372: Are you scared of women? | Dear Men

Melanie Curtin: Yeah, that just sense of freeze, Right? I'm freezing. She's approaching me, and I'm freezing up in my body. What the hell is that? And there's so many men that come to us, and they. And they say, I don't have this go on at work. I don't have this go on, you know, in my family of origin. But as soon as there's an attractive woman, I freeze. Hey, everyone, welcome back to another episode with Jason Lange. We're talking about a pretty important subject today that we wanted to put some attention on. This has come up in. In our group lately and is often behind the scenes of a lot of relationships or a lot of relating, especially for men. And. Yeah. So are you scared of women? Let's talk about it. So, as we start this subject, I'm curious if you want to share a little bit, Jason, about your own journey around this. Do you feel like there was a time that you were scared of girls or women? I say girls because maybe you are young, maybe you were a boy, but what has your own trajectory been on this? And then what have you noticed with our men?

Jason Lange: I feel like I've experienced this fear on every side of the spectrum. An angle. I mean, starting from just, like, initial fear of girls and women as just, like, different. Different creatures that I didn't understand and, like, had very different bodies and ways of talking and relating that I hadn't spent a lot of time with as a. As a young man. In a sense, you know, I had sisters, but one was way older, one was much younger. So I just wasn't around, you know, girls, so to speak. So as I became interested in girls, there was a lot of fear just in my body, some of which I think is totally normal for that age, some of which absolutely had to relate to the neglect many listeners know I experienced as a kid. And just, like, a discomfort with proximity to that. So there's that kind of baseline fear. And then, you know, as I matured a little bit, there was just the fear of, in a sense, a woman's rejection. Right. That, oh, if I put myself out there, what if she doesn't like me or says no or doesn't want to be with me or even worse, the fear that really started to deepen for me after some instances was, what happens if there is some connection and then the way I am actually causes her to not want to be around me, you know, so to speak. Meaning she gets to know me and then rejects me, and there's a fear around that, and what that would Feel like. And then there's, you know, the. The kind of more mature fear, I would say, which is just more the emotional side of things. As I got into relationships and partnership and now marriage, you know, actually fearing my partner's emotional state and what that might reflect about me or when, even when it's not about me, just what that state might evoke in me. So I have definitely been afraid of girls, been afraid of women. I am definitely sometimes in fear of my wife, you know, like, not in a mean way, but sometimes it's just like, ooh, I don't know how this is going to go or what's going to come out or what's going on. And that's something I still have to work. Right. I'm way more comfortable with it now than I was, you know, when we got married many, many years ago at this point. But it comes up from time to time, or if there's a vulnerable conversation I need to lead or something I want to talk about, or if I get a piece of feedback, I can, I can feel that come up, certainly. And I think it's very common in particular for a lot of us kind of so called nice guys to fear that, including, you know, just the fear of what we see with a lot of guys, and was true for me for a while, of our self worth being tied up in her opinion of me. It's a deep fear. If she doesn't like me, then am I worth anything? You know, is unfortunately a reality a lot of us guys kind of walk around operating from.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah, thank you for speaking to that, because I do think that, you know, we're going to get into some of the connections here between nice guy tendencies and this pattern. But I wanted to go back to something I thought was really important and a pattern that I think we've definitely seen in a lot of our men, which is emotional neglect in the home. So. And I think for a lot of people, not just men, it's uncomfortable to put labels onto childhood experiences, particularly when you understand truly at an intellectual level, you really grasp that your parents were doing the best that they could. They were doing the best that they could. What they provided was the best that they could provide. And a lot of people experienced emotional neglect, and some people also experienced physical neglect. And one of the things I just want to point out and go back to is that for you, for you, Jason, and for a lot of the men that we've worked with, you didn't get enough touch, you weren't held enough, you weren't you know, I want to say the word stroked, but I don't mean in a sexual way, but just like someone's hand on your back. Physical affection. Physical touch. Physical affection. And when you come from a home where you weren't getting enough touch, then touch becomes uncomfortable and weird. Right. It's something that you're not comfortable with. Well, that becomes an issue when you're dating because what happens during sex? Physical touch, what a lot of people like when it comes to affection. Physical touch. It's part of the equation. It's a lot of the. You know, when I was working back in the day, especially like in dating workshops, we called them bridge moves. Right. How do you get we're sitting across from each other at dinner to we're kissing by the car? Bridge moves are sort of like your hand on the small of her back or you touch her hair, you, you're joking around and you touch her shoulder. All of those kinds of things have to do with physical touch. And if you were raised in a home where that was very rare or non existent, then you're going to be more uncomfortable with touch and that's going to be something that you have to reintegrate into your life and become more comfortable with. So can you just take a moment to sort of share your experience with that and maybe what you've witnessed in other men we've worked with because it seems like emotional neglect is pretty prevalent.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I think it directly correlated to some of my fears even. I mean there's just like a bracing. I became aware of in my nervous system of when touch did come my way. Even if I wanted it, there would be like, it was almost like a hiccup, like someone would touch me and my body would kind of startle a little bit, which didn't always send the most comfortable signal to the person I was with. And that had a big impact on me. When you then stack that with the emotional neglect of, you know, fear in a sense started from I don't know what I'm feeling. So sometimes I'd be in fear, just I don't know what I'm feeling. So I hope they don't ask me or I don't know how to communicate something here. Right. I, I get a sense something is happening, but I don't know how to talk about it. Right. Because I came from a family that didn't talk about these things or didn't have that kind of connection there. So in some sense it's like there's certain parts of my nervous system and some of the nervous systems of guys we work with that are, they're just atrophied, right. And when we don't feel full, when I didn't feel full capacity there, it made it even easier to fall into fear with the feminine of like, oh, what if she is mad at me? What if she does ask something? What if I do present something? And as I got more comfortable with touch through somatic therapy and doing work, it became more easeful. And paradoxically, I wasn't as afraid to touch either. I think there was a polarity there for me in that as I was uncomfortable receiving it, it also created a hiccup in the. For my nervous system when it was totally an appropriate time to touch, so to speak. Like it was, you know, all, all, all green lights, so to speak. But I would kind of have a hiccup around it because of just how stuck my nervous system had been. And then that would start to create some stories and fear in me around how they would respond or wouldn't respond. Or am I now blowing it? Because I feel like I should be initiating touch, but I'm not. And oh, I can feel she now also feels this would to initiate touch and I'm not. And then the whole fear, fear, kind of death spiral I would often get into would ignite there. So neglect is, I would say, a deep part of this because part just in a simple way, what we're not used to is connection, no matter what. And I just. What I mean by that is, okay, there can be conflict or I don't have to be perfect, or the person I'm with doesn't have to be perfect, but we're still connected and connection in itself is soothing. And when, you know, I didn't have that soothing, you know, it's another way to put that kind of structure, stroking energy. As I, my family didn't know how to soothe, I had to learn to self soothe from a young age in some pretty unhealthy ways. And that soothing, that lack of soothing results in fear, right? If I'm not soothed, I'm more anxious and afraid to begin with. And particularly then if it's with a woman who I kind of want to be soothed with. But I'm very confused about the energy with like, I'm not clear on that. That starts to create all kinds of hiccups, as I keep saying here.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah, I really appreciate what, what you're saying and, and the, the journey that you went on in particular, and the ways that you engaged in men's work but also, you know, somatic therapy and working with different practitioners. I think it would be a good time to mention the massage work that you did, because I think we have a pretty big library of episodes now. So not everyone has listened to everything.

