A Man's Guide To Mastering Your Emotions - Connor Beaton

why do men have a bad reputation with emotions do you think oh man uh I mean I think that we 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 um and so I think sometimes men have a bad rap because of that I think that there's been a few generations of men that have been told not to Fe that their 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 and just keep soldiering on right stiff upper lip as I think they say in your country um and so I think we've 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 so a lot of men have just you know older Generations haven't been able to speak the language of emotions of what they're feeling of what they're going through um but I 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 yeah I I think it's not that men don't feel I think it's that men feel very deeply 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 I think those are are parts of it uh I'm curious what what your thought is on that though as well because I mean you talk to a lot of people in this space yeah I think you're right um we don't exactly have fantastic emotional Role Models as men and you mean Homer Simpson and uh Peter Griffin aren the like the role models of emotional Acuity exactly who's that 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 was American guy I'm not from this country I don't [ __ ] I don't I think that's I think that's before my time I'm not sure very well may be yeah you know it was the 50s it was a different time the hands were softer um so yeah I think the role model of the kind of bumbling unfeeling largely useless semi- useless kind of dedicated but emotionally out of touch man uh 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 uh 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 uh feeling feelings seems kind of at odds with that so um it's not it's not particularly well portray trade archetypally in the culture uh I don't think it is a particularly proud thing either internally or rewarded externally by Society you know for all that the world says we need men to open up more and talk about their emotions no one has any [ __ ] 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 soy and you go I have no 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 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 I think often times I mean I get comments on my YouTube videos all the time stories from Men Who uh did open up to a past partner to a girlfriend to a wife and you know were left shortly thereafter um guys being ridiculed whether it's in the locker room from another man or being ridiculed by a woman who then loses attraction or says that she doesn't like the way that he brought it Forward um so 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 [ __ ] together right that you kind of you're able to weather through really intense emotional 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 because of course not because it's denial it's denial because outwardly the the the guy that has gone and worked through all of his [ __ ] 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 and the guy that's just [ __ ] suppressing it like they appear as the same person um I got to I got to uh make a comment on what you said about um guys that open up to their Partners this is a very common it's like a trit 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 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 [ __ ] test very early on during the dating process 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 uh expected perhaps not acceptable um can they handle that so sending uh psychology articles or something and seeing if they've got anything to say back it's like that's something that's important to me and maybe you you're in the early days of the flotation stage and whatever whatever like sending a side poost article about the neurobiology of depression is like not that it's like hey this is probably going to become important to me to be able to have a conversation about because it's [ __ ] that I'm interested in so let's see 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 and it doesn't need to be you know like your chronic athletes foot and the trauma around that or whatever but um 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 5 10 years down the line opening up 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 [ __ ] 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 if your partner can't [ __ ] see you talk about emotions and open up you you that relationship is 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 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 yeah I think that summary is really good and I'll just reaffirm something that I said I I think when we talked about attachment last time I was on which is that and this is my this is my good friend uh Dewey Freeman who's been a therapist for 40 plus years he's got a saying that the foundation of attachment is going through a hard time and coming out the other side okay so the foundation of relationship is being able to go through a hard time and come out the other side okay and the truth about monogamy is that when you're in a relationship with somebody you 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 because and 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 and one of the challenges that comes along with long-term relationships is often that people do evolve emotionally I mean you 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 I feel like I don't know this woman 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 and traditionally when you look at some of the research that's out there men generally as they get older will soften psychologically so they become less harsh less aggressive less angry and women go in the opposite direction generally speaking women become harder as they get older emotionally and I'm not really you any idea why that is a big part of it is the is the chemical um balances in your body so as you get older 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 and so they become more 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 postmenopause 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 uh 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 uh to to 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 I lost my mom last year she passed away from cancer and she had a you know pretty rough battle she was dealing with addiction up until she got diagnosed with terminal cancer and then got sober uh after she was diagnosed which there a whole other conversation um but you know it was it was tough it was really tough to to watch her go through the chemo and the treatments and all those different different types of pieces 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 you know I