insignificant cohort of people that also do it.

Speaker 1 That it's better, that life's better when I'm trying to do that, when I'm trying to work with emotions as opposed to against them, when I'm trying to actually feel my feelings as opposed to deny them,

Speaker 1 when I feel connected to the things that I do because there's a sense of resonance between me and it,

Speaker 1 when I'm not trying to explain away

Speaker 1 what's going on in life because i can come up with some clever sequence of letters and sounds that come out of my face hole uh

Speaker 1 and then you leave the conversation thinking well at no point in that conversation was i there i wasn't there in that conversation i did this really cool dance or whatever And everybody there was really impressed by the dance, I'm sure, but there was no part of me that actually got seen during that.

Speaker 1 And yeah, the full breadth of human experience is there for us to

Speaker 1 go through. And

Speaker 1 I'm interested in finding out what's on the other side of it. So I think that this is

Speaker 1 maybe an important redress, maybe a massive fucking error. And we're going to look back and realize that, you know, the suppression thing was right all along.
But

Speaker 1 you can't look at the state of the way that guys feel in the world and say that whatever is happening is optimal. Like, the one thing that you can't do is defend the current system.

Speaker 1 Now, I'm aware that this system has an awful lot of different inputs to do with socioeconomic status and their meaning in work, and

Speaker 1 what's happening to sperm counts and testosterone levels and dating and online porn and video games and social media. And, like, yep, yep, all of those things are in there too.

Speaker 1 But everything should be on the fucking table. Like, if stuff's not going well, everything should be on the table, including the psychological and emotional landscape that these guys are inhabiting.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yeah, for me,

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 what I'm working on. It's what I'm interested in.
I think it's,

Speaker 1 I like the, I like the group that I'm a part of. I like being a part of people like yourself and like Chris, who, I don't know, like fucking

Speaker 1 for the people that have got a massive problem with it, or for the people that don't think that it's sufficiently masculine, it's like pick any vector of masculinity that you want and somebody from my friend group will beat you in it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So if you want to play that game, if you want to play the shallow, like my dick's bigger than your dick game, it's like, I've got a fucking army of dicks behind me.

Speaker 2 I've got the biggest emotional dicks on the planet.

Speaker 1 Honestly, precisely correct. And yeah, I don't know.
It just seems,

Speaker 1 it seems petty. and juvenile and immature looking at kind of previous versions of what guys are supposed to be.

Speaker 1 And I understand the whole, like, I keep seeing these fucking atrocious videos of, or, or memes or whatever of like, my husband did X and I got the ick and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the rest of this stuff.

Speaker 1 I'm like,

Speaker 2 to be honest, I feel like

Speaker 1 the more that this happens, women should be fucking ashamed for that in the same way as guys who abandon their partner because, you know, something happens on their side, some common error or challenge that women come up against, something like that.

Speaker 1 It's like

Speaker 1 you suck as a fucking partner, and you don't deserve to have a guy in your life. And I can't wait for him to find someone that is going to support him.

Speaker 1 And I can't wait for you to be alone until you realize this.

Speaker 1 So that's what I meant about the emotional shit test: that you want to find out quite early,

Speaker 1 earlier than you think you should, whether or not this person can handle it. And if they can handle a little bit of emotionality when they don't have the buy-in, they don't have the

Speaker 1 investment, the conviction, the attachment, the dependency. Um,

Speaker 1 that bodes really fucking well for the future. And if you, if you just see this like run for the hills thing, you think, well, great, you've been saved.

Speaker 1 You've been saved from having to invest more time into somebody who's so emotionally immature that they can't bear to deal with a guy who feels things. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I saw this.
I saw this. I just did a commentary on it.
I saw this reel of this woman.

Speaker 2 This was like three or four women on a podcast, and they were talking about how the one woman started off, and she said,

Speaker 2 when a man treats me well, I actually feel uncomfortable and I don't like it. And the other women all agreed with her, you know?

Speaker 2 And I was like, what a fucking wild way to say that you like dysfunctional relationships. Like, why don't you just say, I like dysfunctional men and dysfunctional relationships? Like, just say that.