Jason Lange: Yeah, well, it's. It's a very straightforward version of when we talk about. When I talk about that kind of baseline fear. So after doing some coaching work, I got referred to a somatic therapist. And she was amazing. And, you know, this is kind of standard somatic practice in some sense, but she really had me work. She happened to be a woman. Right. And so even in some of our first sessions, we. She just played with me in terms of bodily distance. Okay, I'm here. How does that feel in your nervous system? I'm here. I come closer. How does that feel? I come farther away. For me to start building that self awareness of where I actually started to go into distress just with closeness. Right. So just feminine energy coming in close. There was a threshold that it would create some bodily distress for me because it was very. I was uncomfortable. Right. I didn't have that receptivity online. So we worked that over time, building trust. And then she took it even deeper and partnered with masseuse who came in for a session in particular that was really potent for me, where my therapist was working with me on what was happening internally while a woman was working with me on my external body. And part of what she was coaching me through was actually finding the words to share. That feels good. More of that. That doesn't feel good. No, thank you there. To become directive in a sense, and allow myself to enjoy. Because I was kind of so shut down in a sense. You know, it was almost like a. What's the word? I'd kind of go catatonic with the receiving. There'd be like a little freeze in terms of just anything's fine. Okay. I didn't have a lot of agency in that. And, you know, so she had to guide me more into my nervous system to get more comfortable with touch, to get more comfortable with feedback, and to just be more comfortable in presence. Right. And to start to unwind some of that fear in my nervous system of just closeness is. You know, that's another way to put it here, of there was a part of me that was bodily afraid of being close to a woman, being close to the feminine. So this fear we're talking about manifests in all kinds of ways. And that was a very direct one for me. And it wasn't because I didn't want Hit it was just because it was so foreign to my nervous system that what was different and unknown to me was scary. And so it would create fear. And that showed up, lo and behold, on every date or interaction I had with a woman I was attracted to before that. And it took me a while to really get that and see that. But as I unwound that, things started to relax. I started to relax and, and then I got really into touch and I was like, yeah, this is sweet.

