When the moment calls for fierceness, a good marani is a killer.
And they are.
They're warriors.
Don't kill you.
Don't cross them.
When the moment calls for tenderness, a good marani will lay down his sword and shield and be sweet like a baby.
What makes a great marani is knowing which moment is which.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Terry Real.
Terry Real is a therapist and considered one of the world's foremost experts on male psychology and on male female dynamics in romantic relationships.
Today we discuss what it means to be a man and the mental health crisis that men are facing nowadays.
As you may have heard, rates of depression and suicide are at an all time high in men right now.
Fewer and fewer men are in romantic relationships and many don't even have a single close friend.
And for those that are in romantic relationships, the public messaging about how to show up in those relationships is very conflicted.
Today, we address all of these issues head on.
Terry explains that to thrive in life, men have to look at relating as a skill that requires action and yes feelings, but also processing and communicating those feelings in a specific way, and sometimes not communicating them at all.
We also discussed the critical importance of fraternity not necessarily college fraternities, but finding and belonging to a group of men that you can trust, that you can enjoy time with, that give you honest feedback and that hold you accountable.
What I appreciate so much about Terry Real is that he's willing to answer the hard questions about men and women very directly.
And frankly, most therapists are not willing to do that publicly.
For example, he explains that in his extensive work with couples, women and men are equally bad at relationships, but in different ways.
And he offers solutions for them both if they actually want their relationship to thrive.
Thanks to his honesty and providing practical tools, Terry Real provides us today with essential information for men and women of all ages.
It cuts through all the generational differences that certainly exist to highlight the practical ways that men can build and support their mental health and thrive at work, school and in romantic relationships, and also, just as importantly, in their relationship to themselves.
That is how men can build a strong self-concept, sense of agency, and confidence.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.
And now for my discussion with Terry Real.
Terry Real, welcome.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you.
What's going on with men?
What's this mental health, men's crisis, suicide rates are way, way up.
What's going on?
What's going on is that the old role is shifted.
The sand is shifted under our feet.
And we're trying to figure out what the hell we are.
And if we're not going to be what our dads and granddads were, What are we going to be?
And we're searching and we're grappling.
I got to tell you.
The other thing that's going on is someone in reaction to feminism, and you know somebody said about my work women have had a revolution and now men have to deal with it.
It's like, what are we supposed to do here?
And there's been a backlash.
There's been a resurgence in our country and around the globe of almost a celebration of some of the most difficult, unattractive aspects of traditional masculinity.
And we're not sure what it means to be a man anymore, and particularly young guys are grappling.
There are a lot of healthy examples saying, okay, here's the new territory.
Let me show you what it looks like.
The biggest response that I see to the confusion about what are we supposed to do here has been regressive.
Let's go back. to being powerful, dominant, entitled, aggressive.
And you see this at the top.
You see this in politics, not just in our country, but all over the globe.
Autocracy dominance is celebrated.
And it's like, we're tired of the woke.
We're tired of being told that we're bad.
You know I grew up in the 60s in the height of feminists and I consider myself a feminist family therapist.
Did you have long hair in the 60s?
Oh, yeah, and a mustache and the whole thing, yeah.
Yeah, I did, and a lot of drugs.
But when I grew up the joke was, you know the philosophical if a tree falls in the woods and no one's there, does it still make a sound?
When I grew up, it was, if a man speaks in the woods and there's no one there, is he still wrong?
That was the first surge of major feminism.
Yeah, early stage feminism was angry.
I am proud to say my dear friends and colleagues who are in the forefront of feminism Mr Perel, Carol Gilligan are man-loving feminists.
But that wasn't the first wave.
It was really an understandable... reaction to the entitlement and the oppression of women.
But I call that political patriarchy, and it exists.
Look, you step out of America, and it's pretty clear.
Women are oppressed by men all over the globe.
That's true.
But what I, as a psychologist, what I'm interested in is what I call psychological patriarchy, the dynamics of patriarchy.
And that can take place between two men, between two women, between a mother and a child, between two races.
And the psychology of patriarchy is a straitjacket that is, I believe, toxic for everybody.
Now look, there are some positive traits to traditional masculinity.
It's not completely black and white.
But a lot of it is really unhealthy.
So a lot of guys reacted to being told you're wrong.
You're wrong, you're wrong by hey, I'm throwing off the shackles, I'll do what the hell I want.
And a kind of celebration of the old freedoms and the old entitlements.
But that ain't the way out.
And even though we see this resurgence right now, That does not breed a happy human being.
So we need models of progressive masculinity, not regressive masculinity, and they're rare.
Is it possible that now there are more templates of what it is to be a man than there were before?
I mean in my mind, in my very simple-minded mind, not formally educated about this topic except having grown up.
Yeah, you are a man.
You are a guy.
Yeah, yep.
I mean, that's the only experience I have, right?
So everything's filtered through my own experience as best as I can try and get outside.
I mean, this is where I started and where I'll end up.
You know, the model that I was exposed to was okay.
You know, In the 40s and 50s, men looked and acted a certain way.
And it was a fairly narrow template.
Very narrow.
Pretty narrow template.
And pretty inhuman in some ways.
The essence of traditional masculinity, which didn't end in the 50s it's still with us very much today is stoicism.
The essence of being a man is being invulnerable.
The more invulnerable you are, the more manly you are, the more vulnerable you are, the more girly you are to this day.
And being girly is not a good thing.
Well, there's some problems with that.
One is we are vulnerable.
As human beings, that's a lie.
Denying our vulnerability is a lie.
And so I see chronic anxiety, depression.
Everybody's in a state of, do I measure up?
And you don't because what you're trying to measure up to isn't real.
You know, I say to guys trying to run away from your own vulnerability is like trying to outrun your rectum.
It has a way of following you everywhere you go.
We are vulnerable.
And the other issue with that traditional model of stoicism is we connect to each other through vulnerability.
That's how human beings connect.
And men are walled off.
And one of the issues facing us is in hetero relationships.
Women across the West are insisting on levels of emotional connection and open heartedness and intimacy from us guys that literally were stamped out of us as boys.
You know, the way we turn boys into men traditionally in this culture is through disconnection.
You disconnect from your feelings.
You disconnect from vulnerability.
You disconnect from others.
You disconnect from your mother.
We call all this becoming autonomous.
Well, this whole story of achieving autonomy has nothing to do with real psychology.
There's no basis for it at all.
