The fear of coming off as creepy is one of the things that actually makes men come off as creepy. That's a big part of what Melanie and I got into on this episode of Dear Men, and it's something I see time and time again with the men I work with.
We covered three areas: being in your body and breathing, context awareness, and being in right relationship with your sexuality. They're all connected, so think of it less like a checklist and more like poking the same pond in three different places.
The first one is the most underestimated. When you're up in your head, disconnected from your body, not breathing, you tend to pull the woman you're with up into her head too. She starts tracking. Is he attracted to me? What's going on with him? I can't tell. And when two people are in their heads like that in an attraction context, it's not good. But when you're grounded, present, and breathing, her nervous system follows. There's a direct inverse relationship between safety and creepy. If she feels safe with you, it won't feel creepy. That's it.
Context awareness is the more layered one. Knowing where you are, who you're with, what the history is, what the power dynamics are. I shared a story from a night on a dance floor where I was touch starved and completely missing what was actually happening for her. I thought the connection was there. She shoved me off when we got outside. She wasn't saying no to me. She was saying not like this, not right now. A lot of men miss that distinction.
The third piece, being in right relationship with your own sexuality, is where most of the shame lives. So many men I work with are either too stuffed around their sexuality or completely uncontained with it. Both cause problems. The work is containment, not suppression. There's nothing wrong with sexual energy. It's what we do with it that matters.
If any of this lands for you, what would it look like to move through the world more grounded in your body, less in your head?
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Jason Lange: But when I'm just relaxed, breathing in my body, then often what that'll reciprocate is her being connected to her body. And here's the thing, guys, if she's in her body, so if she's connected to her body, she feels you're attracted to her and she feels safe, she's not going to feel creepy.
Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of the most common ones with the men in particular we work with, that there's such a fear about being creepy that there's all kinds of other downstream consequences that will talk about. But the main reason for doing this right is if there's some deeper understanding here. Our hope is that it does allow men to bring themselves more forward in a way that feels good to everyone involved.
Melanie Curtin: Absolutely. So we have the top three basically ways to make sure you're not being creepy. So we're going to start with number three and work our way up to the number one way to not be creepy or not come off as creepy. So number three, the number three way to make sure that you're not coming off as creepy slash not being creepy is to be in your body and breathe. I know that sounds basic, but it is very common that when a man is around someone he finds attractive, his body locks up and he stops breathing. And that can be felt on the other side. Would you like to elaborate on this from your own personal experience?
Jason Lange: Yeah, totally. As someone who was more kind of anxious, numb, frozen a lot in my life, I wasn't in my body and wasn't able to have a good relationship with my sexuality in that sense. And because of that, you know, women either didn't feel me or I came at them too hard. Right. Which is gonna. Again, a lot of times we do these lists and they. They blend. Right. So you can think of this more pond, and we're just poking the stick down in three different areas, but it all overlaps. But that capacity to just literally be connected to my body, feeling what I'm feeling in the moment, in the moment is very key. And breathing is often so much more powerful than almost all the men we work with realize. And, you know, I'm someone who doesn't consider myself a good flirter. Right. I don't have like zippy talking, kind of humor wit that I project. You know, good flirters do. And I think a lot of our guys come in and assume they have to have that, and it creates all kinds of things. But part of. Part of what we're talking about here is how to not be creepy is when you are in touch with your attraction. It's just feeling your body and breathing in the process. It's almost all it takes to transmit a healthy version of that. And what's really key, I would say about this one in particular is. Right. We talk a lot in our program about this idea that head evokes head, heart evokes heart, and body evokes body. Right. That's a type of polarity. And so if you're up in your head, not in your body, and breathing, you're often going to reciprocate. A woman, in the case we're talking about here, also kind of being up in her head, like, what's going on with him? I don't know. Is he attracted to me? Is he thinking about something? I can't tell. And then she's thinking about it. And often when two people are thinking in that way, when it comes to attraction, it's not super attractive, and it can have its own versions of creepy. But when I'm just relaxed, breathing in my body, then often what that'll reciprocate is her being connected to her body. And here's the thing, guys. If she's in her body, so if she's connected to her body, she feels you're attracted to her and she feels safe, she's not going to feel creepy. If she's connected to her body and you are not, it's not going to feel great. If she's not connected to her body at all, it's also not going to feel great. So part of what we're saying here is one of the ways you can kind of counteract creepy is just being present and breathing. Not locked up, not withholding, just I'm right here, right now.
