There's a moment in this conversation I still think about: a guy in one of my groups finally admits, out loud, that there was a stretch of his life where part of him thought about just checking out. Another man in the circle doesn't try to fix it. He just turns to him and says,...
There's a version of this I hear from guys constantly, the frog in the boiling pot. Things are fine, then the temperature creeps up so slowly nobody flinches, until five or six years later someone finally points out the water's been boiling the whole time. That's basically what Melanie and I spent this episode unpacking,...
There's a version of the lone wolf that gets romanticized in movies and gym locker rooms and every joke about the guy who doesn't need anybody. Here's the actual biology of it. The lone wolf is the one that got kicked out of the pack, and he dies faster. That paradox sits right at the...
There's a particular kind of quiet that happens when a man is surrounded by people and still feels completely alone, and I lived inside that quiet for a long time before I ever had a name for it. I sat down with Lisa Lacey on Notes from the Edge and we went straight at it,...
There's a client I mentioned in this conversation who spent a whole weekend on a ski trip with guys he's known since he was five years old, right in the middle of a painful separation, and not one of them brought it up the entire time. He came home lonelier than when he left. That...
I spent my teenage years watching other guys wrestle and touch each other easily, cracking jokes with their whole bodies, while mine simply refused to do any of that. Girls were the terrifying part. My body would lock up, I'd freeze, I'd ruminate for hours instead of just talking to someone. That pattern didn't fix...
What happens when a man finally stops abandoning himself just to keep everyone around him comfortable? That question sits underneath most of what came up in this conversation, starting with my own story. I grew up in a family of neglect, not much physical touch, not much emotional connection, and by the time I hit...
I was a teenager who froze every time a woman I liked walked into the room. Body tight, palms sweaty, brain completely offline. That's where I start this conversation on Echo Chamber, because that freeze followed me into my twenties and it's the reason I ended up doing this work in the first place. I...
There's a very specific kind of panic that shows up in a young man's body around attraction, sweaty palms, a throat that won't open, a mind spinning through everything you could say and none of it coming out. That's where I started this conversation on The Growth & Ownership Podcast, tracing my own story back...
One of my clients came back from a three day ski trip with the buddies he's known since childhood, right in the middle of his marriage falling apart, and only one of them asked what was going on. He came home lonelier than when he left. That story is basically the whole conversation I had...
Every time I hear a guy call vulnerability weak, or connecting with other men weak, what I'm actually hearing is fear talking. That's it. I sat down with The Wisdom Movers to dig into why so many men are still stuck posturing their way through life, and what it actually takes to get out of...
I was in my mid-20s, still a virgin, numbed out on porn, and I didn't have the first clue how to be in my own body. That's where I started, and that's the story I brought onto Born without a Choice this week, because I think a lot of men are living some version of...
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