350: Weed, Porn, and Masturbation: The Trifecta! (ft. Jason Lange & Luke Adler) | Dear Men

Jason Lange: Our longing for connection, our longing for fulfillment is actually that's what's present underneath the urge. Right? Like we somehow make the urge. Wrong. But the urge emotionally, there's something very beautiful there. Very beautiful. Right? I'm longing for union, for contact. Well, contact with what? Contact with a higher state of relationship. D.

Jason Lange: Yeah, obviously longtime listeners in the show know this is very close to me. Definitely a porn addict from a pretty young age. Got broadband Internet in high school and kind of never looked back. And porn and masturbation were my primary tool for regulation. You know, I never smoked, never got into weed. You know, had some drinking for sure back in the Day, but not quite in the addictive sense, just kind of the college blackout sense. But porn was like the, the number one relationship I had for, you know, probably over a decade in my life in terms of intimacy and really was a self regulation tool. And, you know, there's kind of probably very few men out there that aren't self regulating with one of these tools at some point. If it's not that trifecta we mentioned, then, yeah, alcohol, you know, oddly enough, even though it's so incredibly destructive, alcohol is like the one drug our culture's just like, yeah, that's cool. Yeah, you can just get drunk, your two year old's right there while you're at a party, like all good, but you know, name some other stuff and people are like, whoa, no, that's so scary. And then weed has quickly caught up. And, you know, I think weed is a little bit more subtly destructive. What I've seen, because it, you know, weed doesn't tend to make people loud and angry and aggressive like sometimes alcohol can do. But man, does it just suck the life force out of so many guys I know and that we've worked with and that we've seen of just like a total numbing agent. And you know, weed in particular. Right. What do they call it? Getting high. I'm gonna lift myself up out of my experience so I don't have to feel it as deeply. And there could be in a time and a place seeing a dead show or something where that's fun and great and awesome. But the. I think what we're pointing to here is many men that we have worked with are doing these types of things nearly daily. Smoking a joint, browsing up, booting up, pornhub jerking off or. Yeah. Having a couple of drinks to wind down. And what you and I have seen in Pillars and what Luke and I have seen in the Heart of Shadow is, you know, that's almost always covering up deeper material that men just do not know how to handle.

Melanie Curtin: That's well said. And I, I think before we go to you, Luke, I just want to slow down because this is something we're going to be talking about on this episode. And Jason, you mentioned that it was one of the primary ways that you regulated your nervous system. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say that? Because some folks aren't going to be aware of what, what does it mean to be regulated or dysregulated?

Jason Lange: Yeah, really, it just means I don't feel good in my body and I want to Feel something else. It's kind of that simple. Like, there is distress or disease in my state, and I want to be feeling something else. And for me, there was definitely a time period where, you know, it was kind of the thing I would do before I went to bed. I know a lot of men who jerk off to go to bed because it kind of knocks you out and it helps them sleep. And, you know, in some sense it's like, well, that's not a problem, is it? But in the other sense that we often start to look at is, well, what is it about your life that has you unable to wind down naturally, right? Just like you come to the end of a day and you're beat and you fall asleep. And that's where things start to get juicy as we dig in, you know, with men looking at that. And then paradoxically, you know, particularly with porn, most guys don't jerk off without using porn. And porn involves a screen almost inevitably these days. And screens keep us up. It's extremely stimulating, right? So our brain is getting both signals at once. Wake up, and then we ejaculate. The prolactin hits, go to sleep, and it's like, this certainly sense for me. And then I would stay up too late. I would be exhausted. I'd wake up the next day already tired, feeling bad, and it would just keep rolling into, well. Then I'd feel so bad all day. At night, I'd have to get some kind of relief. Thank you for your candor, Jason, as always. It's so personal and insightful. As you were speaking, I was reflecting on something that I had heard from. From a participant recently. So articulate. He said that when I look at porn, I have the. I have the freedom to experience pleasure and also the freedom to not experience rejection. Not experience rejection. Porn is so profound. Porn does not reject you. I was like, just hit me so deep in my heart like I had never thought about it like that. Like, the whole layering of. Of actually engaging with a relationship and a woman and getting to the place where you could have sex, it's like, wow, here's this super highway to, you know, a pseudosexual. Well, an experience of sexuality that. That doesn't have to risk vulnerability, doesn't have to risk extension of self. And in. In a lot of ways is. Is like this just instant experience of some level of intimacy, at least sexually, that. That people want, that men want. And of course, you have this layering on top of it of cultural and religious shame, if that's your background. But nevertheless, there's cultural shame with masturbation for most people. And so we're not necessarily highlighting that, but that piece comes in and then adds to that hangover effect, like you're talking about Jason. And like many of these things, they lift you up momentarily and then they drop you lower than you were. So then you're like, whoa, I'm now depleted in terms of my hormone function. Now I'm depleted in terms of just my kind of sense of wellness and well being, because my inner critics really having its way with me. The shit shame monsters is very opinionated. Maybe not right after orgasm, but the next day, perhaps. And then we're fighting against that. So give me the weed again, because I don't want to feel the shame guy, right? And so I know we're getting here, but I just want to lay the groundwork of, you know, why, why do we use weed? Why do we use porn? Why do we masturbate? And to just say, these are the common ones, right? We all do things to avoid feeling the thing we don't want to feel. But what is that thing that these particular kind of dopamine drivers, oxytocin drivers, adrenaline drivers do for us? And the thing that we all want to avoid, such that we engage these chemistry compounders, is this feeling of not belonging, which we could call insecurity as a feeling. It's like this insecurity of being. And we don't feel like we belong. We don't feel like we're part of a group that can hold our depth. We're beginning to feel alone and. And separate from a deeper sense of connection. And. And. And no one wants to feel that. No one.

