Jason Lange ON Breakingthrough the Nice Guy Syndrome | Reignited Marriage

Host (Reignited Marriage): For generations, men were told to tough it out, go at it alone, and never show weakness. But that script is breaking down now. Today's guest has dedicated his life to helping men shed the lone wolf armor and discover true strength through embodiment and connection. He's guided countless men to find purpose, deepen intimacy, and stand tall in who they really are instead of who they were told to be. He's a men's embodiment coach, group facilitator, and a Certified no more Mr. Nice Guy Coach. Please welcome Jason Lange.

Jason Lange: Yeah. So excited to be here. Thanks for having me, AJ Absolutely.

Host (Reignited Marriage): I'm so excited to have you here.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I've been looking forward to this conversation.

Host (Reignited Marriage): I would like to kick start the conversation with this question. What does nice guy mean to you?

Jason Lange: Yeah, so nice guy, like you said, I'm a trained Certified no more Mr. Nice Guy Coach. Which that particular phrase comes from the book no More Mr. Nice Guy, which was written by my friend and mentor, Dr. Robert Glover. And the idea with the nice guy is it's really a man who puts everyone else's needs in front of his own. And so nice guys are often very friendly, want to play it safe, but often have a very hard time setting boundaries, bringing forward anything that might cause conflict, and in a large part, basically expressing their own needs and desires. So nice guy is a particular kind of codependency. So not all codependents are nice guys, but all nice guys are codependents, so to speak. And it's, you know, Dr. Glover who wrote the book, which for many men is kind of an aha book about how they've been living their lives and not really getting the things they want. The book sells more copies every year since it was released, so it's getting more and more popular and at a kind of cultural level. I think part of what explains the nice guy is for a long time, you know, masculinity and men were, were kind of the traditional domineering, my way or the highway kind of energy. And that started to shift a little bit in the last decades where many men became aware, wow, guys can be destructive. Right. When it comes to the environment, when it comes to women, when it comes to all kinds of things, the economy. And then a lot of those guys were raised by, by women who were hurt by men and were raised in a culture, you know, particularly even more so now for the younger generations post metoo that have really highlighted, wow, you know, men can be a harmful force. And so there's a whole kind of type of guy that developed in response to that of basically I don't want to be that guy. I never want to make someone uncomfortable, I never want to take advantage of them. Frankly, I don't want to be a dick, I want to be a nice guy. The problem with that is how nice guys attack that, like I said, is they forego their own needs and desires and wants and boundaries in order to try to always appease the other person they're with. Particularly in intimate relationships, but really in any kind of connection. And what that leads to is these men often feeling, taking advantage of being frustrated and not really getting the success they want in their careers or intimate relationships. So, you know, all that said, here's what I'll say. I love nice guys, I'm a nice guy. There's actually no problem with being a nice kind hearted person. All we're really addressing in this work now is if that's coming at the expense of yourself. So if you're not actually standing up for yourself as much as you might other people, that ultimately doesn't work. Right. And it's not fair to anyone involved. So the idea is you can still be kind, but we want to make sure we're connected to ourselves, we're clear about what we want, we're not afraid of confrontation, we can set boundaries and our needs matter too.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Right. And what's the worst consequence of being a nice guy?

Host (Reignited Marriage): Yeah. Something that you mentioned that hits so true to me is happy wife, happy life. That's. Some part of me always felt like that is such a bad phrase because if you are inherently saying that only one part of the couple needs to be happy for the marriage to work, that's a lack of balance. That's a really problematic statement.

Jason Lange: Yes.

Host (Reignited Marriage): You're basically trying to enforce this narrative that just make the other person happy, you know, that's enough, and then you can be happy. That's all you need to do. And that is such a sad situation. And often what I have found happens is the people who cannot speak about their needs, it frustrates their spouses, it frustrates their relationships because. Or their partners. Because the partner feels like, if you cannot express your needs to me, how are you going to express it to someone else? When I need you, how are you going to be there for me? How am I going to feel like I can depend on you? And if I really can't depend on you, when the time comes, where is the partnership? Is it just you depending on me?