Melanie Curtin: Yeah. There's two points I want to make about this. One is, we've mentioned this before when it comes to polarity. So the two different poles of polarity are omega and alpha. Omega is more flow, Alpha is more structure. In my experience and in the work that we teach, whoever is breathing more deeply in any given moment is holding Alpha. Whoever is breathing more deeply in any given moment is holding Alpha. This is true in a dating context. It's also true in a work context. If you're in a team meeting, whoever is breathing more deeply is providing more structure. I'm not talking about structure in the meeting. I'm talking about structure in one's nervous system. Structure in the grounding of the room, the grounding of the team, the grounding of the folks in the space. If you've ever been in an emergency situation, you can see that in action. Whoever is breathing more deeply is grounding the situation. They are holding Alpha in that moment. And one of the things that we see a lot, I would say, is A lot of men show up to the work and they're pretty locked up in their bodies. They're pretty rigid, they're pretty tight. Sometimes they'll actually have tight muscles. Their, their stomach is often really tight. They're not even aware of that. But it's felt, right? It's felt on the other side. And what I have found in general is that when a man is locked up and tight in his body and not really breathing, if I, if, if I, I basically don't even notice him. Like, there's a way that he's just sort of invisible, right? But if he's locked up and tight in his body and he sees me. One of the things that can happen where it does feel creepy to me is when there's a, a hyper fixation. It feels like I have all of his attention and he's not breathing. There's no fluidity, there's no play. There' sense of. Yeah, I just keep coming back to that word, fluid. When I imagine the, the times that I have felt creeped out, which I'll get to for each of these categories, have been the times when I felt like I am the sole point of focus. And it's intimidating and it's a little scary. It feels a little threatening. And when I think about men that were fluid with their attraction in their bodies, breathing, right? And this could be, you know, people on the street or in a bar or in a library. You know, I've told this story on the podcast multiple times that my most memorable experience of this one, feeling creeped out was in a library and there was a guy across the way. And I felt hyper fixated upon. I felt his attention and energy, and it was just on me to the exclusion of everything else. Could not feel him breathing, did not feel him in his body. Very heady. And I felt scared. I felt scared. I felt scared about walking home alone. And I actually said to him, you're staring at me. I said it aloud across the library because dusk, it was starting to get dark and I didn't really know what to do. And I was like, let me just name this. And so in basically every way, I was holding Alpha in that moment, right? I am holding consciousness. I'm breathing more deeply. I'm naming the moment. I'm holding Alpha, and I don't really feel safe. When I think about men that are in their bodies and breathing, I have felt. What's the word? Even if I haven't felt attracted to that man, I have felt safe, right? So I'm thinking Of at a bar context or a party or whatever. Feeling noticed hasn't actually felt good to me. So. So it's almost the. It's the opposite. It's like, oh, I feel beautiful, I feel seen, I feel noticed, and I feel safe. So there's something about a man being in his body and breathing that a, takes work to get to because a lot of men have unresolved trauma living in their tissues. So they're just locked up and rigid almost all of the time. Because your issues are in your tissues. They're just. That's just how they're moving through the world. And then B, what's really great is that when you, when you loosen up, when you do the work, when you get into your body and you breathe, then you have a lot more success. So, for example, one of our clients, this is not even. Not. This is like within the last year came and he had come from a really pretty, pretty awful marriage, Just very lonely and I think not a lot of sex happening and was pretty intimidated to get back on the dating market. You know, how do I even do this? I haven't dated in 30 years. I don't even. I don't even know where to start. I'm very intimidated. You know, came into the program and I would say it was probably within the first few weeks. I think it was within the first three or four weeks. Got on the apps, doing the work, applying the concepts, everything that we teach, and getting much more into his body and breathing. And it was funny, was when he came in, he was like, what the hell is embodiment? You know, I mean, I hear you talk about it on the podcast all the time. And I gotta be honest, I don't know what the fuck that is. I just really don't. He didn't use the F word because he's not really like that, but I am. And so within three or four weeks, he's on the apps, he meets a woman, and he just applies everything we're talking about. And he's in his body and he's, you know, reading the room and he's in the moment and he's attuning. And he got into basically the sexiest, most fun dating relationship of his life. And it didn't end up lasting forever, but it was a beautiful growth relationship. It was a beautiful, wonderful experience for both people. They. They parted on, you know, friendly terms. It was just a really healthy relationship. It was a healthy sexual relationship between these two people that both wanted to go there and he was able to relax and Be in his body and breathe and generate polarity based on all the things that we talk about. And I remember on one of the calls him saying, you know, this stuff really works. I don't really understand. I still don't really understand embodiment, but it's working. It's working. Any comments on that?