Melanie Curtin: I also want to just briefly bring in the cultural element because in North America a lot of us live in a much less touch friendly culture. And they did a study once where they had two good friends meet up in Puerto Rico and two good friends meet up on in the mainland US and I think they did 60 pairs of friends or there was some, there was some n. Right. There was some number that they were doing. It wasn't just one set of friends. And then they averaged the number of times friends touched each other in Puerto Rico and the number of times they touched each other. Mainline US and in Puerto Rico it was 60 to 70 times per hour. So that's like almost once a minute. There's some kind of like touching someone's shoulder or just little things, right? Little touch. And in mainland US it was five to six. So that's a pretty drastic difference. And I remember the description. It was either one of the social scientists involved or someone, someone involved said that the culture in places like Puerto Rico is more like marshmallows and one us is more like ping pong balls. Like we're all bouncing off each other, but not like sticking or like that sweetness and sticky sort of soft, squishy, cuddly culture. So I do want to, I think that there's, there's such a unique culture in each family system and then there is the cult, the wider culture that we are, that we grow up in. And I would say that as a woman who grew up primarily in North America, the biggest contrast that I've seen is ease and comfort with touch in other countries, other places that I've been. Latin America comes to mind that's even more comfortable with touch and how different it felt to date and relate with men there versus somewhere like Japan, which is even less comfortable with touch, in my opinion. And how distant and you know, it just, it just felt different. Right. And so there's a, there's a wider kind of cultural experience that can be had. And if anyone's listening and you've been to other cultures, you might have that like Whoa. This is really different. Feels really different to be here. And there's something to be said for, in my opinion, travel in that way just to get that experience of, like, wow, not everyone is like this. There are other ways to be. And I really appreciated the word that you used, atrophy. Because muscles can atrophy, and then we can work them out and they get stronger and we have more power. So I just want to be clear. Everything we're talking about is workable. And, Jason, I think you're a great example of, you know, you invested significant time, energy, resources, money into all of this, and it paid off. Right. You're married to a beautiful woman. You have great kids, you have a really lovely relationship, among other things in your life, you have a fulfilling life. And that was not what was happening before you did the work, that it was not fulfilling. It was confusing. It was lonely. And I really, really wanted to highlight what you said about going into a state of catatonia or being catatonic when touch was. Was happening, or even proximity. So that's something that I think is very common in the clients that we've worked with, particularly towards the beginning of the work. And something that often shifts. Yeah, that just sense of freeze, right? I'm freezing. She's approaching me, and I'm freezing up in my body. What the hell is that? And there's so many men that come to us, and they. And they say, I don't have this go on at work. I don't have this go on, you know, in my family of origin. But as soon as there's an attractive woman, I freeze. And I do think that that's partly related to all the things that we're talking about here and in it's. And it is related to childhood, meaning. Yes. Middle school, high school. Many men have bad experiences in that zone. And it is also related to family of origin. This is almost always related to family of origin. Were you touched enough as a child? Were you held? Were you soothed? Like you. You use that word. I thought that was so moving. Because touch is a primary way that you soothe an infant. You touch them, you hold them, you stroke them, you stroke their back. You know, you are supposed to be held a lot as a child. And for a lot of folks around the globe, particularly, I'd say in North America, they were not held enough. They just weren't held enough. They were left alone too much. There are a lot of cultures where infants are never not held. They're always held. They are not always held by the Bio parents. But in the. Within the tribe, within the village, they are always held. They are passed around. They are always held to someone's chest. They can feel the heartbeat. We are meant to be held. And I do think that there's. They're just. I don't know if I'd use the word epidemic, but there's countless millions of children, not just men, but children that just weren't held enough. And so they have often a state of anxiety or fe. Fear a lot of the time that they're carrying around. And again, it doesn't have to stay that way, but it is important to understand the origins and particularly for men. Since we are talking primarily about men, I want to talk about, you know, where this comes from. Where does this come from? You know, where does this fear come from? And I'm going to say more generally, not just fear of touch, but fear of women. And what we've seen a lot of the time is that it's not all the time, but I'm just gonna. We're just gonna roll with it for this. A lot of the time it comes from experiences with Mom. Right. What was mom like? And there are three main archetypes that we wanted to cover today with respect to what mom was like that we've seen in our work. And the first one is anxious, worried Mom. So mom herself is pretty anxious, kind of wound up maybe doing a lot of things at the same time, running around, hurrying around, and sort of her baseline state is anxious anxiety. And I have a few friends that had moms like this. And there's a sort of constant state of, I'd say vigilance.

