352: Do you ever feel collapsed or hopeless? (Like nothing’s working) | Dear Men

Jason Lange: What happens in this kind of collapsed, hopeless state that we all hit sometimes is we get stuck down in that dorsal shutdown and it feels impossible to get out. You know, it's literally like being stuck at the bottom of a well and it's just often dark and we don't even know where to start to get out.

Melanie Curtin: Hey, everybody, just a quick announcement before we start this episode. First of all, we are in eclipse season. There was a lunar eclipse yesterday, as of this recording, dropping yesterday or today, depending on where you are in the world. And the reason that's important is that there tends to be extra intensity around eclipses. This was a lunar eclipse. And one of the themes for this particular eclipse is around letting go and transformation taking effect quite quickly. So you might notice big shifts, big changes, potential for big openings. And that's just something to be mindful of. So be gentle with yourselves during this time. It's a good time to reflect and to release, to let go. And you can read more about all the eclipse stuff online. But I just wanted to mention that because eclipses do tend to kind of, they're sort of like acupressure. I think of it as sort of like spiritual acupressure. Like it presses down on certain points, sort of brings things to the surface and puts pressure on certain places, which can release tension. Right. It can open things up. It can also sometimes be painful. Sometimes those two go together, sometimes they don't. So just wanted to mention that totally normal. If you're experiencing some intensity and that should be continuing for a few weeks. So something to look forward to. Also happening in a few weeks is our live Q and A. Jason Lange and I are hosting a Dear Evolutionary Men live coaching session. If you have a question, something that you've been wanting to get coaching on or you've just wanted to witness, what is coaching like? Please come. It will be Monday the 31st, March 31st at 5 Pacific, 5 to 7 Pacific. And you can join that. You can sign up for [email protected] live call melaniecurtain.com live call we would love to have you with us again. Even if you don't have a question and you just want to witness, you can do that. But if you have something on your heart you've been wanting to get some guidance around or just see what it's like to be in a space with us, you are more than welcome and we would love to have you. And you can always get [email protected] and if you want to support the podcast, you can either become a patron. We do live calls once a month for patrons that join at a $10 a month level or more. And also if you want to rate and review the podc, that would be super helpful, particularly on Spotify. If you listen on Spotify or if you don't mind going into Spotify and adding a rating and a review, that would be extra helpful and I appreciate it. You can always get [email protected] hi everyone. Welcome back to another Jason episode. Always exciting. We get lots of compliments on your participation, Jason. Thanks for being here.

Jason Lange: Stoked to be back. I'm sorry.

Melanie Curtin: So we're talking about a sort of specific type of collapse today. And if you've ever done parts work, also known as internal family systems, then you will be familiar with some of the things that we're going to talk about today. But even if you're not, most human beings have a version of this collapsed state, which is basically like, ugh, nothing's working. Nothing's ever going to work. Everything's going to be hopeless forever. One of the close people in my life calls this part Eeyore in himself. So if you've ever read Winnie the Pooh, then you're familiar with that. Or inside out, the sad one. I think she has a name, but I don't remember her name. She's blue and she's sad all the time. That's a bit of what we're talking about today of just the collapse and the collapsed state. And we're going to talk about kind of like where that comes from and how it shows up and the kinds of thoughts and thought patterns that are associated with that part are not very resourced or resourceful. And sometimes we can get collapsed into the part where we think it's true. And part of our intention today is just to raise awareness about this part of ourselves and how to work with it and what, what it does in relationship and. Yeah, to just kind of raise awareness about it because it's, it's a part of us. It is not all of us. But when it's active, it just. Man, it just feels overwhelming. It just feels like it's true.

Jason Lange: Right.

Melanie Curtin: Nothing's working. Nothing will ever work. Nothing can ever work for me. And wah. So, yeah. So can you share a little bit from your perspective, especially about the physiology of this part and how it relates to the vag. Vagus nerve?

