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6 - Why Were We Never Taught This? · Masculine Containment

• 0:00
  Hi, I'm Alex Sharfman, and welcome to episode six of the Masculine Containment Podcast.
• 0:05
  Why were we never taught this?
• 0:08
  As men, most of us grew up believing that we are bad at relationships.
• 0:14
  But I've come to realize something different.
• 0:16
  Most men aren't bad at relationships.
• 0:18
  We simply were never trained for the moments in relationships that matter the most.
• 0:23
  And I hear this reflected all the time in the comments and the direct messages that I get online.
• 0:28
  Men will see something about masculine containment.
• 0:30
  They'll read one of the long-form posts that I have.
• 0:32
  They'll read one of the videos.
• 0:34
  And it'll make sense to them.
• 0:35
  And they'll have this exasperating moment and say, why wasn't I taught this?
• 0:38
  Like, why are you the first person I've ever heard talking about this?
• 0:42
  And the reason is, if you look at societal conditioning, the way things work today, we're taught how to work.
• 0:49
  We're taught how to compete.
• 0:50
  We're taught how to solve problems.
• 0:52
  We're actually taught how to push through discomfort to get to an outcome.
• 0:55
  Right.
• 0:56
  But almost no one ever taught us to regulate our emotions when conflict or a trigger or something that raises emotions enters the room.
• 1:07
  And that's why I get this question all the time.
• 1:09
  Why was I never taught this?
• 1:11
  We were never taught how to stay calm in conflict.
• 1:13
  We were never taught how to regulate ourselves when emotions get intense.
• 1:16
  We were never taught how to lead the energy in a relationship instead of reacting to that.
• 1:23
  I want to say it again.
• 1:24
  We were never taught how to lead the energy in a relationship instead of reacting to it.
• 1:30
  We were taught how to participate in the energy, especially if it gets out of control.
• 1:34
  And the honest answer is we were never trained for this.
• 1:38
  But here's what we were actually trained for.
• 1:40
  If you look at...
• 1:42
  Your childhood, if you look at societal conditioning, if you look at the examples of relationships that you see in popular culture around you, here's what we were trained for.
• 1:49
  Men were trained for competition.
• 1:51
  From when we were young, things were a competition.
• 1:54
  How often do you remember there being a scoreboard present where you were competing with other people?
• 1:59
  We were trained for work to get things done, to make things happen.
• 2:03
  We were trained for problem solving.
• 2:04
  Like if there's an issue, let's make sure that we get to the other side of the issue.
• 2:09
  We were trained for performance.
• 2:10
  Like how do we do better?
• 2:12
  How do we do more?
• 2:12
  How do we get things done?
• 2:14
  How do we achieve?
• 2:16
  And that's another thing.
• 2:17
  We were trained for achievement.
• 2:19
  Like how do we...
• 2:21
  Get to the top of the scoreboard.
• 2:22
  How do we get the award?
• 2:23
  How do we finish the class?
• 2:24
  How do we finish the test?
• 2:25
  How do we score well?
• 2:26
  And we were trained for endurance as men.
• 2:29
  Like, put your shoulder to the wheel and get things done and push forward.
• 2:33
  I know I heard all of those things when I was a kid.
• 2:35
  We were taught how to win, how to build, how to fix things, how to compete, how to push through discomfort.
• 2:40
  But almost no one teaches boys how to regulate emotion.
• 2:46
  Like, when there's emotions present, how do we slow things down?
• 2:48
  Right.
• 2:49
  No one teaches us how to metabolize frustration and resentment.
• 2:53
  When there is frustration present or resentment present, how do you breathe into your body?
• 2:56
  Understand where it's coming from.
• 2:58
  See the origin of it.
• 2:59
  Know that you're safe in the moment.
• 3:01
  We were never taught how to stay present when someone's emotional.
• 3:04
  I know I wasn't.
• 3:05
  Maybe there are some guys out there that were, and they have an unfair advantage over the rest of us because...
