The Most Powerful Tool for Transformation

This week, I want to talk about one of the most powerful tools for growth there is. Right?

If you're listening to this podcast, you're someone who's interested in growing and developing and healing and becoming the most complete and powerful version of yourself you can be in this lifetime. Now, there's all kinds of tools and strategies I've talked about before, and we'll be talking about a lot more on this podcast. But today I want to focus on what I have really found to be the most crucial and important and powerful one.

Essentially, relationship is where a lot of our deepest wounds were created. So the famous author and researcher Brene Brown, she was one of the first people I heard talk about this. And that was there's certain, certain emotions, certain experiences that are social, meaning they only happen in relationship. Now, something like shame or issues of trust, big things for a lot of men I work with, those wounds are created in relationship, Meaning if we were some weird sci fi movie and we were born alone in the forest and there were no other people, it's very unlikely we would experience those because they only happen when we're in relationship to others.

So a lot of us when we're young, like we've talked about, have traumatic experiences, big or small, that create these wounds in us that we need to heal. Now, the thing is, it's super important to be doing your work, to be meditating, to be working out, to be doing all the things you can do on your side of the court. But those things won't often heal those social emotions, those social traumas, they actually have to be healed in the relationship of container, because that's in the container of relationship, because that's what they were created in.

So relationship is the place that you're most likely to get triggered, where your old trauma is going. To get triggered, where your nervousness is going to get triggered, where your anger is going to get triggered, where all the different parts of your nervous system are going to become activated, your fear, whatever that might be. Now, that can be pretty upsetting, right? And that can be a large part of the stress for a lot of people of relationships.

But it's also the gift, right? It's the gift in that now I have a place where I can start to heal this, and I can't do it alone. Growing alone sucks. Truth be told, there's always a plateau. It's pretty easy to just run away to a cave and sit in a mountain alone and feel pretty good. But it's also pretty hard to grow beyond the limits of that specific lonely circumstance.

And so relationship is the place you need to be putting your energy, and it's the place where you're actually going to get to practice everything you learn, everything. In the worlds of personal growth and development, it's literally where the rubber hits the road, right? This is where application happens. You can read about a lot of stuff in a book, but doesn't mean crap unless you bring it into your relationships, unless you bring it into your interactions.

Now, listening to this podcast, you know, part of my mission is to get every man into a men's group. Men's groups are relationships, right? There are ways to create relationships with other men. Now, the beautiful thing about them, particularly if you can get into a group that meets pretty consistently, is members of that group will start to trigger you, right? They'll start to cause reactions in you. For a lot of men, just being in the presence of other men can be triggering.

If you were bullied in the past or didn't have good experiences with healthy, masculine growing up, which is most of us, right? Most of us were shamed, ridiculed, made fun of traditional kind of gym locker banter and big dick competitions, not places conducive to growth necessarily. And that can be pretty traumatic for a lot of us and cause us to not trust a lot of other men. So men's group's a place where we get to start to redo a lot of that and we get to heal a lot of that wounding we got socially from other guys and men in a safe container and start to rewire that and learn I can trust men.

You know, something I've been telling a lot of the guys I work with lately is one of the biggest shifts you can make is when you find the right men, good, solid, trustable men who are doing their work in in life, you will see that men are no longer the competition, but allies. They're actually your biggest allies for getting everything you want in life. They know the experience, they know what it's like to be you. They know the ups and downs, they know the sticking points, and they'll resonate with you in that.

And then suddenly you have allies that are rooting for you and don't need anything from you. It's one of the great powers of having solid men in our lives and doing men's work and being in men's groups. Now, men's groups are an awesome place to work relationship, right? Like I said, you're going to get triggered. You're going to get to practice being in deep presence. You're going to get to practice being vulnerable. You're going to get to practice a lot of different things with a solid group of men in your life. They're also going to point out your blind spots, right?