don't you know and especially after she passed I mean the birth of my daughter happened after she passed uh this was the first Christmas that you know since she passed and my willingness to be transparent about this this is joyful on the one hand right bringing my daughter into the world and having 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 men do because we feel that For Better or For Worse our intrinsic value comes from our ability to perform and so we we over index our performance at all costs and we oftentimes see our emotions as a hindrance to our performance it's like I won't be able to perform on whatever it is right on the training floor at work in the office uh and provide for my family if I'm you know if I let myself be emotional so yeah make the case for emotions for me what use are they why are they important so 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 and so if you want any real um 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 and he kind of asked me the same question like why should I care about how I feel you know he's like I 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 you're looking at buying Tesla uh this is not Financial advice you're looking at buying Tesla and you don't look at the company's p&l statement like you just don't look at their balance sheet you you just buy the stock out just because you think it's a goodidea idea um 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 and you're trying to make decisions based purely on rationality and logic which is already being informed by your emotions so the case for it is fullness fulfillment uh deeper sense of meaning and purpose if 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 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 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 we don't know how to decipher what our emotions are saying or sometimes we choose really dysfunctional relationships over and over and over and over and over again because we're ignoring our emotions uh so there's a number of different reasons but I'll I'll use a Carl Young Young 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 and for most of us for all of us our emotions are these oftentimes unconscious responses or reactions to things that are happening in our head head or things that are happening outside in our world 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 where should people get started with sifting through them feeling their feel should we should we sift through them before we feel them do we need to think about them first like where do we even begin on this this journey it's page one I always I always love this because the the more that I've worked with men the more that I've realize that we always try and come at emotions from a rational standpoint you know it's like that to be some sort of blueprint right there's there's an optimiz there's a worksheet from Andrew huberman that's right that's right huberman's feeling your feeling yeah I was I was going to make a joke uh to you before we started about like how you've asked me to come on and talk about the topic that most men least want to talk about you know this is this is this is going to be a wildly unpopular episode yeah except except for perhaps amongst all of the girlfriends of right the women the guys that need to hear this is one of those referral episodes right the the opening is going be like ladies refer this to your man exactly that would be a great point if you are 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 [ __ ] listen to it please comment below because I want to know how many how many of you are being Slowly sced by your girlfriend into listening to this yeah slowly sced or just just directly told you know correct Hey listen to this you suck yeah well Where Do We Begin I think the the you know the sort of like admitting that you have a problem is a good place to be actually yeah let's get back go back from that more let's this is a better starting point how do people know if they have a problem with their emotions okay good um 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 your your partner says something to you your boss says something to you Etc and you react you react from defensiveness or judgment or hostility uh aggressiveness you just you have very little Toler so you have a pretty bad temper and you react from that temper quite quickly so that that's a good indicator um another one is is that you are struggling or struggle quite often to just accomplish and and and do the things that you know you need to do emotions can really become a drag on us achieving or moving forward with the things that we want to do right so uh I think it was Jim Cary said like depression is your body's way of saying [ __ ] you and 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 and how they're doing that is by preventing you from doing the things that you know you want to be doing 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 and everything is through the lens of rationality and logic 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 there's a lot of rational explanation that won't necessarily tell you at all how they feel so there's a disconnection from um from 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 body 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 it's like a nervous system decapitation correct yeah yeah it's a complete disconnection from the body and the another good one is what I call emotional constipation you know where where somebody really has a hard time expressing um experiencing or even acknowledging that they are feeling something whether that's because there's a a threat to them or they've just been conditioned not to so emotional constipation is another really big sign that somebody's pretty cut off from their emotions yeah it's uh it's funny the desire the masculine urge to uh try and reverse engineer emotions mentally and be like wait no like I must be able to think my way out of this um is that is that some is this a thinking problem like well it so I'll give you Ein Stein 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 and we've created a culture that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift and so in Psychology there's something called the the Rider and the elephant and the rider is your rational mind and in the West in our in our culture we've largely over indexed that writer who's on top of the elephant and the Elephant is your intuitive mind it's your emotional body it's your physical body which has a tremendous am of power a tremendous amount of information 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 Bess Bessel vanderock from the body keeps the score and and and so you know I think in some ways we've been conditioned to really uh over index that rational mind because there's safety