Jason Lange: Yeah.

Melanie Curtin: And never a sense of relaxation. Right. All is well, we're hanging out, nothing's really going on. Right. This is going to be whether it's like, oh, does everyone have, like, the drink that they need? Is every. Is everybody okay? Does everyone have what they need? Or, you know, am I okay? Should I be doing something? You can feel the amped up nature of that. And for some women, that's how they're parenting. That's how they're parenting their children. And they don't necessarily realize it. Right. Because what their experience is just, well, the world is kind of scary. And I need to make sure that everything's put together and perfect so that I can be safe myself. Right. This is. I just want to be really clear. We're not blaming this kind of mom. We're just explaining these archetypes and then the effect of them. And this is one of the Ones that. That's the nervous system that this child or these children were raised on. That's the, that's the template that they were given. Can you share a little bit about what you've seen in your own, you know, friendships or our clients or anything? I don't think that your mom falls into this category. But what have you noticed about this?

Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, in a sense it's. It's a mom whose nervous system is stuck in a kind of sympathetic activation. Vigilance, like you said, is the right word for it. So there's a lot of fear dropped driving her, just fear in her system about the state of the world or things that might happen or worries about this or that. And I mean, what's key about this then is right as kids, we regulate towards our parents nervous systems. So if our primary feminine attachment figure is anxious and in fear, there's a certain amount of that our nervous system takes on and mirrors. It's hard for us to just relax as a young boy if mom is totally wound up all the time. Right. And so we get used to being in fear. Right. What's she afraid of now? How do I have to show up in this moment to help soothe her fear? Again, what starts to happen is the, the locus of attention moves onto her and the state of her fear in anxiety, in worry, in a sense. And what it can create is, I mean, in some sense like a superpower in certain guys who are extremely sensitive to the state of a woman's nervous system there with. And so there can be this vigilance. Then we as adult men are bringing in and afraid of what she's feeling. Is she anxious right now? I don't know. Is she like. We start to replicate our mom's energy in how we're feeling this. Is she okay right now? Is this. Did I do too much of this? Did I do too much of that? Should I have done this? And we're in fear of her fear, in a sense, and her anxiety. And we assume her anxiety is in a way like the truth, which is one of the problems all three of these archetypes we're going to talk about get into.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah. And there's the thing I want to point out here about enmeshment, which is that I really liked the way that you phrased that just now that we come into the world as loving beings and love is what drives so much of our behavior, including what we're talking about here, which is that I love and care about my mom and I want her to Be well. I love and care about my mom, and I want her to be okay. And that becomes, when we are not aware of it, codependence. Because we are dependent on her state. And so we're busy regulating her so that we are also okay. And this is also kind of known as enmeshment. And what we. What we also see that we don't necessarily want, right, is independence. Independence, which is, I don't need anyone else. I'm an island. And this isn't necessarily a conscious thought, but it's a pushing away of dependence, right? There's codependence, independence, and what we want, what we're looking for, the ideal is interdependence. And interdependence is I actually do know how I feel and what's going on inside me and what I want. And I am also attuned to you and what you need and what you want. So there's a dual situation happening. I am aware of myself and I am aware of you rather than I am only aware of you. I've sacrificed myself completely. All my attention is going to regulating you. And most parentified children were raised that way. So most parentified children have to learn how to come back to themselves. How am I feeling? What do I need? What am I wanting in this moment? Because the tendency, if we don't do any consciousness work, is just to sacrifice ourselves and do everything for the other person so that they're okay. That's what we were trained on. And that's, you know, another. Another way of saying that is codependence. And ideally, through the work, like you said, working that muscle, the atrophied muscle, we become interdependent, which is, I do need you and you do need me. And we are. We are interdependent. It's not independent. I don't need you at all. We all need each other. We all need love. We all need affection. We need it just as much as we need sunlight, air, food, shelter. We need love. We. We die without it. It slowly sometimes, but quickly other times, you know, we can't. We can't live without it. So I think that that's something to keep in mind as we're going through all of these archetypes is that we're not saying, you know, don't need anyone. It's, you know, we're not saying that. And we're also saying enmeshment is not healthy. And what, what will happen if you don't do your consciousness work is you will repeat the patterns of Your family, period. If you don't do an intervention, that's what will happen. If you were raised in a securely attached home, great. Then you're going to repeat that most of us were not. So sometimes it takes something to get there. Any other comments on that? Anxious worried mom before we move on?

