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

28:00Describe what it's like when you feel anger. 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? Does it become constricted in your throat? Does, you know, 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? And then once you have that emotional awareness, you can move in to 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 is trying to relay, right?

28:45Maybe a boundary has been crossed in your relationship. And this is what happens all the time. So I'll give 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 hiss 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.

29:24I 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 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 trying to alert you to. So that's a good sort of breakdown of what you can begin to do with your emotions.

30:05There's there's more that we can get into for for all those, but that's a kind of a good like four step What you do with 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 And there's zero room for it. And so they shut it down immediately. 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.

30:42We 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.

31:17So I give guys that have, even 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 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 cognitive functions are starting to become impaired and you are likely not going to respond properly.

31:59So 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 is 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 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.

32:44So 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? Yeah. So number one, developer awareness, have some awareness around the charge this in your body. And that charge is just your whatever the emotion is, right? Whatever, whether it's anger or grief or 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. 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?

33:29And 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 you can. 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 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 therapy 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 when 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.

34:28That'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. 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 actually giving themselves permission to feel their feelings because there's a whole slew of what ifs that usually come along for them. And just giving themselves permission to say, okay, I don't know how I feel most of the time.

35:14Or 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 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 don't know whether you're really happy or sad. 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. The second stage is the tolerance stage. It can be really challenging for you to build up any level of tolerance, especially because because the majority of men are carrying around an intensity inside of them that is very hard for them to manage.

36:03So 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. 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 fucking deal with this.

36:41So 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. You most men have been conditioned to deal with their emotions by drinking off and watching porn, smoking weed, drinking alcohol. All of those things are wonderful for hitting the reset button or numbing out what you're feeling. 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, I took my son skiing for the very first time and he's never been on skis.

37:21He sucks. You know, I mean he did pretty good all things considering probably about as good as me on skis. I feel I mean It's these three and a half so 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 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.

38:02It can be very frustrating at first because for a while you're going to sit with your anger and You know you sit down your angry set a timer for two three four five minutes. Just something manageable at the beginning and you're gonna feel Well, probably at first you're gonna curse me 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, their embarrassment, their shame, it's dominated them to some degree.

38:47and what you're really trying to do is sit with the enemy. For most men, they're 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. 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. It's ruined my marriage, it ruined in 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 acknowledgment, of understanding.

39:26You 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. 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 Boat load 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.

40:16I want to do this. 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, 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, point, stuff like sadness, anxiety, shame, depression. Is there a different way that guys should think about trying to feel those?

40:56Energetically, 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, it's like an anvil on the chest. Right. So once talked about the anvil one, yeah, one's more impllusive, one's more explosive. 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 Prykotel. 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, we've been taught your weaker for grieving, your weaker for being sad, you or your weaker, if you deal with depression, and that compounds it.

41:50The hiding of your depression and your grief will compound your grief and your depression. For sure, 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, we need to begin to slow our breath, we need to begin to sit with them, we need to be able to understand them and can trust ourselves when that really intense emotion starts to come up. And sometimes that means that you are labeling it, right? So with every man that I ever work with, I say, you have to determine what a cause for a pause is for you.

42:30If 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 cause for a pause. 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. 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. And with grief specifically, I want to speak to grief first.

43:04Just 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 much that you can grieve. 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 grief can be about the, the, the, not just the loss of a person or the death that 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.

43:38I mean 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've reached a point in my life five, six years ago where this is before my son was born, where 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 shit, I made it. Holy shit, I didn't die. I didn't kill myself. I didn't get dragged underneath the weeds of alcoholism or drug addiction or some of the heavy shit that I was dealing with.

44:25I reached escape velocity. I reached escape velocity. There was a really unique type of, it wasn't a lation, 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. Fascinating. I think that people experienced that a lot. And so grief isn't just about loss. Sometimes grief is about achievement. You know, I mean, I've worked with NFL athletes and NHL players and rappers, heavy metal artists, 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 that NFL one.

45:06Clearly, I'm Canadian, right? I'm like, whatever the fuck all hockey references. But sometimes the grief comes in those moments where you achieve the thing and the effort that you've been carrying around and everything comes out. So grief is a very specific one where it needs expression and it needs witness. 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 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.

45:47And 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 grief. 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, you know, his friend got diagnosed with cancer and he gave me the IK, you know, he was crying about his friend getting diagnosed. I saw this me in the other day was exactly this. And so I think we have this, we have this social stigma around people grieving and And we want it to be over quite quickly.