Jason Lange: Yeah, I think I'll just kind of tie this one up with, I think you named it. So very simply, right. Why it's so important to be in your body and breathing is there tends to be an inverse relationship between safety and creepy. So another way to think about what creepy means is something doesn't feel safe. Right. That's it. So if, if I walk into a space and someone feels creepy, part of what is I'm having to track am I safe with this person and what might be about to happen. And if I'm having to track, guess what, like you said, I'm holding alpha, right? So that's going to fuck up polarity in a sense. But when we're in our bodies, grounded, present breathing, that is one of the strongest signals we can send for safety. Because if I'm in my body grounded in breathing, I'm much more likely to be attuned to you. I'm much more likely to be aware of what's going on inside myself. I'm more aware that I'm staring at you or that I'm feeling attracted of or whatever that might be. So if you're not in your body and if none of that makes sense to you, that is one of the things that can contribute to a woman in particular, not feeling safe with you. And that's going to basically lead to creepiness because she's going to have to track her safety. And as you promote her feeling safe, one of the easiest ways to do that, get into your body. That's going to allow her to get into her body again. If she gets into her body and she's feeling safe with you, attraction will flow. It won't be super creepy in a sense.
Melanie Curtin: Absolutely. And like you said, I liked the sort of it's all the same pond, different elements of the same pond. But I think it's interesting, number two, that we have on this list, in order to not be creepy, you must be context aware. Context aware. And this relates to two different contexts. One is literally the physical context that you're in. So if you're on a deserted subway platform late at night, that's a different context than a crowded bar or a beer garden during the day. But also the context can be. For example, I had a recent experience where a friend of my dad's. So someone that is older than me, not, you know, 30 years older than me, he's sort of between my age and my dad's age, but someone who's older than me, the context of whose relationship I have is as my dad's friend. I am his friend's daughter. Okay? And the way that he looked at me felt creepy. It wasn't something he said explicitly, it wasn't something he did explicitly, but I felt creeped out because of the way he was looking at me. And that this one has a lot to do with containment, whether you're able to contain your sexual energy, your. Your attraction. And what's interesting is, you know, this is sort of a spectrum. If you think of it as 0 to 10, right? 0. You contain your sexual energy at all times, in all contexts, always. And 10 is you have no containment. You're just going around just exuding your sexual vibes everywhere you go, with no containment at all. If you think about those two poles, the one where you're not containing at all, which a lot of them, you know, sort of fuck boys live in this category. That's a kind of. What is the word? Like, it's hard to put into words, but it's basically, it feels really irresponsible. So, for example, I have been. I've had women friends talk about being in a work meeting or a work context of some kind and feeling a man's sexual energy coming towards them, which in a different context at a bar, in a club, or a friend of a friend at a barbecue, a different social context would have been fine. But during a work meeting, while she's presenting, doing a slide deck presentation, or the context, being a potential new client, things like that, it feels really irresponsible to me. And it feels a little bit like kind of what I want to say to that man is, grow up, grow up. Learn to contain