Shadow Work for When You Can’t Say What You Feel (with Luke Adler)

Jason Lange: All right, everybody, and welcome back. Super pumped to once again be joined by Dr. Luke Adler, my co facilitator in the Heart of Shadow program. We're back for another episode of our Shadow Work for series. And today we're going to focus on shadow work for when you can't say what you feel. And this is. This is so great when Luke kind of brought this up as a topic, and it's one I've struggled with for decades, honestly, still do in some ways, but I want to set just a little context. Then we're going to kind of dive in of. Of the many things we do in the Heart of Shadow and in men's work and in men's groups, we've often talked about one of the big ones being cultivating deeper interoception. Right. So just this awareness as men of what's happening inside of us. Right, right. What's internally happening, what are we feeling in our bodies? What are we feeling in our hearts? And that's a real skill and capacity that many men are underdeveloped in. And we see it all the time. One of the practices we lead, you know, helps guys start to differentiate those things. And oftentimes when a man's new, he just blurs it all together. It's like a feeling outside a thought. It. Like it's just all one lump, but it changes. But there's a second really important step which is what we're going to really cover here today, which is once you know what's going on inside, you got to fucking say it. You got to bring it out in conversation in actual words, in order for other people to know what's going on inside of you. Right. And this is a really big one for men in particular, I think, in. In intimate relationships, but in other places too, that we're really going to dive into here today.

Luke Adler: Yeah, I mean, the work we do in Heart of Shadow is centered around several principles, but the two primary ones, in order for the unconscious to come all the way to the surface, for us to really discover what's underneath, our first response, what's underneath our reaction are the skills of vulnerability. Um, and kind of in parallel to vulnerability is transparency. So vulnerability involves taking some kind of emotional risk. Transparency can be a Little different, where you're just revealing everything, like, here's everything about me. And it can be kind of exhibition. Exhibitional in a certain sense, but it's not vulnerable. It's just kind of like a show. A show for. For shock or entertainment. When you put the two together, you're being transparent but vulnerable. You're really sharing content that has a tinge of fear to it. Typically. Sometimes it can be a lot of fear. Like, whoa, if I share this, I'm actually at some kind of emotional risk. I'm having some emotional exposure where if the folks I'm sharing it with don't handle me well, I could be hurt or injured emotionally. So heart of shadow, we create safety for men to share vulnerably, transparently, and a couple other agreements that we have there. But what that enables is that first skill to be developed. Interoception. And where this gets muddled is when we talk about what we're feeling in the world of feeling and in the. In the landscape of being more emotionally intelligent. Folks still very much. Even people that I really admire and how they teach will speak in metaphor around emotion. So here's an example. Right now, I feel that you're not listening to me. Right now, I feel that this is a mistake. Right now I feel that I should have this for dinner. And so what we do in that statement is that we mix perception and feeling together. We collapse those two. We collapse our point of view with feeling. And a point of view. That's an opinion. That's a statement about how you perceive the world to be. It's not a feeling. And it may seem a little bit anal that we draw this distinction, but it's so important with regards to what you feel, because feeling is really actually a simple thing. And this is where we mess up a lot around. This is I feel. And here's the first step. I feel tightness in my chest. And as I learned to settle with that tightness and get to know it more, I learned to recognize that tightness is fear. Could also be anger, depending on what. Whether that tightness is moving up or moving down or staying stuck. But as we recognize sensation, we start to recognize the emotion that flows along with sensation. And there are only five or six primary motions, and then there are derivatives off of them that move into maybe hundreds of derivatives. So when we look at that first step of what we're feeling, the second step is. How the hell do you say it? How do you get it out? And of course, our coaching is it's actually really Simple. Once you've identified what it is, then that's what you share. I feel scared, I feel hurt, I feel angry, etc. And so on. Now, the simplicity of what we just laid out is quite obvious and maybe seems silly how you get there. That that's the work that's complex, that's challenging. That's what we're here to talk about.