Jason Lange: Yeah. You can kind of summarize this and write, a man who abandons himself constantly can't be trusted to not abandon the people in his relationship. So the experience, often from the other side in relationship is one, wow. If you can't stand up for yourself, how can I trust you to stand up for me? So that's a huge part of the problem in that phrase, as is even the idea of happy. Right. Because happiness is something that comes and goes. Sometimes we can do the same thing and we feel happy and we don't. I actually think happy is kind of a crappy marker for wellbeing, particularly of a relationship or what I tend to emphasize, rather than happiness is fulfilled. So fulfillment is this feeling of, okay, this is worth it. But the key difference is it's not always happy. I'm not Always happy when I'm at the gym or working out or doing something difficult or having a challenging conversation with my spouse or saving money over long term. Right. But it's fulfilling in that it's, it gets to and fulfills a deeper desire in me that day to day might not always be pleasant, but. Right. If I take care of my health or my finances or my relationship. Yeah. Sometimes it might not feel great, but I'm like, it's very fulfilling to be in this, even though we're in a really challenging moment right now. So it's both the frame of happy because that comes and goes. Right. What makes you happy one day won't make you happy the next day. So it's already a losing battle. And like you said, if we're constantly abandoning ourselves, trying to appease our partners, it doesn't work. They cannot trust us.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Absolutely. I completely agree with you. The, the, the part that really caught, like this really caught my attention and you started off our podcast with this, that it's a form of codependency and I've never heard it being put like that. And I want to understand what made you say that and what's the perspective around that.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Have you heard of Tony Robbins? Eight levels of consciousness. Actually, it's not by him. He learned it from, I think, Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela, have you heard of that one?

Jason Lange: You'd have to refresh me. I'm sure it would link up with some other things I know, but yeah.

Host (Reignited Marriage): So basically it says that people are in eight different stages in their life. So the first stage is when you're born. You basically cannot take care of yourself and you're completely dependent on people around you. You're basically a baby. Everything's about you. You just want to be taken care of. It's all there. The second stage is called purple, where you are living in more fear and your security comes from being a tribal person. The third level is someone who graduates from that and goes to. It's all about me. They they don't. They. They're not afraid anymore, but they have transitioned to being it all being me. It's ego and that kind of thing. And then there are a few more levels that go up where, you know, people get into, okay, I don't want it to be about me now. I want to serve others. But they find that rules will help them, right?

Jason Lange: Oh, yeah, totally.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Sure.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Yeah.

Jason Lange: This is actually drawn from developmental theory.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Right? Right.

Jason Lange: Developmental consciousness. So there's lots of different models for this, but it's basically the idea that people develop. Right. We develop. We all see it, and it's really obvious in kids. But it turns out it goes through adulthood and there's levels of development we can grow into which are. Involve the complexity of our awareness, in a sense. And I know this most through things like spiral dynamics and Robert Keegan. But there's lots of different models. But basically there's pre rational rational and post rational. And then you can divvy that up in a lot of different ways. But part of where this can link together with nice guys is the other big thing people talk about these days. Right. Is attachment theory. So attachment to our primary caregivers and relationships. And that really starts with all of us, with our caregivers, whether it's our specific parents or not. And the way I've seen this play out in particular with nice guys is right when we're born, we have two needs. We have a need for secure attachment because we cannot take care of ourselves.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Right.

Jason Lange: Humans are actually really unique in that our brains got so big we had to be born three months early. So our gestation cycle is actually a lot shorter than others because at one point we literally couldn't get out of our mother's wombs. And so there's this whole theory of the first three months of a baby are basically the fourth trimester. Cause other animals come out and they're way more capable. Right. Some of them are walking within minutes. Babies. Not at all. Like, we are still literally kind of in the womb when we come out. But they can't see, can't move really a lot anything like that. But because of that, we come out with this need for secure attachment. Right?

Host (Reignited Marriage): Right.