yourself. Because I think healthy containment is related to discernment, which is basically, I am in this context, therefore I'm going to behave this way. I'm in this context and I'm going to behave this way. What's interesting is that on the other end of the spectrum, we have the contained all the time guy, right? I contain my sexual energy all the time, constantly. Which means that I don't. I don't bring it on dates, I can't bring it in public, I don't bring it at the beer cart, I don't bring it in the Club. I'm not bringing it ever. And we work with those guys, we help those guys be able to turn the volume up in the right context. And I want to say that if you're out there listening and you're concerned with being creepy, I respect you because you. Because that's coming from a really good place. You have a good heart. You have integrity. You don't want to make a woman feel uncomfortable. You don't want to make her feel unsafe. So you've overcorrected, you've gone down to zero. When we really want you to be around 5, we want you to spike up to 8 and drop down to 2. But we want you to be connected enough to your sexuality and your sexual energy that when you choose to, you can bring the spark, you can generate polarity. And when you choose to, you can contain yourself. So if you're around your, you know, somebody's daughter that you care about, you can contain yourself. Right? That you. That you're not kind of leaking sexual energy in this way. That feels creepy. That feels creepy. So context dependent is about both sort of geography and physicality as well as your relationship to that person. Right. Gauging, where are we in this relationship? How much trust and rapport do we have built in this relationship? So it can also be kind of, you know, I have. I have seen men be creepy in situations where they're sort of watching two friends, other people kind of teasing each other, and then they try to get in on it, but they don't have the same level of closeness and trust as those two people. So then the conversation kind of stops and there's this record scratch moment of like, ooh. That actually didn't feel good at all because they. They didn't. They weren't reading the room. They couldn't read the room. They didn't know. Oh, I don't have the same level of trust built with those people. So just. This is not very. I don't know what the word is that, like, my friends will call me a bitch, and that's fine because they know me really well and they're kind of joking and I trust them. I know that they love me, they have my back. It's a different relationship than a stranger or someone that doesn't know me as well or an acquaintance, which would feel really weird. That would feel really weird and off. Right. It wouldn't necessarily feel creepy because there's not a sexual context in that regard. But, man, when you add sex in there, sexuality, it gets really weird really fast. So not being able to read those social cues. Not being able to read the room is related to number three, being in your body and breathing. When you're in your head and you're not in your body, it's way, way harder to read the room. It's really hard to read the room when you're not actually in the room. When you're just in your head, you're kind of like calculating and ruminating and trying to figure out what to say, when to say it. If I say it now, you're not present in the space. I'm curious if you have any comments on that.
Jason Lange: Yeah, like we said, these things are all deeply aware or related. And context awareness is deeply related to something we often teach, which is attunement. Right. Attunement just means being able to resonate and feel where someone's at, to attune to them. And you can't be attuned if you're not aware of what's going inside yourself, let alone someone else, and then the environment around you.
Melanie Curtin: You.