in it right their safety and not having to really understand what's happening in our body 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 and 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 and you know some of these things can really shut a man down from uh feeling his emotions don't cry Etc so it's less of a thinking problem and it's more a a lack of modeling what it looks like to feel your feeling 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 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 uh suck it up I don't know if this is 100% true or not 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 continue fighting 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 you know if you're having to go and kill the enemy you in some way have to disconnect from your emotional body and become hardened it's just a rational thing it's like either I kill them or they kill me and so there's many many different examples of social conditioning environmental conditioning um just historical you know pieces that have led to us as men uh really having to shut down our emotions but to to get more directly to it on the individual level and make maybe make this more practical for the individual um I think that for a lot of men it feels like a threat it's like there's there's a threat to their relationship if they open up and are emotional there's a threat to their their ability to perform uh if they open up and are relational 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 just in the in the mode of perception right so the way I like to look at this is that your your senses are how you perceive reality and your emotions are how you experience reality 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 you're going through at the party with your friends or eating the ham you know the hamburger at the Burger Joint there's the experience of that and that's where emotions really come into play 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 uh or it's very challenging uh it's very threatening and and we've not really been taught what to do with that okay teach us what to do with that how do people get started to feel their feelings 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 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 a d a a very specific experience somatically or physiologically in your body so for example if you get angry 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 B their feet up and down uh your face might start to get flushed your breathing might start to get tense but every emotional charge has a very specific sematic or physiological response shame grief sadness Etc so if you're wanting to develop emotional Mastery where you need to begin is just asking yourself the question what sematic experience or what physical experience accompanies each emotion and as 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 and just beginning to have some awareness that you are feeling what you're feeling because again depending on how um you know uh nervous system get decapitated you are I 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 so we need to start there do you want to add anything in or ask anything before we keep going you're on a roll let's keep rolling so once you've developed that awareness then you need to be able to learn what to do with each emotion and every emotion's a little bit different I think one of the main emotions that men contend with often is anger and for for men anger is usually the emotion that we deploy 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 and so what you want to start to do is to use your breath because your breath is the the modulation dial of your nervous system of your autonomic nervous system specifically and your emotions are largely being produced in your autonomic nervous system between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic you're oscillating back and forth between those two and it's sending data and information up into the brain to your hypothalamus and amydala and they're determining threat response and all those types of things but what you want to start to do is to bring awareness into your body by using the breath 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 so and being able to being able to uh 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 uh 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 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 uh because your emotions can hijack your brain right your your emotions can hijack your communication and how you're interacting so begin to very 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 describe what it's like when you feel sadness or grief or Joy uh or frustration whatever it is embarrassment really begin to describe what happens does your breath start to slow does it become constricted in your throat does uh you know do you start to feel like you're 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 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 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 uh so I'll give a a good example that maybe is going to help guys 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 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 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 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 and then is there something that we want to communicate or Express not from that emotion but but maybe that something was you know crossed or somebody overstepped a boundary or that you felt embarrassed about something or whatever it is that the emotion is trying to uh trying to 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 and uh 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 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 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 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 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 so I give guys that have maybe not like rage issues but anger problems low temper what we'll start to do is okay when you feel angry and you feel feel that anger at like a 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 caused for a pause because that means that your prefrontal Co cortex your your uh 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 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 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 and so anger feels like a visceral threat in your body so you have to begin to condition your body to have a a a higher tolerance for feeling some of these emotions 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 so charge and intensity and then sitting with the emotion to actually build some level of Tolerance around it can you just take us through that process those full steps again y 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 