Latest / Masculine Containment / 39 - Why Men Shut Down or Explode in Relationships (The Missing Skill Most Men Never Learned)

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39 - Why Men Shut Down or Explode in Relationships (The Missing Skill Most Men Never Learned) · Masculine Containment

• 0:00
  I want to bring something up that I rarely hear, almost never hear anybody talk about.
• 0:06
  I don't think most men feel safe.
• 0:09
  In this podcast, why men shut down or explode in relationships, I want to discuss this topic.
• 0:15
  And before I even start, I want to make sure that people understand this, that you understand, this is not an argument about women and how unsafe women feel and, you know, comparing men to women.
• 0:24
  I've published extensively and I've spoken a lot about how unsafe women feel and the realities of being a woman and how vulnerable women feel.
• 0:32
  This is a completely different discussion.
• 0:34
  And again, it's not a comparison.
• 0:36
  So I want to make sure that I get that out of the way up front.
• 0:38
  And I think it's important to bring that up.
• 0:42
  Because this is completely different.
• 0:44
  It's something that I've known for a long time, but it's something that I've gotten a deeper understanding of teaching the men in the brotherhood and working with men over the course of what is soon going to be almost a year.
• 0:57
  What will be a year by the end of our fourth container, which has interviews open right now.
• 1:03
  Working with the men of the brotherhood has been extraordinary.
• 1:06
  It's been one of the most amazing and honestly most difficult and challenging but most rewarding things I've ever done.
• 1:14
  And there's a reason.
• 1:15
  I think that when we look at men in general, we don't really understand a lot about how
• 1:25
  We react in relationships about how what happens to us in relationships, about what happens to us in our lives.
• 1:30
  And there's been so much that's been normalized about us that a lot of reality is obscured.
• 1:35
  And I'm going to explain that in just a moment.
• 1:37
  But first, I want to share a personal story.
• 1:41
  When I was in my 20s, I was in a really challenging relationship that went through an extraordinarily challenging breakup.
• 1:48
  And afterwards, I just felt, for lack of a better term, activated all the time.
• 1:53
  I was having a hard time sleeping, a hard time eating.
• 1:55
  I kind of felt always kind of on edge and triggered or pre-triggered, like walking around like something was gonna happen.
• 2:03
  And I had no idea why.
• 2:05
  And I went and saw a therapist and we sat down and I explained to him what was going on.
• 2:09
  We actually had two intake sessions and towards the, like two thirds into the way, into the second intake session,
• 2:17
  He said something to me that I'll never forget.
• 2:19
  He was like, Alex, well, what I want you to know is you were in an abusive relationship.
• 2:23
  And before I say anything else, I want to know, I played my part in the abuse in that relationship.
• 2:28
  It was definitely not unilateral.
• 2:29
  But what he told me was that the way I was treated, the way I was lied to, the way I was told one thing and gaslit over and over and over again was actually abuse.
• 2:40
  And that's why I was feeling activated all the time.
• 2:43
  That's why I was feeling charged and like I couldn't sleep and couldn't eat and, you know, couldn't really focus, had a hard time getting things done.
• 2:51
  I was actually charged.
• 2:53
  feeling unsafe.
• 2:55
  And when he told me that, I remember being shocked.
• 2:59
  To give you context about how little I understood about relationships, and by the way, if you're a man listening to this, you might be in the same place.
• 3:05
  I don't think a lot of us understand that much about relationships.
• 3:09
  When he said, Alex, you've been abused,
• 3:11
  or you've been in an abusive relationship where you're being abused, I literally asked something like, I think I said something like, I didn't know men could be abused in heterosexual relationships.
• 3:21
  I really didn't.
• 3:22
  I didn't have context for it.
• 3:24
  I had three younger sisters growing up.
• 3:25
  It was always about protecting my sisters.
• 3:27
  It wasn't really always a lot about me.
• 3:30
  And I didn't know that we could actually be in situations where we were abused.
• 3:34
  Now, granted, this was almost 30 years ago and so things have changed and I think there's a lot more awareness now
• 3:41
  But I don't think most of us as men understand this.
• 3:45
  You know, I knew I wasn't in physical danger in that relationship.
• 3:51
  But because of the emotional wounding and the conditioning and the trauma and the patterns that taught my nervous system that certain emotions and conversations and situations and conflicts that we had just weren't safe.