Jason Lange: Yeah. So I mean, I'm by no means an expert here, so just take this as a kind of Generalization, but enough that maybe can make you a little dangerous. And really, you know, the idea is we have this vagus nerve, which is this bundle of nerves that go down the. The. The front channel of our body, basically from the base of our brain right all the way down to our sacrum. And that's what connects our body to our brain, really. And inside of that, there's this idea that, you know, polyvagal theory, which was popularized by Stephen Borges. And, you know, it's continuing to evolve as a body of research. But the idea is basically there. There's a few states of our nervous system. There's the parasympathetic, and there's the sympathetic. And sympathetic is what we would traditionally think of as, like, activated, engaged, right? So there's. There's an energetic output. I'm moving, I'm acting, I'm talking, I'm speaking. Like, I'm outputting energy of some kind. And, you know, we use that every day just to move across the room, right? You're. You're. You're activating your sympathetic system. And at the high end, when we really get up there, there can be fight, flight, mania. Just like rumination. Like, there's. There's a lot of energy moving. And if we get stuck in that state, it can have all kinds of problems. On the other side, there's parasympathetic, which is also what they call rest and digest, right? This is where we restore, rejuvenate, downshift. Incredibly important for us. And at the low end of that, kind of like, there's the mania, the fight and the flight and sympathetic. At the low end, the very bottom of parasympathetic is shutdown. They actually call it dorsal shutdown. So it's. It's the. Just basically part of that vagal nerve gets activated and, like, our whole system just shuts down, right? There's no. There's no movement. We're kind of frozen. Oftentimes maybe a little dissociated at the extreme. Depression tends to often happen down here. And the optimal place is actually a little bit in the middle, what they call ventral vagal, which is where we're engaged and we're relaxed, right? That's. That's basically it. We're engaged, but we're relaxed. What happens in this kind of collapsed, hopeless state that we all hit sometimes is we get stuck down in that dorsal shutdown. And it feels impossible to get out. You know, it's literally like being stuck at the bottom of a well. And it's just Often dark. And we don't even know where to start to get out. And that's a place I've definitely experienced in my life. Most human beings I know have in different times, some of us, and some, particularly as kids, like, really got stuck there. If you're a child of neglect in particular, that is where a lot of this can, you know, form in the system and create some deep patternings. You know, there's some theory that maybe more avoidant. Avoidant types tend to gravitate more down here in that kind of dorsal shutdown. Like, there's just. I just. I can't deal with it. I'm. I gotta disengage. Um, another man, a man in one of my men's group, Ryan, who you had on your podcast many moons ago. You know, he. He framed this for me. Is. There's another way to think about this as sympathetic is we're. We're hyper. Like so hyper. Ah, just think of the energy of a hyper kid. Right. Ah, the other side of that is hypo. So it's like hypo is damp, kind of listless, depressed. Right. There's just. There's just not much anything happening. And this kind of hopeless shutdown state is. Is when our nervous system kind of falls down there and doesn't know how to get out.

Melanie Curtin: I love everything that you said and I, I think that since this is a. This is. We're going to be talking about dating and relationships in the context of this. One thing I want to point out is that it's very common for someone who trends towards hyper to partner with someone who trends towards hypo. And that's. I'm just laughing because it's just so perfect. You know, people say opposites attract and, and. And I just want to point out that the, the promise or the potential is for both people to heal things that need to be healed and then to meet a bit in the middle, more towards the ventral vagal place where we're relaxed and we're engaged. We know how to move through conflict together. We don't go to these places and then get stuck in these places. A couple of things I want to point out. You know, you mentioned the dissociation, the freeze, and then also the kind of manic, activated, activated state. So the hyper and the hypo. And I would say that as a woman, I have experienced men on both of these sides. So I have partnered with men who trended more towards hyper and men who trended more towards hypo. And I wanted to point out that this is obviously most apparent in conflict. When we are in conflict with our partner, that's when a lot of these patterns show up. And so in my experience with a partner who was more hyper, I could see that his body was agitated, he was breathing more shallowly. He would kind of stride around the room in a quick fashion. He. He was. He activated. He was activated. And there was. He would speak very quickly, like, a lot of words very quickly, which was pretty overwhelming to me. And there was just a lot of, yeah, up, up, active, activated, wired. You know, that. That situation. And then. And that was. That was hard for me in a. In a kind of a way. And I would say that in general, I also trend more towards hyper. And if you think about this in terms of the elements, right, the four elements. Water, air, fire, earth. This is going to be more of the fire and air qualities. And it's interesting because I think sometimes there can be a certain complementarity to types that aren't the same. Whereas what I noticed in that partnership was that it felt like we're both fire. We're both fire and air. And that's hard. That's hard to. To work with. You can work with it. It's possible, but there's a certain natural kind of like, oh, we both sort of inflame each other. And we're gonna talk about what to do about all these patterns. But the seed I would plant is that slowing down is actually pretty valuable in all of these circumstances. Slowing down and mindfulness. And when I say the word mindfulness, I mean being aware of our body sensations, being aware of the space we're in, the room we're in. Slowing down and cultivating mindfulness in moments of stress is part of how we meet in the middle. It's part of how we get back to presence. Because that's really what we're talking about in either of these sides is we lose presence. We are no longer present. We are activated, or we are shut down, but we are not present. So that was that partner. And then with a hypo partner who went more towards disassociation. My experience was it sort of prompted a sense of panic in me because I could feel that he was slipping away or had slipped away. And it felt. I felt really helpless, like, there's nothing I can do. He's just. It's almost like if someone's drowning and you're just, like, watching them go away, you're like, oh, my God. What. What do I do to get you back? How do I keep you here. And there was no way to do that. And, and what that looked like was, yeah, he would get sleepy, like tired sleepy. His eyelids would droop. I don't know if his breathing was shallow, but it, what, it didn't feel like he was fully in the room, which is basically dissociation. Right? We're talking about dissociation. And yeah, a collapsed posture. So collapsed shoulders, leaning back on the couch, just kind of like, yeah, sleep sleepy was the thing that I kept coming back to, was sleepy and down. Down, I guess frozen, like. More like frozen yawning, which is what you were describing as dorsal shutdown. And. And interestingly, similarly, one of the things that can help is slowing down and mindfulness. And when I, When I'm talking about that, I'm really talking about on the part of both partners or whoever's in the space, because this can happen in family systems as well. It doesn't have to be just partners, but we're going to focus on partners for today for simplicity's sake. But in a similar way, slowing down mindfulness. There's a way that sometimes people will describe this where one partner is going into shutdown and it's. It's spinning the other partner up. Right. The other partner is getting more and more wound up as this person is spinning down. And I believe it's because of what I was describing, where it's like, oh, my God, I can't feel you. I can't feel you. Where are you? So it's ramping up my anxiety because I can't feel you're slipping away from me and on, on your side, which you can speak to because you have lived experience, I would imagine it's like, oh, God, it's just getting even more overwhelming out there. Like, I can't. I can't handle that. That's way too much. I get, you know, and it's getting worse. The storm is getting worse, not better. So it doesn't feel safe at all for me to come back into my body and to be present in this room. I don't know what the fuck to do about this. Like, I don't. This is way too much for me. And something I want to slow down and point out is that these states, these ways of being are old, very old, very old. Often they are preverbal. They come from very young places in us, and they can sometimes even come from experiences that we had in the womb. So the way that your mother felt regulated, supported, held in her pregnancy will affect her child. The being inside her. If she Was very stressed. If she was frequently dysregulated, if there was not a sense of safety or support in her life during pregnancy, that will affect the child. And there are very interesting studies, for example, mothers that were pregnant during wartime and what happens to the child then born, and then the generation after that, too, that child's child. So there's a lot of research about the. The impact of grandparents. So basically three generations, right? Something like growing up during the depression, being a woman that was pregnant during the depression and then had a child and that child's child. They are all linked. Those three people are all linked. The mother, the child, and the child's child. And I want to be very clear that we are not saying that you are stuck. If that's you, you know, that's me, that's Jason. We're not saying you're stuck in these patterns or ways of being. But it is informative to know that the way that your mother existed during her pregnancy, how safe and supported and held she felt, has a direct impact on you and her parents also. So a lot of people came from tough backgrounds, and that is going to show up in your physiology, and there are lots of things we can do about it, and that's just part of the deal. So I'm curious if you can kind of take us through, you know, this. This feeling of collapse, this feeling of, ugh, it's hopeless, it'll never work. You know, what is your. Your lived experience of that, and how does that tie to your experience of dating and being in relationship?