whatever whether it's anger or grief or sadness ETC number two after you have the basic awareness is label the experience of the emotion of the charge in your body so I feel the charge of anger in my chest and label the intensity of it so I feel the the charge of anger in my chest and it's a it's the five right and then step number three is try and describe it as much as humanly possible 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 seemly possible and then number four is try and identify what the emotion is wanting to express so a good prompt for that is you know if 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 that doesn't mean just very important caveat 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 bath water 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 ignore it entirely that's not emotional intelligence we want to feel it 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 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 how where do people get stuck the most and how do they get stuck the most during this process so for men where they get stuck is usually in the permission stage it's it's actually giving themselves permission to feel their feelings because there's a whole slew of what ifs that usually come along for for for them and 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 because for a lot of guys what they say is yeah well so what like I I don't feel my feelings what's the big deal 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 you relationally they they don't know whether you're really happy or sad uh 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 so the permission stage is a big place where guys get angry um the the second stage is the tolerance stage um it can be really challenging for you to build up any level of Tolerance especially because the majority of men are caring around an intensity inside of them that is very hard for them to manage so some men the intensity that they're feeling is way too much energy and that's you know we label that as anxiety in today's culture 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 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 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 [ __ ] deal with this 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 and that's what most of us have been conditioned to do most men have been conditioned to deal with their emotions by drinking off and watching porn smoking weed uh you know drinking alcohol all of those things are wonderful for hitting the reset button or numbing out what you're feeling so developing tolerance is a really really big challenge for a lot of men because when you start you feel like you suck 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 he sucks you know I mean he did pretty good all things considering he's probably about as good as me on skin I feel 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 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 and you keep losing your temper at your 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 you could you know you sit down you're angry set a timer for two three four five minutes just something manageable at the beginning and you're going to feel well Pro probably at first you're going to curse me uh for giving you this exercise which is what inevitably happens but then you're going to feel like it's impossible because for the majority of men that intense emotion that they're carrying around inside of them has overpowered them constantly throughout their life their depression their anxiety their anger their rage um their embarrassment their shame it's it's dominated them to some degree and what you're really trying to do is sit with the Enemy for most men their their intense emotion that they're carrying they they've perceived it as the enemy it's the thing that they do battle with again whether it's depression anxiety Etc and so there's this inner Civil War that's constantly happening with that anxiousness that they're like [ __ ] you I hate you I don't want to feel you or God this anger is ruining my [ __ ] life 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 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 so that inflection point of starting to try and build tolerance is really hard for a lot of men um for me as an example I'll just use myself I have a tremendous amount of energy like Energizer Bunny level energy and so beginning this process was really hard because I had a lot of anger and I had a lot of intensity and a just a just a boatload of energy 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 I want to do this um but that's really the place where you start to reconcile with this intensity that's living inside of you that's often times keeping you away from the people that you love creating distance from the goals that you want to achieve Etc so those are the places where guys really get hung up talking about maybe the other side of the fence energetically from an emotion standpoint stuff like sadness anxiety shame depression um is there a different way that guys should think about trying to feel those energetically you know things like anger and anxiety and panic and fear they're they're often very externally pushing where things like grief and sadness and depression they're very um it's like an anvil on the chest right so let's talk about the Anvil one then yeah one's more implosive one's more explosive I I like this quote um that says that grief is praise grief is praise because it is the natural way that love honors what it misses Martin pratel I like this notion because for many of us for many guys and I won't I won't speak for guys because we hate that but for many guys um we've been taught you're weaker for grieving you're weaker for being sad you or you're weaker uh if you if you deal with depression and that compounds it the the hiding of your depression and your grief will compound your grief and your depression for sure it's the shest 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 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 and sometimes that means that you are labeling it right so I 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 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 caused for a pause I need to pause because I'm getting so whatever you want to say angry or disregulated or unable to communicate with the heavier emotions it's the inverse those heavier emotions almost want to cause you to be inebriated you know they they want to slow your movement to such a degree where it feels like you can't do anything and with grief specifically I'm going to speak to grief first just on a 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 yeah oh man I mean there's so there's so much that you can grieve um I like to say that