Jason Lange: Just that, you know, I think you'll see this pattern as we go on here. Oftentimes then in particular, the thing we fear than in our feminine partner is the state our mom often held. So, oh, if she's anxious, that's like my greatest fear. If she's angry, that's my greatest fear. If she's sad, that's my great. And I will do whatever I have to to try to make her not feel that. And we're going to kind of dive into those here.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah. So let's move on to angry controlling mom. So, yeah, angry controlling mom. Often this will. Often some of these will correlate to borderline personality disorder, bp, also known as bpd. We've done several episodes on bpd, particularly if your mom was quite angry and controlling. You're probably going to want to listen to some of those episodes. But yeah, angry controlling mom could be angry and controlling with the kids and. Or with her spouse or partner, whoever was there. This will affect the children either way. And this is going to be the type of thing where you're really scared of her criticism because it came with real consequences. And when I say real consequences, I think a lot of times we, we think about domestic violence as physical hitting. And that's sort of like the pinnacle of. Of emotional abuse or physical abuse. And there is something that stands apart when it comes to physical violence in the home that is borne out through research. There's something particularly pernicious about that and really, really, really scary for a young person's nervous system. And I also want to say that one of the things that can happen with angry controlling mom is that she can take all her love away. So there's a way that when she's angry or upset, she might give the silent treatment or pout or sulk or just kind of, what is someone called it, like emotional toxic gas. I thought that was a great way of saying it. Of just this sort of atmosphere of stress or anxiety or. It's not anxiety. It's like stress, anger, frustration. Just it sort of permeates the home. And I just want to say that for a little person, having love taken away is really stressful and it's a true consequence, but it's not something that we think about, you know, it. It's not as obvious, I guess, is what I'm trying to say as something like physical violence, but it's still really, really harmful for a little, a little young person. So if you had an angry, controlling mom, of course you're going to be afraid of women until you do some consciousness work. Because mom was scary. Right? You were scared because mom was scary. That's, that's how it works. And it's easy to forget that we were really small. We were really, really tiny compared to our adult caregivers. They were so much bigger than us. They had so much power. And that's, you know, a lot of our brains were formed between 0 and 6. So do you have any, anything to offer around that? What you've noticed in terms of particularly clients with angry, controlling mom.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, good thing to know about anger. The angry one is. Yes. That can be directed at you or the kids. And that's a very unique flavor of it. It can also be that kind of angry at the world, angry at dad, whether he's living in their stolen partnership or not. Right. A version of this is the constantly badmouthing your deadbeat father who blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which then, you know, gets absorbed by many young boys as well. Men are bad. I'm bad because I'm a man, because men are bad because all I do is hear mom talk about how awful dad and men are. And then, yeah, there's the version of this that's, that's the kind of. I would also say maybe the controlling high expectation thing too, of there's a way you need to be. And if you're not, that, that's bad. You're bad. Whether that's academic, sports, cultural behaviors and choices as well, that can be really hard on boys. That again will then map onto future partners. Because there's a fear, there's a way I have to be with them in order to earn love. Right. It's just a kind of simple way to think about that.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah. Thank you for speaking to that. I really appreciate that. Because what you're talking about there is conditional love.

Jason Lange: Yes.