Melanie Curtin: We're.

Jason Lange: We're. We. We all abhor that feeling. No one's like, I love feeling insecure. It's just my favorite part of my day. It's like, no, no, no one likes that. So it's just a natural reflex to go, I get me out of this. Get me out of this. This. The literal hell hole, you know? And so in a certain sense, it's kind of smart, right? It's like, oh, yeah, weed, alcohol, porn, masturbation. Brilliant. Get me out of here quickly. Of course, this is why the three of us have created programs to address the deficiency, to address the malignancy of culture, you know, so just kind of lay that. That groundwork. And I know y' all have plenty to say about that. Yeah.

Melanie Curtin: I want to bring. Bring up something in this discussion that is quite loud for me, which is loneliness. So the Structure of our world. The way that our world is structured now doesn't facilitate connection. It actually inhibits connection in many ways. There's a famous book called Bowling Alone, which goes into the sort of deterioration of certain social networks within especially North America. We used to have things like bowling clubs in a lot of communities. And so you, once a week you were going to see friends, you're going to be around and see friends. And I'm sort of specifically highlighting men. Excuse me. And wanted to share just a few brief stats, which is in 2023, there was a study done that said that most men, from older millennials to Gen Z said, quote, no one, really me. Well, and there's another pretty staggering contrast, which is that 30 years ago, 55% of men reported having at least six close friends. And in 2021, that number dropped to 27%. So almost cut in half. And there's a lot of research around this that shows that men in particular are vulnerable to loneliness. We're all contending with it in the way that our modern world is structured. We used to work together teams in tribes right back in the day. And now we're much more individualistic. And if you are in North America or the west, it's particularly individualistic. And there's a certain loneliness attached to that. And then you add the man box on top of that. And for those interested, there's a very interesting episode on the Hidden Brain. The name of the podcast is Hidden Brain, and it's about. It's called Men and Loneliness. And it goes into a lot more depth than I'm going to do here. But essentially right around the age of 12 is when boys language shifts. Right around 11, 12, 13, there's a huge shift in North American boys in the way that they talk about other boys and friends.

Jason Lange: They.