It's just patriarchy.
So like, for example, you know, the monosyllabic adolescent boy who won't answer his mother.
That's not normal.
We think of it as normal.
But that's not psychologically necessary.
It is a mandate of traditional masculinity.
And I'm here to tell you that traditional masculinity is harmful.
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Let me ask you about this template.
Like, so there's the 1940s. went into the 60s somewhat template, right?
As Steve Jobs so aptly said, you know, the 60s really happened in the 70s.
The long hair, the mustaches, most of that was in the 70s.
Some of it was in the 60s, but most of it was in the 70s.
Okay.
So there's that very stoic template right right um, provider protector stoic, no feelings, right yeah, and it's actually interesting to.
I have looked a little bit of the history of this.
Um, you know, there were even uh, diagrams that you know men should never stand with their hands on their hips, because that was like a feminine stance never tilt a hip to one side.
I mean, this stuff was good, but it was out there right, and It was also coupled with etiquette.
It was very clear how to act, right?
There wasn't much range, but the sort of range of things to do and say was fairly scripted, which I'll just make.
I'm not trying to play devil's advocate here, but it made the script simpler and therefore more accessible, but it masked a lot of other things is, I think, what we both agree on.
But then came the template.
I was born in 75, so I'm 50 now. in the late 80s and 90s, it was kind of a mishmash of things.
We saw our first gay male characters in television shows.
We saw also gay female characters, but since we're talking about men and masculinity here, that was the first time.
I think it was the character on The Real World, San Francisco, the first character.
Forgive me for not remembering his name.
He died of AIDS, and it was during the AIDS epidemic.
Will and Grace, yeah.
Yeah, so there was more of that, right?
But there's a difference between having gay men in the public eye and saying that the role of straight men had.
Totally agree, totally agree.
There's two separate things.
But there was sort of an expansion of of notions of maleness, i would say, in the 80s and 90s.
It's almost like things became somewhat more of a buffet right.
You had your football jock types, your finance guys.
There was the stoic thing, the provider protector thing, but then There was more of an artsy artist phenotype that emerged as well.
You had I wouldn't say sensitive artist, but the artistic expression became kind of It was always, but it became part of masculinity.
Well, you had hippies.
You had hippies and then it became... And then it was like rock and roll, right?
I mean, you had also, not my taste, but you had like the Bon Jovi's types.
You had like long hair and it was... Oh, you're from Jersey.
Okay, I forgot.
So Bon Jovi's an appropriate example.
So there was somewhat of an expansion, right?
There was somewhat of an expansion.
And then...
Now it seems that the templates of maleness I mean some of the most famous musical artists, who are men and you know report as heterosexual from what I know are, you know, dress in what used to be considered a very feminine way.
Right.
You had that before too, David Bowie.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean.
So there's always been a bit of gender bending within this template, but it really, I think, emerged the most in the nineties and it's continued forward.
And now when I talk to guys in their twenties because I have friends with kids who are now in their late teens and twenties um, It seems that they are very comfortable with the idea of self-expression.
I guess this is where I'm trying to reconcile this notion of like that we're so.
You said that we're kind of still steeped in the patriarchy, but it seems like the kids in their 20s and 30s, and maybe even 40s, they feel like they have options.
Well, they have access to emotion in ways that we didn't.
You know, they were all raised by feminist mothers, right?
And it had its impact.
But the problem is, you know, I see these guys and they're all whining that women aren't attracted to them.
And there's a reason for that.
A lot of guys who get in touch with emotion and the sort of more heartfelt issues bring along with it.
Traditional male privilege.
So it's like, I'm emotional now, come and take care of me.
And a lot of the women are complaining that these guys are kind of children.
They're not, they don't stand up.
The issue is this.
Can you be big hearted and open and emotional and show up and be responsible and be giving.
The thing that hasn't changed for a lot of us guys is giving.
Back in the 50s when it was stoic, it's about me.
I show up and I am responsible in ways that younger guys are less responsible than our dads were.
That's all true.
But, you know, I go out and I fight dragons and I come home and where's my martini and slippers?
Then the 60s came on and feminism.
Okay, it's okay to have feelings.
It might even be okay to be a little bit vulnerable.
But it's still about me.
And when I talk about progressive masculinity, I want men who are big-hearted strong, connected and giving
And that's missing both in the traditional patriarchal model and in many of the countercultural models.
You know what's missing in our culture.
I'm going to fade back to men for a moment and talk about generally.
What's missing in our culture generally is relationality.
What's missing in our culture is the beauty of connection.
And look, you follow the science.
I've been saying this for 40 years, and now the science is really very clear.
Being connected, being intimate with yourself and with others, that's what we humans are born for.
That's how we're designed for pack animals.
And the lack of intimate connection is not only bad for us psychologically, but I think it was Vivek Murthy who quoted it's as bad as smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day on your body.
We are born to be connected and related.
And I wrote about male depression back in the 90s.
What I said is the way we, quote, turn boys into men is through disconnection.
We tell them to disconnect from their hearts, less so younger men.
Disconnect from others, that's being independent and autonomous.
And the cost of disconnection is disconnection.
And some men have recovered more feeling inside their skin, but they haven't developed the art of connection yet.
You know, I deal with, just like you and many of you, I deal with high rollers in my practice.
And one of the things that I teach these guys is the difference between gratification and what I call relational joy.
Gratification is just what you think, a short-term hit of pleasure.
And our culture loves gratification.
And you know these captains of industry who come in and fly their private planes in to see me.
They're all about gratification.
And they've done beautifully at it.
You know, they're rich, they're powerful.
That's great in this place.
I like pleasure.
There's a deeper pleasure that I call relational joy.
And you get that as a parent.
Sometimes your kids are gratifying.
Sometimes you want to throw them through the goddamn window.
But if anybody said hey, we could do a time machine and you don't have to have this, I'd deck you, because there's a deeper down joy in just being there and being connected, just being in the relationship.
And that's been lost in our culture.
We live in an anti-relational culture, narcissistic culture, and even though some of the terms of patriarchy have moved, the narcissism and the lack of relationality has not moved.
It's just a different variation.
There's a lot there and I want to make sure I ask about this notion of emotional experience and expression from men seems like a very important topic to parse because indeed it seems that men now are, thanks to your work, and others are hearing that it's important to feel, to feel that feelings are not just okay, they're encouraged, that if you bottle them in you know.
