Most men aren't struggling because they're not emotional. They're struggling because they're deeply emotional and have never received any real training on what to do with that.
I got to dig into all of that on the Wellness Reimagined podcast, and we covered a lot of ground in 23 minutes. The man box and how it gets built from the time boys are young. What happens in a man's body when he spends years holding all that feeling back. And why I've put everything behind men's groups as the most direct path I know for changing this.
One thing we got into was triangulation. Most male friendships look like two guys bonding over a shared third thing, a game, a project, an activity. Eyes on the same target. That kind of connection has real value, but it doesn't teach men how to turn toward each other and actually ask: where are you struggling right now? What do you want? What's not working? Those conversations, when men are given the right container for them, land completely differently in the body.
We also talked about what it actually costs a man to keep holding it all in. And it isn't always obvious. It doesn't always look like a guy who has no friends and never leaves the house. Often it looks like a man who has everything on paper, the career, the family, the life that checks all the boxes, but who is quietly depleted and utterly alone inside of it. That depletion is real. Over time it starts showing up in his body, his mood, his ability to be present for the people he loves most.
What I've seen shift all of that more than anything else: a small group of men, 6 to 12 guys, who love you enough to hold you when you're struggling and call you out when you're drifting. Purpose and belonging in the same room. Most men don't know how starved they are for that until they actually get a taste of it.
What would it mean for you to stop going it alone?
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Host (Wellness Reimagined): Men are struggling quietly, privately, and often completely alone. Not because they don't feel things deeply, but because somewhere along the way, most of them were taught that needing support was a weakness rather than a human reality. What if that single belief is costing men more than they realize? And what if the answer has been sitting right in front of us in the form of something as old as humanity itself? A group of people who genuinely show up for each other. And today on Wellness Reimagined, we are asking, what does it actually take for a man to let someone in? Welcome to the Wellness Reimagined, where we look at well being through a wider, more curious lens. Because health is never just one thing. I'm your host, Shreya, and today I'm joined by someone who is doing some of the most grounded and necessary work in men's wellness space right now. Jason Lane is a men's embodiment coach, group facilitator, certified coach, and evolutionary guide who helps men access deeper clarity in their purpose, in their relationships and their sense of self. He is a passionate advocate for men's group and has built his work around the belief that no man should have to navigate his inner life alone. And today we're exploring why asking for help is so hard for so many men, what changes when they finally do that, and why the men's group model might be one of the most underrated tools in modern wellness. So let's get into it. So welcome, Jason. I'm honored to have you on my show.
Jason Lange: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Host (Wellness Reimagined): Thank you so much, Jason. And before we begin, there's a disclaimer for my listeners. Some statements reflect personal belief and experiences and are presented as individual views, not medical advice. Listeners should consult qualified professionals for medical conditions. And with that, Jason, before we dive into all of this, I want to ask you something personal, like, when did you first realize that men needed a different kind of space? Days. Like, was there a moment in your own life where you failed? That gap, that absence of somewhere will to actually go with that, like what you were carrying?
Jason Lange: Yeah. This really started in my own journey, in that as a young man, I struggled a lot kind of coming out of the gate, getting into the world. I struggled in relationships. In my case, I'm heterosexual. I did not know how to connect with women. I was a virgin until my late twenties. I struggled financially and finding a career and a purpose and direction. And I was suffering quite a bit without a lot of guidance in my life. And so in my mid-20s, I got lucky in that I got exposed to my first men's group and really started to feel the power of what could happen when I gathered with other guys who literally didn't want anything from me other than just for me to thrive. Right. They just. They just loved me and cared about me and tracked me. And that experience of being held in a group of men who both were able to support me when I was feeling struggling, I was struggling and feeling challenged, but also, yeah, in a very important way, kind of hold me accountable to myself and what I wanted to create and live in life and make sure I was really taking the actions that would bring me closer to where I wanted to be, was totally transformative for me. And so as I navigated my 20s and then into my 30s in a men's group, I quickly discovered I just wouldn't stop talking about it. And so other men started asking me, hey, can we join? Can we join? And at the time, the group I was with, we would just meet in a small therapist's office, so we didn't actually have any more physical space. And so it dawned on me, like, oh, I'd actually like to start creating this space for other men. That has been so transformative for me because it really changed things for me more than anything else. Therapies, plant medicines, you name it. Men's group really moved the ball for me. And so in. In my mid-30s, I started leading groups.