Luke Adler: I love that you, I love that you took it to sexuality because the, the reflex in our body when there's something that we need to address, we don't know how to address it is steeped around the fight or flight nervous system. Flight, freeze, fawn. Actualize in a certain sense. And it immediately regresses us back to a moment of tension, a moment of collapse, a moment of failure. Stress from usually our childhood because that's where our nervous system gets shaped the most around fear. And we lock up at a young age because we, we, we have to in order to endure something that's stressful. It could be something seemingly small from the outset. It could be something egregiously traumatic. But our body at this very plastic stage mean the stage where it's very shapeable will start to harden or scar tissue. The nervous system around survival. And when it comes to something that we know we need to address. We know we need to say something that we feel, and we can't say it. That's the first thing we hit up against. We hit up against what happened when dad yelled or when I was hit or when I didn't make the team or whatever it was that was hard and hurtful. And then that's what comes out, particularly around anything, but definitely around sex. You know, it's the hand on the ass or like, you know, kind of whispering or like, maybe some baby talk or, you know, some gruffness. Like, you know, we haven't had sex in a while. It was like, you know, this kind of complaint, but it's masked with this kind of macho thing.

Jason Lange: And it's.

Luke Adler: It's just not open and honest and it's not flowing. And then, you know, of course we can judge that. But what we're identifying here in terms of the context of shadow work is that there's no training around it. There's no training about it. And we know without certainty, certainly from heart of shadow. We know science. The brain's plastic. It's plasticized. Plastic just means it can be bent and shaped. And so the men's group. Why we're so emphatic about shadow work, men's groups in particular, is it's the place where we can make massive changes in the nervous system in a short period of time and then reinforce that change over weeks and months and literally change the way we respond to things that were hardwired to either fight against, to flight against, to freeze against, or to fawn against, which is very common for nice guys. We just. We just flip into being nice, and then we think, oh, that's just a great way to be. But we're really scared, really nervous inside, and. And we're not settled into just our nervous system and what we want. And this is a hard move. This is a very hard move. And the practice domain, the best place to practice for men is with other men. Like, wait, I want to practice with women? It's like, yeah, women are part of it. They're half of the equation. But so much of our pain has been hardwired around masculinity not being open and available. Really. We've been saying this for weeks, Jason, you and I, that no man alive in his probably 20s onward, probably younger than that, has had a dad who was really available in all of the dimensionalities of. Of being present emotionally, physically, financially, et cetera, and so on. So the. The work of safety and comfort around our emotions. It. There's A there's at least half of it has to be shaped by another man. Sure, half of it. I mean, by the masculine side, half of it can get shaped by the feminine side. But this is where men's groups initiated in this kind of just, honest, open, vulnerable, courageous work are essential that you actually can't do it in the domain. This is like part of our major call of like, hey, guys, there's too much pressure on women to be your emotional support. You gotta lean towards other men. And of course, this is what. This is the wave we're on in Heart of Shadow.

Jason Lange: You just made me realize, you know, another way to think about just shadow work in general and particularly what we're talking about here is shadow work is often the process of discovering how to get things moving again. Like, oftentimes there's just some kind of energy inside of us that's not moving. It's stagnant, it's frozen, it's locked in place. And it can be all kinds of stuff, right? It can be fear, it can be grief, it can be anger. And learning to bring that forward, get that energy moving again, is really at the root of it. And this particular thing we're talking about is just a very specific manifestation that's actually quite, quite tactical in that it's taking the energy and making it into actual sounds that communicate. Which, I know it sounds simple, but for. Right. We've worked with many guys who are like, I got this smoking hot wife and she's sitting right there and I want her, and I. I just can't bring that forward. And oftentimes it's kind of heartbreaking, right, because there's like an implicit knowing it's there, but there's something about not being able to bring it forward that's really painful. Or we've seen this with, like, boundaries or needing to bring, let's say, even forward feedback with an employee, right? Like, oh, I have to have this, like, performance review with someone. And there's this thing. And I just. So I just. I haven't scheduled the meeting or I don't talk to the person about it. And what we're really talking about is, okay, so first we want to go back in. The freeze is an attempt for the fear to prevent us from feeling whatever was super fucking intense back then, right? So we had some origin story of.