we walk through life with grief and gratitude hand inand all the time I mean grief can be about 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 are working with I mean uh 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 this might sound strange but I I've reached a point in my life six years ago where uh 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 and I had this very unique type of grief which was holy [ __ ] I made it holy [ __ ] I didn't die I didn't kill myself I didn't get dragged underneath the weeds of alcoholism or drug addiction or you know some of the heavy [ __ ] that I was dealing with I reached escape velocity I reached escape velocity and there was a really unique type of 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 and I think that people experience that a lot and so grief isn't just about loss sometimes grief is about achievement you know I mean I've I've worked with NFL athletes and NHL players and rappers heavy metal artists and sometimes times 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 I'm like whatever the [ __ ] all all hockey references um but sometimes the grief comes in those moments where you achieve the thing and the the effort that you've been carrying around and everything is you know comes out so so grief is a very specific one where it needs expression and it needs witness um there's there's almost no way around it I like to say that grief that's not witnessed is not processed so if you have grief of a form of 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 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 and we've in our culture made it very strange to deal with grief because I mean we have all these sayings now right 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 diag I saw this meme the other day was exactly this um and and so I think we have this we have this social stigma around people grieving and we want it to be over quite quickly and so usually for people they they hide their grief instead of Express it and expose it and it needs that you know in it needs to be done uh relationally with somebody else yes yeah 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 can 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 and that's a very important part of human nature oftentimes what we what we end up doing is we we defer grief we try and push it down the road um and it you know it turns into a slow depression so grief needs to be witnessed and it and it needs to be expressed you need to be able to say I I'm grieving the loss of X Y and Z or I'm grieving the you know the the movement into the space of my life I'm grieving the transition into this place and to have somebody that can witness it and and actually refle back like yeah I get that that's that's terrible um and 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 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 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 so sometimes part of depression is saying I 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 um in quicksand it's like you you probably need somebody to help get you out of the quicksand that's really what depression is emotionally so part of depression is asking for help asking for support without falling into the Trap of obis cating the responsibility to the other person because oftentimes what happens with depression is this victim mindset sets in of I'm worthless I can't do anything I'm not able to get out of this and then there's this I need a savior to come and get me out of it so we can ask for help without uh you know causing somebody else to do that to to pull us out and I think with something like depression there's just no way around it working out like go to the gym go to the gym and work out and work out ruthlessly 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 uh but with something like depression that's really going to help you 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 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 uh much quicker so you can do breath work to you know like the intense whm 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 um with things so bizarre if you're uh 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 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 to score but you 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 it's from a time in your life it's non-verbal you know you might be going through something that has no memory attached to it uh from when you were one or two or three uh or you're you know you're expressing grief that you never dealt with or processed from a breakup um or that you never worked through properly and you go into breath work and all of a sudden you know like you said it bubbles up and and goes so so those are some those are are some helpful ways to to move through things like grief sadness um and uh and depression but we could get more granular with them but those are some high level ways I think you know one of the common or most likely criticisms uh 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 uh how do you think about balancing that desire for Mastery with a desire to not suppress emotions you know people don't want to feel ashamed about the things that they feel and what you've said there's this great story about uh Tiger Woods where he had a bunch of inefficiencies in his swing and he was good but he was never going to be great 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 but the problem is he wasn't even starting playing golf from 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 and oh my God he's fallen off he's gotten worse etc etc um yeah I imagine that it's a tough cell to get guys to think okay so you're saying that I'm going to actively make myself worse for an undetermined as yet undetermined perhaps sort of infinite amount of time uh and it's going to suck and 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 um you know what I mean what an analog so yes that that is what I'm saying For Better or For Worse that is what I'm saying 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 they're very good at what they do hedge fund owners you know guys that are Wall Street Traders and 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 it's like well then 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 so either you take the Reigns and you actively move into a position of potency by saying I'm going to try and address this or those emotions will inevitably be a downfall for you in in some way shape or form they you just they just can't not guys have a fear of the loss of power right yes like I'm I'm powerful I'm competent I'm in control and this thing stops all of those from happening correct well you you mean emotions stop you from having power it stops you from feeling powerful at least in the