Jason Lange: Yeah. Another way to think about the state is often just paralysis. Right. It's like a feeling of paralysis for me. You know, it's often associated with, like, a deep kind of visceral nausea in the pit of the stomach of just like. There's just no, like, nothing. You know, it's just feel so stuck or hopeless or. I can't even imagine, you know, part of this, the paralysis is like, I can't even imagine right now what the path out of this is like. It's just so overwhelming that I'm just, like, frozen. And so, you know, I would have this with women earlier on in my, you know, life when I would, I don't know, kind of mess things up. And there was, you know, oftentimes there's, you know, sometimes there's these very specific moments where you're like, oh, yep, that was it. Like, the. The context of our relationship just changed and something will never go back. Like, you know, there's these. Those feelings sometimes of oh, the energy just shifted and I can tell that was it. And then there's this feeling of like, or, you know, I felt this. Many men I know have felt this around work, employment, finances of just like, I've been looking for a job for two years and I've put out thousands of resumes and just like, there's nothing I can do. I, I don't know what else to do. Or, you know, I have no money in my bank account. And ah, I felt it around health, you know, when I was overweight. Just like a feeling of wow, you know, paralysis. And this kind of dorsal shutdown for me often came up. I've talked about this before on my show around energetic debt. Like the idea of debt. When you feel some, When I would feel something in my system that I knew there's no way to instantly get out of, it's like, wow, this. If I made this amount of money at this, in this many hours, that's two years to get back to zero. Or if I was losing a pound a week, it's nine months till I get to somewhere I want. Right. There's this sense of nothing I can do can liberate this from me right now. It's, it's far away. And that would often collapse me because I was just like, ah, I, I, to start. It feels so painful in this sense. Yeah. There's often a sense of not wanting to move, collapsing in on the self, you know, shame is often deeply connected into this state. I don't want to be seen, I don't want to see anybody. Withdrawal was very common for me in this state, particularly as a, as a single guy. Just the feeling of I just want to hide, you know, that's another way to think about this kind of hopeless state is often like, I just want to hide. I'm hiding, I want to hide. I don't want to be seen. I don't want to get up, I don't want to get out. And um, it's a pretty, you know, brutal place to be. Like, you know, another way to. I sometimes think about it. It's kind of, it just feels like a black hole. Like there's just something sucking me down and I have no idea how to get Escape velocity. Don't even know where to start. And I felt it around dating and the hopelessness there. You know, I felt it in my relationship before of getting stuck in certain patterns which we'll talk about and you know, not being able to get going, you know, another way. It just struck me sometimes I've I've heard about this is, you know, in terms of the hyper hype hypo parasympathetic. Sympathetic is. You can just think of this. Sympathetic is gas pedal. Parasympathetic is break right. You need both and a healthy nervous system. We're able to fluidly move back and forth. Okay, I need to rev up to do some work, and it's the end of my day, so I need to rev down and unwind and go to sleep. What is so hard for a lot of us these days is when we haven't built that capacity so that they actually call it vagal tone. The ability of your vagal nerve to fluidly move back and forth will get stuck. So, oh, my God, I'm gonna take a lot of caffeine. I could easily. And then I just get stuck in this amp state. And then I have to, like, hardcore crash down because I've overexerted myself. And then I kind of get stuck in this low state. And then I might need to pump myself up with some kind of stimulant. You know, that's what a lot of people do these days. It's just up all the way, down all the way. There's nothing smooth about it. It's like when you first learn to drive stick shift. For anyone who's done that, transitioning is like bumpy, bumpy screech. As you get better at it, it becomes like a smooth transition, right? But it. It takes a certain capacity in practice. And this side that we're talking about today, I think it particularly, you know, just my story, at least because of who we work with and my own stories. I think men are very susceptible to this, to that kind of paralysis. Because the other thing here is it's often it's not engaged, right? There's. There's like a loneliness to this. That withdrawal thing. I talk about that men often, we often convince ourselves, I cannot be seen like this. Like, this would just be death. So I have to, like, hide myself when I'm in this state, which kind of doubles down on it. And then I think, often makes men feel worse because, you know, one of the most, you know, we'll get into this. But one of the most simple ways to start to make that shift is social engagement. So the. The vagus nerve. One of the ways we actually get back to ventral vagal, that kind of relaxed and alert state, is by engagement. It's literally presence with another human being. Seeing their face, seeing their eyes, hearing their voice, touch. These are the things that can start to shift us out of there that so many men, you know, particularly for those single guys, are often just totally lacking. Right. We're just lacking that human connection to help us shift out if we've had a bad date or got rejected again online or whatever that might be.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah. Thank you for articulating all of that so beautifully. It really. I think what jumped out at me the most when you were just sharing was that feeling of loneliness and how many men that we work with, honestly, whether they're single or partnered, feel lonely on a regular basis and how damaging that can be and how much that alone contributes to or exacerbates everything else that's going on. Connection is the antidote. You know, connection is one of the major components of this, of. Of. Of healing, essentially. And I appreciated what you said about the way that it shows up in single men. Right. Men that are. That are dating or trying to date. You know, we. We work with a lot of guys who, God, they haven't dated in a long time, or they, you know, they haven't had a lot of connection in a long time. And I mean, within a few weeks or a few months of working with us, a lot of those men are having breakthroughs. Different breakthroughs, you know, different. God. We have a guy right now who has basically gone into freeze most of the time. He's ever tried to ask a woman out, and he's asked, I think, at least two women out in the last two weeks. And he was like, yeah, it was easier than I expected. I didn't freeze. And, you know, it's like, it doesn't have to take forever to shift a lot of these patterns. I think that's something that I want to be very clear about. And it does take something. And when I say it takes something, essentially part of what it takes is getting the right kind of help. So working with a mentor or a group or whoever it is to. To get through it and to understand how to work with these patterns better. So I. I'm. I'm hoping that you can speak a little bit to your experience around, you know, you. You've been contending with this hypo situation for a long time. I mean, basically your whole life, where do you think that it came from in your background? What. What prompted it or whatever? And then how did it show up in single. Your single life? And then how did it show up in your partnered life? Because that's something that I think it's important to note, is that this shows up in wherever you are, whether you're Partnered or not, and can be worked with wherever you are.