Luke Adler: This.

Jason Lange: Thing in our nervous system. It was too intense, overwhelming, really dysregulating whatever it is back then. And so our system learned like, okay, shit, we want to lock that off. We don't want to go there, that's too much. And that lock becomes the basis. That kind of flows all the way up right to the expression. So what we do in the group is kind of a one, two, punch in that first we go in and we kind of warm things up so we can make contact with the original pain. Right. Whatever that is. What was that original pain? That now that we're, you know, adults, if it was something earlier in life, but honestly, even if it's something current in life, what's different is now I'm resourced within our case, you know, 12 to 14 other nervous systems supporting me, holding me, creating safety for me, totally have my fucking back, are like, actually cheering me on to have some kind of opening or movement. And suddenly, okay, I can go there. And I'm resourced, right, by this kind of global nervous system we create in the group that really does matter and really does impact guys and allows things to start to be felt and move that haven't before. And once that starts starting to move, right, that's when you and I intuitively, you know, as I look back on groups we've led, we often do this. Then we kind of come in with some of the strategic or tactical, which is okay. Now, so and so standing right in front of you right now. Bring it to them. Like, actually practice right now this, you know? You know, and oftentimes it's like, well, that's fake. You know, it's just rehearsal, or I'm just acting. It's like, no, it fucking matters. It actually brings the words through your nervous system starts to carve a channel and gives your body an embodied reference point that it can come back to. And the beauty of a group I've talked about so many times before is it also gives us a very safe place to dial in the expression. Right? So we bring the thing forward, and Luke's like, you know, more like, I barely heard you, Ben. Like. And I'm like, oh, my God, no. I'm going to be an aggressive asshole. And I finally am like, no, we can't do this. And you're like, boom, that's it right there. And I'm like, whoa, I never would have gone that big by default.

Luke Adler: Yeah.

Jason Lange: Because my calibration has been so off in my life. Or the other way. Right. Some guys just. It's like, okay, great. That's intense and a good expression. And we want you to bring that here. And now we want to just notch it back a little bit so we can make sure it can actually be received or maybe clean up the language a little bit, where the same energy gets transmitted, but in a way that someone else can actually hear it. And so we get to play with actually experimenting on all sides of this, of being too big or loud or unskillful, or being too careful and kind of internal around it internally until we can find this sweet spot. And it's usually very obvious to the group. There's like a, you know, everybody just suddenly gets it of like, that was it. That was it. The way you just said that right there. That's all you need to bring to your spouse, to your kid, to your employee or whatever it is. And why that's so powerful is then, oh, okay, my body has done it before. And in the moment, we can help the man really anchor that in what that felt like and what it's how it was different than other versions. So then when they go into the big moment, you know, they're practiced in some sense. They've run the drill a little bit. And we've seen that a number of times in groups. Really powerful for starting to bring forward these places where we just can't express what's going on inside, because at least we've expressed it to the group and it's been received and we didn't die. So our nervous system, right, is a little more like, okay, maybe I can do this. And then, you know, we go back out into the world, into our relationship. And I've also heard this from so many guys. Not only then have we actually embodied and brought the energy through, but it's also now being held where I've had so many guys say this, it's like, yeah, imagine I just imagined you and Luke there with me, or the guys with their hands on my back, and suddenly it's like, oh, shit. There's this swell of support behind me that's gently encouraging and loving me to say, hey, man, you bring it. You deserve it. It's important. You can do this. And suddenly I'm in the middle of a conversation I never thought I could have before.