We used to hear about this in the context of the impact on heart health, like type A, type B, like you go back and look at the, it was almost like a mask for this other thing.
It's still true, you know you can destroy your heart by smoking cigarettes and all this other stuff, but it was really.
It was about that original typing of people who tend to die early from heart attack.
It was the people who hold it inside.
It was about people who manage a lot, do a lot, but hold it inside.
And it's kind of interesting because the ones that turned out and I'm not suggesting people do that screamed and yelled a lot that catharsis actually helped them in terms of longevity.
I'm not saying you should go scream at people.
But Steve Jobs used to be a big proponent of scream therapy and just getting out there and vocalizing.
But I think that the question that's in my mind is okay.
So if it's important to feel, then let's just do this as a decision tree.
Okay, so I think if we agree, men need to feel their feelings.
Then the question becomes, should they feel those alone or in the presence of someone else?
And I'm guessing there's a case for both.
But then at what point does one not have this, what you refer to as emotional privilege, where it's like putting it on someone else to take care of them?
Could you give an example of what healthy expression of an emotion is?
Let's keep this in the context of heterosexual couple for simplicity.
Sure.
Obviously it carries over.
Sure.
What is an example of healthy emotional expression, let's say sadness, deep sadness, or frustration and sadness, in the presence of a partner that doesn't bring about this thing of that they're regressing and are now becoming a child?
Yeah.
What does that look like?
It looks like a negotiation and not a demand.
Could you tell me more?
Yeah, because even in our... I'm going to push us.
Even in our talk, I don't care about the feelings.
I care about the connection.
What will make us men healthy is connection.
So, yeah, great, have your feelings, and then what are you going to do with them?
I used to have no feelings and now I have feelings all over the place and I don't give a shit about you and your feelings.
I want you to pay attention to me and my feelings.
Well, is that a step up?
I mean, a little bit, but it's not where I want to leave you.
So what I want men to move beyond is our selfishness, because it's in our interest to move beyond our selfishness.
And so recovering feeling, being stoic or having feelings, sure, that's good.
That's important.
The way we connect is through feelings.
The way we connect is through vulnerability.
So I was nervous coming here talking to you.
Really?
Yeah.
Me?
Hard to imagine, right?
But it's true.
Well, it's true.
I spent a lot of time here, so it's a very familiar place.
But I would hope that's not because I'm intimidating.
No, it's not that.
It's more like there are a lot of people listening to us right now.
Oh, yeah, who are intensely interested in these issues.
Men and women, young and old, are really interested in these issues.
As we should be.
And not just because men are killing themselves more that too but also because, as you pointed out, we are a old-world primate species and we are not going to go back to living in troops.
Sorry, folks.
No.
My colleague...
I like to consider him a friend as well, Bob Sapolsky.
We talk about this from time to time.
It's like, yeah, that's how we evolved.
Guess what, folks?
There's no little village where everyone moves to.
I know.
It's not happening.
I know.
But we are also very adaptable old world primates.
That's true.
But the circuitry is not going anywhere.
It's a need.
So if I could, hopefully you're not feeling nervous anymore.
But let me answer your question.
Yeah.
Because what I did is I called our mutual friend Bea.
Oh, yeah.
And I said I was nervous.
Is that right?
Yeah.
She's wonderful.
And she said, he's wonderful.
Let me tell you about Andrew and what's going to happen.
And she, like, read me through the whole thing.
And little.
I'm not going to get into it, but my fear is about well, we're going to disagree about this.
No, you're not.
Let me tell you how it is.
And after I was done talking to her, I was chilled.
That's a blessing.
What men lose when we don't, when we're not in touch with our vulnerabilities, is we lose the capacity to ask somebody to help them.
But it's ask someone, not demand.
And it's also reciprocal.
It's not, you know, then Bea started talking about her relationship and I started supporting her.
And that's a relationship.
Yes, I want men to come out of this straitjacket and have feelings.
I want us to be whole and own our human vulnerabilities, but in a context.
In a context in which we're connected to other people and we're neither cut off from them nor are we imposing on them.
But we've learned the art and it's virtually lost of how to be with, simply how to be with, how to ask them to be with us, and how to reciprocate and be with them.
So many women are angry at us.
I mean, I deal.
I'm the medic in the gender war.
You know, I deal.
My beat are couples on the brink of divorce that no one else has been able to help.
That's my specialty.
And it's like we just don't know.
I have a saying, and I may get into trouble.
It's a broad generalization, but clinically.
I like to say an angry woman is a woman who doesn't feel heard.
And so many men are like, what is going on here?
My marriage isn't that bad, but if you could just get her off my back.
I don't understand what the problem is.
And we're hit with an angry.
Well, I'll double back on this, but we're hit with an angry woman and we either push back or get defensive or withdraw.
I have to lead men by the hand.
Let me teach you something.
Tell me why you're angry.
Tell me what you would like.
Let me give you unless it's jumping off the bridge, I have a saying.
I know how you can disarm an angry woman in five seconds, 50 of the time, which is better than you're doing.
Okay, how do you do it?
Give her what she wants.
Let me ask you, what's going on with you?
And do what I can to help out.
This is a skill that's brand new for our culture.
And if I may, it doubles back on the central issue, which I hope we get to, of men and self-esteem.
Because most men in our culture have no idea what healthy self-esteem looks like.
Self-esteem comes from the inside out.
I have worth because I'm here and I'm breathing.
I don't have to earn it.
I can't add to it.
I can't subtract from it.
You know, it's democracy.
My worth is no better or worse than yours.
I'm born with it.
Men are taught outside in self-esteem, and it's mostly performance.
I have worth because of what I can do.
I have big muscles.
I can give my wife an orgasm.
I can land this job.
I can hit this homer.
That's great when you perform well.
But when you don't perform well, you go into shame.
What happened to your worth?
And so healthy self-esteem.
If I may and I may double back and talk more about it which I have to teach men is the capacity to feel proportionally bad about bad behavior.
I screwed up.
I hurt you.
I'm sorry.
And at the same time, hold yourself in warm regard as the imperfect person.
And what we do is we either don't feel bad about bad behavior.
That's shameless, that's grandiose, sociopathic even.
Or if we do feel bad, we go right into shame.
I'm a useless piece of shit.
I feel terrible.
I have to teach men to come up out of shame and not be obsessed with the.
You know, one of the things I say is when you go from shameless, bad behavior irresponsible selfish, insensitive to oh my God, that's terrible.