Jason Lange: Yeah. I mean, another way to frame this energy is what's the point? Right? So it's that feeling, the feeling state is like, what's the point? What's the point of trying? What's the point of getting angry? What's the point of connecting with another person online? Like just what is the point? It's not going to change. And so, you know, I had a, I had some of this in terms of the neglect I experienced as a young kid. You know, some of this is pre verbal and you know, there's, there is research with the still face baby experiment, you know, things they wouldn't really do anymore now, but you know, what happens when our primary caregivers detach from us or become unavailable. And the ultimate place that, you know, there's all these phases that infants will go through is just shut down of just like, I'm not even going to try anymore. So I need to kind of take care of myself. And at some point that doesn't even work. So I'm just gonna like go offline essentially. And so parts of me, you know, went offline, excuse me. And yeah, I mean I, I would often feel this two strong places when I was single in those early days when I would start to engage with a woman and then all my kind of nervous system angst and trauma would come up and it would come out not so attractive, just be clear. And like I said, there'd be this kind of energy shift where I could just immediately feel where I was located in their kind of thought pattern was, was outside the box of this is someone I want to get intimate with. Right? There's like a, ooh, yeah, this is, something's not right here. And I would get right back into that stuck place. And for me, I would then go into rumination of how do I fix that? And you know, rumination. This is just my theory. I don't know if anybody's done any research on this, but I think it's actually a unique blend of the two where our body is shut down but our mind is stuck in activation. So like our, our mind is racing but our body isn't moving, isn't taking action. And sometimes that, you know, that was all I could do. If anything, I was at least ruminating. And other times I would just fully numb out, right? Go eat a pizza, go watch 10 hours of TV, jerk off for, you know, half a day. Like these were things that would just to shut my system down and, and not have to Engage with reality. Would definitely also see this in kind of the online world. You know, I think some of you cynical guys will kind of know this pattern of, you know, there's like this thing and then you connect with someone and then the anticipation and hope starts to build, like, oh, maybe, maybe, maybe. Hey, maybe. And there's like going up the roller coaster. Oh, maybe this will be liftoff. And then, you know, they stop responding or they say no or whatever. And then there's like the. The just the crash back to hopelessness of not yet. Nop. It doesn't matter. Stuck right where I am again. And so I would get into that hopeless state and I would definitely withdraw in my relationship. It would really be anytime, you know, particularly in my marriage, that I would get activated into feeling like I'm not enough. Like, oh my God, I'm still doing this thing that isn't enough for my partner after all the therapy, all the men's work. And there's just like a feeling of that kind of collapse that I would get into, which, you know, would then actually exasperate the situation because then it, you know, would freak my partner out even more to feel me collapsed around it. Because it's like, wow, if you're collapsed around it, like, what are we going to do? Like, what are you going to do? And then, you know, that collapse would make me want to withdraw even more, feel even worse about myself, et cetera, et cetera. Those were. Those are probably two of the big ways I've seen that kind of show up in both of those places. You know, there's also the, like, here I am again. Maybe that's another way to think about it that. That feels hopeless. But it's just like, here I am again. I'm in the same spot that I was. And no matter what I've tried, I always circle back to this spot. And that's then what really triggers for me that, well, what's the point? Disappoint. I even try anymore. And when that hits, why even try anymore? That is the shutdown. That is the hopeless. That's just the, like, you know, like, literally just disengage with life. And it's just a brutal place to be. You know, I just. To any man who's out there experiencing it, no, like, I've certainly been there in my own way. And it's. It's pretty awful, right? It's. It's a pretty deep place of suffering when. When we don't feel like we have agency over our own life. Like, while there's nothing I can do to shift this. It creates a pretty deep depression.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah. And I want to talk about, you know, the ways that you have gotten out of that place and what your relationship is to it now. So one of the things we talked about was I. I definitely have this place in myself as well. I think I trend more towards the hyper side, but I definitely have moments of. It feels like I've tried everything. Nothing is working. Nothing will ever work. Nothing for me. I do the catastrophizing thing where I'm like, it's not working now, it'll never work. And then I go into very dark places and there's the. What's the point? All that. I don't find that I tend to stay there very long. I. My system because it, I think trends more towards hyper. I don't think that I stay there very long. But we've had clients who've been in this place for years and then they've gotten out. And so I want to hear what you have to say about like how have you learned to work with this part of yourself? What has that journey looked like for you and what is your relationship to that place within you now? Because I'm sure it still arises, but you have a much different relationship to it. You have a much more robust nervous system. You know, what, what has that journey been like for you?