Melanie Curtin: They go from more loving, connected language to more competitive, separate, pushing away language. So what they're learning essentially is the patriarchy, which is I have to go it alone. I have to look tough and strong if I'm gonna. And I'm not allowed to feel like anything except rage. So. And you can watch it happen. All these sociological research studies show this is right when it happens. And then these. And then we have young men and men who don't know how to connect with each other. And so there's this deepening of the loneliness. And then a lot of times for a lot of people, what happens is they'll have friends right in college and as young adults. And then folks start to get married, pair off, get married have children. And then you have a double isolation. You've got the isolation of the guy in the home with the kids, and that's pretty much his world. I mean, he does not get out a lot. That's like, all he's doing. And then we have the folks that didn't have kids that are kind of like, where'd all my friends go? So there are a lot of contributing factors to this, but the reason I'm bringing it up is that this fundamental sense of loneliness, which I think is part of what you were pointing to, Luke, is almost intolerable in the body. It's just so uncomfortable to feel that isolation and loneliness, that we want to do something to get rid of the feeling, to stop feeling that feeling. And I think that's a large part of what the conversation is. But what's confusing is when. When it's happening. And I love how eloquently you spoke to the shame monster, Luke, or I think you called it the shame guy, is that we think it's about the weed. We think it's about the alcohol. We think it's about the porn and masturbation. We're like, man, if I could just get my shit together and stop doing these things, you know, I would be a better man, or whatever the belief is, rather than the compassion of understanding where it's coming from. And I think that's part of why we're doing this, to uncover what is underneath. Why. Why are these behaviors showing up in such a droves? Right. I mean, millions and millions of men are contending with this trifecta. Maybe billions, I don't know. So what, there's like seven and a half billion of us on the planet now? It could be billions. So, yeah. I'm curious if either of you has anything to add to that, that part on loneliness, especially in what you've seen with. With clients or in yourselves, really.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, there's. There's. There's so much here. And, you know, men, I think. I think, particularly men of a certain age, are very susceptible right now to these cultural shifts and particularly here in the west, in the States. You know, the bowling alone thing is, it's. It's really about the eradication of public spaces where you are around people. That's it. You know, Americans love going to Western Europe and certain other parts of the world where cities were born before cars because the streets are small and there's public squares and you go outside and you're around people, your body is around other bodies, and it's not just all consumerist, you just hang out in the square, you might get a coffee. But it's not like an artificial mall. You know, we have a lot of those here in the States. And this is just a big thing that catches up with guys. And this has all been accelerated in the last years with work from home and Covid and extremely convenient culture, right? Of, oh, I can just order my groceries now. I can have Amazon ship me everything I need. There's. You can live alone, you know, in a sense and not actually need other people. I think the other thing that really struck me I was, I was hearing about the other day that is just so true, is while there are so many gifts to what we're doing here online, the way we lead our community online, the big shift has been we've moved from geographic based community to virtual identity based community or interest based community. So it's like you used to kind of just be surrounded by people and kind of everyone around you is a little weird, but like in different ways, right? Like, like, oh, that's the weird person that X, that's the weird person that Y. And now you get into these kind of cultures online where everybody's actually the same, oftentimes in a weird way, and it starts to isolate you from other culture. And you know, we've, I've seen lots of men with this, right? You just get lost in the online rabbit hole where you're so desperate for connection, you start to find connection through these kind of fringe areas online, then lo and behold, you don't feel good inside. And we turn to these different things to self soothe. And you know, I've been telling the story a lot lately that this starts super young, right? There's plenty of research that shows even the most conscious parents tend to treat little boys different than little girls. Little boy falls down and scrapes his knee. That's okay, you're fine, you're tough. Get up, you can do it. Little girl falls down. Oh yeah, tell me about that hurt. You know, like there's kind of an attunement to that. And then in that process, you know, what we're teaching boys from such a young age is whatever's happening in your body, ignore it. Override it with your head. And then we throw our kids into school. And while there's more similarities than differences, there definitely are biological differences. Boys, hormone profiles, they tend to need to move a lot. They have a lot of energy and they learn fairly kinesthetically, right, by actually using their body. But you throw them in the modern school system, what are they taught? That urge to move is wrong, Sit still, override your body with your head. We get into adolescence, you have feelings, you have vulnerabilities. Your bodies are changing at different speeds. What do we quickly learn from our peers? Whatever's happening in your body or your heart, don't share it because you're going to be bullied or ostracized or, you know, made weak, in a sense. And then we get out of there and we get into the workforce and it's like, oh, yeah, you're a successful man. You work 80 hours a week, right? You're destroying your body. Ignore your body in the process. And, you know, it's certainly changing. But a lot of the most dangerous and toxic jobs are all held by men. Men's bodies, for, you know, biological, cultural reasons, tend to be a little more disposable because, you know, one man can impregnate 10 women. But if you only have one woman and 10 men, you know, you're going to have a much harder time keeping the population going in a healthy way. So point of this is, from a young age, us guys kind of have a leg down in that we're not taught to be in our bodies. And if we're not taught to be in our bodies, emotion starts as sensation in the body. So if you're not in your body, you have no idea what an emotion is. So we're not taught to identify what's happening inside of us, let alone how to express it and what to do with it. So so many guys, they don't even know, I think, a lot of times, until maybe Luke or I, or you ask them in a deeply attuned present conversation, like, hey, do you like, are you lonely? And they're like, yeah, actually, I am. Otherwise, they just realize I don't feel good, right? I don't. I can't even label that feeling. I just know that I. I need to unwind at the end of the day with this thing to make myself feel better. So, you know, I share all this because I have, you know, because of my own journey. But for a lot of men, I have so much compassion because we don't give men the tools. And then our culture just says, use these medicines that always provide temporary relief, but they do not address the underlying actual issues, right? They just. They just relieve the symptoms. And I think just because of kind of how we're wired as men, we are a little more susceptible to this in that, you know, most men aren't just by default Relational. You know, I think we saw this a lot in Covid at least, or, you know, I see it in my house all the time. You know, I can. I can, like, get into my stress zone and just kind of. I'm part of men's groups. I'd, like, see people, and I just kind of withdraw into myself, and I got to provide for the family. I got to do my thing, and it's all go, go, go. And, you know, I cannot talk to anyone for days sometimes. And then, you know, my wife can be having a hard time and be so busy managing our children, managing her business, managing her health, and yet I hear her phone going off, and there's these, like, threads of conversations and relationships, and she's, like, finding a way to still connect. It's kind of more woven in, I would argue, to a lot of women's default. You know, all of us and the programs we run or, you know, really try to change that to men to say, like, hey, no, you know, most of what ails you can be significantly soothed by connection, just. Just by getting connected. And that kind of gets you back to a baseline, and then suddenly you have a certain amount of energy where you can t the challenges in your life. Beautiful sharing, Jason. And. And a couple of things stood out as you're. As you're sharing. One is that, you know, when we're reaching for weed, alcohol, porn, masturbation, there's the sense of, let me elevate my state chemically in a certain way. There's also a deeper thing happening, which is that our longing, our longing for connection, our longing for fulfillment is actually. That's what's present underneath the urge. Right. Like, we somehow make the urge. Wrong. But the. The urge emotionally, there's something very beautiful there. Very beautiful. Right. I. I'm. I'm longing for union, for. For. For contact. Well, contact with what? Contact with a higher state of relationship. Ah, well, that would take. That would take a massive level of risk because I'd have to. As a man, I'd have to be vulnerable. I'd have to be transparent. I'd have to ask for help. I'd have to say, hey, do you want to hang out? Right. So it shifts me culturally into all the areas that are. That are dangerous for us. So. So what, are we left? Well, I. I have to fulfill that longing in isolation. What the three of us have discovered, one, through our own experience, but two, through our own study, our own study of this and having become teachers of it, is that transparency and vulnerability work in A safe container. It takes the facilitation of someone who's gone through that enough to then become established in that consciousness, to lend it and teach it to others. Right. This is what the three of us do. And then, and then the third thing happens that is quite extraordinary which, which we're starting to see. And that's that when. When a human being, but in this case, a man shares and is held in a context that is not like the context he was raised in. Meaning. It's not competitive, it's not cruel in any way. It's totally welcoming, loved and encouraged. And it's not. There's no religion around it, it's secular. It's just the presence of another man. This extraordinary thing happens. The man's longing for freedom and connection comes forth. It's then held. Melanie, you and I are talking about this the other day in this mindful way, like it's not being clutched, it's not being, you know, it's not being reflected with an opinion, it's just being held. And then that man's longing bounces off the love of the group and refracts back to him. His own love comes back to him in a magnified way. And you see, there's this generative fulfillment that starts to occur in the work that we do with Pillars and Heart of Shadow, the break work, the breathwork breakthrough that we're offering, that people's longing gets to be self fulfilled in a group where the cultural rules are completely turned upside down than what we've all had to live in and go through. And so it's as if we're really not changing anything in the circumstance or the field other than the conditions or the rules by which people get to exist. It seems like a really simple thing, at least as an idea. But the power of holding space, the power of holding space for another man is not a passive thing at all. It's deeply generative, it's deeply generous, and it requires tremendous, tremendous skill. Right. And this is, you know, the, the. At the very. At the very vibrant vibrational heart of, of Pillars, art of shadow. This is what we do. And we, we basically teach men to do what they know how to do instinctually underneath what they've been taught. You know, like all of these skills, they're already online. They just, they're. They're buried underneath all this training, you know?