Melanie Curtin: I will love you if you are successful at sports. I will love you if you are successful at this musical instrument that I have selected for you. I will love you if you get straight A's. And if you don't, I will withhold my love. That is conditional love, and that is inherently anxiety producing. Right. Inherently, it's stressful because we need love. We need love. We will do anything to get it. It's a need. It's a human need. And I can't tell you how many clients we've worked with this kind of pattern that again, the parents don't realize they're doing half the time. They don't understand. They want their child to be successful. They think this is what it takes to be successful. So I'm going to nudge them or direct them in this way without realizing that the message the kid is receiving is you're only worthy of love if you are perfect. And that is exhausting. And that will lead to fear of not being perfect. And so then you're contorting yourself in all these ways to be perfect for your partner so that you will earn love so that you will be loved. Okay. Um, and then the last archetype is depressed, dissociated, absent mom. And dissociated can also be related to addiction. So could be a substance, could be an activity, but something where mom is there, but she's not really present. So she's emotionally absent, whether she's physically present or not. And she's kind of depressed or down or just dampened in some way. Right. She's not truly alive. There's not aliveness vibrating through her body. She's not moving in that way. Um, can you share a little bit about what that one is like?

Jason Lange: Yeah, I would say that, you know, that's one where young boys we've worked with who then became men get really good at caretaking their parent, in a sense, and kind of lifting her out of that, making her okay. And so there. Boys raised in that environment can have a very good. Can be very good lovers. They're very loving. They can bring a lot of positivity. There can be like a performative aspect in the sense of I got to lift you up, so I got to be silly or funny or kind of bring her up out of that. And you know, the guys I've worked with who have had parents like this, you know, some. Some of their mothers were addicted to alcohol or certain drugs. But yeah, there was just like depression often, like a darkness, a lack of vitality, a kind of not thereness that the young boy then has to learn to work with and take on often, then takes on the responsibility of getting her out of that. I have to rescue my mom. Right. And these guys will often then later in life be magnetized to partners who have a lot of need or aren't in a stable place in their life because they get to be the hero, get to Be the rescuer, so to speak, for. For this kind of mother or, you know, the. The level of their mom's grief was so intense, they just cannot be around it. In an adult woman, any kind of depressive or sad emotion, they just. They'll. They'll eject. They're out. They're so far away from that. And they might go the other way, right. To just constantly partying or being with, you know, drug like, where there's just no emotional room for that kind of thing. But again, you know, with all three of these, what we're kind of pointing to is the intensity of these experiences creates a fear that lives on in the adult man's nervous system later on that he wants to not have to come into contact with, and will create all kinds of mechanisms and strategies in order to mitigate encountering that energy. Again, one of which, you know, is the nice guy, the. Okay, well, I'm going to constantly disregard my internal state to just make sure your internal state is even and keeled. Right. Whether that's anxious, angry, or sad and depressed, like in. In the third archetype there. And that ultimately does not work.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah, I, I appreciate you connecting the dots there about, you know, it seems like these are all pretty disparate ways of being raised or disparate ways of being. But they all often lead to the same thing, which is fear of women. And I'd like to shift now into kind of like, well, what does a guy do about this, right? If he's like, oh, yeah, I'm pretty scared of women. I've been scared of women pretty much my whole life. I didn't want to rock the boat in my marriage, right. I was scared of my wife. I was scared of, you know, whatever it is. And it's not, like, constant all the time, but it's. It's frequent enough that it. It's a thing. What does a man do about it?

Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, short of it is the theme of this podcast is you got to start doing your work to unwind some of this wounding in your nervous system. But, you know, a theme we've been working with a few men in our program lately is to really attack the fear in a sense of, you know, we use this phrase in a group a couple weeks ago. If, you know, if fear is leading, you are not. So if you are afraid of your feminine partner, your woman, you can't really lead her, including if you're afraid of her emotions. Right. So if you're afraid of her in her anxiety or in her anger, or in her depression, you are not effectively going to be able to lead her through that. So you have to be more comfortable in that. Right. Is part of what you want to cultivate. And how do we do that? Inner work, somatic work, shadow work, Getting into men's groups, getting more comfortable, being in intense spaces, doing hard things like you and I were talking about and learning, actually learning some of the mechanics here of, you know, polarity and masculine and feminine, alpha and omega, whatever you want to call it, energy inside of us that I think sometimes, particularly for us more men, we confuse, like the weather with the geography, right? Where it's like one is something that comes and goes, right? So her emotional state is something everybody has. We have it as men too. And it comes and goes and it changes. Oftentimes we'll confuse that for, oh, my God, this is how the land is now, right? It's over. She's mad at me. I fucked that up. I can't ever. Right? We're. We're doomed. I'm so doomed now. I'm a piece of shit. I'm no good. It's. It's all true. Like that. That's a. That's a much slower moving thing, right? It takes millions of years for the mountains to change, for the land to change. It's much more steady. And as we, you know, as I've learned that in my journey and I still have to learn this, right? I learn it with my kids, I learn it with my wife. Ah. Her emotional state is not the truth. It's a partial truth about something she's experiencing in the moment, but it's not necessarily going to be the same experience for her ten minutes from now. So it's not useful for me to get completely swept up in that. I don't want to dissociate from it and ignore it or make it wrong. That's not useful either, Right. This is kind of that middle lane that we work with so many guys on. I want to be attuned and connected, but also not be enmeshed by it or subsumed by it. Right? So it's learning to not fear that is. Oh, my wife can be super pissed at me. And that doesn't mean she doesn't love me and adore me or isn't going to be just as grateful to be with me the next day, right. Sometimes it's quite literally like, oh, I just have to ride this storm a little bit, welcome it, let the feeling move through her nervous system and then that's it, you know? Like that's it. And this is one of the great skills that we have to work with a lot of men around is just got to stop fearing our feminine partner. Because if we're in fear, we can't lead. And that's not super useful for her, right? For anyone. It's like, oh my God. Hey, lead me. Wait, you're just as scared as I am. Fuck. Right? What now? No. Okay. You know, we value when we're around someone who, when we are in fear, we can feel their steadiness. Doesn't mean they don't have fear, but there's like a sturdiness to them. And so doing that work really often starts with us getting more connected to our own emotional experience. Right. This is the polarity I talk about with so many guys that whatever you're uncomfortable feeling inside yourself, that's going to show up in the partnership as something you're afraid of being around, including even something as simple as feedback. Right. I used to be afraid of disappointing my partner, my wife, Violet, because I was still uncomfortable with the level of self loathing and low self esteem I had for myself. Right. So I didn't want to feel that. So I could never be wrong, right. I'd come into that lawyer mode, have to defend because if she was right in something and I messed up or I dropped the ball or I'd hurt her, I actually had to connect to and feel the parts of me that I didn't want to feel as I got more comfortable and you know, in some sense got more intimate with my shame and self loathing and doesn't run the show anymore. I'm actually way more open to taking feedback now. Right. Of oh yeah, no, you're right. I'm sorry, I just did that. That was, that was not cool or whatever that might be and makes me a lot less afraid of our interactions. And you know, if I'm low resourced and stressed out or tired, I can get triggered into, into the fear all the time. But even when I do now, I can move through it much faster. And things that would have been, you know, two day standoffs are now sometimes just minutes.

Melanie Curtin: I appreciate you saying that because I think that progress is often in much the same way that when we're training physically, resilience is about how quickly we recover. Right. The run is still difficult, but we recover faster. I think in intimate partnerships it's often you don't necessarily stop having that fight, but you have the fight way faster so it doesn't become this massive, you know, relationship threatening Situation. It's more like, ah, sorry, okay, then you move forward. I wanted to come back to something that I thought was important in what you said, which is the weather versus the topography. And this reminds me a lot of, you know, teenagers who were like, I hate you, and they slam the door. And we all know they don't really mean I hate you. They mean, I'm in a lot of pain and I feel like you're trying to control my life or, you know, I feel trapped in some way, right? I'm. I'm having big feelings and I'm pushing them out on you. And for a lot of parents, they love their child in this way that it makes it tolerable for them to, you know, be angry with them. Right? It's like, oh, my kid is angry with me. But there's a sort of grasp of like, and I still love them and I see the pain underneath, and I'm not necessarily blown out by it. That's not always the case. You can be blown out by it. But where I'm going with this is what I'm hearing you say in that situation is that that's often what it's like, relating with the feminine. That if you can stick with this is an expression that she's bringing in this moment. This is an emotional truth that she's. That she's storming, right? And there's. It doesn't mean, you know, the relationship is over or I'm a terrible boyfriend or everything's wrecked, but the capacity to do that, the ability to stay present and grounded in those moments, that requires intensity. It requires the ability to stay present with intensity. The reason I'm bringing that up is that I want to connect the dots between something like coming to our live retreat and doing some hard things and growing yourself in this way that when we're talking about, are you scared of women? I think it could be easy to say, well, I should just, I don't know, do exposure therapy or something. Or work with women. Yes, working with women is important, and men's work is important. You know, in person retreats are important. Any kind of emotional growth is important. It's not just about women, right? It's about relationships. It's about relating. And when you're in spaces where you're processing intensity, you're learning how to physically be with intensity in your body, emotional intensity in your body. When you're witnessing other men going through their process at a live event, you're growing your nervous system. You're learning what it is to be with intensity, to ride the waves and then to be okay and to be soothed and to come down, to down regulate. So one of the things that, for example, we are proponents of in our work together is doing something hard and then doing something soothing. So doing something really hard together as a group, and then downregulating, coming back into softness, sweetness, okayness, that was missing in a lot of people's homes. You didn't learn how to come back into being regulated. There was just anxious, stressed out mom, and that was it. There was no ah. And here's how you move your body from a state of up to a state of relaxation. Here's how you do it. And we're gonna do it as a group. We're gonna do it again. You're gonna feel what that's like, the transmission of that. And that's part of what's required in those moments of intensity with a spouse. Right. That's part of what's required to hold that position of I'm still in touch with myself and my center. And I'm also tracking you because again, the training for a lot of nice guys was, I sacrifice everything that's happening in me and I regulate you. I sacrifice everything happening over here and I regulate you. And that, first of all, is terrible for polarity, also terrible for your health. It's not. It's not good. Right? But learning how to bring your energy back, right? To actually be centered and grounded and be in relationship, that is what it takes to be able to roll with the weather and really understand this is temporary, this is not permanent. Because if you don't have that training in your nervous system, you're going to be worried and that's going to come through. Anything to add there?

