“I would never hit you. I would never hit our kids.”

I would never hit you. I would never hit our kids. The second I said it, I knew it was a lie.

I knew deep down in my body what I was capable of. I just didn't want to admit it. I had felt the impulse various times in my life to shake, to rage, to lash out, to assert myself. But I had buried it so deep inside until it couldn't hide anymore.

I had been on retreat for almost a week, deep in the desert with other men, connecting to myself, growing, challenging, nourishing. It was amazing. And at the end of it, I couldn't wait to get home, couldn't wait to go see my wife, couldn't wait to share with her the presence and depth I had been cultivating.

Thing is, I got home and from the get go, things weren't right. Could tell she was withdrawn, she was agitated. Then I got withdrawn. I got agitated. Had wanted this to be a special night, not a fight. It'd been a tough year. It's my first year as a coach, as a men's guide, as a men's group leader.

When she and I first met, I was on fire in life. I was creating my art, was leading community events. I was making more money than I'd ever made before. And in the first couple years of our marriage, that had changed. I'd lost my way, I'd gotten off track, and I was stuck. I was stuck doing work I didn't want to do.

I was stuck not making enough money. I was stuck not really leading myself and creating a self practice. She had called me out on it. We knew from early in our relationship we wanted to have a family. And she called me up, tears in her eyes. What's your plan? I don't know what your plan is.

How are we going to do this? I'd gone astray. I needed to be called out. It was brutal, but it helped. Helped wake me up and go for some big changes and claim what I really want. And so over the next six to eight months, so began my journey to do men's work professionally. I got resourced, signed up for two men's trainings of my own to deepen myself, build my leadership skills, and do as much of this work as I could.

Now I also invested heavily in learning how to create a business, how to create a coaching business. I had nothing when I started. Problem was, as awesome as those things were and as much as I felt aligned with the work, I was in a rush. And I really didn't want to keep doing the daily work that I was still doing to pay the bills and get by.

So I let all that go. Burned the boats, went all in. Problem was, I had nothing to fall back on. And I was spending way more than I should have been. Spending on ads, spending on software, spending on equipment, spending on my trainings. I started racking up debt really fast. Really fast.

There were many nights and days my first year of coaching. I had no idea how I was going to pay rent. I had no idea how I was going to get money into my account before the next bill was drawn, sometimes less than 24 hours away. There were many times I just broke down in tears. Now, the point of that is, it was a rough, hard year.

I was trying to expand, but I didn't do it very well, didn't do it very intelligently. I had a family now, had a partner now. Couldn't just make rash decisions, even though I did. And so, 3/4 of the way, a little more than 3/4 of the way through my first year as a coach, I went off on retreat to end one of my men's programs almost a week deep in the desert.

No tech, totally offline. Just incredible men of depth and practice, stretching and learning and opening and nourishing out in the desert. It filled me up. I got so connected to myself. I knew what I was here to do. And as that event ended, I was so excited to go home and bring all these gifts, bring this energy, bring this presence that I had cultivated that week to my wife and share it with her.

The insights were endless. I couldn't wait to let her know what I discovered about myself. Problem was, from the second I got home, things were off. I could tell she was agitated and a little withdrawn. That made me agitated. I wanted this to be a special night, a connected night. And here we were again. Her not trusting me, me getting a little annoyed.

And so our night quickly plummeted. There we were, sitting on the couch, having a talk. I'm wanting to share about the depth of my experience in the desert. She's unable to hear it because all she can think is, yet again, what's your plan? I know how bad it is for you right now. What's your plan? This doesn't feel safe. These weren't words she necessarily said, but they Were the words underneath everything that was going on.

She couldn't trust me. We couldn't have a family right then and there. I couldn't support her or kid. My business was flailing. But she kept pushing and kept pushing. What's the plan? What's the plan? What are you gonna do differently? Maybe you should go get a job again. It was a full court press, and I was pissed. This isn't the night I wanted.

I'm doing everything I can to change my life, to create a business of impact and meaning and freedom. But she just kept pushing. She wanted to be able to trust me. And that's when it started to happen. A feeling I knew deep in my body. I had felt it a couple times before. Never really done anything with it, but kind of a heat, an urge to lash out, to just push it all away and to have myself be known.

So there we were, sitting on the couch, facing each other. She's in pain. She can't trust me. She doesn't feel connected to me. I'm in pain. I can't trust me. I don't know what I'm doing. But I couldn't say that it was too much. I was feeling too hurt, too agitated. So what happened instead was she came at me again. And I just yelled, stop. And that's when my hand flew up maybe six inches from her face, shot right by it, and bashed into the wall.

Three times, in fact. Bashed through the wall, leaving a giant hole so close to her. The impact was immediate. She panicked, sprang up, retreated away. It wasn't safe. I wasn't safe. Her instinct had been right. I immediately sprang up in defensive mode, trying to calm her down. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. How could you do that?