Shadow, something we talked about in previous episodes. Other men will often see things that you can't see sooner than you can, right? They'll be able to name, wow, this thing keeps happening. You're doing it, or I notice while you're sharing that or checking in, you're saying you're happy, but you actually look miserable, right? Your face is frowning and your eyes look baggy or whatever that might be, they're going to be able to reflect these different things we can't see, which is going to help accelerate our growth.

Now, beyond just peer groups like men's groups, the next level. You know, probably the most profound place I have personally found in my journey and many of the men I've worked with to grow, in addition to men's group is intimate relationship. And this one is particularly powerful because all that stuff we talked about in a previous episode about our wounding creating a protective barrier around us that's all related to attachment and our authenticity and expression needs.

Now, this is stuff that happens to us when we're young. A lot of it's influenced by our primary caregivers, whether that's mom and dad, mom and mom, dad and dad, just mom, just dad, grandparents, foster parents, whoever that might be. It conditions us, right? And we build these structures to learn to survive in that situation. Now, the most powerful place then to remove that barrier as we get older to get what we truly want is intimate relationship.

So in relationship, in intimate relationship, you know, I've seen this in many couples, clients I've worked with and experienced this myself. You know, one of the places people often get messed up is they meet someone and, you know, we have a name for it. There's the honeymoon phase. Sex is hot. The connection is hot. There's so much attraction, and it's fun and it's easy, and you're excited to see each other. And it feels like deep love and magic. And then usually between 18 months to 24 months or sometimes earlier, if some kind of commitment is made, if you move in with each other, if you become monogamous or get married, something shifts.

Suddenly our partner annoys us or triggers us and vice versa. The hormonal cliff hits us. And suddenly we don't just want to get them naked as soon as we can. Maybe our mind wanders, maybe we think of other partners. Maybe sometimes we're just too tired. Even though when we first saw them, that would never have crossed our mind. Well, what happens at this point is usually attachment starts being made healthy, secure attachment.

And what that means is if we have attachment wounds, they come up right then and there. They start surfacing. And they start surfacing because our system is longing and seeking a way to heal them. And boom, here it has relationship. Here's a place where I can start to work through those old triggers, where things that happened to me as a kid start showing up in the present, right?

And sexual energy is one of the most potent energies in the world. Literally, this is the tool, the mechanism for the creation of life. It's supercharged sexual energy, right? Can be used destructively, but it can also be also be used incredibly positively for healing and growth. And so it can become a tool to heal some of these relational wounds, to feel that energy and move it while staying connected to another partner.

So if you really care about growing, changing, healing, becoming more, having more capacity, more availability in life, relationship is something you have to be engaging with. Relationship to peers in something like a men's group relationship to an intimate partner in some kind of sexual relationship.

And then we'll talk about another time. Even relationship with your family, right? People who you didn't necessarily choose, but you got to make it work with. There's that old joke that many have said of think you're enlightened, Go home. Go home for. Go home for the holidays. Boom. We often can get triggered right into our youth. Now, the thing is, sometimes it's hard to heal stuff with our, with our parents, with our families, because they may not be open to it or available to it or even alive.

But the beauty of intimate relationship is that those same triggers will come up. Triggers from your family will show up in your intimate partnership. Triggers from your childhood will show up in your intimate partnership. The thing about intimate partnership, intimate relationship is you get to choose that person. And you should choose someone who wants to grow and you should choose someone who wants to use and knows that relationship is the ultimate tool for doing that.

And that in the context of your relating, that's woven in and that they understand you're going to need support around you through some kind of men's group or peer group, and that all of those relationships are going to be the place where your changes actually show up, where you have to change, where you get to put it into practice. So if you're ready and want help magnetizing and creating this deep kind of relationship, you can watch my free training at Evolutionary Men webinar.

And if you watch that training and like what you hear and want to get involved, follow the instructions at the end and then head over to Evolutionary Men apply talk to you next time.