Melanie Curtin: Yeah. And I think what you're pointing to is also the kind of space that a therapist holds, a counselor, even sometimes a close friend, that ability to be held in Whatever it is actually experiencing, which. Which brings us back to what is. What is under there, right? What is the drive to weed, alcohol, porn, masturbation, the ability to sit with that. The intensity of whatever is there, whatever's coming up, that is part of what I think is missing in a lot of our culture of how the fuck do we do that? How do you actually sit with grief, shame, pain, rage, whatever's under there. And so a lot of times we don't even know that it's there, right? So, like, to your point, Jason, a man will come home and just not feel good. Just not feel good. Like, I want a beer to take the edge off. I want a joint to calm down. You know, there's just a sense of agitation or whatever it is, and the need to soothe that. We keep coming back to that word self soothing. And I just wanted to kind of name that because, you know, the trigger could be something even as innocuous as your boss put a meeting on the calendar for tomorrow and you don't know what it's about, man. That could be enough to dysregulate you, right? It's like if you don't know what's gonna happen and you're worried about it. No, I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling dysregulated. I need. I need to feel better. And one of the things I've. I have found to be really beautiful in the work that we. We do. And what I've witnessed from men is that as. As men get connected and they have a place to go with the feelings, basically, they build friendships and community within these groups, within these structures, they're able to speak more to, here's what's going on. You know, here's what's going on. And they.