I'm a big shit.
I should just beat the hell out of myself.
You're trading one form of self-preoccupation or guess what, another form of self-preoccupation.
I definitely want to get into self-esteem, but I just want to, for my sake and for some of the listeners, make sure that I summarize two what I think are conclusions, and then you can modify these.
As it relates to expression of emotion.
Yes.
Which you...
And I totally agree.
I mean, you have to be able to feel your feelings.
If for no other reason.
One good reason, great reason to get started on that trajectory is it's great for your physical health.
It's also great for your mental health and your relational health.
But oftentimes, as you know, men need to be kind of like led to the trough for a particular carrot and then there are additional carrots in there.
But it's holding everything inside will kill you.
Yes, it will kill you.
And then it makes everyone else around you miserable too, even if you think you're protecting them from it.
But as you... very importantly pointed out, it can't be a dumping of emotion on other people.
So what I heard from you was at least two very healthy ways to engage emotionally.
For men is one To ask for help.
Yeah.
And the help from your example that you're referring to, also a very talented therapist, Bea Voce.
When you called Bea was to ask for help by expressing what is on your mind as the point of concern.
Like one is nervous or one is sad, or and and, And I think in my experience, women naturally reach out to help when you couch them.
Everybody does.
Right.
Can I slow that down for a second, Andrew?
What we have is what I call the Icarus syndrome.
In the absence of worthiness, so many of us feel we have to earn love.
We have to earn worthiness.
And I like to say, guys, leave their wives.
I'll be hetero for a moment.
Guys, leave their wives and kids.
Go fly off into the sun. to be worthy of love.
And meanwhile, their wives and kids are saying, where the hell is dad?
What's going on here?
Well, I'm off trying to win your love.
Well, sit down and play Monopoly with us for Christ's sake.
You don't have to do that.
It's like, it's a bill of goods.
It's a scam that we've all bought.
Just sit down and be still and be connected.
That's all you need to do.
But we're not taught that.
Right, and we'll get back to this later, but the demands of also, and the joy frankly, of being a provider and protector many times not always involve having to leave the home and go do work.
And frankly, all my friends with kids and I've certainly experienced this.
It's when you're not able to be home because you're working.
It's this weird pain.
Because I certainly love my work.
Being a provider is wonderful.
And at the same time, there's this pain of not being able to be there for things.
And we can get back to that.
But asking for help and then, in terms of responding in a non-regressive, non-entitled way, privileged way, as you said, When a woman is upset, the words what do you need?
Ah, that is water in the desert.
And perhaps also, what do you need from me right now?
What do you need from me right now?
Okay, great.
I'm just trying to put some structure on this, because there is also something about the Y chromosome.
Like we respond well to simple instructions.
Okay, I'll take that.
I believe that.
I have a whole theory about Y chromosomes and how men evolved to be the way that we are.
We can talk about maybe at the end for fun because it's somewhat facetious, but not really.
And then the next thing that you were saying and I think this is so critical about self-esteem is the ability to accept responsibility when we screw up.
And at the same time, not take ourselves into a place of shame, to be able to still hold on to one sense of goodness.
I'm a good guy who screwed up.
I'm a good guy who behaved badly.
What if the words coming at you are not of that?
It's not, hey, listen, I'm upset because you really dropped the ball on this thing.
I'm upset because you really dropped the ball on this thing.
And it becomes character, you know, characterological assassination.
Yeah.
That takes an extra level of work.
It does.
And in that case, is your recommendation to try and counter that or to just sit with it and do the work internally to say that's not true?
Well, good luck countering it.
How's that working?
Listen, this is a trap.
First of all, the thing is this.
The lack of self-esteem leads us guys to be unaccountable in our relationships.
When we're confronted with an imperfection, We're going to go into shame.
We don't have the capacity to feel proportionately bad about the imperfection.
Okay, you're right, I screwed up.
What can I do to help?
It's like, oh, you mean I didn't hit a homer?
That means I'm a loser.
And we defend against the overwhelm of our own lack of self-worth.
What do you mean, I'm not perfect?
We defend against that awful feeling, and it's an awful feeling, by warding off the criticism.
Well, wait a minute, you have to understand.
Well you, you know, we do all these defensive things that women always complain we do, and we do because we're protecting ourselves from the overwhelm of getting swamped.
I'm a bad guy.
So...
Interestingly, I teach men self-esteem as a way of helping them be accountable in their relationship.
Interesting.
If you don't have healthy self-esteem, you can't afford to be accountable, because it's too overwhelming to admit how imperfect you are.
This is so important, what you're saying.
Also for people who aren't in romantic relationship.
For men it's so critical because we could in my mind, we could easily transpose boss or feedback.
Absolutely.
And there's I feel like and again forgive me for kind of going slow here, but I feel like parsing some of this into a structure is going to help me and hopefully help other people.
There are kind of two forms of criticism that perhaps I've experienced in life.
I'm joking.
Of course, I've experienced it.
One is someone is upset about what I did.
Yeah.
Okay.
And I hear you loud and clear, even if it's coming at me with characterological assassination, to have the internal reservoir of self-esteem that I can hear that.
What happens to us, look, I've been married 40 years.
It's me too.
We get caught in the horrible delivery and we react to the horrible delivery and You know, come on, it's not that bad.
Hey, you're talking horrible.
A black belt in a relational guy, you duck under the horrible delivery.
I'm not saying it's not horrible.
It is.
But you try and get to the point that the person's trying to make.
Why?
It's jiu-jitsu.
You duck under the horrible delivery.
You deal with their ouch.
And guess what happens?
They calm down.
You react to the horrible delivery.
That's exaggerated.
And, well, you're off to the races.
But, oh my God, what an enlightened man your partner or your boss or your kid is saying you're a shitty human being.
You know, this isn't about your bad behavior.
You're just a rotten person.
That's shame.
You have enough boundaries.
You have enough self-esteem.
Well, they're being abusive.
This is not the best part of them.
But rather than react to that, what are you so upset about, honey?
What can I give you right now?
And The beauty of these skills is that they work.
You react to the bad behavior on your partner's part and you're off.
This goes on for hours, days.
You duck under that and go, okay, you're upset.
What can I do to help you?
And all of that toxicity just passes through you.
That's a real man.
And it's like something that could have been misery for a day to a week.
It calms down in 10, 15 minutes because it's a good job.