Host (Wellness Reimagined): Yeah, thank you for sharing this with us. And I think there is a narrative that gets repeated a lot, that men just are not emotional, that they don't want to talk about their feelings, that they are built differently when it comes to vulnerability. So I'm very curious from your work with real men on the ground, how much of that is actually true and how much of it is story we have collectively agreed to tell ourselves without questioning it?
Jason Lange: Sure. It's a great question. And here's the truth. The men I work with and the many men I've. I've worked with, you know, thousands of guys at this point. Men are extremely emotional and extremely intuitive and have very deep feelings. But the truth is, we are not taught, often from an early age, how to connect to or relate to or in particular, share those emotions. And so part of the challenge for med in modern days is we're fighting against what we call the man box, this preconceived notion of what a man is, that as long as you check off the boxes inside of it, you're considered a man. And if you do anything else, you're not and the most important box in the man box across almost all cultures is to be a man means to be invulnerable. It means not to be weak, not to share vulnerabilities or cry or weaknesses or ask for help. It means to be a man means to be tough, right? And to be invulnerable and pick yourself up by the bootstraps and always move forward. And this is extremely damaging to men. And it starts at a really young age. You know, thankfully things are changing, but you can still see pretty frequently in the world, right, A young boy falls down, what's the first reaction often to parents or people around him? Oh, you're okay, you're fine, you're tough. Get up, you can do it, just keep going, right? And you know, there's some power in that. But what it's really teaching young boys is, hey, whatever you're feeling inside, ignore it, override it with your head. And then we get put into school systems where, you know, male bodies in particular. I have a 18 month old son and I can tell you he needs to move. He is very kinesthetic, very energetic, his body needs to move. And we get put in schools where, you know, I'm not anti school or anything, but basically sit still all day, don't move. And if you move, you're considered a bad kid. You have ADHD and we got to give you medication or something. So what we're taught in school is, hey, that impulse in your body to move, it's wrong. Override it, ignore it. Then we get into middle school and the pressure comes from our peers. Our bodies start developing at different times. We learned really quickly about in group and out group culture and that there's a way you need to be if you want to be accepted and not bullied. And so boys once again learn, hey, whatever's happening inside of you, do not share it because that will become ammo potentially for another man or boy to attack you and ostracize you. And then this just keeps continuing. We get out into the workforce and you know, I'm here in the United States where we live in this hyper individualized culture and you know, what's the model of success for a man? Oh, he works 80 hours a week and sleeps under his desk. Well, what does that take? That takes a man ignoring his body, ignoring his feelings and pushing, pushing, pushing with his head. So all this conspires against men that we are deeply emotional creatures, but we are actually taught and rewarded by our culture to spend more time up in our Heads and disconnect from our bodies. And then what's key about that is emotion. In the work I do, it always starts as physical sensation. So if we're disconnected from our bodies, we're disconnected from our feelings. And so what happens for a lot of men is we have all these sensations and feelings. Nobody has ever taught us what they are, let alone what to do with them. They make us uncomfortable. We're surely not supposed to share them with anyone else. So what do most men do when they're feeling uncomfortable inside? They turn to something outside of themselves. Alcohol, weed, porn, masturbation, sex tv. To try to make their insides feel better. And long term, it just doesn't work. So we have so many men suffering alone with all of this emotional feeling, but they don't know how to talk about it and don't know what to do about it. So men are sensitive, we are emotional. We just haven't often received the training for what to do with that.