Jason Lange: They've been.

Melanie Curtin: Become embodied enough to recognize I'm starting to feel dysregulated. And what am I going to do? I'm going to make a different choice. So instead of going to porn and weed and masturbation, I'm going to share with someone that's trusted with someone who I trust what's going on. You know, this. I got this calendar invite tomorrow, and I don't know what it's about, and I'm feeling kind of anxious. And then what happens, Luke, to your point, is that what do the other men do? They say, man, I've been there. I fucking feel you. I don't know, you know, Freaks me out too. And then the man feels less alone. He feels less alone, he feels more connected. And that's that's a simplified example. There's, there are other more complex examples, but there is something inherently healing about sharing where we're at and being met just that, just being met, being met with love, being held with love. Not that we have to do something different or any of the outside circumstances have changed, but just being met. And then bonus, sometimes men will say, hey, what time is your meeting? It's at 10. Okay, I'm going to check in with you at 11. I'm going to see how it went. Right. I've got you and you've got me. And that's the power of team, of tribe, of community, of antidote to isolation and loneliness, right? Is connection and belonging and that sense of, of we, of togetherness, of group, of, you know, that medicine, of community is deeply healing and restorative and it's part of what's needed. We need mentors, we need the one on one support and we also need groups. We need that sense of belonging and trust and safety and, and commiseration. Just commiseration. Right. Because that guy didn't solve anything when he said, man, I've been there. I hate, I hate meetings that I don't, when I don't know what they're about. He didn't solve anything. He just said, me too, I experienced that too. And there's just something about that, it. That is, that is soothing.

Jason Lange: Yeah, yeah. Soothing and uplifting. Yeah.

Melanie Curtin: Oh, go ahead.