And when I talk to guys, I want to redefine strength.
Strength, the way we normally think, you know, it's the rumble.
You give me your best shot, I give you my best shot.
I like jiu-jitsu.
Duck under it.
Duck under the wave.
And at the end, instead of saying, I was really strong.
I didn't put up with that bullshit.
No, I want you to say, I was really elegant.
I just sidestepped that whole thing.
And what might have been a struggle that would go on for days, I just diffused in 10 minutes.
Aren't I cool?
That's a real man in my book.
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Two questions about this scenario that we've kind of got structured here.
There are at least two general types of criticism.
One is you did something, you screwed up.
Yeah.
Like you screwed up.
You did the wrong thing.
You did the bad thing.
You did something poorly.
The other is upset about what you didn't do.
Okay.
And...
In my limit.
I'm not a clinician, obviously you know, but in my limited number of interactions with men where they share about a frustration could be from a boss, could be from a partner
Oftentimes, it's what they didn't do.
And they'll confide that the reason they didn't do it.
The reason it seemed like they didn't think about it is because they are awfully busy doing all the other things that come with being a provider, and a partner entails.
And there's the real world constraints of time, right?
And so it's not like, oh, you forgot the anniversary or you forgot the present.
It's the things that never get asked for that someone doesn't just naturally see.
I'm a vision scientist first and a neuroscientist second, really.
We have giant blind spots about certain things.
Women see and hear things that we just don't.
Yes.
And men see and hear things that women just cannot see.
You're not allowed to say that.
It's very politically incorrect.
Men see things in women that they can't see.
Women see things in men that they can't see.
This idea that women are all-knowing and men are dopes is part of what got us here.
That's true.
You know this notion of like, you know, the Homer Simpson type thing.
You know there are certainly men like that, but I would say there's a real world version of Homer Simpson that was actually working very steadily at his job, trying to make things work, you know.
So when it comes to dealing with criticism about what one did not do, I can imagine same rules apply, but I think it's only fair to say what aspect of this falls on the partner and the way they raise an issue.
Yeah.
Obviously, characterological assassinations are not going to help.
Yeah.
They make the jujitsu harder.
Yeah.
It makes it harder to accept responsibility, but it's going to happen.
It's going to scale with how bad the infraction was, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
But what is a healthy delivery of a criticism?
Is it all I statements?
Is it purely based on how one feels?
Yeah.
I'm not trying to distribute responsibility here, but let's be honest.
It's a two-way street.
It's more than a two-way street.
And again, let's own these are broad generalities.
We both understand that.
But we're speaking simply because we've got to start somewhere.
So I teach women, too, how to be relational.
I'm not saying men aren't relational and women are.
We're both pretty screwed up in this culture.
And the tough news for a lot of women.
I have eight million sayings, and one of them is you don't have the right to get mad about not getting what you never asked for.
Could you repeat that?
You don't have the right to get mad about not getting what you never asked for.
And that's women stepping out of their traditional role.
What do you mean?
I have to tell them?
Like Prince Charming should just know.
If I have to tell them, it doesn't count.
I mean, I literally hear that.
And, you know, what I say is, well, gals, Cinderella's dead.
Prince Charming probably just came out of rehab.
And I hate to tell you but I know it's not romantic.
But if you want something from your guy, you're going to have to roll up your sleeves and fight for it.
You're going to have to assert what you want and then teach them what you want.
There are three steps of getting more of what you want in a relationship, and it's particularly true for women, because they're the ones carrying the dissatisfaction.
One, dare to rock the boat.
Honey, this is really important to me.
I don't think you've been listening.
You better pay attention.
Two, once the guy is on board, okay, what do I need?
Teach him.
Don't expect them to know.
I've been listening to women for 40 years tell me men don't know how to be relational.
Guess what?
I believe you.
So how are they going to know how to be relational if you don't tell them?
Not that you're the objective teacher.
That's a trap.
But subjectively, with humility, this is Sally instructions.
This is what I want from you to make me happy.
But roll up your sleeves and show them what you want.
And then reward them when they try and give it to you.
People don't do any of that in this culture.
You know, the concrete example is...
John Gray, God bless him, made millions of dollars on this.
Men problem-solve listening and women want empathic listening.
There's nothing wrong with either.
What's wrong is it doesn't get negotiated up front.
So I teach women to say, listen, I'm going to talk to you about a fight I had with a girlfriend.
10, 15 minutes.
First of all, it helps to limit it.
Guys here, we have to talk.
They think they're in until 4 in the morning.
15 minutes.
In that 15 minutes, I want you to be like a girlfriend.
There, that sucks.
Tell me more about it.
I want you to do empathically.
This is what it looks like.
We're passive in our relationships.
We let each other do what we do, and then we complain about it.
We can shape it.
More assertion up front, less resentment on the back end.
So roll up your sleeves and teach your guy what you want.
I don't want you to solve my problems.
I want you to do this instead.
As a favor to me, would you do it?
Not I'm God's gift to relationship.
This is what you need.
No.
As a favor to me, would you do it?
And then three, once the guy starts to do it, encourage him.
Don't discourage him.
We all, too little too late, did it happen.
I tell women, celebrate the glass 14% full.
It was only 5% full a week ago.
Hey, you did a half-assed job.
Good for you.
What are we going to do to get the other half on?
But we're discouraging people because we don't want to be vulnerable and receive.
There's an art to receiving.
So there's an art on both sides of how to work a relationship.
And I have to teach women how to be more empowering of their partner and less complaining of them.
And I believe in that, and that's often their work.
But you can't sit around and wait for your partner to do it right.
You have to be able to respond.
On Tuesday, they do it beautifully.
On Thursday, they're a goddamn asshole, but you still have to respond well.
This is your own integrity and it's a great freedom to take it upon yourself to behave with integrity and skill, independent of what your partner's doing on their side of the seesaw.
It doesn't always work, but it's your best shot.
And you don't have to be a slave to their immaturity.
If every time they're immature, you jump in the mud pit with them, you're a flag in their wind.
It's liberating.
You're immature right now.
I could be immature five minutes from now, but I'm going to meet your immaturity with my maturity right now.
That is a very beautiful thing.
Amazing.
Question about childhood patterns.
But rather than get right into the parent's piece of it, which I want to, I have this very crude model in my head that goes something like we all have like an inner child or a childlike part of ourselves, and there's a healthy part and an unhealthy part.