Jason Lange: I. I'm smiling right now, so this is gonna be a deep cut for some. But you know, I got a five year old daughter so there's a lot of Frozen in my house and I remember crying the first time we watched Frozen 2. If you've ever seen the Next right Thing, it's like the moment of, you know, it's the all is lost moment. In the movie she's in the dark cave and there's just like, what the fuck is the point? I've lost everything. And then it becomes this. Well, just one breath, one step. One breath, one step. And you know what that really means is one of the central things is just movement. Like when we can, we can like to actually unfreeze means to move. So sometimes that's walk. I'm just going to get up and move my body into a different environment. Sometimes I'm going to reach fur the computer or the phone to reach out and then connect with someone. Right. So connection and movement in my mind are kind of often the two most important things that you know, sometimes to shift our, our mindset and state we have to actually shift our body first. And a lot of people get that wrong, right? We're like, oh, I have to wait until I feel better to start to take action. When a lot of times it's like taking some kind of action starts to make us feel better. And that action doesn't mean, like, I'm gonna go conquer my goal. It's just like, I'm gonna do something, gonna take a step right towards a friend, towards getting outside, getting into some nature, whatever that might be. And for me, that, you know, that was a big part of it. As I got more and more immersed into men's groups, and then as I learned to actually use those groups, meaning, okay, to reach out when I was feeling low or collapsed or stuck, which I didn't even do that necessarily initially because that was still, like, even in the group. I could. I see this all the time in, you know, in our group and other men's groups, in my personal men's groups, you know, someone will come back and then be like, I just had the worst week of my life. I was totally shut down and frozen, and I'm like, oh, my God. It's like. Like heartbreaking. Because I want to know that, right? I want to know that when you're there. But the habit is just often so deep, particularly in men. But as I started to get more connected and to have spaces and then, you know, for me, there is a certain amount of hygiene, is the only way I can put it, where I'm like, okay, like, I don't tend to crash there if I know I'm moving my body a couple times a week, right? Like, if literally, if I'm exercising a couple times a week, I don't really crash in the same way. If I don't, man, I can feel. I can feel it. Some days, like, the stress just gets so overwhelming or something feels hopeless, you know, These days, it can even be beyond the personal in terms of the global. Of just like, what is the point? Like, nothing is working. And that can seem overwhelming sometimes, too. But so, yeah, I mean, movement in connection, that. Okay, I don't have to fix everything, but I. I just need to take a step. And often in taking that step, something will transform and my state will start to shift. And for me, you know, yeah, like, in some sense, you can combine them too. It's like, go for a walk with someone just. You literally just go for a walk with someone, and that will handle, like, 90% of this a lot of the time. I find, particularly if you do it outside, like, it's not like all your problems are going to Be fixed. But you're going to come back online. Like, like I would actually just come back online. Where? Okay, well, like, there's, there's some me here now, there's a me here now that can start to orient to this thing rather than just being totally gone.