Luke Adler: Man, it's so beautiful the way you describe that. And that is the experience that we all have. I remember when we started working together nine years ago, Jason, I. I had that experience of, man, if I say this, I'm gonna die. Like, I'm gonna shatter to a million pieces. And it's a common thing, I hear folks still say when they get into the work, is it is. I'm. I'm. I'm gonna shatter. And I think that's not an inaccurate statement because the nervous system is fixed in a pattern of how to respond to something scary. And literally that response has to change if it's confronted. So there is something that breaks, shatters and dies. It's that fixed way of having been trained at a young age. Right. It's as if you could almost think of the nerves like twisting up upon each other and just tightening like a, like a vine or a. A roots in a tree that just gnarl themselves together and they're so tight that they can't even get water into them. And the process that we get into is the process of bringing water and sunlight, or we call it love. You know, just that's, that's what opens the nervous system is a sense of safety, being seen, care, and it works. And then there's this sense of whatever I was afraid of, I'm not made of glass, I didn't die. Wow. I'm actually. My system is built to be much more resilient than I perceived. And again, this is where perception and feeling get muddled. Our perception is so certain that we're not going to survive this, that it just is like, well, at least I know, at least I know how to survive. I'm going to stay there. So part of taking this big risk is you need a group that creates enough care and safety that in a certain sense becomes that surrogate presence of love that we never had. And we do know, we all know, that the thing that we want more than anything, materially or otherwise is love. We all want, we all want to be cared for. We all want to love. We all want that to expand in our lives. That's the essence of what we bring to Heart of Shadow, what we create there. I want to share a quick anecdote of my own experience. I was leading a training recently and something happened that was. Made me very angry, very pissed off in the training. Then I had to come. I came home and I was still vibrating with this kind of traumatic experience in my nervous system. I was in shock. I knew I was feeling angry, I knew I was feeling sad and I was feeling hurt. But they were all ripping through my system and they weren't settled yet. And so I knew that I needed to process it and I came home to it. You know, typical evening and my kids were, you know, kind of loud being children, and my wife was commenting in a certain way and I was just so sensitive to the environment and I got angry with my kids, I got angry with my wife. I was up at 3am several nights in a row, because I was just still processing this event. And I knew I wasn't upset with my family, but I was feeling a lot all at once, and I just had to keep showing up for life. So I was. I was not being attuned and sensitive in the ways that I'd like to be with my loved ones. And I knew what I had to say. I knew I needed to make things right with my kids and my wife, but I wasn't ready to say it. I was. I was still too much in a fight or flight response. I was in a. I was in a fight response. A little bit of fight, a little bit of flight, a little bit of freeze. All of it was in there. Fawn, that was in there, too. And I got some support from some people I trusted. I saw my therapist, but it wasn't until I was with my men's group, I think it was yesterday morning, my men's shadow work group, which Jason is a part of. And I was able to share the somatics. I was able to share how angry I was and how hurt I was and how not okay it was that. That I had that not okay. It was what I experienced. And once I was able to feel that and have it be held, not fixed, not processed, just held by my men's group that loves me, cares about me, that knows me, the charge could finally come off of my body, and then I could say what I needed to say with my family. So last night, I called a family meeting. I explained to the family what happened. I listened to, you know, their hurt because dad had yelled at them for a couple days in a row. And then I. I was able to apologize and. And find my words, but was a situation where I couldn't find my words yet. I needed help. I needed support. I needed time. And so I wanted to share this just a quick illustration of, you know, sometimes we know what we need to say and we just can't say it. We can't get the words out. And we. We. We have to. We have to find that scaffolding, that support. We need to get the charge out of our system to. If it's, hey, I want to have sex, we need to bring that to a place where we can process all of the.

Jason Lange: The.

Luke Adler: The mixture of feelings that are. That are in there. Some fear, some excitement, some anger, some resentment, some shame. It's really difficult to find the words when there's one intense emotion, let alone more than one. You know, it can feel very conflictive inside when there's. I Want this and, and I don't want this. I'm excited and I'm afraid we need a place where that can be fully, fully realized and vibrated and moved like you said, Jason, how can we move the energy consciously? Shadow work is the one place I've found that truly does that, particularly the kind that we teach and in a men's group that's built around that is the best vehicle that I've found. It continues to work and give benefits to it.

