I had one of those conversations with Melanie Curtin on her podcast Dear Men that reminded me why we do this work. We dove into something that touches every man I know but gets whispered about in therapy offices instead of talked about openly: that place where you're so deep in the pit that even the idea of climbing out feels impossible. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
We got into the nervous system piece of this, what's happening in your body when you hit that dorsal shutdown state. It's not just feeling bad, it's your entire system going offline. I shared about my own journey with this, particularly around dating when I was single and certain patterns in my marriage. That feeling of "here I am again" after all the work you've done, all the therapy, all the men's groups. The rumination that keeps your mind racing while your body stays frozen.
What really landed for me in this conversation was talking about the simple, unglamorous things that actually help: movement and connection. Not fixing everything, just taking one step. Getting your body moving. Reaching out to someone instead of hiding. I talked about how men's groups became essential for me, not just showing up, but actually using them when I was in the shit. Learning to say "I'm struggling" before I hit bottom.
We also got into the deeper work: somatic therapy, bringing anger back online (huge for me), learning it was okay to need help and be seen in that collapsed state. The pattern of believing you have to do something to be worthy of connection, when sometimes what heals is just being met where you are.
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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: 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.
Jason Lange: Da da da da da da da.
Melanie Curtin: Da da da da da da da da.