• 4:04
  it kind of started to land that that's why I was so activated.
• 4:07
  That's why I was actually feeling like I was unsafe.
• 4:10
  I would have never have described it that way, but that's really what was going on with me.
• 4:14
  And thank goodness I found a really good EMDR therapist.
• 4:18
  I was able to work through it and get some relief and learn a lot about myself at the time.
• 4:22
  And that was before I met my wife, Katie, which...
• 4:24
  you know, in retrospect, hindsight's 2020.
• 4:26
  I'm so glad that that happened before I met her and I was able to process some trauma, some wounding, some condition.
• 4:31
  It's probably why we ended up making it, especially in the early days.
• 4:35
  But it started kind of a thought process for me way back then that's come up more recently.
• 4:40
  You know, what if this isn't just true for me?
• 4:42
  What if most men don't actually feel safe?
• 4:46
  And because if it's true, I think we've been asking the wrong question.
• 4:51
  Maybe the question isn't why do men explode or why do men shut down or why do men react in relationships?
• 4:59
  Maybe the
• 5:02
  as though there's danger, even though there isn't actually danger?
• 5:07
  I think the answer is surprisingly simple.
• 5:08
  We don't feel safe.
• 5:09
  And like, let me play this through for you.
• 5:12
  Here's the evidence.
• 5:13
  Look at what happens when his men were triggered.
• 5:17
  You know, we can be going along.
• 5:18
  Everything's fine.
• 5:19
  We're in our bodies.
• 5:20
  We feel present.
• 5:21
  We're aware.
• 5:22
  We're doing something.
• 5:24
  And then there's a trigger that comes up.
• 5:26
  There's, you know, a look of contempt where something is said that bothers us or we get a message that bothers us or we see something in an email that bothers us and we get triggered.
• 5:37
  And.
• 5:38
  Instead of being in the present moment, instead of being right here, we become activated.
• 5:43
  If we're safe, we don't activate.
• 5:45
  We don't activate around feeling safe.
• 5:47
  We activate when we feel a lack of safety.
• 5:54
  We get triggered when we feel a lack of safety.
• 5:58
  And so what happens to us in the present moment, when one of those things happen is we explode, we implode, we become angry, defensive, reactive, controlling, or we withdraw, we suppress, we disappear, we numb ourselves.
• 6:12
  Or if you're like me, there's a combination of the two.
• 6:15
  But I think most of us lead with one or the other.
• 6:18
  So as you're listening to this right now, just to get the most out of this episode that you can, because I want this to help you.
• 6:24
  I want this to give you awareness.
• 6:26
  I want this to maybe give you some insight into why you behave the way you do.
• 6:33
  Which one are you primarily?
• 6:34
  Are you the person who reacts with way too much energy and where you're saying like, you know, I need to react so that nobody sees what this emotion is inside of me?
• 6:43
  Or are you one of those people that implodes?
• 6:45
  You pull back, you withdraw.
• 6:46
  It's like, I don't want anyone to see this emotion, so I'm going to hide.
• 6:50
  Because I think for most of us, most men are one or the other.
• 6:53
  And if you're like me, we lead with one or the other.
• 6:55
  And then we sometimes go to the other.
• 6:58
  I think my primary pattern for most of my life was explode, bring too much energy to the situation, and then withdraw, pull back, isolate, be alone, look productive, but just completely in my head and completely overwhelmed.
• 7:14
  It was one of those situations, or not one of those, it was most situations I would numb myself.
• 7:19
  I would feel terrible.
• 7:20
  I would feel challenged.
• 7:21
  I would, yeah, I would just play it over and over again in my head.
• 7:25
  It would get stuck there.
• 7:27
  And so either way, whether we implode or explode, we don't stay with the emotion.
• 7:32
  We try to escape it.
• 7:34
  And I don't think that's because his men were broken.
• 7:37
  I don't think that's because his men were not intelligent.
• 7:40
  I don't think that's because his men were not even emotionally intelligent.
• 7:44
  I think it's because we react as though there's danger, even though there isn't danger present.
• 7:52
  Not because the present moment is necessarily dangerous.
• 7:55
  It's because the present moment reminds us of a past where there was danger or where there was embarrassment or frustration or feeling vulnerable or feeling challenged.
