When Melanie Curtin and I sat down to record, she asked me about something I see destroying relationships daily: men who can't receive feedback from their partners without going into defense mode. What started as a conversation about communication quickly became an exploration of the deeper nervous system patterns that keep us armored when the people we love most are trying to reach us.
We got into the nervous system piece of this, what's actually happening underneath the surface when criticism lands. For a lot of us men, feedback triggers deep wounds around not being enough. So we lawyer up, we rationalize, we try to explain our side. Which usually just makes our partner feel more unseen and disconnected.
I shared how this showed up in my own marriage with Violet. Early on, I'd immediately jump to explaining the logic of the situation, hoping she'd understand and the upset would go away. What I missed was that she didn't need my rationality. She needed me to be present with her emotion first, to show her I was attuned to what she was feeling.
One tool I've found incredibly useful is what I call the fast food rule. I learned this from a parenting book with my daughter Ruby, but it applies beautifully to partnership too. When you order at a fast food joint, they repeat your order back to you first. You feel heard, there's no miscommunication, and things move forward. Same thing with your partner. Match the emotion, reflect it back, show you get the feeling tone. Then there's an opening for something else to happen.
We also talked about how a woman's criticism often isn't really about the dishes or the errand she's mentioning. There's usually something deeper. She's not feeling loved, not feeling your presence, not feeling met. If you just try to fix the surface stuff without addressing that root, you'll be stuck in the same loop forever.
The real capacity here is learning to feel below her criticism to what's actually true, to where she might be right, to what she's really asking for. And the best place I've found to build that capacity is with other men. In men's groups, you get to practice receiving feedback in a safer container, without all the sexual and relational charge. You learn to stay open, to try feedback on, to feel into what's true and what's not.
If you're interested in developing this capacity with other men, check out my work at evolutionarymen.com. We run groups and programs specifically designed to help you strengthen your nervous system and your ability to stay present, especially when it gets uncomfortable.