Jason Lange: Right. So context aware is such a key one because this is where, you know, I sometimes think we hear the, the feedback about certain men are clueless or creepy. Right. Like the, the. You go to a party and a married guy is clearly attracted and kind of leaking his energy with someone and you're like, you know, I'm, I know your wife. Like this, this is creepy. He's not aware of the context that, hey, this isn't really appropriate. I'm, I'm in a, in, in a marriage here. He's certainly not aware of what he's energy, which we'll, we'll talk about. This is also a really big one for power dynamics. Right. What are the power dynamics in the workplace? In a teacher student relationship, there's lots of different places this shows up financially even sometimes. And so the, the key about context aware doesn't mean certain contexts prohibit you from ever pursuing any kind of romantic connection. It means one of the ways you can be less creat be as a man is being aware of the context and often speaking it. So. Right. Hey, I'm aware we work together and you know, there's not technically any policy against dating, but I'm aware. What that this is a thing. And I'm aware I'm attracted to you and I want to pursue you outside of here. But the most important thing to me is that our workplace relationship stays safe and you feel safe in that. That's context. Aw, right. That's speaking to the awkwardness, the Uncertainty that will create a lot more safety than not. And like you said, if I'm not in my body, it can be really hard to attune to her, to the environment. Context aware is also about the nature of your relationship. Right. Sometimes we think our relationship is one thing, but we're totally unaware of the actual context. Right. So this is, you know, it gets into tricky territory sometimes. Like if you're at the coffee shop and the breeze as being really friendly, certain guys interpret that as oh my God, she's really attracted to me. Which is not always context aware of actually it's her job to be friendly and engaging and she's seeing 400 people a day. Again, doesn't mean attraction is not possible there. But it's the kind of thing, you know, we, we want to speak about and speak towards the other piece of context where I'll, I'll just speak about is about our partner's history. Right. So for me, I had a real split with Violet recently around an unattuned moment where something that I had experienced differently elsewhere hit her trauma in pretty significant ways. And so in my mind it wasn't a thing, but I wasn't attuned to how it would land in her particular nervous system. So context aware is something that actually gets easier with time with our partners. Right. As well, in that in long term relationship we still have to be context aware. Right. I have to be aware of what my partner's been through in her past or even just in that individual day sometimes because the same thing might land differently, a different day of the week or if we've been relating in a different way. So just being aware of the context, you know, this is kind of a more heady, esoteric one. But again, it's a extremely masculine. Because it's consciousness, it's awareness, it's. I'm aware of the circumstances that you and I are relating to. If I'm not aware of that, that can create a feeling of lack of safety and creepiness. So context awareness is one we could, I mean, we do teach quite a bit about it in our programs and we could keep going on and on about. And it's going to be unique in different situations. But it's just that awareness of what's the context we're relating in, what's the context we're physically in right now. Like you said, if I'm walking down the street late at night and you're the only one on the road, probably not the right time to kind of creep up behind you or If I'm on the subway and you have headphones in and you're looking ahead and you're sending that signal, I'm not here to be related with right now or at the gym. That's being context aware. Doesn't mean in another environment you might not be open to it, but there's choices that are intentionally made there. Now if, you know, I'm making eyes and we make a little eye contact and you pause and you smile at me and maybe pull an earpiece out, okay, the context has just shifted. There's an invitation for engagement there. But if I look at you and you just kind of look away and work out harder, that's a signal. And that's a signal. We need to learn to read as men.
Melanie Curtin: Yeah. I really appreciate this piece around awareness and consciousness because when I think about situations where I have been the one that is more conscious and more aware, it is not polarizing, it's depolarizing. So I'm thinking about, for example, years ago, I was in a. I was in a group house and one of my roommates, housemates was interested in me. And he was a little pushy about it, and it was a little annoying because I would have dated him if we hadn't been housemates. But it had taken a really long time, time to put the house together. It was a. You know, it was a lot of effort. It was. And it was high risk. It's like, if we date and this doesn't work out, it's going to be horrible. And it's going to be horrible not just for us, but for the people we live with. That doesn't feel fair to me at all. And he was just blithely going around, like, pursuing me. And I remember this one time he was at my door, and I don't remember exactly what I said, but I remember being so annoyed, I wanted to stamp my foot like a little kid. Like, again, I had this desire to say, grow up. How can you not be aware of the context that we're in? Why do I have to be the adult in this situation and tell you this is not a good idea? If we didn't live together, that's different. But we do. Why do I have to be the one holding that pole? Why do I have to be the one holding consciousness? And I. I thought that was like. Like an interesting dynamic because to me, it was incredibly obvious. And I hadn't yet sort of said aloud, like, if this doesn't work out, we're