• 8:06
  You know, I'll relate this to myself.
• 8:10
  There were countless times in my relationship that
• 8:13
  I could bring up so many where there was a trigger present.
• 8:17
  And now that I really understand what triggers are and what they mean so often, it was insignificant.
• 8:25
  But something in the moment triggered me.
• 8:28
  Something was said or a look or, you know, some type of behavior and I.
• 8:34
  I would explode and then implode and withdraw.
• 8:38
  And in my relationship with Katie, like I can, I know there's like an arc that this went through.
• 8:43
  You know, we went, we got together when I was 30 and she was in her late twenties and, or mid twenties.
• 8:48
  And at the beginning that we would go through this pattern of trigger escalation, rupture, withdraw.
• 8:53
  And then sometimes we wouldn't even repair.
• 8:55
  We would just like come back together and start talking again and it would be awkward.
• 8:58
  And then we would pretend like it wasn't awkward until the pattern repeated itself.
• 9:02
  And then over time, we got better at repair.
• 9:03
  And then over time, it wasn't as explosive during the triggers.
• 9:07
  I learned to, like, not let it all out, not let it all come all at once and right away.
• 9:12
  But the pattern remained relatively similar.
• 9:15
  You know, there was something that came up where it made me feel unsafe.
• 9:20
  Like now, looking back, I can admit that that's what was going on.
• 9:24
  I can admit that that's how it felt.
• 9:26
  I can admit that there was this reaction within me from a past that was massively challenged because when I walk through what happens and I look at it and I think about it, here's what I know.
• 9:38
  If I actually felt safe in that moment, I wouldn't have reacted that way.
• 9:43
  Some of that was conditioning.
• 9:44
  Like, hey, if there's a moment like this, you explode.
• 9:45
  If there's a moment like this, you implode.
• 9:47
  Like, I saw it over and over again in my childhood.
• 9:49
  I learned it.
• 9:50
  I don't think we were born this way.
• 9:52
  You know, for me, there was a ton of reinforcement around emotions and emotional expression of any kind being unsafe.
• 10:02
  My dad told me, boys don't cry.
• 10:03
  I remember struggling playing sports.
• 10:05
  I remember feeling embarrassed, being called names, feeling judged, feeling weak, feeling vulnerable.
• 10:10
  Yeah.
• 10:11
  You know, as a kid, I was not like that kid that every other kid looks up to.
• 10:17
  I was kind of the outcast outsider.
• 10:19
  I was judged a lot.
• 10:21
  I was called feminine.
• 10:22
  I was called gay.
• 10:22
  There was all kinds of things.
• 10:24
  And like, not that there's anything wrong with being gay, but when I was a kid, it was being used as an insult.
• 10:30
  And it hurt.
• 10:31
  You know, even like sharing this right now with you on this podcast, it still brings up a little something inside of me of like, ooh, do I really want to say this?
• 10:39
  It feels vulnerable.
• 10:41
  Even though I'm confident in who I am, even though I'm like successful by any measure, even though I have an extraordinary life and a great wife and great kids, there's still a part of me that feels a little leftover vulnerability from the past.
• 10:55
  I think most men have their own version of this story of, of,
• 11:00
  feeling isolated, feeling alone.
• 11:01
  You know, in the brotherhood, what's come up over and over again, especially during group shares, as men have shared things like, you know, the day that they were embarrassed in front of other people or the day they were betrayed by a woman and figured everything out or the day that one of their parents did something that just has stuck with them until now.
• 11:20
  And like I'm talking about some men that are 50, you know, like me, 40, 50, 60, sometimes even 70 years old, still remembering things from their childhood, still having those things bring up tears.
• 11:31
  you know, I think a lot of us learned as men that we weren't safe and that if we showed any type of weakness or vulnerability or fear or any of those things, we were going to be treated harshly or there were going to be consequences.
• 11:49
  And so vulnerability could become ammunition, weakness
• 11:56
  What ended up happening a lot of the time is the only emotion that I felt safe expressing that didn't create vulnerability, that didn't look like weakness was anger.
• 12:05
  And I think you can see this these days in a lot of the men's leaders out there.
• 12:10
  Not all of them, certainly.