Jason Lange: You know, I, I wanted to also just point to one of the deeper things here, particularly for the masculine, as to like, why, why we go towards these things is they can be an unconscious way to try to get to, you know, what really is the bliss state for the masculine, which is freedom, no tension, peace, emptiness. It's literally the emptiness of just. There's nothing right now pulling at me. Right. And these are states that can be cultivated consciously, primarily through meditation. Right. It's one of the oldest, it's really the oldest form of that in a lot of ways. But all kinds of different, different ways that get us there to this kind of the masculine urge, right. For no tension. That's peace. I just want peace. Every, you know all the movies guys love, right? What are they about? They're about war and invasion in the battle, in the tension until we can get to freedom. And then there's peace. There's no more tension. The, the struggle with these substances is they're an unconscious way to get there. Like literally, men will drink themselves to black out. I will drink myself into emptiness because there's A type of bliss of not having to feel anything there or weed, where we just get that distance from it. And so there is like a nugget of a good impulse in there that this is a deep craving for the masculine of all of us. Not just, you know, men, but women. Like, oh, yeah, once I get to that certain financial threshold, I can quit my job and I'll be free. Right? Like, we all have these things, these ways we want to be free. The problem with these substances is, like we said, they. They don't actually get you there. They're like the unconscious, unearned way to do it. And I think this then ties into. The other thing I just wanted to name is there's. There's a couple of things also happening in our culture where, right. We're, well, all informed of information overlay. The amount of information we take in as humans now is astronomically higher than even just a generation ago. There is so much more input and a lot of input that has to do with things that are actually out of your vicinity, in control. Right. I'm learning that there's a natural disaster across the planet. What do I do with that? People are suffering. What do I do with it? Back in the day, you wouldn't know, right? You're in a locality where you have some ability to impact that situation. And then they've said, you know, the most stressful state, like you named Mel with the. The meeting is it's not like failure or hurt or harm. It's uncertainty. It's when we're in between and we don't know, that uses so much resource in us. So we're living in a more uncertain world. We're having to digest more information. Our social constructs have kind of dissolved in a lot of ways. I mean, something, you know, I don't go this route, but something as simple as a church community you and your family go to once a week. There's a reason that existed for a long time and created a foundation of locality and family and kinship and whatnot. And a lot of that has been eradicated. And then you met, you. You. You stack on that with. We have easier access to pleasure than ever, right? Like, like Luke said, we can. Whether it's through porn and masturbation, endless sugary food, we can get the quick hits without having to do the work to earn them. And you know that I'm a little new to this, so I'm just going to name this, but it's, it's, you know, research. I'm going down the Rabbit hole of that's pretty cool, because I didn't really know about it. But, you know, we talk a lot about oxytocin and how it bonds human beings together. And there is a slightly different mechanism in biological males and biological females where estrogen has a little bit more impact on oxytocin in creating the bonding for men. Testosterone, the equivalent to oxytocin is vasopressin. It's a bonding hormone. That and oxytocin actually come from, like, the same grandparent peptide or whatever it is. Probably got that wrong. But they share an ancestor, but they work in slightly different ways. So vasopressin, which is related to testosterone, we get that as men by doing really hard things together. Competition, overcoming challenge. And through the feeling of protection, I protect. I'm protecting someone, right? So, Seven Samurai. Someone's coming from my village, and we're not going to let them do that. The bonding that happens there is extraordinary. And you hear these stories constantly from vets who have gone off to war and grown really close, so close to their platoon mates that when they go home, they feel deeply guilty and they'll often keep going back because they're like, I just can't leave my closest human brothers and sisters, you know, there because of this vasopressin bonding, which is a little different, right? It happens in a different way. And I think probably heard it on this podcast before, but, you know, when I was reading this, I was like, oh, there's the mechanism, right? I went on this bachelor party camping trip in the Smoky Mountains when I was, like, 26. The guy who I'd been good friends with in high school, but he had then gone off to college somewhere else. He had then gone to grad school somewhere else. I hadn't really seen him in a long time. Me and one of my. Our other high school buddies I'd stayed closer with, we, like, met up with them. And it was all these guys I didn't know. And, you know, I'm a little more introverted, and it was just clunky. We're, like, hiking. Everybody's potting off to talk to the people they already know. And then, lo and behold, it's springtime. We hit a river, a deep, fast river that we have to cross, and we got backpacks on. And it was the kind of situation where it's like, to cross this river, we have to be careful, because if you get swept in, you're not coming out. Like, someone could. Could die in this moment. And, you know, suddenly there's link ups and anchoring and grabbing arms and helping people and slipping the second we got to the other side. I kid you not, everybody was best friends. All the walls were gone. Everybody's talking to each other. We did this hard thing. And now I know the mechanism behind it. And why I also want to share this is because a fundamentally important part of men's work, we do this in pillars and we absolutely do this in heart of shadow, is there's the bonding, but we also do hard shit. The hard shit, however, isn't necessarily in the outer world of climbing a mountain. It's. We're gonna go into the place in our interiors that is the great unknown. You know, the dragon is Luke. And I call it like we're gonna face the dragon and it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be challenging. And what we've seen time and time again, and then you have men holding space for that, which I think starts to activate their feeling of like, wow. I can. I can feel the vul activated in my brother right now. His little boy's coming out, his fears coming out. His trauma from being abused is coming out. And I'm fucking here for him. I want him to know he is safe. So that protector gets activated in what we've just seen, whether it's the Labor Day retreat you do with me with Mel, and you know, we do hard things and there's slightly competitive things where we're going inside. In the heart of shadow, guys come out of that, that. And they're so deeply bonded. I mean, I am just. I don't know if you track it, Mel, but I've never seen this happen before. But we started a WhatsApp group for this most recent Labor Day retreat. Guys are still chatting with each other in this thing. It is blowing my mind how deep that group went together, that they are just self sustaining this connection with men they spent five days with. Five days. And these are the men they keep coming back to. So the, the. I just kind of went on a rant there. But the other thing is, I think for some men, for some guys in isolation, they're not getting to have that experience unless they got lucky and got into a good kind of sports situation of moving through something hard with other guys. And the bonding that really comes from that, it's this huge vacuum, I think, in our culture right now. And it's one of the. I think it's why men's work is really kind of taken off right now, because we need it. We need it to create those deep bonds with each other as men. The one thing I want to add to this conversation, particularly focused on masturbation and porn, is that we look at ejaculation, specifically the release of it as not just the release of a vital substance, but the release of our unprocessed shadow material. So where do we put all these emotions? What's the deepest place we can put them in our body to not feel them? If we know energetically in biological, psychologically, that the heart moves the blood, and that's where we process things, right? The furthest place we could push it in the male body, the female body, too, is in the sex organs, in the substantiveness that has the most density and potency. So in the ovaries for women and the testicles for men. So part of the urge, this is the longing, but part of the urge is that I don't want to feel alone. I don't want to feel like I don't belong. I really don't want to fucking feel that. How do I get rid of that? Well, where does that live? That lives in the ejaculation, in the sperm. And for women, it's the same mechanism, but the way sexuality works is different. So, you know, obviously men, we can move it usually much quicker. So what we're doing with really ejaculation is we're liberating those feelings from having to come up through the heart. Instead, they exit down through the lower portion of the body and we get relief, we don't have to feel it. And then we're left with a certain emptiness that maybe we like for a period of time and then don't like. As the vital substance builds up and the feeling commensurately builds with it, right? As we build back sperm, then the emotion builds back, the sense of not belonging, and then we want to do it again, right? It's a cyclical, generative, in a certain sense, degenerative cycle when we start to feel like we belong. And, Jason, you used this word in Heart of Shadow on Monday. This phrase that we need to coin, this is a phrase for all of us. The inoculation of belonging. Absolutely genius. The inoculation of belonging that you feel in such a group is the antidote to this vibratory sense of insecurity. So when the inoculation of belonging to enters into the nervous system again and again and again and takes root as a new, uplifting vibratory frequency in the mind, body, it does a really cool thing. It frees up sexuality, sex, ejaculation, and even porn. If that's something that you're open to, to be experienced for pleasure and for joy and for, you know, kind of a generative experience where you can. Where you can be free from the context that there's something wrong with ejaculating, there's something wrong with masturbating or something wrong with porn, however you feel about that topic, and enjoy sex and enjoy touch and enjoy pleasure and actually be filled up by that. And I can't remember the term, Jason, we've used this before, but, like, is it dry masturbation when you don't use pornography or something? You're just thinking of images perhaps that are arousing to kind of desensitize that. That addict. Addictive thing that happens with porn. But you get to explore sexuality in such a much freer way. That's so wonderful. And that is much more connective with. With a woman or man, whoever you're attracted to. And so then we. We free sex from the obligation of discharging our pain to liberating sex to be a generative activity. So I just wanted to enter that in is. We're not saying any of these things are wrong. There's a way we can repurp something that is healing, very healing. It's absolutely lovely.