Jason Lange: I need the people around me to want me around, to take care of me, because I will die without it. And that continues, you know, through childhood in a lot of ways. And so there's. We learn these tools for how do I get people to attach to me? There's hormones that support that there's eye contact that supports that baby's laughs. Like all these things that make us want to be near our kids and take care of them. But simultaneous with that drive for attachment, there's the drive for what we call authenticity or the need to express ourselves and what we actually need. Right? No, not that. Yes, this. Right. I have a 11 month old and this is coming on strong now. He's very clear about. I want to go over here, I don't want to go over here. I want to eat this, I don't want to eat this. And that's really important. The challenge for nice guys comes in what happens when those two things are in conflict from a young age. So when a child starts to learn, wow. In order to keep the relationship with my mother, often particular for nice guys, but also father alive, I need to start modifying my behavior to keep that connection alive. Because if I get too angry or fussy or say no, I can tell she doesn't want to be around me. Right. And so nice guys from a young age, where things go wrong is what I call around the direction of attunement. Ideally as an infant, the direction of attunement is the parent. The caregiver is attuning to you and your needs. I have more capacity. So my job is to get you what you need and keep you safe. Right. But for nice guys from a very young age, it goes the other way around. Whether it's a volatile father with anger issues or a borderline mother who sometimes is very loving, sometimes is very shaming and cutting, nice guys have to learn. I need to figure out what my parent caregiver is feeling and then adapt my presence and behavior to them. Adaptability becomes important to keep that flow alive. And so rather than having a strong sense of self, I'm just becoming what you need. And that creates all kinds of developmental problems that nice guys often then have to go back and readdress in. Some of the work I do with men right around just learning to say no and learning even to get in contact with, yeah, I want this, right? Like this is what I want and this is what I'm telling you, or this is what I'm going to go for. And there's quite a bit of development, you know, shored up inside of that.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Okay. And one of the other things I was tying this up to, what happens is a lot of women who see, who feel comfortable with jokes, so called jokes, they are in the stage where it's all about me, but there's this certainty that they Bring with them. There's a confidence where they're like, okay, yes, I, I am okay just trying to say what I need and I don't care what you feel. And there's a level of stability that some people find in that, which is what gets the attract, creates the attraction, but it's not common to all people. Maybe someone who's way more mature is not going to find that attractive.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, that's a great way to think of kind of the macho guy, the my way, the highway guy is my needs matter, I don't care about yours. Yeah, right. Whereas a nice guy flips the other way. My needs don't matter. I only care about yours. And what we're pointing to is the healthy balance on the other side of my needs matter and your needs matter. And we need to navigate this together. If just one of us is dominating, it's not going to work long term.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Okay, so I'm going to segue into an online question that I found here. So here's what the question says. I'm working through the book, which is how to not be a nice guy that you referred. I'm having issues fighting my destructive behavior more directly with my wife. My wife is a great woman, loving, caring, driven, intelligent, smoking hot. I'm doing dumb shit, seeking out approval from other women online. I know the reasons behind it, but I'm struggling with breaking it. Instead of building her up like I should, I get stuck in the manipulative, controlling, and at times damn mean cycle. I need help. What do I do?

Jason Lange: Yeah, I'd say you need some coaching, therapy and to get into a men's group. There's deeper issues below that. So this is what I. In the work I do, I call this shadow work, which is the process of. Okay, if we have moments in life where we keep doing something we've identified, isn't helpful for us and can be harmful and we know we don't want to do it yet we keep doing it. Often there's shadow inside of us, which just means some kind of trauma from early in our life that's running some kind of script that we're not even aware of, some belief structure of, oh my God, if I get too close to my wife, she'll leave me or whatever it might be. Or, you know, we'd have to like sit down and really get in there with that guy and get clear about what's he feeling, his body when he starts that. What does it remind him of? And insight could be found pretty fast of, oh, yeah, I'm actually afraid of this, this or this, or I don't feel good enough or I don't know how to say no. There's lots of different things around that, but almost certainly there's going to be some patterning from his family system when he was young that he's just not conscious of that we would need to bring to the light of day so he can make some different choices.

Host (Reignited Marriage): You know, the great thing about this guy who posted this, it seems like he's really trying to work on the issue. He's aware of what the problem is. He understands that change is needed. He's just in this whirlpool of situation trying to figure out, okay, I have too much information around me. I don't know what to do.

Jason Lange: Yeah, again, he probably doesn't need more information at this point, and he just needs to slow down and get more connected to his body and become aware of exactly what triggers him in these different moments to go towards the behaviors he doesn't want to go towards, whether that's meanness or reaching out to other women online. It's not like that. Just these kinds of things just suddenly happen. Usually there's actually a sophisticated sequence of, ooh, she looked at me this way, and that reacted to this part of me that suddenly gets afraid and da, da, da. And this whole chain reaction goes off. So a lot of the men's work I do with men is teaching men how to slow down and get into their bodies and connect to their emotions and not just try to override everything with the head so we can understand what. What is driving my behavior at the base level. And once we see that and understand that, we can often make some different choices that aren't just coming from the top down. They're actually shifting what our nervous system believes and feels. And instead of constantly mapping the past onto the present, we teach it to kind of grow up in some sense.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Tell us about your journey. I know you went through a pretty hard beginning where you went through some loneliness and really struggled with how to shift certain aspects of yourself. What was going on, what was your journey, and how did you actually end up shifting this?

