There's a moment that changed everything for me. I was in my first somatic men's group, probably 25 years old, about a year of talk therapy behind me that hadn't moved the needle much. The group's attention landed on me. Within 10 minutes I was on my back on the floor, hands shooting up toward the ceiling, crying out in what felt like a two year old's voice: hold me, hold me, hold me. I had no idea that was in there. No idea how much physical and emotional neglect I'd carried since childhood, quietly running the show in every interaction I'd ever had.
That's where this one starts. The Open Heart Healing Podcast brought me on to talk about men's work, purpose, and what healthy masculinity actually looks like in practice, and we went somewhere real.
We covered my full origin story in men's work, the male connection and loneliness crisis that's been building for decades, and why I keep pointing men toward men's groups as one of the best responses we have to what's happening right now with men and boys.
One thread I kept coming back to is how emotional literacy gets framed as something that might get in the way of what men want to create or accomplish. I flip that. The vagus nerve research is worth knowing: 80% of the information traveling that highway is body to brain, not brain to body. If you're disconnected from your body, you're making decisions with about 20% of the available information. That's not a therapeutic argument. That's a navigation argument.
We also got into shadow work, specifically the question I give a lot of men as a simple starting place: what are you avoiding right now? Follow that thread and you'll almost always find something worth looking at.
And the loneliness numbers are hard to absorb. In 1990, 3% of men reported having no close friends. By around 2020 that was up to 15%, before the pandemic made everything harder. Men are hurting in a particular way right now, and most don't have language for it, let alone a place to bring it.
What I keep coming back to after conversations like this: if you could bottle the documented effects of real social connection, no one would believe it was real. And yet here we are.
What's one relationship in your life that deserves more of your actual presence?