• 12:11
  There's a lot of them who have learned this and overcome it.
• 12:15
  But so often, I'll see a male coach or an influencer who is conveying something that is relatively benign, but they're conveying it through anger.
• 12:25
  And they are really frustrated.
• 12:27
  Or they're conveying something vulnerable, like talking about a vulnerable time in their
• 12:36
  sometimes violent, sometimes kind of overwhelming tone.
• 12:40
  And I think we do that because anger and the visibility of, or the visual of anger kind of masks vulnerability.
• 12:48
  And I think so many of us have learned that because over time as a man, you learn your value comes from producing, from providing, from protecting, from performing, from winning.
• 12:59
  So eventually, feeling emotion doesn't really fit into that picture anymore.
• 13:05
  It doesn't make us have value.
• 13:08
  It doesn't move us in the right direction, or at least that's how it feels.
• 13:12
  And so when we look at what are exploding and imploding, this is where I think we've misunderstood men.
• 13:21
  I don't think exploding is the problem.
• 13:24
  I think it is definitely a problem.
• 13:26
  I don't think imploding is the problem.
• 13:27
  I think it is definitely a problem.
• 13:29
  But I also think they're evidence.
• 13:31
  Evidence that somewhere inside of us, we don't feel safe enough to be right here in the moment present.
• 13:38
  Exploding says, I need to overpower this feeling before it overpowers me.
• 13:42
  Exploding says, I need to disappear before anyone sees what I'm feeling, like I said earlier.
• 13:46
  Different behaviors, same outcome, same fear.
• 13:50
  And the fear isn't the emotion.
• 13:53
  The fear is actually what the emotions represent.
• 13:56
  We react as though there's danger, even though there isn't actually danger.
• 14:02
  And here's the cost of this.
• 14:05
  Here's what's so challenging about this unspoken truth about men.
• 14:10
  This is a unspoken truth.
• 14:11
  You know, I think most of my life, one of the things that I've done, especially in business, is I was the one to speak the unspoken truth.
• 14:17
  It's not always safe.
• 14:19
  Don't always get a lot of respect for it.
• 14:21
  You get made fun of a lot for it.
• 14:22
  Go look at any of the comments on the stuff that I post.
• 14:25
  Maybe it's not so much, not so much, not as much.
• 14:29
  some these days on Facebook, but if you look at YouTube and stuff that I post, a lot of times I get comments that are just like single word names, or I get called a wuss or a simp or a, you know, all kinds of other stuff.
• 14:45
  I usually just answer labels are easy, discipline is hard.
• 14:49
  But the cost is that if we're in this place where
• 14:58
  We are experiencing this unspoken truth that we don't feel safe.
• 15:01
  And when we explode or implode, there's a massive challenge.
• 15:05
  When I explode, the people I love, the people around me, the people working with me, the people who are trying to support me, maybe the people that I'm managing or leading, they don't feel safe.
• 15:14
  And when I implode and I withdraw, the people that I love, that I'm managing, that I'm leading, that I wanna be able to communicate with don't feel connected.
• 15:22
  And when I become controlling myself,
• 15:25
  and try and overpower the people around me, the people around me start carrying the emotions that belong to me.
• 15:31
  And the very strategies that I developed to protect myself, the things that I went through and have used forever to try and make myself okay and safe become the things that do the most damage to my relationships and the most damage to the people around me.
• 15:51
  And by the way, this is a tough one to even talk about.
• 15:55
  The most damage to me.
• 15:59
  I'm actually the one that bears the brunt of the damage.
• 16:01
  When I yell and scream at somebody else, I now know.
• 16:04
  It takes a long time to get here.
• 16:06
  And if you're not quite there and you don't quite believe this, I totally get it.
• 16:09
  Let me plant a seed.
• 16:11
  Let me plant a seed.
• 16:12
  And the seed is...
• 16:14
  That when we explode at somebody or when we implode the person that we are doing the most damage to most of the time.
• 16:22
  Like obviously we can cause trauma to the people around us.
• 16:26
  But the person we're damaging the most is ourselves.
• 16:29
  Because when I look at my life path.
• 16:31
  And I think about what gets me to where I want to go.
• 16:35
  It's making the right decisions.
• 16:36
  It's being present.
• 16:38
  It's seeing opportunity.