• 3:11
  For most of us, what we were taught through example, what we were taught through watching the world around us is that when someone's emotional, you have to react to it.
• 3:20
  And I'll talk more about that in just a second.
• 3:23
  And we were never taught how to leave relational energy instead of reacting to it.
• 3:27
  In fact, we grew up learning that emotions aren't safe.
• 3:32
  I know that I heard things all the time like, don't be so emotional.
• 3:35
  Stop crying.
• 3:36
  Men don't cry.
• 3:37
  Calm down.
• 3:38
  Don't be so loud.
• 3:39
  Don't make other people uncomfortable.
• 3:41
  And over time, we internalize a message.
• 3:43
  We actually see it as a way of life, as a way to succeed in life.
• 3:48
  And that message is kind of challenging.
• 3:51
  Emotions create problems.
• 3:53
  Emotions make people uncomfortable.
• 3:55
  Emotions get us corrected.
• 3:57
  So we learn how to suppress our emotions.
• 4:00
  And the other boys or the other place that boys and men usually see emotion is when someone's actually reacting to us.
• 4:07
  I know for me, those were times where someone was angry with me, frustrated with me, yelling at me, triggered.
• 4:12
  You know, there was somebody in authority that was emotionally reacting to me.
• 4:17
  And that taught me even more that emotions weren't safe, that emotions are associated with danger or doing something wrong or conflict, which means that boys grow up really developing beliefs like emotions aren't safe and emotional moments are something to escape.
• 4:33
  fix or overpower.
• 4:34
  And I said I'd talk a little bit more about that and I'm going to in just a moment because...
• 4:39
  We grow up in inner relationships where emotional presence is required, and we've never been trained how to do that, how to have emotional presence.
• 4:49
  In fact, in our primary relationship with our spouse, with our partner, emotional presence is a requirement for success.
• 4:55
  It's a requirement for long-term connection.
• 4:58
  It's a requirement for bonding in a way that is healthy, not trauma bonding around something that's unsafe, which I will do a future podcast on.
• 5:06
  But.
• 5:06
  For bonding in a way that's safe.
• 5:08
  For bonding in a way that creates connection.
• 5:10
  For bonding in a way that creates closeness and attention and affection and love.
• 5:15
  Because here are the three models that most of us were taught growing up.
• 5:19
  Let's get into this.
• 5:20
  Most men never saw emotional regulation modeled.
• 5:25
  I know I didn't.
• 5:26
  Instead, we saw three common patterns in order of increasing challenge.
• 5:31
  So the first one is fixing.
• 5:33
  You know, this is the common response we develop.
• 5:36
  We were taught to fix things, to make things better, to take something that's broken and unbreak it, you know, or fix it or move it in the right direction.
• 5:42
  So when emotions are present, we explain, we rationalize, we try and minimize the emotion.
• 5:48
  Then we try and fix it and make it better and make it go away.
• 5:51
  But emotions aren't problems to solve, especially when someone else is having them.
• 5:55
  They're actually experiences to move through.
• 5:58
  And when our primary relationship or our kids or someone around us is emotional and we tell them, hey, you shouldn't be that emotional.
• 6:05
  And, hey, here are all the reasons why you shouldn't be having this emotion.
• 6:08
  And, hey, look, here's examples of how you had this emotion in the past and you don't really need to.
• 6:12
  What we're really doing is not regulating.
• 6:15
  We're invalidating.
• 6:17
  We're telling that other person their emotions aren't safe, which makes them feel shut down, unseen, unheard, unsafe.
• 6:24
  And over time, if we continue fixing in a relationship, that level of invalidation of not being seen, not being heard on the other side can cause massive challenges.
• 6:34
  And we're seen as the cause because we, in fact, are the cause of the invalidation.
• 6:38
  We're not meaning to.
• 6:40
  We're not trying to invalidate.
• 6:41
  We're trying to make things better.