Melanie Curtin: This reminds me of one of our clients years ago, who I would say showed up in a pretty, pretty frozen place, you know, like living in a basement apartment. Not a lot of natural light, not a lot going on in his social life, dating, not successful, et cetera. And as we started working together, I remember him, he got a bicycle. That was actually a really big thing. He got a bicycle. He was able to go, and I think he was able to commute to work on the bike instead of car. And that was huge. And then as he, I think that part of what happened is as he felt the love of the group, as he felt loved and seen in some way and supported, he was able to then connect with colleagues at work in a different way. And so he started to make some friends and then they started inviting him places. And his, his world kind of opened up. Like, you can think of it like a flower. And so there was just more, there was just more there. There was just more life there. And that, it's not that he didn't go back to collapsed states, but there were, it was much less frequent and it was less, you know, intense or less time. So a lot of these patterns that we have don't necessarily get eradicated completely, but the intensity goes from a 10 to a 7 to a 6 to a 3. And then like you said, I loved what you said about exercise. Just noticing again, mindfulness. Oh, I noticed that when I, when I'm biking several times a week, I don't get into that dark place as much. And what, you know, what are the things that, that help us stay in a more dorsal vagal, engaged, awake, relaxed place. One of the other things a lot of people report is regular social engagement, like you said. So one of the things we're always talking to our guys about is get to an improv class, start taking a dance class, do something that meets weekly with people that you just on the calendar. You don't have to figure it out, you don't have to schedule it. You don't have to find the time. You know, sometimes in big cities, even getting together with friends is complex, especially if they have kids. But having these social engagements, that's a big part of, of health. I'm wondering if you can also. I, I, I want to Just briefly say that you mentioned the, the. The flat affect experiment with children, which is. They. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they did an experiment where they had mom and baby, which was pretty, A pretty young baby. When, when mom is in front of baby most of the time she's. Her face is animated and she's maybe making some sounds and she's engaging with the baby and the baby is mimicking her. And they did an experiment where they had her just go blank. So flat affect, no verbal expression, no facial expression. And then they watch what babies did. And babies tended to get agitated, so they would try to get mom's attention by being louder, by being more expressive, by crying. And then sometimes you would watch them try to get away. So they would kind of squirm and they would look left, they would look right. Like, this is uncomfortable. I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it. And then to your point, the kind of end stage of it was just collapse, just a collapsed state. Like, it doesn't matter what I do. There's no one here. And that's what we're talking about. The reason I bring it up is because if you suspect that you may have been a child of neglect, which is not always physical neglect, it could be emotional neglect. We did another episode all about neglect. I will drop that in the show notes, and I do recommend that you listen to it again. None of these patterns are fixed, but I think it's enlightening if that's part of your history. And similarly, you know, that sense of. If your mother was quite dysregulated during the pregnancy, there can be an experience that you had of there's connection, and then all of a sudden there isn't. There's connection and then all of a sudden there isn't. And that can impact your sense of safety and security in the world. That at any moment everything can be taken away. And that's not conscious. It's not a consciousness situation. Right. And so I'm. I'm curious if you can speak just a little bit to, you know, the, the healing modalities or what you did sort of in a. In a direct sense to work with your nervous system around healing patterns that include this collapsed one, but might not be, that might not be the only thing that you were looking at. But what kind of, what kind of work did you do solo and then what kind of work did you do in your partnership?

Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, somatic therapy, plant medicine, breath work, menswor, you know, the kind of rinse and repeat I've often talked about on here are. Are very important. You know, some of that somatic therapy which I know you know about. There's. There's literally certain approaches that can map developmentally. Oftentimes where these things kind of splintered off in the. The musculature that goes with them. Right. So my somatic therapist had me actually activating certain muscles which correspond developmentally to the periods I kind of had these splinter offs. Right. Because, you know, there's a progression from an infant into a toddler of what you can move first and what has to turn on so something else can turn on all the way from being able to roll over to crawling to, you know, sitting up and walking. And, you know, unsurprising for me, I remember one of my. A guy in my men's group in LA is a physical trainer and I worked with him for a couple years. And one of the hardest things for me was. I can't remember what he calls it, but it's like the, the baby flip over where you're kind of just laying and you like move one leg and like flip over. And there was a part of me that just did not have that wiring. And I was compensating for all these other things. And you know that it's a big part of my story, in a sense. But so doing musculature stuff with my somatic therapist, getting in men's groups, again, just having these regular places where, where I learned, you know, the other big thing here is particularly relationally that can be so important that, you know, in our program and my shadow work, I see this, that sometimes when we get stuck in this kind of shutdown place, as men, we have this story that there's something I need to do to be worthy of coming out essentially and having the experience of you don't need to do shit, someone else is just going to be with me in that and I don't actually have to do anything in order to receive that attunement. Right. That's so healing for so many men, particularly who didn't have that because, yeah, maybe they had a. A parent who just wasn't present or able to attune or, you know, all the different things we talked about and, you know, get into that kind of hopeless. What's the points, you know, what's the point? Hopeless. It's all up to me is, you know, the infant will internalize this. Okay. If. If I'm not going to be regulated on the outside, I have to regulate on the inside. And when I can't do that, I just got to go offline, right? So there was all kinds of stuff for me about bringing that online. And in my particular journey, you know, a big part of that, which I think for a lot of guys who get into this more shutdown state, it was learning to reconnect to anger, right? To actually have that. That lower part of my body come online with like, no, fucking help me, right? Like, I need help, help. And then having that actually be responded to. Incredibly important, Incredibly, incredibly important. Because, you know, particularly for infants and young kids, right, when something isn't going right in our family system, we don't have the prefrontal cortex yet to label and situate and contextualize. Well, it's not actually my fault. That's my dad and his dad and da, da, da. Instead, it's just, this isn't working. It must be my fault is often the safest move for kids to internalize, because the other option of, oh, my God, the people that are taking care of me can't actually take care of me. I'm, like, existentially on my own is so overwhelming to a nervous system. It's almost always safer to go with the, it's my fault, it's my fault. Because then there's, you know, as small as it is, there's like a type of hope and control that, well, as long as I change, then it'll be okay. And I had to work through, you know, so much of that in all these different ways, bringing anger back online, learning that it was okay to be upset and say, hey, I need things, pay attention to me, that kind of thing, and being willing to be seen, you know, in my grief or in my shutdown and. And to. To put myself out there in that really uncomfortable state of just, yeah, okay, here we are on kind of the personal levels. And, you know, particularly through, like, breath work and plant medicine, just really being forced, like, forced to make contact with the most painful, literally the most painful somatic feelings in the body that, you know, I had a lot of sophisticated mechanisms to get around. But when you do those kinds of things, like, no, they're. They're going to be there, and you just. You have to be with it. And often if we can be with it, then we start to be free from it. And then in my relationship, you know, it's still an ongoing process of just rupturing, repairing, getting help, acknowledging when I dropped the ball or didn't get something right, asking for what I need, saying hey, you know, actually, I do need this, or I want to push back on this. And, you know, in a lot of ways, just becoming comfortable disagreeing on things and becoming comfortable holding tension. Meaning, oh, right now we're just in conflict. Right. We were talking about this the other night. Conflict is just, I want this, you want that. Just being able to hold that and not even try to resolve it really started to shift me in a weird way out of feeling stuck. Because it's just like, oh, I don't. There's actually nothing to do sometimes other than really feel the conflict. You know, we have tons of strategies and relational time and, like, you know, kind of like we have hygiene for ourselves. There's hygiene for our relationship knowing. Okay, we. You know, I've used this term a lot lately, like, got to feed the meter on the relationship. And if we don't do that, our relationship can get into that hypo, like, this isn't going to work kind of phase. But if we're feeding the meter, it keeps us. Keeps us in that kind of ventral vagal state. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know if I quite answered it. It's a process that never ends. I'm still in that process. There's a lot. You know, the other thing I would say that, you know, as much credit as I'd like to take on my development, probably what has shifted me the most out of this tendency to go hypo and paralysis was becoming a father. Because there's. There's actually. It's just sometimes it's not an option to, like, go offline. It's just like, okay, I got 10 minutes. I got 10 minutes to send this email that I've been avoiding sending. If I don't send it now, it's going to be two days, so do it. Just go. That has actually been great for my nervous system in particular, in terms of just helping to keep me move and to have a greater, you know, greater context to even want to do this work that. Yeah, I want to be available to. To my kids and to my wife. I'll pause there.