• 16:40
  It's hearing inspiration and intuition and separating them from everything else that I hear.
• 16:44
  It's understanding what I should do next.
• 16:46
  It's getting excited about my future.
• 16:48
  And here's what I know without question.
• 16:51
  When I'm in a state of explosion or implosion, none of those things are present.
• 16:55
  When I'm in a state of explosion or implosion, I am in a survival mechanism.
• 16:59
  I am barely making it through.
• 17:01
  And I know that can sound weak as I say it.
• 17:05
  The reason I excuse it because it's like, man, this really does sound like emotional fragility.
• 17:11
  But it's emotional reality.
• 17:15
  And for those who believe I'm emotionally fragile, okay, I get it.
• 17:20
  But for those who are dealing with these patterns, and for men who feel stuck, and for men who know that you either explode or implode, I think it's important for us to actually talk about this as reality, even though we might be judged.
• 17:35
  I think it's important to consider this as reality, even though it might feel vulnerable.
• 17:41
  And...
• 17:43
  When we are in this place of reaction, we're hurting ourselves the most.
• 17:48
  We're taking ourselves off course.
• 17:49
  We're taking ourselves offline.
• 17:50
  We're taking ourselves out of the moment, out of the present, out of productivity, out of accomplishment, out of momentum, out of the life force of momentum.
• 18:00
  Momentum is one of those things that as men we live for.
• 18:03
  When we are in momentum and things are going our way, we feel fantastic.
• 18:06
  We feel great.
• 18:07
  When we explode or implode, momentum is not present.
• 18:11
  And I want to be really clear.
• 18:13
  This explains our reaction.
• 18:14
  It doesn't excuse them.
• 18:16
  And understanding the pattern here is where responsibility begins.
• 18:21
  I'm not saying it's okay for us to explode or implode because we don't feel safe.
• 18:24
  What I'm saying is we explode or implode.
• 18:28
  One of the reasons, primary reason could be that we don't feel safe.
• 18:31
  And once we acknowledge and understand that acknowledgement is the first step to healing, when we acknowledge this and understand it, then we can start processing and understanding how to move in the right direction.
• 18:42
  And so in the title of this podcast, I said, you know, the missing skill that we were never trained and the missing skill is not becoming emotionless.
• 18:52
  I tried that for a lot of my life.
• 18:53
  It didn't work.
• 18:54
  I even wrote a book called The Entrepreneurial Personality Type where I talked about us not feeling emotions.
• 18:58
  Man, we do.
• 19:00
  I was in a state of suppression and it's not suppressing ourselves better.
• 19:05
  It's not pretending we're okay.
• 19:07
  The answer is.
• 19:09
  is to learn how to become safe enough inside ourselves that we can remain present instead of treating every emotion like an emergency.
• 19:19
  Or instead of treating emotions that get over a certain threshold as an emergency.
• 19:24
  And extending that threshold much higher than it is today so that we rarely feel like an emotional response is an emergency.
• 19:33
  Instead of acting like there's danger where there isn't actually danger, we can stay in our bodies and stay present and stay rational.
• 19:39
  I actually went through this today.
• 19:42
  I'm a little tired from it, but so much better than I would have done in the past.
• 19:48
  Today, I had an appointment with a dentist where we were going to take measurements for a bridge that I'm getting in my lower front teeth.
• 19:58
  Most people don't know this, but I don't have my four lower front teeth right now because there were some issues with them.
• 20:03
  We had to pull them out.
• 20:04
  We put in implants.
• 20:06
  And I've been going to the same dentist and I had an implant put in that failed.
• 20:11
  I had actually first he told me we're going to take out the front two teeth and then we're going to put a bridge in and that didn't work.
• 20:17
  The implants failed.
• 20:18
  Then we were going to take out four teeth and that didn't work.
• 20:21
  One implant failed, then another implant failed.
• 20:23
  It's been really challenging.
• 20:25
  And then today I went in to see him.
• 20:28
  And another one of the implants failed.
• 20:30
  And he said, now we're going to go from the front four teeth to the front six teeth.
• 20:34
  And we're going to put in a bigger bridge.
• 20:35
  And I'm going to do it right now.
• 20:36
  And I'm like, time out, man.
• 20:38
  I can't do this.