• 6:43
  But we've got this tool that is absolutely broken called trying to fix it when emotions are present instead of listening and hearing and validating.
• 6:51
  The second pattern that we were taught growing up, and I know I saw this over and over again, was withdraw.
• 6:58
  When emotions were present or a trigger was present, I know the primary place that I learned withdraw was with my father.
• 7:05
  My dad used to get upset, so there'd be an explosion.
• 7:10
  There'd be that, you know, trigger, escalation, big rupture, and then that withdrawal period with my dad could last hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks.
• 7:21
  And my dad's a pretty extreme example.
• 7:22
  I think it's part of the reason that I do this work.
• 7:24
  But I remember time periods where he didn't really talk to us.
• 7:28
  And even though he was in the room, he wasn't really there for a long period of time.
• 7:32
  You know, he shut down, he would leave the room or he'd be in the room and have massive emotional distance and there would be silence except for small answers and conversations he was required to have.
• 7:44
  You know, what I know now is that he avoided conflict and didn't really actually resolve anything.
• 7:50
  And now the third pattern, and this is a big one, it's important for us to understand.
• 7:56
  We were taught dominance.
• 7:57
  Dominance.
• 7:58
  And this is the most intense of the three.
• 8:01
  We were taught yelling, overpowering, intimidating, emotional explosions.
• 8:04
  Even if we didn't learn yelling and intimidating, we were taught domination through our energy, through staring at somebody, through seeing them, through seeing them in a way or looking at them in a way that made them stop.
• 8:20
  The loudest nervous system in the room is what appeared to win an hour conditioning.
• 8:25
  I know that was true for me.
• 8:26
  The person who was most dominant looked like they were handling the situation and control of the situation.
• 8:31
  But really, they were just dominating, overpowering.
• 8:34
  And instead of like fixing the situation, what they were doing is causing people to withdraw.
• 8:38
  causing people to shut down, causing people to retreat.
• 8:41
  And in the moment, it may look like that dominant person wins, but long-term, that dominant person is causing nervous system issues on the other side that get more and more challenging and create more withdrawal, more disconnection, more disassociation, not more connection, not more love, more healing.
• 8:58
  None of these models we were taught teach regulation.
• 9:01
  They actually teach reaction, and in some cases, violent reaction as a way to fix things.
• 9:07
  Why?
• 9:08
  There's this massive cultural blind spot in the world.
• 9:12
  It's part of the reason people rarely talk about this skill.
• 9:15
  I think one of the biggest blind spots that there is and one of the biggest places of challenge today in the world is that men and women are taught that we are the same and that we are equal.
• 9:28
  And so if there is some type of an issue and the man or the woman escalates,
• 9:33
  The man can escalate and even exceed the emotions, and we're equal.
• 9:36
  It's okay.
• 9:37
  There's an equal playing field.
• 9:38
  What we're also taught as men is that if there's a trigger present that we're upset about, well, that's a righteous time where we can get upset, we can get frustrated, we can raise our voice because, hey, this thing is here that I'm reacting to, which makes it justified, which makes it okay for me to react.
• 9:55
  This just isn't true.
• 9:56
  You know, and not only do these things, these blind spots make...
• 10:01
  the people around us challenged and push the people around us away, they also significantly challenge our nervous system.
• 10:09
  And when you look at some of the better things that we're taught in relationships, a lot of the relationship advice that's out there focuses on communication techniques and using better language like in nonviolent communication.
• 10:21
  And I laugh because, you know, I remember being taught nonviolent communication.
• 10:28
  but not being taught emotional regulation.
• 10:31
  And so often I verbally said words that communicated nonviolent communication with the energy of violence right beneath them.
• 10:41
  And that doesn't work, especially with your significant other, especially with your partner, with your wife, with the person that...
• 10:47
  You should love more than anybody in the world and you should care about more than anybody in the world.
• 10:50
  And the person you should protect against pain and frustration.