Melanie Curtin: Well, it's. It's great. I think it dovetails with the celebration from the beginning of this episode and how much I've witnessed our men grow not just as partners or as men in the dating world, but also as fathers. And that's a pretty remarkable shift to think about because it does feel like that is the breaking of the pattern. Right. That grandparent to child to child pattern can be broken. It doesn't have to Be that way. And one of the things I really wanted to emphasize from what you said was, was the power of being part of healthy groups where there is love and there is connection. The power of being connected to mentors where there is love and there is connection. It could be a therapist, it could be a coach, it could be whoever. And how much it really takes both of those. You know, I've spoken to many people over the years, and there is something about being held one on one, and there's something about being held in a group. There's something about each of those. There is a magic, there is a medicine, there is a necessity, and then the wider being held by something greater than all of us. You know, we recently did an episode on this, on spirituality. And that's a topic that I've frequently avoided bringing in or including in conversations like this because of the amount of religious trauma that so many people hold. And I'm starting to be more vocal about it because making room for the mystery, making room for something greater than any of us to come in is part of the process. It is. It's part of the process. And it. It's ephemeral. It's not specific or local or concrete. But I have witnessed it repeatedly in my own life, in the lives of others. Just help. Just help with things, you know, it just. It just helps. And I loved what you said about holding tension. I want this and you want this, and they're not the same. And just holding that space, being in that space. Because what I see in so many of men is. Is the desire to collapse. Oh, you want this thing? Okay, fine. Right. I'll just capitulate. I'll just. I won't stay with what I need. I won't self anchor in my own self. Because what I've learned is to sacrifice, is to martyr myself, is to go for what you need instead of what I need. And there is something. I think there's something in that moment of holding the tension. I want this. You want this. Allowing a little bit of space, allowing the mystery to come in. And then often something shifts. Something shifts in you and me, in the greater. You know, somebody's schedule opens up. It's pretty amazing what happens when we're willing to just hang out there for a little bit. And. And it can be the same in our lives. You know, it's the same. I'm collapsed around my job stuff. I don't know what to do about it. I'm gonna let it rest. I'm gonna go for a walk. I'M gonna talk to someone. I'm gonna do something else. I'm gonna let it rest and then see what comes in. If there are ideas or there. You know, a lot of the time, it's just about getting out of the state that we're in, that state of stuckness, and then allowing the mystery to help us. To help us unravel the knot to help us. You said one breath, one step, just the next right door. One of my mentors used to say that all you need is the next right door. You don't need to see the whole path. You just need the next right door. And that tends to open up a whole world. And we've seen that in a lot of our clients that we. Our program has been the next right door for a lot of men. And then they've found the next right door. Right. It has led them to the next thing, and their growth has only continued. And a lot of the time, you know, we have guys regularly say, my biggest regret is not doing something like this sooner. I wish I'd done it sooner. I wish I'd done it sooner. I can see how much. Yeah, just. Just my relationship would have been different. My parenting would have been different. My 20s would have been different. You know, I would have had more fun or, like, there would have been more. I do think that there's something about just the next right door. And the last thing I wanted to say that I thought was so important about what you said was you finally being able to vocalize, I need help. Help. Because that is the restorative function of the infant who was crying. They were crying because they were saying, I'm wet, I'm hungry, I'm lonely, I'm anxious. Pick me up, hold me. And when nobody came, there was a collapsed state. And so the restorative function is to get back to a place of, as an adult, saying, I need things. I'm comfortable needing things. I need help. Sometimes. This is part of me, and that is incredibly powerful because that. That's how we have healthy relationships. Right? We have healthy relationships when each person can say, this is what I need. This is what I want, and the other person can say the same. And we can also hold differences with love. That's healthy relationship. And that's what most of us didn't learn how to do. So sometimes we need some guidance. We need some help. We need some support. We need some mentorship. And it works. You know, it works. It's messy. It's not always linear, but it does work. And I find that really inspiring. So if you are interested in our work and our coaching, you can go to Evolutionary Men Apply. If you are already a graduate of our program Pillars of Presence and you're looking to go deeper, Luke Adler and I are running Breathwork Breakthrough starting in mid March. You can find out more just email me@dearmen podcastmail.com and if you like this episode, if you want to support the podcast, if you can just rate and review us, that's really helpful for discoverability and, you know, boosting the algorithm and everything. So we would love that. And if you ever have any comments, you can also get me@dearmen podcastmail.com.

Jason Lange: Da da da da da da da.

Melanie Curtin: Da da da da da da da da.