• 20:40
  And I sat up and I'm like, hey, I've, and I could feel the reaction in my body.
• 20:46
  You want to talk about not feeling safe?
• 20:47
  Like I have all kinds of medical trauma.
• 20:50
  And for those who have a hard time going to the dentist, if you're listening to this, I so empathize with you.
• 20:55
  Like I get uncomfortable just walking into the office.
• 21:00
  And over the past almost two years, I've been going through this stuff with my bottom teeth.
• 21:04
  And there's been procedures that are incredibly painful and they've been exhausting and they've felt traumatic and painful.
• 21:14
  I keep going back to this guy who's giving me advice, and then today, like all of it kind of came to a head where I'm like, look, we're not taking any more teeth out, we're not grinding teeth down, you're not doing anything else.
• 21:24
  Like I'm done.
• 21:25
  And I said, you know, I need the mold for my bottom front teeth because we'd taken a cast of my bottom front teeth and I'm going somewhere else.
• 21:30
  And he went to go look at it or look for it in his office and couldn't find it.
• 21:35
  We took a mold.
• 21:36
  My teeth are gone.
• 21:37
  So I can't get that mold again.
• 21:39
  And he couldn't find it.
• 21:39
  Took him like 20 minutes to look for it.
• 21:42
  And in the past, during that 20 minutes, I would have been overwhelmed.
• 21:46
  During that 20 minutes, I would have been like angry and ready to scream and yell.
• 21:51
  And I probably would have screamed and yelled.
• 21:53
  But today, I spoke to him in a voice not much higher than this, not much louder than this, probably a little more direct, probably a little more forceful.
• 22:01
  But I explained to him, like, hey, I've come here for your expertise.
• 22:04
  And what you told me the first time didn't work.
• 22:06
  And what you told me the second time didn't work.
• 22:07
  And what you told me the third time didn't work.
• 22:09
  And I've been coming here for two years.
• 22:10
  I've gone through a ton of pain, a ton of frustration.
• 22:13
  Now I'm sitting here.
• 22:14
  You can't even find the mold for my teeth, which they eventually did find.
• 22:17
  But at first, he told me, oh, we're just going to fake it with some other scanner or something.
• 22:22
  And I said, and instead of exploding or imploding, instead of like lighting the whole office off like I would have at any point in time in my past, I was direct with him.
• 22:30
  And he said, what can I do to make this better?
• 22:32
  And I said, you're going to refund every dollar I've paid you back to dollar one and I'm going somewhere else.
• 22:36
  I'm not doing this with you anymore.
• 22:38
  There's a level of incompetence here that is most likely malpractice.
• 22:41
  I'm not sure that it is, but there's a level of incompetence here in the way that I've been treated over and over again.
• 22:47
  And I'm like, I'm done.
• 22:50
  And because I was contained, I believe, because I wasn't yelling and screaming.
• 22:54
  If I was yelling and screaming, like I know in the past, it would have been one of those things where they're thinking about calling the police just to make sure there's not an issue.
• 23:01
  And if I was yelling and screaming, the subject matter of the entire conversation would have become my reactions, my yelling and screaming, my overpowering him.
• 23:09
  But instead, I remained contained.
• 23:11
  I was direct.
• 23:11
  I told him exactly how I felt.
• 23:13
  And he went and wrote a check.
• 23:16
  a big check because I've spent a ton of money there for every penny I've paid him back to the beginning.
• 23:22
  Even for some other dental work that had nothing to do for the front of my teeth.
• 23:24
  I said, I want every dollar back.
• 23:26
  And he gave it to me.
• 23:30
  And it was hard.
• 23:33
  It was hard.
• 23:34
  I felt unsafe.
• 23:35
  I really felt unsafe when he went into my mouth and for like the third or fourth time started moving around the implant and it hurt.
• 23:41
  And,
• 23:43
  my whole body tensed up.
• 23:45
  My stomach started feeling like acidic and I started feeling that feeling like that uncomfortable feeling of about to get into a fight or about to run away, like that survival mechanism kicking in.
• 23:57
  And I laid there and I started breathing and staying in the moment and feeling my feelings of anger and rage and frustration and fear.
• 24:06
  and fear, and allowing myself to feel them as I transmuted them, as I breathed through them, as I processed, and I told them exactly what I wanted, and I got it.