46:22And so usually for people, they hide their grief instead of express it and expose it. And it needs that, you know, in - It needs to be done relationally with some of the others. Yes. Yeah, whether that's, you know, whether that's with, you could do it with this therapist or a psychologist or a coach, a counselor, but ideally you're doing it with people who love you and who know you and who 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 defer grief.

47:06We try and push it down the road and it, you know, it turns into a slow depression. So grief needs to be witnessed and it needs to be expressed. you need to be able to say, I'm grieving the loss of X, Y, and Z, or I'm grieving the, you know, the movement and the space in 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. That's that's terrible. And so having people in our lives that can do that is important. I think with things like depression, expression is important being witnessed is important, but there's also a kind of So, you're pressing out that's required.

47:46Like 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 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 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 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 of obviscating the responsibility to the other person.

48:41Because 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 actually, you know, causing somebody else to do that, to pull us out. And I think with something like depression, and 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.

49:17But with something like depression, that's really gonna 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 much quicker. So you can do breath work to, you know, like the intense whim -ha for 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.

49:57With... So as long as you're 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 fuck are you? Like, why are you, what are you doing that you're here? I'm just breathing. I do this all the time. I literally have done this since I was born. And this very particular patent 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.

50:30And sometimes it's from a time in your life, it's nonverbal. 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 expressing grief that you never dealt with or processed from a breakup, or that you never worked through properly. And you go into breathwork and all of a sudden, you know, like you said, it bubbles up and and go. So those are some helpful ways to move through things like grief, sadness, and depression, but we could get more granular with them, but those are some high level ways. I think one of the most likely criticisms that I'm anticipating is that men have this desire to be consistent and reliable.

51:19And there is an expectation of mastery of your emotional state among men, from other men, from your partner. How do you think about balancing that desire for mastery with a desire to not suppress emotions? People don't want to feel ashamed about the things that they feel. And what you've said, this is a 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. 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...

52:07Well, 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, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I imagine that it's tough sell 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, and it's going to suck.

52:45And I'm not going to be rewarded for it until who knows how far that is. It's like, it's like, it's like, ordering an Uber and having no idea when it's gonna arrive. 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. 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 hyper linear. 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 a very, very long time. And they never would say, but I don't want anything to suffer.

53:27I don't want to slide back in any way, shape, or form. I'm just 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 reins 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 some way, shape, or form. They just can't not. Guys have a fear of the loss of power. Yes. I'm powerful. I'm competent. I'm in control. and this thing stops all of those from happening.

54:12Correct. Well, would 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 the gold standard is to get to the stage where you use your emotions to inform you so that you'll sign up and be more powerful. I mean, my reframe around this very much as a white belt at feeling feelings and, you know, like the hopeful, wide -eyed desire to like actually make it to somewhere, appropriating the top of the mountain. Is that I don't see denying yourself of your weaknesses to be any kind of strength.

54:57Correct. that suppression isn't strength, that denying yourself of it, of what it is that you're feeling isn't strength, and that true power to me is feeling the thing and being able to show up anyway. Like that's what courage is. And the goal that everybody's trying to get to is to like, like fuck experience, the fullness of the human world, your in a landscape, and not to nerf your way through this weird self -programmed autism and a desperate attempt to be able to fucking increase your own your profits by 20%. Yeah, well, and who knows how you might perform, how you might increase profits afterwards, living more fully?

55:48And 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. 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 emotions.

56:27It 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, are you familiar with Richard Roer? He's a like a Franciscan, I think he's a Franciscan monk. Now it'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, Boys used to go through initiation processes that put them into the realm of being a man.

57:15And 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 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 you are somewhat powerless against. That's really what I've been talking about in terms of developing that tolerance with your emotion. If you are a man who has this really deep darkness inside of you, that's heavy, that feels like it's overwhelming you constantly. That's a type of an initiatory experience.

57:56You 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, filling the blank with whatever emotion feels like it's too much for you to handle. And so the formula isn't to just ignore any of your emotions. You will not find a deeper sense of purpose in 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 paralysis.

58:38That'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 in 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.

59:20And 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. You read somebody like Marcus Orilius, what he's really talking about is, 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 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.