Because it's kind of wonderful, at least in my experience, to be in the company of someone, especially a romantic partner, where you can be in your kind of like childlike.
I call that the natural child.
The natural child, right.
It's healthy, it's explorative, it's fun, it's sweet.
And sometimes it's mischievous.
I've certainly observed that.
But it's lovable.
It's very lovable.
And then there's the unhealthy...
And that could take the form of brattiness, entitlement, whatever, closing up.
I mean, it could be any variety of things.
I imagine that a great number of people listening to this conversation are in relationship and a great number of them are not.
How much work and what kind of work can be done to understand those two parts of oneself on one's own.
Maybe even if you're in a relationship, because that unhealthy child is a very dangerous thing to show up in relationship.
It can be very destructive very fast.
Yeah.
So if I were a patient, a client, I don't know what you call them.
Do you call them clients?
Customer.
No, clients.
Clients.
If I were a client and I just said, okay, yeah, I don't want to talk about my parents right now.
We can do that later.
But I know the healthy childlike part of myself, and I think I know the unhealthy one.
And then like what's some good work that I could do to have those understood and have them in their proper place, so that I make sure that I keep, like the bad childlike Andrew locked away and the good childlike Andrew appropriate times, let them out to play, right.
I mean, I'm very fortunate that my girlfriend now, like she's very good at expressing that healthy child, the natural child part of her.
And she's also a woman.
And again that part just shuts down and then she can be in that mode, or and they that's.
You know, I've seen this before.
It's really wonderful to experience to, and when those mesh very seamlessly, it's also just awesome.
You're like, wow, it's like total ninja virtuoso of this.
Yeah. let's say I'm not, then what does the work look like?
Okay.
So first of all, you're in relationship.
Anybody listening to this podcast is in a relationship.
It may not be an intimate sexual relationship, but you've got a boss, you've got colleagues, you've got aunts and uncles, you have cousins, you have a dog.
We're all embedded in relationships and the work is the same.
No matter what, relational skills are relational skills.
So I don't care whether you're single or whether you've been married for 40 years, it's the same thing.
That's A. So here's my model.
That natural child, leave him be, enjoy, let him play, love him, enjoy him.
That's our creativity.
And interestingly enough, that's erotic.
In the broadest sense of the word, that's the life force.
That's spontaneity.
And that's unhampered, unwounded.
That's a beautiful part of us.
That's fine.
Leave it alone.
Celebrate it.
What you call the unhealthy child, here's my model.
And interestingly, this jibes with Dan Siegel, a neuroscientist.
So I talk about the wise, adult part of us, prefrontal cortex, that can stop and think and reason and choose.
That's the part I'm trying to grow and cultivate and give skills to.
The issue is when the heat comes on, and it really has to do with trauma when something happens in the present that is similar to what was dangerous or injured us in the past—.
Could be a violation, could be abandonment.
It could be either an active mistreatment or neglect, either.
When something in the present, you know this, of course, we don't remember trauma, we relive it.
So the combat bit, here's a car backfire and turns around like she's got a gun in her hand.
She's not thinking, I'm walking down Main Street remembering combat.
She's in combat.
The present goes away.
And it's subcortical, limbic system amygdala, and you get flooded.
That's what we call the wounded child.
Very young.
When I do experiential work with somebody, first minutes of life through four or five years old.
And that's all feeling.
That's the part of you that just experienced it.
Between this very mature, present-based part of us and this totally flooded, very primitive part of us, is the part you call the bad child.
I call it the adaptive child.
This is the you... that you learn to be, to cope with whatever was going on with you.
And it's neater, you know, fight, flight, or fawn.
It's automatic, it's subcortical, and it's utterly compelling.
I've got to stand up for myself.
I've got to shut this down.
I've got to fix you if you're upset or I won't.
These are basic, you know, these are animal survival instincts.
And when you're in the adaptive child, you won't use relational skills because you're not interested in relationship.
You're interested in survival.
It's literally a different part of our neurology.
And the work I do, I call it relational mindfulness.
When you're flooded, you've got to bring the prefrontal cortex back online.
Take a walk.
Take 10 breaths.
Go around the block.
Take a break.
I'm a big fan of breaks.
Get re-centered in the more thoughtful, non-flooded part of you.
Dan calls it the responsive brain instead of the reactive.
When you're re-centered, I call it remembering love.
You remember the person you're talking to as someone you care about.
Then you go back and you try.
But we all struggle with these adaptive child parts.
I deal with couples on the brink of divorce.
Almost all of them have been living in their adaptive child, thinking that that's an adult.
And the world will reward you.
The world will reward an adoptive child, but you'll make a hash in your family life.
So fight, flight, or fix.
Anybody listening today, when you're flooded, when you're on automatic, because that's the hallmark of the adoptive child, it's automatic.
Fight, flight, or fix.
What are you?
And what's your partner?
And then what's the dance between you?
The more I fight, the more they fix, the more they fix.
Okay, the way out of this is to bring your thinking brain back online.
And the beauty here is that capacity I call it relational mindfulness that capacity to remember, to think, to bring yourself back into the present can be cultivated and grown.
So can I give you a story?
Enough talk, let me tell you a story.
Yes, please.
Before I just want to make sure I ask one question about when one enters this adaptive child I think that's how it is which is reactive in the moment at worst, and one can learn to dance with that and turn on their prefrontal cortex and remind themselves this is a relationship that I care about and there's et cetera.
Taking space, a break, is something- Essential.
Is essential.
What's the best way to ask for that?
Because here's perhaps something I've observed.
Things are getting ratcheted up internally, maybe both people, and you need space.
Yes.
You ask for space, like, hey, I need to take a break to be able to hear this.
And then the other person gets very upset because it activates their sense of abandonment.
Exactly.
And it runs countercurrent to this idea that we need to stand in the face of it jujitsu it, et cetera.
It's a pause.
We're not talking about like, hey, I'm leaving for a week.
We're not talking about I'm leaving for an hour even.
It's just need to decompress this.
If that's met with additional criticism about the request, that can be problematic.
Yeah, and common as mud.
So here's what you do.
Contract for it when the heat is not on.
Listen, honey, I get flooded.
And you don't want me flooded.
I'm not nice.
I won't be nice.
I won't be skilled when I'm flooded.
I need to collect myself.
It's in your interest to let me go collect yourself.
I have a skill for everything.