Melanie Curtin: I'm really glad that you spoke to that. And I love. I think it's similar for substances as well.

Jason Lange: Right.

Melanie Curtin: It's when. When we're using them in a certain way, we're using them to regulate, then that's a dependence. And it can also be defined as an addiction, depending on how much it's interrupting your life. But when we deal with the trauma underneath, when we deal with the material that's underneath, when we do the. That work, you know, shadow work or whatever you want to call it, with a mentor, with a group in therapy, any. Any which way that we're doing it, then we can. We can have a relationship with that substance or behavior, whatever it is, without. Without the addictive quality. So that what you were talking about, Jason, of. We can have a glass of wine and enjoy it and love it and have, you know, have a different relationship to it. So that it's not. I don't want to feel the thing that I'm feeling, so I'm gonna drink instead. It's, oh, I'm having a really good time. This feels really good. It tastes good. I'm enjoying it. I'm consciously aware I'm with it. That's a different thing. So anything really, especially behavioral addictions, you know, things like gambling addictions, their addiction takes any which form. And we're talking about weed and porn and masturbation and alcohol in this conversation. But really it's a lot of different things, but the driver underneath is really what we're getting at. What we're getting at is where is that coming from? And one thing I really want to stress in this conversation is that we are not talking about willpower. We are not talking about willpower. I can show you study after study after study after study after study that shows you willpower does not work. It doesn't work when it comes to addiction. It does not work. So trying to go at it from, I'm going to stop drinking, I'm going to stop doing weed, I'm going to stop watching porn doesn't work right. What we're talking about in this conversation is I'm going to bring in new resources. I'm going to join a group, I'm going to get a therapist. I'm going to, I'm going to do that part. I'm going to get more connected. I'm going to start taking dance classes. I'm going to fill up my life with things that bring me joy and that help me move my body. There's an indirect way of going at the problem. And what I see a lot when it comes to substances and frankly, porn, you know, some guys will come to us and say, I've got a problem with porn. I want to talk about porn. I want to stop watching porn. I want blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, porn. And we're like, it's not about the porn. We're going to help you get connected. It's about loneliness. It's actually about loneliness. It's not about. About porn. So I, I just wanted to make sure we got that in this discussion is that willpower doesn't work. If you're trying to do it with willpower, please stop. Because it's. You're just spinning your wheels and you need, you need other resources, you need other help to get there and you can. And the kinds of transformations we've witnessed have been. Been absolutely extraordinary in willpower.