• 10:54
  And, you know, I always often think about how men say, like, if anybody ever touched her, I would just annihilate them.
• 11:00
  But you're the person who's shutting her down.
• 11:02
  You're the person who's communicating with her with violence.
• 11:05
  You're the person who's invalidating her.
• 11:08
  And that's really important to understand because communication techniques, better language, understanding emotions but not understanding regulation, even repair conversations all matter.
• 11:19
  But there's very little in the world that focuses on nervous system regulation.
• 11:26
  When you and I as men regulate our nervous systems and we embody that regulation skill regularly.
• 11:34
  We take on this ability.
• 11:36
  We earn.
• 11:37
  We learn.
• 11:38
  We embody this ability to stay present and stable when emotional intensity rises.
• 11:45
  And that's a completely different kind of training.
• 11:47
  It's a training that's rare.
• 11:48
  It's a training that's not really out there.
• 11:50
  You know, we're taught a lot of things in relationships.
• 11:52
  We're not taught, hey, regulate yourself first.
• 11:56
  I even have had conversations with friends.
• 11:58
  I remember one recently where a friend of mine was saying, you know, he learned a lot, done a lot of personal work, done a lot of therapy.
• 12:06
  He really started understanding himself better.
• 12:08
  And I remember having a conversation with him and he said, well, Alex, you know,
• 12:11
  I think I've done so much work and I feel like I'm in a whole new place because now I understand that when I react, it's my inner child and it's my childhood trauma.
• 12:20
  And I know where that reaction is coming from.
• 12:22
  But she doesn't really seem to recognize the difference because, you know, I really understand this now.
• 12:27
  And I said, brother, like you understand this now, which is fantastic.
• 12:31
  And it's great that you've done the work to identify the wounding and to understand the trauma where it comes from.
• 12:37
  But now you have to process that so that the reactions stop.
• 12:41
  You process that wounding.
• 12:42
  You understand it.
• 12:44
  You work with an EMDR therapist.
• 12:46
  You do time in neutral.
• 12:47
  You walk so you get bilateral stimulation and you process that.
• 12:50
  So you show up regulated.
• 12:52
  You show up regulated so you can overcome your trauma and childhood wounding, not so that you show up understanding your childhood wounding and your trauma and react to it.
• 13:02
  There's like that one last step.
• 13:04
  I think it's one of the reasons so many men's coaches are –
• 13:08
  outwardly angry and aggressive and attacking.
• 13:12
  And I saw a headline on a men's coach's page the other day that said something like, I will help you kill the part of you that no longer needs to be there.
• 13:23
  And it made me feel like so sad for him
• 13:27
  And so sad for the men that he works with because we don't need to kill the parts of us that don't need to be there.
• 13:32
  We need to understand that those parts of us can be integrated.
• 13:36
  Those parts of us can, that childhood wounding, that trauma, that little boy inside of us that's reacting to a situation where there's no physical violence but we're still reacting like there is.
• 13:48
  That's a part of us that needs to be brought forward and integrated into the whole human that we are.
• 13:53
  Now there's a reason why this feels so incredibly hard at first.
• 14:00
  Because of this conditioning, when emotional intensity enters the room, our nervous systems activate.
• 14:06
  Adrenaline rises, threat detection increases.
• 14:09
  Without training, most men automatically, like we don't even think about this, we're not trying to, we escalate, defend, withdraw, or shut down like I just talked about.
• 14:17
  And containment feels unnatural at first because it's a new nervous system skill.
• 14:25
  There's skills that we learn, and then there's nervous system skills.
• 14:28
  And nervous system skills are like at the core of our reactions.
• 14:31
  They're at the core of how we show up.
• 14:32
  They're at the core of how present we are, how regulated we are, how in the room we are.
• 14:37
  And at first, it's our nervous system wants to react.
• 14:41
  Learning nervous system regulation, I say this all the time, is like learning a martial art.
• 14:45
  At first, it's incredibly difficult.