Jason Lange: Yeah, totally. My journey really starts as you know, I was raised lower middle class in the Midwest, in the United States, white guy in the 80s and 90s and in the suburbs. My family basically had all of the basic security needs met. So, you know, we had good house, we had good food. We didn't have that kind of instability. It wasn't that it was easy, but, like you know, that wasn't the main thing. But what I quickly discovered as I got older was my family did not know how to connect both physically and emotionally. So there was almost no touch in my house growing up. And there was no emotion, emotional expression, or really discussion of anything underneath the surface. It was kind of like we were all just in the same house. Didn't really talk too much about our internal worlds or what we were experiencing. And what that led to was when I became a teenager, I'm heterosexual in this case, so I became interested in women and I would just get totally frozen. You know, I wouldn't know how to talk. I literally wouldn't know how to get words through my mouth to talk to them and share things like, wow, who are you? It would, it would like create a distress in my body and I would ruminate really heavily and I would kind of get sweaty and anxious and essentially I didn't know how to connect. And then simultaneously I did. While I struggled a lot with women, I met some good male friends. But I noticed they just related to each other differently than me. They would horse around, they would play with each other, they would wrestle. I just didn't have that wiring in my system at all. And as time went on and my friends started having successful relationships and I didn't, it got really painful and it got really lonely. And the longer it went on, the more embarrassed and shameful I got about it. I was basically in college before I even kissed a girl. Didn't have sex till my mid to late 20s, 20s. And I was so ashamed of being a virgin and not having any experience that even good friends who liked me, I just didn't feel comfortable talking about it. So it created a tremendous amount of isolation and discontent and kind of a numbness in my body and a kind of deep sense of self loathing, or there wasn't something, you know, something in me was broken. And it wasn't really until my early mid-20s, so around 24 that I was like, okay, I really gotta change this. And I went out looking for help and eventually got into my first men's communities, started my first somatic therapy and started to put all the pieces together about how basically the experiences I had had as a young child didn't really wire my body to know what touch was and for it to feel safe and comfortable. And so I had to do a lot of work to bring that back online and to become comfortable with, particularly in the context of deepening first with other men in men's circles and men's groups. I then started to learn to get into my body to express emotionally and feel these. For me, these younger pieces of that were in distress from just not having any connection or co regulation for when I was a kid that lo and behold would still show up in me as an adult male. I would act like a little kid that was really scared when I was around women. And so I learned to grow up those parts of me and just, you know, never stopped in some extent. And so passionate about helping men now in particular helping other guys that are struggling with relationships. In particular I really help supporting them finding that truth inside themselves and feeling comfortable and inside themselves so they can create the relationships and experiences they really want.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Yeah, I can't imagine how tough that must have been what you went through. Because once you add shame and judgment on top of what you're already going through, that becomes a really heavy journey. And I can, I can imagine what that loneliness would have felt like. What was the journey of undoing all this? What was the hardest part? What was, what was the unexpected parts of it? And how did you start to actually rewiring yourself?