first instance as you start to go through things I'm aware that you 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 uh very much is a white belt at feeling feelings and you know like the hopeful uh wide-eyed desire to like actually make it to somewhere appropriating the top of the mountain um is that I I don't see denying yourself of your weaknesses to be any kind of strength correct that suppression isn't strength that denying yourself of it of what it is that your feeling isn't strength and that true power to me is feeling the thing and being able to show up anyway uh like that's what courage is yes um and the goal that everybody's trying to get to is to like you know like [ __ ] experience the fullness of the the the the human the human world in a landscape uh and not to Nerf your way through this like weird self-programmed autism in a desperate attempt to you know like be able to [ __ ] increase your on your profits by 20% yeah well and who knows how you might perform how you might increase profits afterwards living more fully and even even another question on top of that who knows if you wouldn't give a single [ __ ] 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 correct well this is I think what you're talking about is 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 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 tions it requires you to go through the territory of the unknown which is your emotions 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 and that loss of power that you're talking about I don't are you familiar with Richard Roar he's a like Franciscan um 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 and the real essence of what initiation used to be you know men boys used to go through initiation processes that that 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 you couldn't over come 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 that 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 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 you are up against something that you feel powerless against same with your anger same with your anxiety same with whatever it is right I mean fill in the blank with whatever emotion feels like it's too much for you to handle and so the the formula isn't to just ignore any of your emotions you will not find a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in that 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 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 it's about you venturing out into the unknown being put in powerless position after powerless position and learning something extremely useful about yourself and so as men part of how we develop a deeper sense of maturity and mastery life is that we begin to put ourselves in positions where we feel those feelings and those emotions inside of us that feel overwhelming that feel like they're going to collapse our life 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 and I'm afraid to let myself feel it and that's the space that you have to enter into uh because in that is again it's all the data and the information I mean 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 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 but it's it's 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 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 so yes you will likely feel a loss of power know that's not sexy but you will likely learn you will learn something about yourself that you know is missing right now 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 I'm going to let myself uh Express rather than explain maybe we should talk about that difference uh but I'm G to I'm going to let myself feel my feelings and see what happens and be honest about what I'm experiencing 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 and being honest about what you're feeling is brutal sometimes it is [ __ ] brutal but man does it take you on an adventure and man can 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 talk to me about that explaining expressing dichot so when we live this okay most men we live in we live in explaining this is where the term mansplaining comes from right we love to explain things it's like it's never man expressing that's right we should there's there's the hashtag that's going to come out of this mans pressing it's gonna we're gonna popularize that um but we live in we love to explain we love to explain how things work 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 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 you know this is how it's going to unfold it's it's really the how it's really the the what what things look like what things sound like Etc it's expressing something is more about your again your your DFE your direct felt experience 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 uh did you feel frustrated with how the conversation went because you've had this conversation time and time again like what were you actually experien experiencing from your first person subjective experience 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 yeah it's I I I remember you saying uh we never really encounter the world all we experience is our own nervous system uhhuh and uh yeah this if you're not getting to the point where you can tap into what you're feeling you're even another step away from experiencing the world correct you're you're always in the position when you're trying to explain everything and and you're just in your rational mind you're 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 the whole the whole thing and so this is why for a lot of men there 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 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 I'm not fulfilled 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 you know I I was going to tell a story about you but I won't do that I was going to talk about our dinner U here I'll I'll couch it this way if that's okay and you can always cut this out yeah yeah yeah I remember having dinner with you at a point in time where you were in a rough State and I really appreciated 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 and I could 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 and when people let themselves experience and feel 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 I could actually feel like oh there's what Chris is experiencing about this you know moment and time in his life and it really has an effect on him what are some of the ways that people can notice or protect themselves from slipping back into the cerebral world like if if you've spent your entire life intellectualizing reflecting your way through you know there's a a four-step human process for me to etc etc um how 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 yeah