1:00:04It'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. No, 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 it first for Okay, I'm gonna let myself Express rather than explain maybe we should talk about that difference But I'm gonna I'm gonna 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 I'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 fucking brutal But man does it take you on an adventure and man can it leads 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 anything Talk to me about that explaining expressing dichotomy.

1:01:33So So when we live, this is, okay, most men we live in explaining. This is where the term mansplaining comes from, right? We love to explain things. It's like never man -spressing. That's right. We said there's the hashtag that's going to come out of this mans pressing. We're going to popularize that. But we live in it. 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 if this is how it works This is why I think it's a good idea.

1:02:23You know, this is how it's going to unfold It's really the how. It's really the what, what things look like, what things sound like, etc. It's expressing something is more about your, again, your DFE, your direct felt experience. So when you went through that, when you had that conflict or that argument with your girlfriend, what expressed what you experienced? You know, were you disappointed? Did you feel frustrated with how the conversation went because you've had this conversation time and time again? What were you actually experiencing from your first person's subjective experience? What happened inside of you?

1:03:01And 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. I remember you saying we never really encounter the world all we experience is our own know the system. And 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 always in the position when you're trying to explain everything and you're just in your rational mind, you're one step away from the actual experience of your reality.

1:03:45So that means you're one step away from the experience of love and the joy and the frustration and the anger and the whole thing. And so this is why for a lot of men, 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? I don't like my life. I feel like something's missing. I feel like some, you know, feel miserable or there's just something not quite right. I have the good. 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.

1:04:25You know, I was going to tell a story about you, but I won't do that. I was going to talk about our dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here, I'll couch it this way. 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.

1:05:07And 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 moment in time and 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 you've spent your entire life intellectualizing, reflecting your way through, there's a full -step human process for me to et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

1:06:01Yeah. 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 as 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 shit at work, about the stuff that's happening with the kids? my actually expressing what's going on. So just start to notice the difference because when you're explaining something, there's no emotional connection.

1:06:42There's almost none. Like, there's no feeling sense in your body. When you're expressing something, 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're communicating. You can feel joy or a little bit of nervousness or whatever it is that you're experiencing as you're expressing. Just begin to ask yourself because what you want to do is you want to catch the pattern of falling back in to just explaining your way into oblivion. That's number one. Ask yourself if I'm explaining or expressing and move towards expression.

1:07:23correct. Number two is create as much time as you can, ideally 30 to 60 minutes a day of untasked cognitive time. So this might be, sorry, 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. I give it to all my clients, it doesn't matter how much money they have, how successful they are, I give it to every single client or how not successful they are, you know, etc. You can do, you can go for a walk for 30 to 60 minutes with no music, no audiobook. We clutter ourselves so heavily.

1:08:07Most of the men that I work with have very little unstructured cognitive time. And so at the very end of the day, they're or 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 conversation where you approach that girl and she was like, no, I'm not gonna give you my phone number, 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 during laying, 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 gonna take 30 to 60 minutes, and maybe just write down some of the things that you're experiencing.

1:08:52The last thing I would say is involve people in your life. 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. Now, this isn't to say that explaining isn't, sort of put this caveat 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. So make sure that you're not diminishing it entirely. But have other people who are going to support you?

1:09:26I asked you how you were doing today and you started to explain to me what happened. 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. 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, especially for guys that 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.

1:10:04Yeah, how much can men do all of this stuff by themselves?

1:10:12Some of it, you know, some of it you can do by yourself. 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 can rapidly, I mean, it's like the trading grows 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? Does Wall Street Betts count? Yes, sure. Yeah, why not? But that's a community of men that have a mission. And 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 exponentially when it comes to this.

1:10:59Because you're going to have other guys that are speaking this language that are supporting you with this, that are witnessing you in the challenge in the process that you're going through. So I think for a lot of guys, they'll benefit from being in some type of community or group because our tendency is to do it solo, right? We want to loan wolf all of this. And what I found is that most men, they try and like I'm gonna take myself away from society and away from relationship. I'm gonna go work on myself. I'm gonna go into monk mode for 12 months and I gonna come back this perfect pristine human being 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 It's like you're gonna get into a men's group and inevitably one of the guys is gonna piss you off Right, I mean he's he's gonna get frustrated He's like he's talking about the same shit, you know every single week'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?