How could I ever have kids with you? What if you hit our kids? What if you hit me? And that's when I said it. I would never hit you. I would never hit our kids. And it was a lie. It was a lie I had to come to terms with. We had luckily been in some couples counseling and been doing a lot of work. So as intense as that moment was, we had some tools to stay connected.

It was brutal. Won't lie. That was a hard, hard night. We didn't patch things up right away. Our nervous systems were on edge for a long time. But I learned something. I learned I had a shadow that I wasn't really wanting to look at. I come from a family with a history of physical abuse. While I didn't experience it, my dad did. My grandfather was an alcoholic and hit.

I had always known that in the back of my mind. And my dad had lived his life very differently. He never drank, but he could definitely get angry sometimes, mostly at my mom. I always thought it was pointless, all that anger, nothing ever changing. Why even get angry? So I'd learned to stuff it down deep, deep inside myself. But it came out sometimes in these little micro feelings in my body, in my nervous system.

A quickness, an explosiveness that I could really feel, but usually just ignored and pushed down. Now, realizing that I had this lineage that contained abuse, I knew I had to wake up. It was a lie for me to tell her. I would never do that. I would never hit you. I would never hit the kids. It was in my nervous system to do it.

Not consciously, but reactively. It was part of who I was, part of what I inherited. And so I had to get honest with myself. I had to sober up to the fact that I did have that capacity. That was something I could do. And there was no path forward until I owned that, acknowledged that, and integrated that. Now, the good news was I'd spent a year doing deep work.

I was in multiple men's trainings in groups. And so I had resources. I connected with some of my trusted, trusted men, sent them a picture of the broken wall sharing what happened, the panic, the grief, the anger, and the fact that I needed help. That call was answered. There I was sitting on zoom, being witnessed, being led through a process to actually feel in contact and begin a relationship with my inner abuser, the part of me that could hit even my own kids.

It was a vile sensation. It was rough, big, heavy, sweaty, powerful, angry, destructive. And I learned to run that energy through my body, to breathe with it, to move like it, to know it, to relate to it. And so began my reclamation of a part of myself I never wanted to look at, part of myself that as awful as what it was capable of, I had to bring back into me.

Pretending like it wasn't there, wasn't safe. That's when it would lash out. That's when it was dangerous. So that's a great example of what I mean by shadow work, something we've talked about on some different episodes here. And the power of men's group in relationship. My relationship became a trigger.

It brought to the surface a part of me that needed to be healed, needed to be integrated. The part of me that had lost contact with my rage, my abuser. The part of my family history and lineage that lived on in my nervous system and that I could act on if I wasn't conscious of it and I hadn't been, hadn't really been.

Shadow work is the process of making the unseen parts of ourselves seen, reintegrating them into us. Now the powerful thing about shadow is we don't just carry our own, we often also carry the shadows of those that came before us. When we decide to do the work that is to do the work of becoming a more complete, whole, healed, present human being, shadow work has to be part of it.

Shadow work for ourselves, shadow work for our lineage. From the second we're conceived, our nervous systems are absorbing epigenetic information about how the world is that impacts us in our behavior up to three generations. You have to know how to deal with these things and you have to know how to work with these things.

Getting into a powerful, growth oriented, intimate relationship will be the space for the triggers. It'll start to reveal your shadow. Then you gotta have somewhere to work it. You gotta be working with a therapist and, or a coach and obviously my favorite, a men's group. Beautiful thing about a men's group was that night I punched the wall. I was held, just virtually, just having a space to put.

This is what happened. I'm devastated. And for other men to get it. I've been there. I know that's not who you are. I know how painful that is. And what do we need to do to make sure you never do something like that again? It's the real power of this work. Reclaiming. As painful as it was, that inner abuser which was the shadow, also helped me reintegrate the gift which was my power, my boundaries, my willingness to assert myself, to create safety for myself and my family.

These are lessons that are still working their way through my nervous system to this day. As I sit here recording this, have a photo of my grandfather holding me when I was a kid, probably 3 years old, pacifier in my mouth. Getting to know this part of me was also getting to know a part of him. The part of him that didn't have access to this kind of work, that didn't know how to make the unconscious conscious, who used the only medicines he had available, booze and rage, to get through life.

When you step into doing this kind of work, you're not just doing it for yourself, you're doing it for all those people, all those family members that came before you. It's the warrior's work, it's the hero's work. It's hard, it's not easy, but it's a massive gift to everyone. Around you? What lies in your shadows? What parts of yourself are unseen, unowned, unclaimed, dark or light?

This stuff works both ways. Make a list. Start feeling into it. Start asking your men, what do you think my shadow is? It's pretty hard to figure out alone. It's much easier to figure out in community and particularly in relationship. If you want some help, it's time to connect.

You can join one of my drop in men's groups at Evolutionary Men events. And if you want to join my intensive men's group coaching program for purpose dating and relationships, check out my free training at Evolutionary Men webinar. Till next time.