Jason Lange: Yeah, it started for me the shadow work I now lead. I worked with an older man who's kind of who taught me this and he was one of the. I had been in maybe a year, year and a half of talk therapy and it was useful, but I was pretty sophisticated in my protection mechanisms and you know, could kind of talk around my therapist and not really go deep. And I did a weekend with this man who led a men's group in essence and he kind of, when the my the attention came on me in the circle, started doing the process. He kind of leads men through and within about five minutes I was laying down flat on my back, had my hands up in the air saying hold me, hold me, hold me, please just touch me. Basically crying like a two year old. And my whole body had this huge emotional release where I reverted to a young toddler infant and became in my body aware of how much neglect I had experienced in terms of just not feeling connected to my mother in this case. And then lo and behold that as that started to shift and I became aware of that and learned to actually get in touch with those feelings and express them and let them out. My relationship to women really started to change over the next couple years and I stayed on that path of doing that kind of shadow work, learning to get in touch with my body, my anger, my sexuality, my grief. And way more comfortable about expressing shame and talking about what I was Feeling and whatnot. And for me, that mainly happened in men's work, in men's communities, where I just really felt safe to do that. And in learning to become more emotional, in essence, with other men and to feel what I was actually feeling in my body, lo and behold, was much easier to go out there and connect with women because a lot of it is just being connected to your body. Okay, right now I'm attracted to her. I want to talk to her right now. I want to kiss her. So I'm going to kiss her. I was so numb to a lot of that and would ruminate over it. I would miss a lot of these moments. And then that journey just continued, you know, in terms of learning more about communication and how to create connection through what we call authentic relating. I definitely did a bunch of plant medicines at one point and then just continued in particular on the trajectory of masculine embodiment. So this process of, how do we learn to actually get out of our heads and into our bodies as men? And trained with some other teachers around that, and then met Dr. Glover and got a whole nother frame of what Nice guy was and saw, oh, yeah, I do that too. I just usually don't actually speak my mind because I don't want to upset other people. And lo and behold, I don't get what I want if I don't ask for what I want. And so all of that kind of wove together. But it really started with just getting connected to myself and breaking through what was, for me, a pretty deep layer of numbness of not really being able to access emotions and feel much in my body, even though, you know, eventually I wanted to. I mean, when I was in, you know, my 20s, you would ask, you know, you could ask me how I'm doing. I mean, basically my range was bad, good and fine, you know, like, if you ask me, what are you feeling? That's what I could say now. Way more nuanced, right? I have much more awareness of what's happening inside me and can much better articulate what my experience is. Which, lo and behold, makes it a lot easier for me to get what I want and connect with the people I care about the most in life.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Fascinating. Very fascinating to me. What is shadow work?

Host (Reignited Marriage): What is the. Or, let me rephrase this. How interlinked is trauma with shadow work?

Jason Lange: Very, I would say trauma is often what pushes things into the shadow. Right. Really all that, the idea of trauma is, is it's some kind of stimulus that's too much for our nervous system to handle in the moment. That's it. Right. So it's emotionally overwhelming or physically overwhelming. Right. It actually traumatizes our body. There's like, you know, if I just hit myself a little bit, my body's fine, but if I hit myself 20 times really hard in that same spot, it's going to leave an impact and there's going to have to be some recovery from that. So, you know, these kinds of emotional traumas, and they don't just mean these huge things, they can. Right. There's countless examples of people who are so traumatized that they, they kind of bury things in their memory, whether it's physical, emotional or sexual abuse. We see veterans coming back often from serving overseas. Lots of trauma, different things like that. Again, it's an over overwhelm that the nervous system doesn't quite know how to metabolize. And because of that it can't fully let go of it. So it's like these experiences get stuck inside our nervous system and we replay them and we'll actually create the conditions to experience them over and over and over again if we're not aware of it. And so shadow work is that process of, okay, what happened and how can I safely create space to re pattern that now? So it's very heavily related to trauma. It can also. Shadow work in particular can also be related more to cultural things, meaning we imprint beliefs from our family, our parents, our culture at large, our religion that we internalize. And we often forget that, oh, this is a belief structure I was taught, but I encoded it as my own inner critic or inner voice. And so a lot of shadow work can also be, oh my God, that, that way. I'm so mean to myself. Turns out that was actually my dad or my third grade gym teacher who just tore into me that one Time. These experiences really stay with us when we don't have them, ways to work them in. You know, there's a lot of research now and they talk about. The interesting thing about the kind of more emotional and spiritual trauma is it actually happens in two steps. There's what happened and then there's what happens after. And this is particularly big for a lot of men is two people can experience the same traumatic event, let's say a very scary car crash, let's just say. But one of them has a deeply present, attuned parent who is emotionally available to them, co regulates them, allows them to talk about it for days or weeks afterwards, isn't afraid of their body shaking from fear, whatever that might be. And another one, let's say, has nobody, so has no one to talk about it, has no way to contextualize it. That second person will often be way more adversely impacted because they had no one to express and share it with, in a sense. And that in itself then adds fuel to that, that trauma, in a sense. So. And that's where a lot of guys have trouble, because like me, we've been raised in this culture of masculinity that's always be tough, never show weakness. Men are a competition. If you give them any ammo, they're going to knock you down and, you know, bully you, take you over, whatever that might be. So most men I work with walking through life, having a lot of challenges happen, but have nowhere to talk about it. So they hold it all inside. And eventually it starts to fuse with their shame and build up the sense that, yeah, I'm messed up and I can't let anyone know. And I got to do everything perfectly. And that creates so much stress for our nervous systems. And shadow work is one of the paths to kind of liberate men from all of that.