Jason Lange: I just want to really quickly note here why that's so dangerous is it usually becomes a tool to reinforce the shame and isolation and lonely behind it. So, oh, I set this goal. I wasn't going to smoke weed. I smoked weed. Now I feel bad at myself for not being able to be strong enough to not smoke weed, which makes me want to smoke more weed. And it kind of goes down that thing. So, you know, Luke And I's mentor, he, he always gave us this frame of, you know, we want to outgrow these things. And I think you just name it in a great way, which is it's actually the mindset shift from it's not about stopping doing something, it's about starting to do other things. So what are you starting in your life? I'm starting to go to therapy, starting to go to dance classes, starting a men's group. I'm starting to get more sleep. I'm starting these things which then help me outgrow that old kind of paradigm and then, yeah, liberate me back to there might be a time where I can enjoy some of these things again. And I think again the, the key differentiator between what you were nam and what we were talking about or I experienced earlier is does it lead to more connection? So are you doing it at home alone? Are you doing it in a group? And it ends up isolating you. Then you know, it's kind of on the more destructive side. Does it lead to more connection? Like yeah, you know, a couple times a year me and my buddy, we go, we smoke weed, we see a jam band and we have a great time, right. I come back from that feeling full and great, but I'm not doing it every day. And whether it's weed, porn, masturbation, booze, if you're doing it multiple times a week in isolation, just going to name this guys, you have a deeper issue going on. You might not be a full blown addict in the chemical addictive sense, but you are an addict in the sense of you are relying on something for self soothing and co in regulation that isn't the optimal tool and that if you start doing some of these other things you're gonna find a lot more liberated energy in your life.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, you know, in our program, we have a specific ordeal for men that takes about 30 days. And guys are different at the end, right. They have a different experience of themselves and have a different embodied sense of what kind of change is possible. And we see that momentum being generated all. All the time. And, you know, the. The way this did show up for me, you know, I've told this story of, you know, when I stopped masturbating and ejaculating and got off porn and, like, really did my first, like, okay, I'm gonna change this. I was leading more things than I'd ever led. I was exercising more. I was on purpose with my work in the world. You know, it just hit me one day. I was like, wow. I didn't even. I haven't even thought about that. That just, like. It wasn't that I was stopping. It was just my life was so full. I was up in the morning meditating. Then I was exhausted, falling asleep at night. And it just didn't strike me, you know, that, oh, I need to jerk off right now or I want to do that. There just wasn't, you know, in computer science terms like that, that program didn't run. It just wasn't running because I was getting fed in all these other ways. And so I think it is really important for guys to know that it is possible to change. And the trick here is the change you often want comes on the other side of the discomfort from what you're unwilling to feel. So it's. If you feel stuck, the way to get unstuck is to feel more and avoid less. And that's going to start to generate this heat, you know, that we definitely weave into our program. I call it the kettle boiling. We're going to help you kind of seal the exits so your kettle boils and then your life starts to change. Change. It demands action. And that doesn't have to take years and years of therapy. It helps if you're in therapy, but real change can happen in, you know, weeks and months. We're talking about here substantially.

Melanie Curtin: Yes. And that sense of. And we've got you right. Being. Being held by a mentor and, or group, that sense of being held, being helped. You know, I did a, A, an episode last year on dissociation, which, you know, doing things like porn and weed and alcohol is a form of dissociating. We can dissociate in lots of ways. But one thing that we talked about in that episode was being held, feeling, seen, being known. That is part of what heals things like developmental trauma, where when we bring forth how we're really feeling and we are met in that there's something that happens, especially for preverbal trauma. We need to be held by someone else who is attuned and grounded. We need to be met. We need to be held. There are lots of ways that we can heal on our own, and there are ways that we actually need each other, particularly around things like shame. We need to be witnessed and held with love. It's not enough for us to just feel it on our own. And that's part of why. That's part of why I would say we do the work that we do in the way that we do it, which is mentorship and group work, having both at the same time, and that is something that I really can't emphasize enough, is there is just such power in both. There is just such power being held one on one. And there is such power being held in a group and being part of a group. To your point, that way of showing up for others in the group, having that experience of I need you and you need me me and I can show up for you and you can show up for me. There is something about that that is inherently life affirming and, and sort of irreplaceable. There's no other way to do it. You know, there's, it's just that is part of what we, what we need and, and who we are as social animals. You know, we are social animals. We are, we are tribe based animals. We need to belong. We need a sense of love and compassion and belonging to feel good and to thrive and honestly to survive. We cannot survive without each other.

Jason Lange: Other.

Melanie Curtin: That feels like a pretty good place to wrap. Is there anything else that you feel is missing or needs to be said in this?

Jason Lange: You know, as my other teacher once said, your angst is your liberation. So when you get the right support and community and around you, going right into this stuff is usually the quickest path to just, just total, total transformation.

Melanie Curtin: And if you are interested in our coaching, you can go to Evolutionary Men Apply. And if you are a current pillar or a Pillars grad and you are interested in the breathwork program that Luke referenced, you can get me@Dearman PodcastML.com I'm sending out more info about that today and that course will start in mid.