And this is a skill I call responsible distance taking.
Most of us take unilateral.
I'm just, I'm gone.
No, I'm gone.
Here's why.
And here's when I'm coming back.
It's not a rupture.
It's a break.
So if I have a partner who's vulnerable to abandonment, if I go, I'm gone, boom, they're chasing me.
This is a good example of relational skill.
If I want distance, let me take care of my partner so she'll give me distance.
If I don't take care of you, I'm going to get chased.
It's in my interest to behave with skill.
So I say to you, when we're not flooded, Let's have a contract.
I get flooded.
We don't like it when I get flooded.
I want to take a break.
Here's what it looks like.
15, 20 minutes, and then I'm back.
If I'm not in control, I'll text you.
I'll call you and say, I need another.
I'll negotiate with you.
But I'm not going to leave you.
I'm not going to be irresponsible.
It's not unilateral, and it's not forever.
I will be back.
What do you need in order to be calm enough to let me go?
And 9 out of 10 times, it's like, this contract is fine.
Remind me of the contract.
I'm taking a time out so I can be with you.
20 minutes, I'll be back.
Here's why, here's when I'm coming back.
Okay, no abandonment.
Leave those steps out, you get abandonment.
So it's a really good example of how using relational skills in your interests.
That's very helpful.
Thank you.
I also realize that how resourced one shows up to interactions like this is a big part of it.
I mean, if you're sleep-deprived...
I mean, you've got stuff coming at you from other angles.
Kid has been up all night.
Financial issues.
If the well is low, access to these skills becomes infinitely harder.
Harder.
And I don't believe in pleading special circumstances.
This shit is relentless.
You don't get a pass.
Yes.
I don't care if you're up all night with the kids.
Be immature.
Be unskilled.
I can understand why you would be.
And, brother, you'll pay the price.
So, yeah, I get it.
You're sleep-deprived.
It's harder to be mature.
And when you behave immaturely, this is the crap you're going to wind up with.
It's instant karma.
So the beauty in this is remembering it's in my interest to behave artfully.
It's not for them.
And one of my sons is in residency right now, and he's out of his mind, and he's sleep-deprived.
So we don't hear from him for a week.
And his mom calls.
I'm worried about you.
I've been calling.
You don't text.
I'm worried you're, like, dead on the street.
I know I'm crazy, but I'm worried about you.
He says, you know, I called, and you weren't there.
And I said, well, did you leave a message?
No.
No.
I said, well, why didn't you leave a message?
You don't understand what it's like.
I didn't have it in me.
Okay, listen, pal.
Leave a 10-second message.
I'm alive.
I'm fine.
Don't worry about me.
You'll wind up having less to deal with if you put 10 seconds into it than if you don't put the 10 seconds into it.
And then you've got mom on the phone talking to you for 20 minutes about you know why?
Can't you be more responsible?
It's up to you, but it's an investment in your future, your well-being.
What the prefrontal cortex knows that the limbic system doesn't is.
It's in my interest to to behave well, because I'll get less shit for it.
I don't mean to jump into family matters but, having come from the not medical but science profession, your son had some overlap with places I've been and people we know.
I don't know him, but I'm about to advocate for him here.
I suspect maybe ask him.
I suspect that there could be wrong, but part of the reason he didn't leave a message is when you get like your son got three degrees from an elite university.
He is doing his residency in medicine.
He's clearly a high achiever and he's involved in other things as well.
The 10-second message is very hard for a high achiever.
It's like you either do things really well or you don't do them.
And this is – I'm probably just projecting myself into this here.
No, you're right.
Sometimes the reason I don't respond to things is I can't do it well, so I'm not going to do it at all.
They told us that.
If you're not going to do something well, don't do it.
How you do one thing – and it turns out it's so silly, right?
Because not doing it for 10 seconds is clearly way worse than doing it –
10 seconds becomes perfect under the circumstances, but high achievers don't hear that.
So here I am advocating for your son.
I don't even really know him, but I'm going to, and I don't do it because I want to bail him out.
I think everything you're saying is spot on.
I just, what I felt in that example, I'm like, oh gosh, like I can't help.
I know that feeling.
You want to do it so badly, but you don't want to do it poorly.
So you don't do it.
Yeah, but that's not relational.
Sure.
And medicine is saturated with patriarchy.
This is all, you know, the hazing that goes on.
This is all masculinity.
It's just like boot camp for the Marines.
And this notion that you either do it excellently or you don't do it all is another—it deprives us of being human beings with each other.
It really gets in the way.
So yeah, you're right.
I'm sure that's what he's thinking.
And also, take a step back.
What is in my interest, a 10-second message or a 20-minute conversation?
I'm busy.
What do I want to do here?
And this is how we have to start thinking.
We're not individuals.
That's the great fallacy.
We're living in a context.
Our relationships are our biospheres.
We're not separated from them.
We're in them.
And it's in my interest to do what the biosphere needs because I'm inside it.
That's the new news.
That's my message to the world.
The great mistake this culture has made.
The father of family therapy, Gregory Basin, an anthropologist married to Margaret Mead genius man, called it humankind's epistemological philosophical mistake that we stand outside of nature.
You know, I get these big burly guys.
I deal with tough guys.
I get these burly guys.
Why should I have to work so hard to please my wife?
I go, knock, knock.
You live with her.
It's like we have lost the wisdom of ecology.
You're in this together.
You know, indigenous people around the world understand this.
We don't.
We're not above nature dominating it.
And for traditional women, we're not below nature upregulating it, enabling code.
No, we're in it.
It's in my interest to do what the biosphere needs because I'm breathing it.
This is a whole new world for most of the people that I work with.
And by the way, This, to me, is the essence of the new masculinity.
To understand life as a human as relational.
Relational and ecological.
I'm not above it.
I'm in it.
And I'm a steward of it.
It's in my interest to give to my biosphere.
That is wisdom.
There must be a place for men to develop some of these skills in the company of other men, because that traditionally was the way it was done, right.
Even if we look back to the you know, not so much the 40s, because the world was in a different sort of duress.
But in the 50s and 60s, there was a certain kind of socializing that men did.
It was often around alcohol.
And sports.
Yeah, brief anecdote around that.
When I started graduate school it was amazing that every Friday they would do a seminar and then people they'd have some food and people would go home.
And I was told by a chair of department.
He said do you know that for something like 30 years in this room it was called the Beach Room named after Frank Beach at UC Berkeley, one of the great biopsychologists and endocrinologists.