Host (Reignited Marriage): You know, when you were speaking about how important connection is, I was reminded of this clip that I watched. I think it was. I don't remember who the speaker was, but they were speaking about addiction. And they did this very, very fascinating experiment with a mouse. A mouse was trapped, and I think you probably know the experiment. A mouse was trapped with cocaine, dosed water, and it was alone in this cage and it didn't have anything to do. And pretty soon it just got so addicted to it that it couldn't stop consuming it, even though I think there was an alternate normal water that was there. And then when the same mouse was, I think, shifted into a place where it had all its friends and it had other Things to do. It just stopped going to the cocaine dose water. And that's how powerful connection is. Because if you have people you connect with, you don't feel lonely, you have other things that actually engage your mind, you're not going to go to the things that are not good for you anymore.

Jason Lange: That's exactly it. And that's where so many men in particular, with the direction our culture are going with tech and online and social media and parasocial relationships, men are even more vulnerable to that than most women. Most women just are a little bit better at staying in connection with people and reaching out and asking for help. A lot of that's cultural and you know how the culture teaches us some of that's hormonal. But these are things we can learn to overcome as men and is our work right now, particularly as men, is to not suffer alone and to reach out for connection. Because co regulation, which is really what connection is, right? Our vagus nerve, which is the nerve that connects our brain to our body in essence and is kind of the superhighway between the two, it is created and responds to human connection the most. So eye contact, face to face, vocal tone and breath are the thing that will send the signal. It's okay, it's okay to downshift out of fight or flight, you're safe. And that tells all of our internal organs and systems and things to stress profiles, right? And again, this is something we see so obviously with babies. Baby's distressed parent picks it up, co regulates it, a little bit of cooing, rocking, laughing, humming, eye contact, baby settles down again. That same thing happens as adults. Our nervous systems get overloaded and we get unregulated. And the struggle for a lot of men is because they don't know how to talk about their feelings or reach out to other people. To get that co regulation, we turn to things outside of ourselves other than people, such as porn, weed, booze, sex, overworking, video games, you name it. And ultimately those things don't actually co regulate us, they just numb us. They don't change our relationship inside our body, they just disconnect us from the pain temporarily. And there are plenty of men I've worked with who have gone decades through their whole lives. I've worked with men, you know, in their 50s and 60s who have literally never had the experience of co regulation with another human being. Just eye contact, breath, face to face, whole body relaxes and softens, often in ways it never has for them before. And this constant fight or flight, anxiety, rumination, calms down, and they're like, oh, this is what it feels like. And that's something that, you know, the good news is, can be changed for us men, but we have to seek it out and learn what it is.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Okay. I think it's a great time to shift into a really fun game that I planned for this podcast today. And this is something really new. I haven't done this before. Okay. It's a new format that I created. And the name of the game is, if my son knew about this, what would they think? Right. And basically, here's what it is. As men, so much of what we learn, we learn the hard way, either through silence, mistakes, or someone actually needs to teach us. So in this round, I'll give you a few unfinished sentences that start with if my son knew. And the only reason it's son is because we're speaking so much about men's work. Right. If my son knew. And you can finish the sentence, whatever makes sense from your heart. Right? So here's how it goes. Here's the first one. If my son knew how much I once struggled with Dash, he'd understand. Dash?

Jason Lange: Yeah. If my son knew how much I once struggled with touch and connection, he would understand the importance of what my mother, his mother and I are creating in our family now, of creating a lot of safety, lots of touch, lots of co regulation, and lots of room for emotional expression.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Do you have a son right now?

Jason Lange: I do, in fact, have an actual son.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Yeah. Yeah. How does he. How does he respond to touch?

Jason Lange: Oh, he loves it. Yeah, he loves. He's just about to learn to walk, and he's getting super into wrestling and tussling and, like, play growling and stuff, and it just makes him so happy.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Oh, that's amazing. Here's the second one. If my son knew what men secretly fear, I'd tell him blank.

Jason Lange: Sure. Yeah. If my son knew what men secretly fear, I would tell him. It's okay to have emotions and feelings. It does not make you weak. Vulnerability of the kind we're really talking about here is a sign of deep strength. The willingness to feel is only something very strong people actually do. It's the men who are afraid of that that will create whole ways of being substances, et cetera, to avoid the pain of grief, fear, shame, etc. In that, the truth is, the man who's willing to feel, in my mind, is always more courageous than the man who's not. Yeah.