• 14:47
  It's so hard to learn a new martial art.
• 14:49
  I know.
• 14:50
  I've trained in many over the course of my lifetime.
• 14:52
  But.
• 14:53
  But then once you get some repetitions and you do it over and over again, I always tell men, what's the thing that you cared about in your life about getting better that was hard at first and you put time, effort, and energy into it and it didn't get easier over time?
• 15:06
  And men say, no, things always get easier.
• 15:08
  So just believe that when it comes to masculine containment, things will get easier.
• 15:12
  If you have the right tools, the right instructions, the right rituals, the right process, the right understanding.
• 15:17
  We teach all of these in the brotherhood.
• 15:19
  There's another factor that makes this difficult, and it's one that isn't talked about very often when it comes to the nervous system.
• 15:27
  See, our nervous system looks for familiarity even if familiarity to the outside observer is uncomfortable.
• 15:37
  It's why people stay in broken patterns for years.
• 15:40
  It's why people stay in addictive patterns.
• 15:43
  It's why people stay in challenging relationships that they really shouldn't be in.
• 15:46
  It's why people stay in jobs that they don't want to be in.
• 15:48
  It's why we do the same thing over and over and over again and expect to get a different result.
• 15:52
  But we never do.
• 15:53
  It's because our nervous system seeks familiarity.
• 15:57
  It doesn't seek success.
• 15:58
  It doesn't seek comfort.
• 15:59
  It seeks familiarity.
• 16:01
  And that's why escalation doesn't work and withdrawal doesn't work and fixing doesn't work.
• 16:06
  But they're familiar and it's what we've learned.
• 16:08
  It's what we've internalized.
• 16:10
  It's what we've been conditioned for.
• 16:12
  So it's what we do over and over again.
• 16:14
  And doing something new like staying present and regulating yourself feels unfamiliar.
• 16:21
  So our nervous system pulls back and tries to go back to what we already know.
• 16:25
  But here's the good news.
• 16:27
  Just because we weren't trained for central nervous system regulation, just because we weren't trained for masculine containment doesn't mean we can't learn it.
• 16:37
  Masculine containment is a skill.
• 16:39
  And like any skill, like I said, over time, if we get reps, if we try over and over again, we will get better at it.
• 16:46
  And you can develop the ability to stay calm in conflict.
• 16:50
  calm and present in conflict you can regulate your nervous system you can remain present under pressure you can stabilize the environment around you instead of reacting to it and destabilizing it further and when men begin developing this capacity everything starts to change and i'm not saying this is a theory i'm not saying this is a belief i'm not saying this is like hey i think this works
• 17:15
  I'm saying this from an embodied place because it's completely changed my life.
• 17:18
  And I'm not just saying this about my life.
• 17:20
  I've worked now with over 100 men in the brotherhood
• 17:23
  And every week we see stories of success, of regulating a nervous system, regulating emotional intensity, and things in their lives getting better.
• 17:32
  And it's not just a relationship that gets better.
• 17:35
  We've had men in the brotherhood share about how, yes, their primary relationship has gotten better with their spouse and she's reacting differently.
• 17:41
  She's looking at them differently.
• 17:42
  Intimacy has returned.
• 17:43
  Intensity has returned.
• 17:45
  Excitement has returned.
• 17:46
  Those things are fantastic.
• 17:47
  Yeah.
• 17:48
  It's part of the goal of the brotherhood.
• 17:49
  It's one of the main goals is that we use our primary relationship as the initiation we need to understand this martial art, to step through this, to actually become the most regulated, calmest man in the room.
• 18:01
  But it's not just their primary relationships that improve.
• 18:04
  We have stories of men improving relationships with their children and having more connection and being able to be there for them and seeing them in a different way and not reacting to their behaviors.
• 18:13
  We have stories of men doing better at their job or in their business, having record months signing the biggest contracts that they've ever signed.