1:12:07Or 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 Sharpen's Iron Path, but this act is just too cliche. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Sadly, I am in a couple of group chats called Iron Sharpen's Iron, which shows just a fucking basic me and the other guys that I'm with are. No, you're beautiful. Anything else to say? Anything that we haven't included here that's mandatory listening? I mean, I think there's just the statement. I almost want to say the cliche thing, which is like having emotions doesn't make you less of a man.

1:12:52Feeling your feelings doesn't make you less of a man. and 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, if you look at the StoEx, they were just men who learned to be logical, to be hyper logical, but to also express emotionally. Most of them were poets and playwrights and musicians, and they figured out how to express. 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.

1:13:32I sent you on 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 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. But man, I just wish that...

1:14:15Yeah, I mean, I just wish that this was more normal because I get emails and messages every day from men who have cut themselves off from their emotions and find themselves right at the brink. Yeah, it's heartbreaking because I see so many men, I can't not look in men's eyes and not see their pain. So 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 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.

1:14:55So I'm seeing this everywhere. You know, I'm seeing the sea bum meme 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 and you know, a land of buttons fucking following me around the internet at the moment. We're all emotionally and the same with your stuff and but I don't know. 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, when I feel connected to the things that I do, because there's a sense of resonance between me and it, 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.

1:16:13And then you leave the conversation thinking, 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. And yeah, the full breadth of human experience is there for us to go through. And I'm interested in finding out what's on the other side of it. So I think that this is 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 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 their their meaning in work and What what's happening to sperm counts and testosterone levels and dating in an online porn and video games and social media and like Yep, yep, all of those things are in that too.

1:17:19But 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. And yeah, for me, it's what I'm working on. It's what I'm interested in. I think it's, 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, 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.

1:18:02Yeah. 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. And... I've got the biggest emotional dicks on the planet. Honestly, precisely correct. Yeah, I don't know, it just seems petty and juvenile and immature looking at kind of previous versions of what guys are supposed to be. And I understand the whole, like I keep seeing these fucking atrocious videos of, or memes or whatever, of like my husband did X and I got the egg and then blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the rest of the stuff.

1:18:41I'm like, to be honest, I feel like 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 erode or challenge that women come up against, something like that, it's like, 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 he's going to support him and I can't wait for you to be alone until you realize this. So that's what I meant about the emotional shit test that you want to find out quite early, earlier than you think you should, whether or not this person can handle it.

1:19:23And 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, that boads 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 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 the 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 is a six three or four women on a podcast and they were talking about how The one woman started off as she said when a man treats me well, I actually feel uncomfortable and I don't like it.

1:20:08And the other women all agreed with her, you know? 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 relations? 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 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.

1:20:46Then you guys are safe underneath this roof that you've built together. You need to find out if it's a chicken or podcast that wants to, you know, be 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 Vienna or a Courtney, Chris's wife, who want to genuinely see their partner. And yeah, 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. That's a good way of putting it. That's a good way of putting it, man.

1:21:25I mean, I think the last thing I was gonna say around like dealing with emotions, I love that notion of finding it out early on, whether somebody's on the same page as you emotionally, and having those sort of like emotional tests, like are you okay with, can we go through a hard time and come out the other side okay, or do you completely fall apart or are you not interested in the same things as me? 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 haven't been honest about how much anxiety I actually have or that I'm fucking scared all the time You know, just start with what you've been repressing.

1:22:23And sometimes that can be such a powerful first step. I mean, Jung said that 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 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 of how I'm feeling. and just being truthful about what you've been experiencing internally with somebody that you trust, with somebody that is on board with that, setting that up properly is important, not just dumping it on them.

1:23:00You know, ad hoc and hoping that it goes well, being like that Connor guy gave me a bad advice, setting it up properly and making sure that they're on board for this process. But once you go down that path, I mean, it can lead you into developing much better friendships, trips, much more transparent friendships like we're talking about, and a much deeper relationship where, you know, I think the greatest demand within any human being is to be fully known. I think that that is, there's like something in us that is magnetically pulling us towards being known. and 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...

1:23:52Or not allowing in your own misery. Following 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 in that same way. And 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.

1:24:36Dude, I love you, Debitz. 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? Just go to mantalks .com. You can check out my book there. We have a man's community. You can check it all out there. So mantalks .com or on YouTube or on Instagram. It's just mantalks. Everyone needs to go and check it out. Until next time, dude, I can't wait. I appreciate you. Thanks, buddy.