gonna screw ourselves over and we're Gonna screw over our friends that we live with. Right? This is about more than just you and me. This is about our environment. This is about our ecology. This is about our community. And the fact that I have to be the one to bring that up pisses me off. And it also has me respect you less, which is depolarizing. It's like, well, now I don't want to date you because you're not context aware. So you just dropped in my estimation. You have no consciousness or awareness of other people around you and how you impact them. I want to know that you understand that. I want to know that you understand that. That is part of what I find attractive. And interestingly, when I think about our clients and, you know, context is something that everyone is negotiating all the time. We're constantly, like, defining and redefining it. Like you mentioned in. Even in a long term love relationship, the context can change and does change. I was thinking about, you know, one of our clients that. That did have a situation where he. And he brought it to us in the program, which is one of the advantages of having, you know, mentorship as you're in the dating or relationship process. He said, yeah, I'm attracted to this woman at work. And I've heard what you said about how that can be a really uncomfortable place for a. And. But like, we get along really well. We've been getting along for months. You know, we have the same taste in music. We just talk for a whole shift. Like, we've really bonded. And I would really like to take it to the next level. How do I do that? And we essentially coached him through having the conversation that you mentioned of. Hey, I'm a little nervous to have this conversation because my top priority is you feeling safe, you feeling safe at work, you feeling safe, not at work. I really want you to feel safe. And I. We work together. You know, we're gonna see each other every day. I'm interested in asking you out. And I want you to know that whether you say yes or no, I'm gonna be okay. I'm gonna be okay. I'm not gonna get weird. I'm not gonna punish you. But I just had to say something because we get along really well. And I would. I would just. I would love to ask you out. That is very different than just saying, will you go out with me? It is preparing the way. It is bringing consciousness and conte tuned. Because I think in large part because he got coaching from me, right? From a woman he led with. I want to make sure you Feel safe. And I want you to know that even if you're a no, I will be okay. I will be okay. I will take care of myself. I will not punish you. I will not harm you. Because that is a woman's biggest fear. There's a quote that says, men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them. And there is a very real fear of physical harm and emotional harm. You know, just all kinds of harm that only comes up when you feel rejected. So me as a woman, as long as I tread carefully and you never feel rejected by me, I'm safe. But if there's a context where you feel rejected by me, now I'm scared because I don't know how you will respond. So if you just ask me out, I might feel scared. I don't know. I don't know. What if I say no? What's going to happen to me? And the way he introduced it with the context was, I understand this part of the context, and I'm telling you, my top priority is that you feel safe. Of course, you have to back that up, right? You can't. You can't say that. And then. And then give her the silent treatment and punish her and talk to coworkers badly about her. You don't do that. But if you're ethically, you know, within. Within bounds, then it's okay to do that. There was another guy that actually changed his context with a woman that he'd been friends with for years. And he, you know, with our coaching, he basically said to her, we've had this friendship for years. I've been interested in you from the beginning. I never told you I'm very attracted to you, and I would like us to date. He said it differently than that. He didn't. He wasn't quite. He didn't have his shit together as much as that. He did his best. He presented it, and it took her a few days or a week. I forget how long it was. But she. She was surprised, and she. The. There had been clues, and this was a very specific situation. This is actually very rare that this happens. But they ended up dating. They ended up having the healthiest love relationship that either of them had ever had. And I think that that's in large part because he was leading. He was leading with vulnerability. He was leading from his heart. He was including his attraction in the encounter. He wasn't, you know, sidelining it, but he was bringing consciousness to, I know that this might not work out, and I'm committed to us Being friends above all else. Right. If, if, if this doesn't work for you and you're not into it, that's fine. We've been friends for a long time. I want to make sure we stay friends and, and I have these feelings and I would like to move this forward if you're available for that. That was a lot. Sorry. I went on for a really long time. Any con comments?
Jason Lange: I think that's all spot on. I mean, I don't have much else to wear or to. To say around. Around context aware other than it is extremely key and it's something you can work with. Again, the problem isn't always the context. It's whether or not you set a container and are able to speak to it to create safety.
Melanie Curtin: That is a really good way of putting it. Thank you for being so succinct. So I want to make sure we get to our last one here, which is the number one way that you can make sure you're not being creepy or coming off as creepy. Number one way is to be in right relationship with your sexuality. Another way of saying this is to deal with, slash process your sexual shame. Can you share a little bit about your personal experience here? I mean, I know you've done so on other episodes, but just briefly, what your personal experience was kind of before and after this.