Host (Wellness Reimagined): Yeah, like, so what you were describing is not a man who doesn't feel, but a man who has learned that feeling is not safe to show. And I think that is a completely different problem with a completely different solution. And also in everyday life, a man who is disconnected from himself or his needs might not look, look like someone who is struggling. He might look highly functional. He might be the one everyone else leans on. So what are the signs that the ones that are easy to miss that a man is actually running on empty beneath the surface?
Jason Lange: Yeah, that's a great question. Often what starts to happen is men get depressed, they get lonely, they get irritable, they might get hyper reactive, you know, sometimes exploding in anger. They might get really quiet and withdrawn. Mostly what I see with guys is they become incredibly depleted. So particularly as they enter middle age, they are just exhausted, exhausted. And this starts to show up as mental challenges around some kind of depression, emotional challenges and often even physical challenges. Illness and actual disorders, autoimmune disorders, sicknesses that manifest in their body partly because of how not well they are. Because, you know, the way emotion works is it's meant to be felt and metabolized and expressed. Now what happens for so many of us men is we're taught not to feel it, right. Or we're scared to feel it. And how we do that, you know, if you think about it, if there, you know, there was a little boy crying in front of you, and if I stepped up in front of him and I screamed really loudly, stop crying. How he would do that, how he actually does that. In the moment he stops breathing and he tightens up his body and he holds that feeling inside. And that is how we process, or that's how we don't process all of our emotion. So what happens is men start to accumulate all of this tension inside their bodies that they're holding. It's like literally they're holding the weight of the world. And holding that much emotion takes energy. And so the more we're holding that emotion back, the more listless and kind of dead we start to feel on the outside, where we're just going through the motions in life. And you're right, this doesn't necessarily just look like the kind of typical definition of a lonely man who just has no friends and never goes out in the world. This can often look like a man who has a very successful career, has a wife, has kids, has a. On the outside it all looks great on paper, but on the inside he's lonely, depressed and utterly depleted from having to try to do everything alone and hold in all of his pain. And this really starts to catch up with guys over time. And I think it's a pretty big crisis in our world right now. Right. At least here in the States, it's something like three out of every four suicides are actually men. And I think a large part of it correlates to this culture that men are raised in where it's like, ah, hold it all inside, don't express. And it leads us towards this depression that, you know, you can try to give antidepressants too, but they only help so much.
Host (Wellness Reimagined): Yeah, I think that is such an important refrain because that the goal is not fix him, fixing him or call him up, but to create enough safety that he can choose to step in. And that brings me the thing you are most passionate about, which is the men's group excel. You believe deeply that every man should be in a men's group. That's a fairly bold conviction. So I want to understand what actually happens in those spaces, not in a theoretical sense, but in a practical human sense. Like what shifts for a man when he's genuinely held by other men. Maybe for diverse type.
Jason Lange: Yeah, totally. So out of all the things I've discovered, why I've thrown all of my energy behind this is. I think this is where we could change the fortune of men the most. And that's to get men into these small groups of 6 to 12 peers where they get real about life and what. There's so many different types of structures for men's groups. But what it really Boils down to is most men, for all the reasons we've talked about, are taught to relate to each other through what we call triangulation. And all this means is me and whatever man I'm with, we have our attention on some third thing. Literally, our eyes are looking at something that isn't each other, and it's through our shared connection in that we bond. So it might be a sports game, it might be an activity, it might be fixing something. Who knows, might be fishing. This is how most men are taught to bond. Now, there's a time and place for that, and it can be really good for men to have that kind of connection. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't teach us men how to turn towards each other, Literally to look each other in the eyes and actually connect with each other. Hey, what's going on in your life right now? Where are you in pain? What's working? What's not working? Who do you want to be? These are the type of deeper questions men actually love to talk about when they're given the right safe space and context. So in a men's group, what we do is we actually turn toward each other, and we go under the surface to talk about what's happening inside, and we help each other connect to what we're actually feeling. So we slow each other down to not just report on our life. This happened then, this happened then this happened, but to actually become present to the feeling underneath. And as we as men connect to those feelings, we're able to metabolize them, and they actually transform our behavior. And we start to often make bolder changes in our life, and we get clear about what we want, what we need, what boundaries we need to set and where we want to go. And so it shows up really strongly in kind of two facets, I often say, or men's group is a place for men to come and get support, right? So it's the one place in our lives for many men where we don't have to hold it together, where nobody needs anything from us, where we can be held, we can collapse, we can cry, we can get scared, we can get angry, and that's okay. And then we can put ourselves back together and go out into the world. It's also a place where we can be challenged and be held accountable on our behavior, our presence, our feedback. So if I'm. If I'm sharing with my guys, hey, I want to do this in my life. But then week in, week in, week out, I'm checking in And I'm not actually doing that. The men are going to lovingly reflect that to me. Hey, you say you're wanting this, but you're actually doing this. What's going on, man? And that kind of feedback is so valuable for us men to help us stay on track with who we want to be. And it's actually something I found most men, men deeply crave. Terry Real, who's a famous therapist, calls it carefrontation. I call it the spinach in the teeth moment of, you know, you're walking through your day, and towards the end of the day, one of your buddies walks up to you and he's like, hey, you know, you got some spinach in your teeth. You kind of look dumb. And you're like, what? What? Ah. Feel a little embarrassed at first. And then I take the spinach out, and then I actually feel a deeper level of trust for that man. I'm like, oh, my God, thank you for telling me that. No one else told me that, and I didn't see that. And that kind of care is something men really crave. Guys who are tracking them and love them, to call them forward and last piece, I'll just share that I see is one of the great gifts of men's groups, is it give gives guys two other things. Two things every man craves are a deep sense of purpose and a deep sense of belonging. And being in a men's group can give a man both. It gives him purpose in the sense in a small group, showing up and being present really matters. It matters to show up and be there for another man in your group when he's suffering. It matters to show up and share your feedback or your truth or your experience or your own vulnerability. Because your vulnerability might be the very thing that inspires another man to share what's true for him. So it actually matters that you're there. It gives men a sense of purpose, and it also gives men a deep sense of belonging. I'm part of something, and if I wasn't here, I would be missed. And as men start to get that experience, purpose and belonging from other men, it lands in their nervous systems as love. It's a place where we're loved as men. And so many men are so malnourished in love from other men for all kinds of reasons that when they start to get it, it's like getting plugged into a new fuel source they didn't even know they were missing of. How did I survive without this? Because as we're held and connected by other men. What I have seen is it allows us to live more boldly and be less afraid of making mistakes in life.
Host (Wellness Reimagined): So it sounds like the quality of the container matters as much as the willingness of the men inside it. That structure and intention make the vulnerability possible rather than the other way around. And this is truly a very amazing conversation with you. I think this is a kind of conversation that men really need it. And if after this, my listeners want to connect with you and want to know more about you, about your work work and what's the best way, yeah,
Jason Lange: best way to keep up with me and learn everything you could ever want to know about men's groups is to go to my website, Evolutionary Men. So it's not dot com, it's dot men. And on there you'll find my own podcast where I talk about men's groups pretty much non stop. I have different men's groups programs, I have blogs, really anything you could ever imagine.
Host (Wellness Reimagined): Yes. And I will make sure to attach all these details and links below so that the listeners can find them easily and get in touch with you. And with that we have come to the end of the show. Add to all my listeners and Jason of course, this was such a rich and needed conversation, I think. Thank you Daesun for bringing it with so much care, with so much honesty. And to my listeners is today's episode got you thinking. Whether you're a man who recognizes something in what we discussed or someone who loves a man who might need to hear this, please share it. Sometimes the right conversation at the right time changes everything. You have been listening to the Wellness Reimagine podcast. Keep questioning the old stories, keep opening to new ones and until next time, take care of yourself in whatever way that actually means something to you. And do not forget to hit the follow button. Subscribe and feel free to share your thoughts because your ears deserve premium content. Thank you.