• 18:21
  We have stories of men having more close relationships with the people around them.
• 18:25
  And just people, people who are in their lives, in their orbit, start reacting to them differently.
• 18:30
  Start telling them things they've never told anybody else.
• 18:32
  Start seeing them as a resource to help them do better in their lives.
• 18:37
  And as a man, having the people around you, your primary relationship, your kids, the people at work, the people in your life, react to you in that way where they see you as magnetic.
• 18:47
  They see you as a person who's a problem, who can help them with problems, who can solve things for them, not by trying to fix them, just by being there for them.
• 18:55
  And every week, men in the Brotherhood talk to each other about how they have more confidence.
• 19:01
  They're more excited about life.
• 19:03
  Like that's a big issue for us as men.
• 19:05
  Like sometimes we lose excitement about life because we're stuck in patterns.
• 19:08
  We're stuck in the same things over and over again.
• 19:10
  We're stuck trying to use the same tools to get results and we don't.
• 19:15
  And life can get very challenging.
• 19:17
  But when the world around you and the people around you reflect to you that you're like an asset in their lives and they're excited for you to be there and they can't wait to talk to you again and they tell you things they've never told other people and you've helped them,
• 19:31
  That makes life exciting.
• 19:32
  That makes presence exciting.
• 19:33
  That makes being who we are exciting.
• 19:36
  And that changes everything.
• 19:39
  Learning the skill affects every area of your life.
• 19:43
  Your relationship, your ability to lead, your friendships, your parenting, your business, your job, everything.
• 19:49
  Because the calmest nervous system in the room changes and stabilizes the environment for everyone else.
• 19:58
  So I want you to know something.
• 20:00
  If you've listened to my work on masculine containment and you're thinking, I don't understand this.
• 20:04
  I don't think I can do this.
• 20:05
  I want you to know you're not broken.
• 20:07
  You just were never taught this.
• 20:08
  You were never trained.
• 20:09
  This is a skill you can learn.
• 20:11
  It's a skill that will change the rest of your life and move the rest of your life in a direction that is so much more positive, so much more exciting, so much more engaging.
• 20:21
  and so much more intense because when you actually become the calmest man in the room, your presence changes the world around you.
• 20:29
  You develop the ability to stay calm and present and grounded under pressure and everything you do becomes more effective.
• 20:36
  You execute from a place of awareness rather than a place of reaction and reactivity.
• 20:40
  You lead from a place of stability instead of escalation.
• 20:44
  And when a man learns how to do these things,
• 20:47
  everything in our life changes and moves in a more positive, more upward, more mobile, more exciting direction.
• 20:54
  See, most men think they're failing in relationships.
• 20:58
  But the truth is much simpler and easier to fix.
• 21:01
  We were never trained for the moments that matter the most.
• 21:06
  And when a man finally learns how to stay calm and present and grounded, when emotions rise, that's when everything in our lives begins to change.
• 21:16
  Thank you so much for being here for episode six of the Masculine Containment Podcast.
• 21:21
  I'm so proud to have you as a listener, and I appreciate you spending this time with me.
• 21:25
  And if you want to learn the skills that I talked about, if you want to be the calmest man in the room, if you want to start being magnetic to the people around you and start really changing the world around you in a way,
• 21:38
  that moves you in a direction that is so much more positive, so much more exciting, and so much more engaging, please join us in the Brotherhood.
• 21:44
  I'd be honored to walk this path alongside you.
• 21:47
  You can go to thebrotherhoodsociety.com and sign up for the wait list for our next initiation, which is delivered on Zoom to men all around the world in a container of men that are working to do better, to be more regulated, to understand masculine containment, and change their lives for the better.
• 22:05
  And we would love to have you.
• 22:07
  Go to thebrotherhoodsociety.com.
• 22:09
  I'm looking forward to meeting you.
• 22:10
  And thanks again for being a listener.
• 22:12
  If you have a minute, subscribe, leave a comment.
• 22:15
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