• 24:16
  And now I'm gonna go somewhere else and get this taken care of.
• 24:20
  And the skill that we haven't been taught,
• 24:23
  And the reason we react as though there's danger is because it's so normalized in society for men to yell and scream at each other that we see it all the time.
• 24:33
  I mean, we see it like on TV.
• 24:35
  We see it with people who are juxtaposed on news programs.
• 24:39
  We see it with congresspeople yelling at witnesses or witnesses yelling at congresspeople.
• 24:43
  We see it...
• 24:45
  with people who are playing sports, yelling and screaming at each other and getting in fights.
• 24:49
  Like it was so normalized to react rather than respond.
• 24:53
  It's so normalized to like lose your shit instead of staying in the present moment and being there and aware
• 25:01
  that it feels like it's the right thing to do.
• 25:04
  But if you really slow things down and you think about what it does to you when that happens, how much capacity you lose when that happens, we start understanding that it's absolutely the opposite of what we should be doing.
• 25:15
  And that's why I teach the skill of masculine containment.
• 25:18
  That's why I practice the skill of masculine containment.
• 25:22
  Again, not because I think men should suppress themselves, not because I think men should tolerate abuse, not because I think we don't, we shouldn't have boundaries.
• 25:31
  Actually, the opposite of all those things.
• 25:33
  I think as men, we should feel our feelings, no longer suppress ourselves.
• 25:36
  Not only do I not think we should tolerate abuse, I think we should stop acting in a way that could also be deemed as abusive so we can understand what's actually happening to us.
• 25:44
  Because if we're yelling and screaming, someone else is yelling and screaming, who's being abusive?
• 25:48
  That's how that first relationship I talked about was.
• 25:51
  I think part of the reason it was obscured
• 25:53
  that I was in an abusive relationship was because I was also acting in a way that was abusive.
• 25:58
  I was losing my shit all the time.
• 25:59
  That's abuse.
• 26:00
  That's scaring the people around you.
• 26:02
  So yeah, I was in a place where I had behaviors that were abusive, not on purpose, not intentionally.
• 26:09
  I didn't want to, but that's just how it was.
• 26:11
  And when you look at most relationships, I think those things are present.
• 26:14
  We just don't call it that because it's uncomfortable.
• 26:18
  When we're contained
• 26:23
  being regulated, being present, being able to feel a trigger, feel the feelings, feel the reactions in the body, but not letting those things become an automatic behavior, an automatic reaction, an automatic vomiting out of energy or suppressing of energy and pulling away and running away and hiding.
• 26:43
  Instead of feeling what's going on and staying there in the moment, like I did today.
• 26:47
  Man, it was hard.
• 26:48
  It really was hard.
• 26:49
  I was exhausted afterwards, but here's what I know.
• 26:53
  I would have been infinitely more exhausted if I had spent 20 minutes in that office screaming and yelling at the top of my lungs and releasing adrenaline and getting into fight or flight and reacting and potentially having police called or something like that.
• 27:08
  Not that, yeah, it possibly could have happened.
• 27:12
  Let's be real.
• 27:16
  Masculine containment is the practice of creating enough safety inside yourself to
• 27:21
  so that you can actually set healthy boundaries, so that you're not acting in a way that's abusive and you have discernment as to what's really going on around you, so you can stay present with your emotions and understand what's happening.
• 27:33
  Not run from them, not overpower them, not disappear from them, stay with them.
• 27:37
  Because once you get present, you have choices.
• 27:40
  You can ask another question, you can apologize, you can take a break, you can set a boundary, you can leave, you can stay, you can demand exactly what you want, which is what I did today.
• 27:48
  If you're in a place where there is an issue in the present moment, you can repair.
• 27:51
  You can apologize.
• 27:52
  You can make things better.
• 27:54
  You can lead things in a better direction.
• 27:57
  Even though I was in my dentist's office where he's the authority, he's the owner of the office, I led the conversation.
• 28:04
  I moved in the direction I want.
• 28:05
  I got it to the conclusion I want.
• 28:06
  I walked out with a check for every penny I paid him since the beginning.
• 28:12
  See, I'm not.
• 28:13
  Containment doesn't tell you what to do.
• 28:15
  Containment allows you to see clearly enough what to do.