Speaker 1 Your job as a girl is to find somebody that, if that's what you want, go and find it. I mean, I think it's an insane decision, but if that's what you want, go and and find it.

Speaker 1 And as a guy, if what you want is somebody that you can grow with, that you can

Speaker 1 bear the most difficult and shameful parts of yourself and heal them together with somebody and feel like this is home and that you're the roof of the house together, that you guys are safe underneath this roof that you've built together.

Speaker 1 You need to find out if it's a chick on a podcast that wants to, you know, be

Speaker 1 mistreated for a couple of decades before she bounces off into whatever next relationship she's going to do.

Speaker 1 Or if it's a Vienna or a Courtney, Chris's wife, you know, who want to genuinely see their partner. And

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 1 the sort of birds of a feather flock together type thing. Like people will get what they deserve eventually, but you want to try and find out if you're getting what you deserve nice and early.

Speaker 2 That's a good way of putting it. That's a good way of putting it, man.
I mean,

Speaker 2 I think the last thing I was going to say around dealing with emotions, I love that, I love that notion of finding out early on whether somebody's on the same page as you emotionally and having those sort of like emotional tests.

Speaker 2 You know, like, are you okay with, can we go through a hard time and come out the other side? Okay, or you know, do you completely fall apart? Or are you not interested in the same things as me?

Speaker 2 But I think for the guys that are out there and they're not 100% sure where to begin, and you just want one thing to take away from all this, it's just start by acknowledging what you are avoiding emotionally.

Speaker 2 Just start there. Just start by acknowledging with somebody in your life.
Like, I'm avoiding how angry I am. I'm avoiding how depressed I actually am.

Speaker 2 I haven't been honest about how much anxiety I actually have or that I'm fucking scared all the time. You know, like just start with what you've been repressing.

Speaker 2 And sometimes that can be such a powerful first step. I mean, Jung said that confession is the first step of any therapeutic process.

Speaker 2 And just that admission can be enough to put you on a path of expression and tuning into your emotions on a much deeper level.

Speaker 2 And just practicing that, just having that become routine of like, I haven't been honest about this part of how I've been feeling. I haven't been honest about that part about how I'm feeling.

Speaker 2 And just being truthful about what you've been experiencing internally with somebody that you trust, with somebody that is, you know, on board with that, setting that up properly is important, not just dumping it on them, uh, you know, ad hoc and hoping that it goes well, being like that Connor guy gave me bad advice, setting it up properly and making sure that they're on board for this process.

Speaker 2 But once you go down that path, I mean, it can lead you into developing much better friendships, much more transparent friendships, like we're talking about, and in a much deeper relationship where,

Speaker 2 where,

Speaker 2 you know, I think the greatest,

Speaker 2 the greatest demand within any human being is to be fully fully known. I think that that is, that is, there's like a something in us that is magnetically pulling us towards being known

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 2 to set up relationships where we can be fully known in a way that is healthy and not, you know, not about attention seeking or grandiose validation or

Speaker 2 wallowing in your own misery. You know, it's not about any of that, but it's about actually being authentically and genuinely known by somebody else who cares about you.

Speaker 1 Like, what's the alternative? Like, where else are you going to find that level of intimacy, really?

Speaker 1 You know, you can have a twin brother or sister, and you're not going to be able to share quite the same things

Speaker 1 that you can in a relationship because you just don't have the same underpinning of attachment in that same way. And,

Speaker 1 yeah, man, you can have a

Speaker 1 safe and numb existence for the rest of time, or you can switch the color on the TV and start to actually experience things fully. Dude, I love you, Dubits.
I adore all of your work.

Speaker 1 You know that I do. Everyone needs to check out everything that you're doing.
Why should they go?

Speaker 2 Just go to mantalks.com. You can check out my book there.
We have a men's community. You can check it all out there.
So mantalks.com or on YouTube or on Instagram. It's just Mantalks.

Speaker 1 Everyone needs to go and check it out. Until next time, dude, I can't wait.
I appreciate you.

Speaker 2 Thanks, buddy.

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