so ask yourself if you're explaining or expressing start there start with that is number one am I explaining what happened or what I think is going on or am I expressing what I'm actually experiencing am I expressing what I'm actually feeling about the divorce about the [ __ ] 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 be because when you're explaining something there's no emotional connection there's there's almost none like you're there's no feeling sense in your body when you're expressing something how I've 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 you can actually feel your body as you are 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 so just begin to ask yourself because what you want to do is you want to catch the pattern of falling back into to just explaining your way into Oblivion uh 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 unasked cognitive time so this might be sorry unstructured cognitive time it might be stream of Consciousness journaling um where you just write out whatever is happening inside of you this is such a incredible exercise 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 Etc um you can do you can go for a walk for 30 to 60 minutes with no music no Audi book we clutter ourselves so heavily uh most of the men that I work with have very little unstructured cognitive time 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 instead of replaying that embarrassing convers ation where you approach that girl and she was like no I'm not going to give you my phone number uh 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 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 and maybe just write down some of the things that that you're experiencing uh the last thing I would say is involve people in your life if you're in in a relationship one of the best ways uh and even if you're not you can you know get your buddies on board with this is to have other people point out when you've moved into explaining versus expression now this isn't to say that explaining isn't just want to put this cavity in there doesn't mean that explaining isn't relevant or important for your life there are some things that you absolutely need to explain at work and in board meetings uh so make sure that you know you're not diminishing it entirely but have other people who are going to support you like you know I asked you how you were doing today and you started to explain to me what happened you know how how are you actually feeling about that so have other people that are in your corner they're going to help you move towards that expression and communicating emotionally versus staying stuck in this rigid space um I found that to be really helpful especially with army guys I've worked with a lot of like former Navy Seals and Military and sometimes that accountability can be very very helpful uh especially for guys that they're they're trying to break a mold that they have been conditioned to move against right because if you're in the military you're really meant to shut off yeah how much can men do all of this stuff by themselves some of it you know some of it you can do by yourself um I really uh 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 you 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 if you ever gone down that Rabbit Hole uh does Wall Street bets count yes sure yeah why not but like that's a community of men that have a mission and they can you know you can go sideways sometimes but they can really support one another 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 um that are you know that are that are witnessing you in the in the challenge and the process that you're going through so I think for for a lot of guys they'll benefit from being in some type of community or group um because our tendency is to do it solo right we like we want to loan wolf all of this and what I found is that most men 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 I'm going to go into monk mode for 12 months and I'm going to come back this perfect pristine human being uh when 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 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 I mean he's he's you're going to get frustrated he's like he's talking about the same [ __ ] 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 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 I mean you could go down the iron sharpens iron path but it's it's just too cliche for me yeah sadly I am in a couple of group chats called iron sharpen Z which shows just how [ __ ] basic me and the other guys that I'm with are no it's beautiful uh anything else to say anything that we haven't included here that's mandatory listening I mean I I think there's just the the the statement I almost want to say the cliche thing which is like having emotions doesn't make you less of a man feeling your feelings doesn't make you less of a man 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 and I would say it always has been if you look at the stoics they were just men who learned to be logical to be hyper logical but to also Express emotionally um most of them were poets and playwrights and musicians and they figured out how to express and so if you you want to find a deeper sense of purpose I'm really trying to make a case for it because I I get messages from men every day I sent you one the other day who feel 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 and my mission is to really support men like that and it and you don't have to be in a bad place to start to feel your feelings you don't have to be [ __ ] up or broken to start feeling your feelings you will unequivocally be better off for doing so um but man I just wish that yeah I mean I just wish that this was more normal because I I get emails and and messages every day from men who have cut themselves off from their emotions and find themselves right at the brink you know and uh yeah it's heartbreaking because I I see so many men I can't not look in men's eyes and not see their pain 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 yeah man I mean I don't know I feel like there is a corner being turned it's so hard because the thing that you're working on is the most important thing in the world while you're working on it on it uh so I'm seeing this everywhere you know I'm seeing the seab buum meme reals 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 and you know Al Landa boton's [ __ ] following me around the internet at the moment with all emotionally and the same with your stuff and but I don't know I I I don't care frankly I don't care I think that it's an optimal way for a particular subset perhaps a majority perhaps all men I'm not going to say that it is but 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 you know non- insignificant cohort of people