Host (Reignited Marriage): And you know what's really amazing? When I read this sentence out right now, some of my Mind was expecting to speak on the fear aspect, but actually what you spoke about was the secret aspect, which is amazing, which is actually where the light needs to go. So thank you for that. If my son knew what love really takes, he'd stop trying to blank.

Host (Reignited Marriage): That's so beautiful. That's so beautiful. How did you land onto this insight? I'm so curious.

Jason Lange: My own marriage. Yeah. Just seeing, you know, eight years in now how much work it takes continually for me to keep growing and her to keep growing. And we have seasons where things feel great. We have seasons where things are crunchy and we feel disconnected. But we know how to move through those together now. And every time we do, our bond grows.

Host (Reignited Marriage): I love this definition that you gave because it reminds me of the thing that I learned from Mark Manson, the guy who wrote, I think, what subtle art of not giving a fuck. And the thing he's mentioned that it always sticks with me. It's not the one that's the rosiest picture that you go that you should think about because everything has issues. The question is, which problems are you willing to accept? And the reason I bring this up is there's this notion of, oh, I just saw this person and everything was amazing. But the real work actually begins after that infatuation, after, you know, your hormones have calmed down. And now you know what the truth is. Now you get to think about what problems Am I willing to work with my entire life?

Host (Reignited Marriage): When you actually don't know each other, you can imagine things the way you want it to be. And that's, I guess, partly creates the attraction. You have this fantasized version of the things you don't know about. So there's a blank picture you can fill up.

Jason Lange: It's high on fantasy, low on reality.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Yeah.

Jason Lange: Over time, higher on reality, lower on fantasy.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Yeah. Yeah. Okay, here's the next one. If my son knew how much I've learned from her mother, he would understand.

Host (Reignited Marriage): You know, I have a. This is a question that just came up for me. If. If your son watched this in the future and you had to leave a message for him, letting him know the best parts of the marriage, the best parts of your relationship that he only saw parts of. He saw it from a different perspective. What would you tell him?

Jason Lange: I would just tell him that his arrival was the final missing piece to our little family. And we felt complete in a way that we just hadn't until he got here. And it's been a great joy to heal my own relationship with the masculine and my father through getting to father him.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Wow. That is so beautiful. That's so beautiful. I'm sure he loved hearing this. Here's the final one. If my son knew what strength actually feels like, he would realize. Blank.

Jason Lange: Yeah, he would Realize that real strength is the capacity to stay present and make decisions not out of fear, but out of wellness.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Right.

Jason Lange: What's going to create the most wellness for me in that, you know, strength doesn't mean just brute force. Strength also means, wow, I can't do this by myself. I need to ask for help and look at the abundance of support I have from other men, mentors, spouses, friends, teachers, etc. So that this problem actually isn't much of a problem. It actually becomes an opportunity for me to create more connection and. And that that kind of strength is so undervalued, I think, particularly for men, that I'm already excited to be showing him a different way.

Host (Reignited Marriage): That's amazing. That was really fun. I got to learn so much from it. Thank you for sharing that.

Jason Lange: I loved it.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Here's my other question to you. What does masculinity truly mean to you?

Jason Lange: Yeah, Masculinity, I think, is the part of all of us that can see what's happening and wants to take the perspective necessary to create the conditions for the most thriving. It's kind of simple in a sense. So it's the part of us that witnesses and then brings in care and says, what structure could be created that would create the most goodness, truth and beauty in this moment, whatever it might be. It's kind of esoteric, but it's the part of us that really can take the deeper, wider perspective and say, okay, we could do this, this, or this, but this is what's going to lead to the best for me, for you, for everyone around us. And that kind of masculinity is a little bit in short supply these days, where people assume it means domination, overpowering, my way or the highway. This kind of old patriarchal, authoritarian. I know best when it's really no. I know best by getting present, connecting with you, listening, assessing the whole situation. So that's kind of the application of it. The, you know, the. The deepest, you know, kind of tantric and spiritual side of this all is masculinity is just the part of us that witnesses. It's just the part that sees. That's it. It's the part that sees. And the more we can bring that healthy version forward in the world right now, the better.

Host (Reignited Marriage): I've always been curious about this. Do you feel that this trait is restricted to men or everyone can take this trait up?