Jason Lange: Yeah, just to kind of tie this all together in terms of polarity. It's something I mentioned before. And we do work with our guys around. Right. The essence of this is if we're in fear of her in her state or whatever we mean, you know, we explored some different versions of that fear here. It's very hard for her to trust us. Right. So if I'm afraid of her emotions, she can't trust me to bring her full emotional range and self. And that is antithetical to polarity. Right. If she's having to modulate herself or I'm modulating myself to her, it's not authentic in either way and the polarity is not going to be there. So when we say we have to, like, learn to not fear our feminine partner's storm or energy or emotional range. Part of what we mean, right? When she. When she feels, oh, this man can take my anger, that actually builds trust. That doesn't mean I'm just absorbing it as a pushover, but it means I meet her in it. I'm not afraid of it. Right. I'm willing to engage, connect through it. That's why this work is meaningful, because when you can bring that to a feminine partner, it's extremely meaningful to them because, you know, you could speak to this more than I can, but it's pretty rare to move through the world and find people who can emotionally meet you and aren't afraid of your grief or anger or fear or whatever that might be, but instead are just right with you in it. Like, yeah, I get it. Right. Like, imagine again, this kind of shows up in the anxious man mother. But for a kid, like, if I was afraid of my daughter's emotional state, I would be a terrible parent. And some parents are. And that's where we see this, you know, polarity of boundaryless parenting, where kids are just left to their own devices to do whatever they want. And it's disastrous. It's quite harmful to the kid to not have any limits. And so as a parent, if I'm afraid, you know, that that causes harm and the same thing is going to happen in relationship. So we don't want to make her wrong for her emotions. We don't want to minimize the emotions, but we don't also want to see them as the, oh, my God, it's the end of the world. My partner's upset right now. That causes damage too. Instead, it's my partner's upset right now. Okay, this is a moment for me to get present and lean in more and meet her in a sense. And we can't do that if we're afraid of. What if she doesn't like what I did or what if she's pissed at me or whatever. We can't help in some sense that.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah, it occurs to me that part of doing consciousness work is growing up. The parts of ourselves that weren't grow up. And it's totally possible. It happens all the time. We witness it in our men. I've witnessed it in you in the years that I've known you. I've seen it in myself. And I really want to validate what you're saying about. Oh, man. A man who can actually be with me, just be with me in my expression is very rare and very hot. Just want to say that. So as we're starting to wrap up here. I do want to say that we still have a few spots left for our live retreat that is happening at the end of August. I think when this recording drops, it'll be in three to four weeks from when this recording drops. And if you want any info on that, you can go to Evolutionary Men Retreat. And I just want to say, if you're thinking about coming, it will move you. You will be moved in some way. And all of the things that we're talking about here are relevant. Everything. This. This. This is the kind of thing that we work with at the retreat. This is the kind of thing that we work with in our program in Pillars of Presence. These are the kinds of things that we're working with. Mental health and. And it works. Yeah. Anything to add?

Jason Lange: It's also a lot of fun. Come hang out.

Melanie Curtin: We would love to see you there. Evolutionary Men slash retreat or Evolutionary men slash apply. If you're interested in coaching. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da.