Jason Lange: So.

Luke Adler: There'S my recent example of coming right up against that. We're going to come up against that again and again. And we need the right tools, you know, to be able to know what we need, you know.

Luke Adler: Yeah, it's a deep topic. As you're elucidating some of the deeper nuances and makes me think of how profound language is and expression is and that it's truly coming from the. The. The default level of openness in our body. So to the degree that we're open and in touch with our own power and creativity is reflected in the clarity and the quality of our voice in a certain sense, and I don't mean like the judgment of it, I mean how expressed and full of the sense of aliveness is that comes out of. Out of our words. So this is actually a massive. A massive domain and a place to keep refining and practicing. Questions. Well, where do I practice that? I practice it with my wife therapist. The men's group experience is one where we actually kind of take, in some ways the work that Jason and I do is we take the meaning and context out of maybe what's occurring in our life and what has occurred. It's not to say we don't value it, but we start to focus our attention more on how occluded or tight or blocked is that pipe of expression in your body. Think of it as the way the blood flows through the vascular system, or food flows through your digestive system, or fluid throws. Flows through your. The interstitial spaces of your body. How clear are those apertures from which you can move your physiology? And the thing that's non physical in some ways, which is your voice, the voice has some physical qualities to it, but it also just emits through. Through sound wave. And so in the heart of shadow, what we do is we. We take off the convention around voice and meaning and we let people just share, just share what's there, whether it's just raw emotion vibrating their pain, tears, anger. And as that expression can come fully forward and out and into a space and have it be held with just love and curiosity. The system, the body opens up even more and more, life comes, force comes forward. And then once things are really online and flowing, then we come in tactically and we practice in real life stuff because we don't want our work just to be about full, unbridled, unfiltered, indiscernible expression. We start with that. That's where the men's group is there to just get it up and out. Then we come in with the more tactical kind of coachy work of like, all right, now let's mask the nervous system. We're with spouse, kids, co worker, employee, boss. And let me, let me speak with sensitivity and skill into the context of this relationship, which is different than, let me approach this tactically and contextually this problem. And then just really hold my nervous system really tight and, and try to get the language out in the right way. That's not how we work. We're not, we're not working with the, the fix first. We're working with healing the system and then we can come in with tactics that work really, really well and are generative. It's not squeezing your life force through a tiny little straw hole. It's opening up your capacity to be fully present and relaxed and at ease. That's the, that's part of the goal, at least in terms of physiology. And you know, we've had six men, six, six groups go through hard shadow so far in the last three plus years. All the groups are still together and they are the space from which they get to practice this. Some, some groups meet weekly, some bi monthly, but the men who have stayed in and are and are all in have realized what Jason and I have realized, which is that this resource of a men's group steeped in depth, becomes an engine for life to just work, to work and to work better and better and better. And it's the love, care and commitment to that process that has shown us that this evolution in healing work is incredibly valuable and there's really no price that can be put on it.