Jason Lange: Everyone can. Masculinity and femininity are just energies. You can call them lots of different things, Right? We have yin and yang. We have life and death. We have go and flow, we have masculine, feminine, some people say alpha and omega. There's witnessing and experiencing, there's perspective and feeling. There's so many, there's, there's, I mean the most basic version, there's the inhale and the exhale. Right? Very different things. All human beings, no matter what body they are born in, have access to both of these energies. Male bodies hormonally tend to kind of have men gravitate more towards a masculine disposition. And female bodies tend to have women gravitate to more of a feminine disposition. But that's not always the case. I know plenty of men born in male bodies who are highly feminine and I know lots of women. Right. That's a struggle a lot of guys have these days. Women who have incredible inner masculine, they go for what they want, they create what they want. They have a deep sense of purpose in the world. They have no trouble with goals and achievement and making money. So we all have these capacities and we can all cultivate them. And what we're being called to do in this moment in life is it used to be if you were born in a female body, the expectation was you had to be feminine and be a mother. And that's what your lot in life was. And that's changing just like it's changing for men. Men can become caregivers now. We can be stay at home dads. What's being asked for is fluidity, is understanding. Okay? We all have these capacities inside of us. Some of us feel a little more restored and recharged in one than the other side. There's nothing wrong with that. Some people are more balanced. But we want to understand how these energies interact so we can be the most effective and create the healthiest relationships we want in the world. But yeah, I have, I've done a lot of work to get in touch with my own inner feminine. My capacity to feel, to enjoy, to be in flow, to not always be mapping and thinking. My partner has an incredible masculine. She leads groups all the time, holding space for people running her own kick ass business. We all have these inside of us and it's a beautiful thing, right? These are incredible energies we can draw on.

Host (Reignited Marriage): This is a fun question. Can a man with incredible feminine capacity have a great relationship with women with incredible masculine capacity?

Host (Reignited Marriage): You know, I find it intriguing that we stick to the name masculinity, femininity. I personally feel because of the way our understanding of these energies have evolved, they don't need to be named that way anymore because inherently the name creates a form of restriction and this perspective that it should go towards one side. But now that our learning has evolved, anyone can adopt this, and I feel it's time for a name change.

Jason Lange: Yeah, lots of people are playing with that In a lot of the different circles I'm in because there is so much cultural baggage around masculine and femininity and patriarchy and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, one most people get, you know, I think off the bat that is useful is a pretty strong correlate, is yin and yang energy. And even the beauty of that symbol is right in the middle of the yang side, there's yin energy. Right in the middle of the yin side, there's yang energy. Right. Yeah, it's more complex than you're either this or that. It's just like we said, where's kind of your home base? What's the gift you're yearning to give? And what's the gift you're yearning to receive?

Host (Reignited Marriage): Awesome. Where can people find more information about you and what should they be checking out first?

Jason Lange: Yeah, so you can check out me and I have my own podcast where I teach about a lot of this stuff at Evolutionary men. So it's not.com, but it's.men. and you'll see my podcast of the same name on there. And basically, my jam is I believe every man should be in a men's group. So most of my programs are about getting men connected to other men in community. And I have men's groups around dating and relationships. If you know all this polarity stuff, Talk Talk interested you, you can join that. It's called Pillars of Presence. I have a men's group just around shadow work, which is all about doing that deep, intense shadow work to really liberate ourselves. That's called the heart of Shadow. And then I have just the taster of. You just want to experience the power of male connection and community. And that's called men's group experience, where you just 12 weeks, five other guys, you go really deep and get to have the powerful experience of what a men's group is firsthand. And so lots of ways to kind of different to participate. But again, my thing is get into a men's group. Doesn't even have to be with me or anything I'm doing. Find something in your area. Take your connection with other men deeper in your life, and things will get better. It won't get easier, but they'll get better.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Okay, here's my final question. Let's say you can carry three truths eternally with you. No matter what happens to your body, no matter what happens to you. Three truths from your journey so far you can remember. What would you. What three truths would you want to remember? And pass on potentially

Jason Lange: presence. Matt matters more than anything else. You can't take anything with you other than love and turn towards the things that scare you the most, and you will live a very vital life.

Host (Reignited Marriage): Awesome. That was incredible. Thank you so much for gifting us your time and all you've learned so far.

Jason Lange: My pleasure. So good to be here with you. Really enjoyed it.

Host (Reignited Marriage): I had a great time. Thank you.