• 28:20
  And so in closing, I just want to reiterate, I think it's an unspoken truth.
• 28:25
  I think it's one of those things that is really uncomfortable to talk about.
• 28:28
  But I don't think most men feel safe.
• 28:32
  I think we've spent most of our lives understanding how to look strong, how to look competent, how to look like a man, how to stop showing our emotions, how to mask vulnerability, how to mask weakness, instead of learning how to feel safe.
• 28:51
  Because those aren't the same thing.
• 28:53
  until we become safe enough inside ourselves, we'll continue to react as though there's danger, even though danger isn't actually present.
• 29:04
  And if you think about, as a man, I've gone through this exercise.
• 29:09
  I haven't had to recently.
• 29:12
  But take a minute as I get to the end of this podcast, or maybe when it's done, pause and don't listen to anything else.
• 29:20
  And take a minute and think about the last month, maybe the last week, depending on how often you're reacting.
• 29:26
  And think about the reactions you've had.
• 29:28
  Think about the times where you've exploded, you've imploded.
• 29:31
  And ask yourself a simple question.
• 29:34
  Was there really danger present?
• 29:36
  What I found when I went through this exercise is that there never had been.
• 29:40
  Like not once.
• 29:43
  Not once had there been a time where I was responding to actual danger.
• 29:48
  I was responding to fear and anger and frustration and irritation and, uh,
• 29:55
  a whole bunch of stuff outside of the present and what could happen, what might happen.
• 29:59
  I was reacting.
• 30:00
  I was in a place of like a survival mechanism and we can train that survival mechanism to come on when it needs to, when we actually are in a state of survival, not when we're in a place where we actually are safe.
• 30:16
  We don't need to react as though there's a lack of safety.
• 30:19
  You know, I think that's,
• 30:22
  As men, we keep exploding, we'll keep imploding, we'll keep asking the people around us to carry emotions that we're never theirs to carry until we understand that we don't need to react and we don't need to explode and we don't need to implode.
• 30:39
  And when a man finally becomes safe enough to remain present with his emotions, let me say that differently.
• 30:46
  When I finally became safe enough to remain present with my emotions,
• 30:52
  I stopped reacting from old wounds.
• 30:54
  I stopped reacting to my past trauma.
• 30:57
  I stopped reacting to the fear of what could happen, what might happen.
• 31:00
  I stopped reacting to the fear of the future.
• 31:02
  I stopped reacting to how I felt it made me look and judged and vulnerable.
• 31:09
  Instead, I started reacting and instead I started not reacting, but responding to what was actually in front of me.
• 31:17
  And that's when I became safer for the people I love, for my kids, for my wife, for my team, for my members, for my friends, and most importantly, for myself.
• 31:32
  That's when I stepped into who I really am and stepped into my potential and saw the possibility of doing work that I've never done and saw the potential of helping men in ways that I never would have thought before.
• 31:46
  And really, I feel like found my life's purpose and moved in an entirely different direction than if you had told me I would have been here 10 years ago, I know I would have laughed at you.
• 31:57
  And it's because I stopped reacting, put myself in a place where I trained the trigger and understand masculine containment, and I was able to really hear intuition and inspiration and see the opportunities in front of me and understand a better direction to move in and
• 32:15
  and do the most exciting work in my life.
• 32:17
  And I'd love the same for you.
• 32:20
  If you related to this podcast and if you're interested in learning masculine containment and changing yourself, changing your life, changing the world for those around you, go to the brotherhoodsociety.com.
• 32:31
  When this podcast comes out, we are actually in open enrollment right now for our fourth Brotherhood container.
• 32:39
  It's a 12 week program with 12 weeks of instruction, two integration weeks where we don't have a call,
• 32:45
  And three things, content that's going to help you really understand yourself better, somatic experiences and exercises to help you offload of an old energy and get into a totally different state as a man, and maybe most importantly, brotherhood.
• 33:01
  Men from around the world focus on moving in a different direction, understanding masculine containment, and becoming the most present, the most regulated, the calmest man in the room.
• 33:11
  Those three things will change your life if you let them, and I'd be honored to walk this path with you.
• 33:16
  You can go to thebrotherhoodsociety.com and register now for an interview.
• 33:20
  I'd love to meet you personally.