Attention, Tension, and the Masculine

All right. And welcome back. On today's episode, I want to talk about a phrase that I have heard many times over the years as I've gotten to know men as a men's coach and a men's guide.

This phrase generally comes up when we're digging into their history as men. Kind of, where did they come from, what made them? And for many guys, particularly nice guys, I'll often hear this phrase, well, I had a pretty good childhood. That phrase is one that now kind of brings me to full alert, because for so many guys I've heard that from, once we start to dig in to their family of origin and how they were raised, there's often a lot more there than they even realize.

I think nice guys here in America in particular, we have this weird predisposition to kind of remembering things fondly. Now, I think some of that's kind of cultural. You know, the US here, we kind of have a McDonald's, hey, everything's all right culture. And we have this ideal of what a family is supposed to be. Plus, I think for a lot of us nice guys, we have this capacity, which is important as adults, to hold multiple perspectives.

What I mean by that in this instance is we can often look back and see, oh, my parents raised me this way because they were raised a certain way. So the actions they took, they did for all kinds of reasons. And I can understand that, and I can forgive them and whatnot. And that is a really important perspective to hold. But it's one nice guys tend to over index on. Where that often needs to be balanced is with the perspective of what I call impact.

Regardless of the intent of our parents or their level of knowledge, their choices in raising us still had an impact. And for a lot of us guys that get attracted to men's work, we in fact, spend years as adults trying to unwind patterns that were set inside of us in our first early formative years. Early childhood nervous system conditioning is so fundamental and important, important to how we show up in the world, even as adults.

And one thing I'm increasingly convinced of is the path to becoming a powerful man has to start with first becoming intimate with our little boy inside. And this idea of, well, I had a pretty good childhood, usually what it Masks is. Yes, certain exterior things were provided for me. I had a house, I had some opportunities. I got some of the things I wanted.

My life was kind of stable. But for a lot of men, what that doesn't extend into is what type of presence, emotional attunement, guidance and overall nutrients did I get or did I not get from my parents? And for a lot of guys, that stuff is a lot more complicated. Yeah, dad always provided. Yeah, mom was always around, but they didn't really see me.

They didn't slow down and attune to me. They didn't get curious about me, but expected me to be a certain way. Now, there's a certain amount of this that's natural in any family environment, for sure, but there's a lot that's not the willingness to dig in and look at our patterning, how we were raised, how did our parents show up or not show up for us? How did our caregivers show up or not show up for us?

What did they give us? But what were they either unwilling or incapable of giving us? And this is work that goes right to the heart of our emotions and our ability to be present as men in the modern day. It blows me away still. The work I do on myself and the work I've done with many men, how the biggest, toughest guy can really shift when we get them into contact with what their needs were as a little boy and how they didn't get them.

Tears, frustration, shame. So many emotions get encoded at that young age. And the trick is about all this that kind of makes it so confusing is oftentimes we don't know that anything else is possible. When we're being raised in a family, that family is our world. Its rules, its conditioning, its contexts.

That's what we assume the rest of the world is. Now, often at some point, we get exposed to other families or other possibilities and have this realization, wow. What I thought was normal isn't the only thing. There is. There's other options, there's other possibilities. I know for me, I've sometimes shared this story with guys I work with. One of my first AHAs around this was, I think it was after my junior year of high school, before my senior year.

And I did this summer program with the Sierra Student Coalition, which was the Sierra Club. They're like kind of student arm around environmentalism and whatnot. This was back in the late 90s. And as part of that, they had a summer camp, essentially where you got to go out for a week on the east coast and learn all kinds of educational stuff, how to. How to lead, how to organize, how to start clubs at your school, et cetera. And the moment that sticks out to me the most about this is it was my friend's dad that was driving us out in a minivan with a whole bunch of us high schoolers.

And they came to pick me up, and my mom walked me outside, and, you know, everybody's in the van, and I'm about to get in the van and kind of just out of more programming than anything else, it's one of the first times I was kind of going away from my family for a week on my own. In fact, it may have been the first time, which is what makes this even more salient for me. And I hugged my mom goodbye, and then I got in the van, and I just remember thinking, that felt really weird.

Why was that so weird? That was really weird. All I could think about. And it just stayed with me for many, many years until much later in my 20s, as I got on a path and was having tons of problems relating to women and feeling okay in my body and just all around kind of struggling as a man. I started to do some of this deep inner work, and I did get connected to my little boy, and I got to uncover some of the dynamics in my family.

And in retrospect, I realized much, much later why that moment for me felt so weird and awkward was as I scanned my memory banks, looking back at that moment, I could not find a concrete memory of when I had touched or embraced or been embraced by my mom before that.

Now, there's no doubt as a little kid, I had just the sheer logistics of moving an infant and toddler around. But what's salient and important here is I had no memory past that of us connecting in any kind of physical way. Embrace, hug, closeness, whatever. And as I uncovered more, I realized, wow, that was a big thing in my life and in my family unit.