Jason Lange: Yeah, I was someone who was more in shame around my sexuality. Just not super comfortable with it. Didn't have a lot of experience with it, didn't necessarily have good feedback around it initially. You know, I think a lot of guys that come from a more porny background, like me, our sexuality is something we're taught to hold in shame. Right. Masturbation, porn, do it alone, do it quick, make sure no one sees. And then that bleeds into how we relate in, in, in, in real life. And then we hold that in a culture that's been evolving thankfully over the last decades to show the harms of male sexuality and what happens when it's uncontained. So that tends to create the nice guy. I consider myself and so many men we work with that you were kind of talking about before, where they kind of go in the opposite direction of I afraid of being an uncontained sexual beast that I pull it all back inside. So I was a little bit more like that. But there were moments, you know, that I wasn't contained enough. You know, I tell one story I certainly told on this podcast where I was on a date with a woman. Super touch starve. Like the connection was there, but I Wasn't ding, ding, ding, ding context aware in the dance floor of what her experience was of me in that time. And so I kept trying to basically dance close with her. I was touching her body and then we got out of there and, you know, she basically shoved me off her as we were walking down the street. And it was like, hey, it's not that I don't want that. It's that not like this right now was the thing. And that was an experience I have where having had repressed it so much, it came out too strong in some sense. So, right relationship here, what we're really talking about is being able to contain properly our sexual energy and know when to bring it forward and when not. And guess what? You're not gonna be able to do that if you're not context aware and not in your body. That's part of what leads up to this. That, okay, this is a moment where I can let my attraction really flow. It's feeling safe, the signals are there. We have agreements, whatever those things might be. And we see two sides of this, right? Like we said, we see the uncontained men, which, you know, in, in. In the kind of growth world we joke about, this is a stereotype, so I'm just going to name it, but the kind of, you know, hippie flow boy, leaky, just basically trying to sleep with anybody who will make contact with him. And you can just feel there's no containment around his sexuality whatsoever. Or the guy in public staring like you, who's just not aware of the impact his energy has on someone and whether or not he's grounded in his body. And frequently, you know, in our live pillars calls. I'll drop the old gif for age me a little bit here, but I grew up, you know, there were the Tex Avery cartoons, which were kind of the animated cartoons back in the day, and there's the wolf that like sees the hot woman on stage and he just bing. His eyes go big, his body freezes and his tongue rolls out of his mouth and there's no containment. He's overwhelmed by his sexual energy, and that's not particularly safe. And that can create creepiness, right when it's too out there, in a sense. And that's what so many of our men are afraid of being. Meaning that man can't contain his sexual energy at all, right? He's. He's at a barbecue, his wife's over there with his kid, and he's clearly flirting with this woman. He has no context awareness and he has no containment around his energy, his attraction for this woman. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not a morally bad thing. It's what he's doing with it in that moment, in that he's not containing it at all. Right. And that he's probably not going home and saying to his wife, hey, you know, I was really attracted to someone there. I didn't. Da da da da da. But I just wanted you to know, you know, or healthy ways to kind of work with that. So the being in right relationship is about, again, this realization that there's nothing wrong with our sexuality. It's what we do with it. And when the circumstances are right and it's consensual and there's safety, bring it on. But it's not always that moment. That's the thing we mean by containment. It's being able to attune to, is this the right moment? Are these the right. Is this the right context? Am I in my body? Is she in her body? Et cetera. In that when you don't do that, we tend to stuff it too much as men, and then we kind of become the invisible nice guy.