Jason Lange: And like you said, it's just an incredible vehicle for learning to bring more of ourselves forward. And so, right, we've been mostly talking about this in the context of feeling and expression. And you know, I could hear some guys like, oh, men's group feelings, right? You could, you could think of that. But bringing ourselves forward in our truth is masculine as fuck. And being able to speak your truth is much easier when you can connect to and express what you're feeling in your body. That's it. And that's where a lot of men just don't have the capacity that they really need to. To create the life, the lives they really want to. And that's really what we're talking about here, is we all have this truth inside of us, and for so many of us men, it gets stuck, and we don't. It doesn't come forward. And, you know, truth and trust go hand in hand, right? And the less we're able to bring forward our truth, the less trustable we are as men. It's just that simple. Because then people can intuit, particularly women. But other men, as we've seen plenty in our work, can intuit when what's coming out of us isn't fully it or that there's something inside of us that's not being expressed. Like, the whole point of this episode, but when we can bring it forward doesn't mean people always fucking love it or that it makes them super happy, but it does create deeper trust that, oh, I can trust this man, right? Like, I can trust you, Luke, that if there's some kind of disharmony, I trust you'll bring it forward so I don't have to walk around like, fuck, is Luke mad at me? No. Boom. I trust that you can speak your experience, right? Like you did with your family, like you've done in our group before. And that, to me, that's the kind of man I want to be around, right? I want to be around people who I trust actually speak what's going on inside them. Because if for no other reason, it makes my fucking life easier because I'm not having to guess or do the extra emotional labor to tease it out of people. It's like, oh, no. It's so relaxing to get into a group. You know, we saw this with our last cohort who just fucking knocked it out of the park, really putting into practice very quickly some of the techniques we teach around group cohesion. Withholds, clearings, disharmonies. And what they quickly sensed was, oh, my God, it's so relieving to be in a group that can already do this, because I come from a family system or relationships where. Where conflict was just something you avoided at all costs. And that actually has a tremendous impact on our nervous systems. So in the group itself, in the content we're working from outside of the group, we really get to learn to bring our truth forward and have it be held and heard and create Ultimately, more connection around us. And that's really the power we're talking about of when you can really start to speak what's happening inside you and you can bring forward and actually talk about what you're feeling. It will change all of your relationships, hands down, almost more than anything else. Right. Because it actually moves the ball forward in important ways and creates more of a connection to your inner landscape, something that so many people are often dying for with men. Doesn't mean we're emotionally vomiting, but it's so relaxing to know what's going on inside you, particularly if you're someone I spend all day with or many days or have close relationships with. When we don't know what's going on inside, we lose trust. And often it feels unsafe actually as well. Right. And so learning to bring forward what's inside, create safety and trust out there is one of the many ways, by doing something like shadow work, you can really become a more effective leader in your life.

Luke Adler: If you're ready for one of the great adventures of your life. Many men have said the greatest experience they've ever had. January 12th is our seventh cohort. It's pretty cool. We're going to do this, the retreat part of this one in Oregon. So it's in Falomouth, Oregon, which is about 45 minutes north of Eugene, about hour and 15 minutes south of Portland. So you can fly directly into Portland or Eugene to get there. We have eight modules online, so the group gets bonded, they get connected, so that when we get to the retreat, we hit the ground running. There's already a level of trust, and the accommodations are beautiful. The food is excellent, if not close to gourmet. And, you know, at the very, at the very least, you will come away transformed. And at the most, you will come away with potentially some of the best friends of your absolute best friends of your lifetime. That, that will. That will be an engine for healing and love and support like you've never had. If you were fortunate to have really close friendships as a kid where there was magic and wonder and support and love and openness, this is kind of the adult version of that, with all the maturity and agency that men have. So if it resonates with you, if you feel pulled, you can hit one of us in the chat bubble on hardofshadow.com and. Or we'll get back to you and have a call, but we'd love to meet you, we'd love to see you, we'd love, we'd love for you to be a part of this. So, you know, come join us.

Jason Lange: Yeah. And as we're recording this, we're almost halfway full on the first cohort of 2026. And if that's not right timing for you, you can still go to the website, get it, get tuned in, and find out about future cohorts. They do fill up. So if you're thinking about it and you really want to make 2026 launch you into a new way of being, this is an incredibly powerful way to do it. So definitely, once again, just head over to Heart to check it out. There's also, at this point, I don't know, almost a dozen, maybe dozen and a half testimonials from different guys that have gone through some really killer stuff. So you don't even have to take our word for it. Just listen to what men have actually experienced. All right, well, pleasure as always, my friend. And until next time, thanks, brother. If you're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine preference presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary Men. Apply.