I wasn't the only one. As I got to talk about this stuff with siblings later on, I was a child of neglect. That had massive repercussions for me and still has massive repercussions for me in terms of what the default mode for my nervous system in the way I move through the world is now on the outside. In a lot of ways. I had a really great childhood, right, So I can see where that phrase comes from.

But there were still some incredibly important nutrients that I did not get. And it's those nutrients that. That I'm increasingly convinced are a good way to think about this stuff, it's less about right or wrong or good or bad. Though there are plenty of men I work with whose parents legitimately did some just very shitty stuff. Physical, sexual, emotional abuse, neglect at much more extreme levels than anything I received.

But this kind of more middle of the road that leads guys to say things like, well, I had a pretty good childhood, often stems from, yeah, there was something there, but there were often these other nutrients that weren't. And when we're nutrient deprived, we grow differently, right? Just think about this in terms of physiology. If there's certain nutrients you don't get as a kid, it's not that you don't grow and aren't alive, but you're not necessarily thriving and growing at your maximum potential or capacity.

And for some things, you don't get a second chance around that, right? If there's certain nutrients you don't get before puberty and whatnot, you may never actually develop as you might have otherwise, or even in that early couple of months as an infant, there's things you need and when you don't get them, your brain and body and nervous system suffer. Now, your body can. All that can be compensated for to some extent, but it's never going to be quite as optimal as had you gotten those nutrients to begin with.

Now, that might sound depressing in terms of the work we're doing here of like, I didn't get certain things, I'm doomed for the rest of my life. That's not so much true, which is the good news, because outside of physiology, we can start to do some repair work around this stuff. As we become aware of what we didn't get as children, we can start to offer that to ourselves. Now, so many of us have heard the terms of inner child work, and this is really what it means.

It starts with us developing a relationship to our own inner child and before trying to get certain needs met through others as adults. For our little child, step one is for us to become present and attuned to that kid inside of us and being able to give that little part of us whatever it needs that it didn't get when it was young, which is oftentimes some curiosity, some understanding, some presence, etc.

As we're able to give that to ourselves, it makes it easier to then be in the world as a full adult, because when we don't, that little kid inside of us is often running the show because his or her needs are so huge that we collapse into it and we try to get them met through all Kinds of ways that aren't necessarily the healthiest. But as we build a relationship with that part of ourselves, we can start to relate to our inner child rather than relate from our inner child.

And that is a huge difference. Being able to be present with of, wow, there's a really young part of me that's really scared and nervous right now that's here and act from that place versus don't leave me or you, whatever that reaction might be from that more collapsed place that that kid had to learn to survive in. Now, all of this kind of realization about our childhood ties deeply into some of the patterns I've talked about before.

Particularly, you know, what protected us when we were young is often the barrier to getting what we want as adults. That's another episode I did a while back. And that directly correlates here. Because the family system we were born into, our nervous systems had to learn to survive in it. So they cope and they adapt to whatever nutrients and things they can get. They learn to survive. And in learning to survive, we often build certain habits, routines and protective mechanisms around us to make that environment work to the best of our ability.

But then as adults, those same mechanisms we learned to protect ourselves and survive as kids in this non optimal system become hindrances to us getting what we want as adults. So we have to actually go in and unwind some of that patterning. A lot of what I do in the shadow work I do with men, a lot of what I do in the work I do with guys around dating and relationships as well.

We have to come to terms and get clear about how we were raised and what the impact of that was on us. Because if we don't and we aren't getting clear on that, we aren't even aware of it. I guarantee it's running the show way more than you might realize. And it's okay that things weren't perfect. Some nice guys I work with, they're afraid.

Well, I can't say anything bad about my parents because I do understand that they were doing their best at the time. And that's totally true. And coming to terms with what you still didn't get from them doesn't negate that. It just clarifies what the impact was. And in some sense, the clearer you are about what you didn't get from them, the more authentically grateful you can be for what you did get from them.

But it is really important to be honest about what the impact of how you were raised was on you and your nervous system. If there are things in your life right now that you don't understand about why you keep doing X or why you keep feeling Y. It's often this stuff, those formative elements from when we were young kids, that's at the root of it, that's the main cause of it.

And the more aware and understanding we can be and the more present we can somatically become to those emotional states that are often still living in our bodies, the more choice and freedom we have out in the world when it comes to relationships, intimacy, work, and our ability to be present in any given moment. So, yeah, maybe you did have a pretty good childhood, but what happens if you dig in and go a little bit underneath the surface?

If you were parenting yourself as a young kid, what would you have done different? That's one question you can ask yourself right now that I'd certainly love to hear from you about. So feel free to drop me a message. Jasonvolutionary Men, until next time, if you're interested in working with me around dating, relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary men.

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