Melanie Curtin: Yeah. And I want to. I want to talk about a few success stories, a few men that transformed. And I really want to stress that what I have seen work in this regard, processing sexual shame, is doing it in a group. There is something about doing this work while being witnessed by others and witnessing others doing the work. So, for example, we had a man come through the program who had been in a pretty terrible relationship. They weren't married, but they'd been together for a long time. She had borderline personality disorder. It was a really dysfunctional relationship. By the time he got to us, he was like, didn't know how to date, was just kind of scared and small and. And among the suite of things going on for him was sexual shame. And we have an exercise that we do in the program I'm not gonna go into detail on, but he had an absolute breakthrough through during this exercise. Not just sharing with the group, but being witnessed with compassion. Being witnessed with compassion, which is kind of the opposite of bullying. We have a lot of clients come through that are survivors of bullying and healing that relationship with other men. Healing that relationship with the masculine was a complete game changer for him. And he went on to. Yeah, he was on a date. He got a date with a woman that he thought was out of his league, but she came up to him at the end of a live dating event, was like, you should take my number. Here's my number. He's on the date with her and he breathes, he's in his body, he's in his balls. And he holds eye contact with her without words. Generates a lot of polarity. She's like giggling. They end up making out outside the restaurant. And all of that. The origin of all of that was that breakthrough moment. That breakthrough moment was him processing that sexual shame in, in community and stressing that. Because I think a lot of the time there's this idea that we can do it all alone. And what I have seen again and again and again and again is that that's a false idea. We can't do it all alone. And particularly as men in this culture, if you really want the kind of success that you want with women, you have to connect with men. There has to be that coming back into community, that coming back into brotherhood before you can get what you want want with women. Anything to, to add on that before we start to close?
Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, shame is healed in community and in relationship. So they know. It's one of the most powerful things about the container we create for men, allowing them to reclaim the healthy parts of their sexuality so they can bring it forward with ding, ding, ding. The partners and the women they're dating that often want it actually. So this is, again, it's about choice. This third one, being in right relationship is about having choice around when we bring forward our sexual energy and when we don't and when we're context aware and when we're in our body, we can make that choice in a conscious way that is great for the world. Actually. We want more people. Right. That's one of our missions. More people have good, healthy relationships and great healthy sex. Everybody benefits from that. So you just know as a man you can move beyond creepy and reclaim this part of you in an important way.
Melanie Curtin: Way. Yeah. And I love that you brought up married men and men that are in long term relationships because I'm remembering another one of our clients who came to us and yeah, he wanted better sex with his wife. He wanted more sex with his wife. And he, through the course of the program, really, really processed a lot of the sexual shame. And, and again, part of what happens in, in a container with other people in it is that you're witnessing other people making breakthroughs. So he was watching other men take healthy risks in dating, take healthy risks in their relationship. And I remember at one point he told his wife directly, he said, I find it really hot when you wear a short skirt and boots and he had never said anything overtly sexual like that before in their marriage. And she ate it up. She loved it. So that's another sort of important point about context. This couple already had a lot of trust built. They already had a lot of love flowing between them, but they didn't have as much spark, they didn't have as much passion, they didn't have as much sexual fire. And he wanted more of that. And I think there was a way that in some ways he was kind of waiting, right, waiting. Just sort of passive waiting. Didn't really know how to get there. And through our work together, he started to realize, oh, I have a lot of power here. I can bring that sexual energy forth. And a lot of the reason that he hadn't was because he was afraid of being rejected. He was afraid of being rejected, he was afraid of being creepy. He was afraid of being creepy to his wife. That is totally a concern. It's not just a concern for single men. Men. So what was great was he, he sort of, over the course of the months that we were working with him, he just became a lot more bold, you know, he just became a lot more bold. He brought more of his heat, he brought more of his fire, and she loved it. And it wasn't like every single thing landed right, but he was finding his way. He was taking healthy risks and he was receiving the encouragement, receiving the support, receiving the cheerleading from other men in the community and. And they were receiving support from him. So there's a virtuous cycle that happens when we are doing our work together. That it, it's just different in the one on one spaces. Those can be really valuable as well. But there's something magical about the group container. And it's part of why I would say that we structure our program the way that we do. We could do one on one work, but what we find is that men get better results when they are in the group field, when they are in the group context, when they are around other men that are upgrading and transforming and learning to process their sexual shame, come into their sexual power and experience, you know, mind blowing success. I mean, I can't tell you how many clients I've heard from that say, I've never had this experience before, I've never been here with my partner before. Or I've never been here with a partner before. That's a completely new experience. So, yeah, if you are interested in joining us and transforming your love life for good, we would love to have you go to Evolutionary Men apply.