that also do it 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 uh when I feel connected to the things that I do because there's a sense of resonance between me and it uh when I'm not trying to explain away 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 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 every body there was really impressed by the dance I'm sure but there was no part of me that actually got seen during that and um yeah the full breadth of Human Experience is there for us to to go through and uh I'm interested in finding out what's on the other side of it so I I think that this is maybe an important redress uh maybe a massive [ __ ] error and we're going to look back and realize that uh you know the suppression thing was right all along but you can't 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 now I'm aware that this system has an awful lot of different inputs to do with socioeconomic status and the their meaning in work and what 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 but everything should be on the [ __ ] 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 and um yeah for me it's uh it's what I'm working on it's what I'm interested in I think it's 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 [ __ ] for the people that have got a massive problem with it or for the people that don't think that it's sufficiently mascul it's like pick any Vector of masculinity that you want and somebody from my friend group will beat you in it yeah 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 [ __ ] Army of dicks behind me and I've got the biggest emotional dicks on the planet honestly precisely correct and um yeah I I don't know it just seems it seems Petty and juvenile and immature looking at kind of previous versions of what guys are supposed to be uh and I understand the whole like I keep seeing these [ __ ] atrocious videos of or or memes or whatever of like my husband did X and I got the ack and then blah blah blah blah blah and all the rest of the stuff I'm like to be honest I feel like the more that this happens women should be [ __ ] shamed for that in the same way as guys who abandoned their partner because you know some happens on their side some common error or challenge that women come up against something like that it's like you suck as a [ __ ] 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 and I can't wait for you to be alone until you realize this uh so that's what I meant about the uh emotional [ __ ] test that you want to find out quite early uh 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 investment the conviction the attachment the dependency um that bodess really [ __ ] 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 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 yeah I saw this I saw this I just did a commentary on it I saw this real this woman there like three or four women on a podcast and they were talking about how uh the one woman started off and she said 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 and I was like what a [ __ ] wild way to say that you like dysfunctional relationships like why don't you just say I like dysfunctional men and dysfunctional Rel like just say that your job as a girl is to find somebody that if that's what you want go and find it I mean I I think it's an insane decision but if that's what you want go and find it and as a guy if what you want is somebody that you can grow with that you can 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 you need to find out if it's a chick on a podcast that wants to you know be mistreated for a couple of decades before she bounces off into whatever next relationship she's going to do or if it's a a Vienna or a Courtney Chris's wife you know who want to genuinely see their partner and um yeah event the sort of birds of a feather flock together type thing like people will get what they deserve of eventually but you want to try and find out if you're getting what you deserve nice and early that's a good way of putting it that's a good way of putting it man I mean I think I think the the the last thing I was going to say around like dealing with emotions I love that I love that notion of finding out early on whether somebody's on the same page as you uh emotionally and having those sort of like emotional tests 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 um 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 from all this it's just start by acknowledging what you are avoiding emotionally 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 I I haven't been honest about how much anxiety I actually have or that I'm [ __ ] scared all the time you know like just start with what you've been repressing and sometimes that can be such a powerful first step I mean Yung said that um confession is the first step of any therapeutic process 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 and 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 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 is is important not just dumping it on them uh you know ad hoc and hoping that it goes well being like that Conor guy gave me bad advice setting it up properly and making sure that they're on board for this this process 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 and a much deeper relationship where where you know I think the the greatest the greatest demand within any human being is to be fully known I think that that is that is there's like a something in us that is magnetically pulling us towards being known and to set up relationships where we can be fully known in in a way that is healthy and not you know not about attention seeking or grandos validation or wallowing in your own misery 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 like what's the alternative like where else are you going to find that level of intimacy really you know you can have a twin brother or sister and you're not going to be able to share quite the same things that you can in a relationship because you just don't have the same underpinning of attachment true in that same way and uh yeah man you can have a 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 d i I adore all of your work you know that I do everyone needs to check out everything that you're doing why should they go uh just go to man talks.com you can check out my book there we have a men's Community you can check it all out there so man talks.com or on YouTube or on Instagram it's just man talks everyone needs to go and check it out until next next time dude I can't wait I appreciate you thanks buddy do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a God is it able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself well the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you bespoke so go on go and check it out