Frank Beach and colleagues would get together.
It was all men then.
Every single evening, not Fridays every single evening and get trashed.
Yeah.
And then basically stagger home to their families.
This was like how it was done.
Yeah.
Very, very different time.
And it was standard.
Yeah.
It was standard.
Men smoked and drank and then got drunk and went home.
Yeah.
Okay.
That was real.
And-
Obviously that's not the way it is now.
And I said, well, what would you guys talk about?
And you imagine that it would all be about, you know, kind of like fraternity talk and locker room talk.
He said, no, we would talk about science.
We'd talk about grants.
Occasionally people would talk about what was going on with their families.
But I said, why did people do it?
And he said, it just felt really good to be able to relax and say whatever you wanted.
Obviously there were no phones then, or even the internet.
And it was kind of an end of day catharsis.
And I said on average.
Do you think those men showed up drunk obviously better or worse when they got home?
And he said, oh, that was our therapy.
That was absolutely our therapy.
Now, I don't doubt that there were elements of abuse and all sorts of things that go with alcoholism.
I've been very vocal about the fact that I'm discouraging of people to drink, certainly if they want to be healthier.
In very, very low moderation perhaps, but zero is better than any.
But where do men go now to relate to one another in a way that builds healthy relating with romantic partners, builds healthy relating at work?
Because I'll tell you just even the notion I know, because I've been told just the notion of men gathering scares the hell out of a lot of people.
The immediate assumption is when guys get together, bad things happen.
This is the idea.
But I also think that we've erased some very powerful vessels for self-understanding and for relating and also for throwing off some of the stresses of the day that frankly, don't need to walk in the door at home.
And so guys are trying to do it all alone or on their phones.
And then people wonder and there are a lot of reasons for this but then people wonder why there's so much dissociation and distraction and worse, by way of social media.
It's like if...
Guys can't hang out and talk.
Not say drink, but if they can't hang out and talk, then how are they supposed to be their best selves when they go back to their families?
You're dead right.
And, you know, we talk about the epidemic of loneliness.
We're talking about men.
You know, a hetero couple, the man dies.
Women do okay.
The woman dies.
Men are in deep trouble.
Single men are the greatest public health crisis around.
And we've talked about relational skills with your family, your woman, your partner if you're gay.
How about relational skills with pals?
And I work with men around getting friends.
Many of the men that I work with have few to no friends.
And it's part of my therapy.
I want you to start having friends.
And I want them deeper.
And I teach men.
Okay, so the six guys you go golfing with and you talk about sports and politics and maybe bitch about your wives a little bit, and that's it.
I want you to try pick one that you think might be most receptive and share something a little more vulnerable with them.
You know, I've had chronic back pain and I'm getting old.
It's a little scary.
Or if you're a young man I've been out of work for 14 months and I'm getting you know show some vulnerability and see what they do with it.
And you try that with Steve and you get, oh, yeah, what about those socks?
He ain't having it.
Okay, nice experiment.
You're done with Steve.
Go back to your superficial relationship.
Enjoy it.
You talk to Dave and Dave goes, you know, I can really hear you, man.
That's tough.
I've been worried, too, about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
My dick ain't working the way it used to.
And all of a sudden you're having a heart-to-heart in a way that you may never have had in your life before.
So I teach men to experiment and to try and drive their relationships deeper by sharing more and seeing what they get.
It's not a shoe-in.
This guy may be great.
You have to be discriminating.
This isn't brain death. protect yourself, be discriminating, but also be courageous.
Open up and try a little more.
The crisis of men being alone and not having other men to support them and share is one of the great problems in modern society.
On the other hand, I had the privilege of being and many of your listeners are too young for this, but there was a great guy, Robert Bly.
He wrote Iron John.
Great book.
Yeah.
Amazing book.
He was like the Mr. Men's movement, guys drumming in the woods.
And I went to Moose Lodge, and I was invited.
So you met him.
I did one of the men's weekends, drumming in the woods with Robert and the guys.
I love the book.
I think it has some brilliant insight about all boys' relationship to their fathers, even if they didn't know their fathers.
And there's this wonderful and terrifying passage in there.
Wonderful because it's so astute.
Terrifying because it's terrifying, which is.
It is the places of absence of the father that the demons enter a young boy.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
Something like that.
And Bly is a great writer and I didn't capture it well but that, whether or not someone had a close relationship with their father and he was very present, or they didn't, there are these.
I think of them as actual physical shards of shadow.
Of wound.
Right.
That's where addiction shows up later.
That's where all sorts of things show up.
It depends on the circumstances.
But Bly, I was really ahead of his time.
It's awesome that you trained with him.
Yeah, no, we danced.
We did Sufi dances together.
Oh, so he was into the hippie thing too? drumming in the woods, and he was tribal.
Tribal.
Sorry.
Forgive me.
I wasn't trying to be pejorative.
I'm from Palo Alto.
The Grateful Dead are from Palo Alto.
I get a hippie pass.
Anyway, listen.
So there was a wonderful shaman.
I got to tell you this story.
We're getting so straight, but I just love this story.
So he brought in, Bly, adolescents.
He had all these guys boomers, guys in their 50s and 60s, me included, and he trucked in Bloods and crips.
Not only teenagers, but teenagers from urban gangs. to do this thing.
And he really strongly believed that older men needed to teach younger men how to be on the planet.
There was an initiation that was missing in our culture.
And Martin Prechtel, the shaman, as these kids were getting off the bus, I love this.
I wasn't there.
He told the story, though.
He said, give me a sheet.
He had a big sheet on the ground.
He goes, old Cree shaman custom.
This is a sacred weekend.
We must divest of all metal.
All metal goes on the sheet.
And these gang members are like, knives, brass knuckles, chains, guns, all of their weapons.
Good, good.
That's bullshit.
He just made it up.
He was just divesting them of their weapons for the weekend.
But anyway, but even there, I mean, you can go on YouTube and see this.
When it was my turn to speak to the men, I said, this is beautiful what we're doing with each other.
It's beautiful.
It's necessary.
And now we have to take it home to our families.
It's great for us to be intimate with each other, but we can't be intimate with each other for the weekend and go home and be assholes to our wives and kids.
It's an amazing story at so many levels and it brings to mind something I've been thinking about for a number of years, which is okay.
I wasn't in a university fraternity, but I sort of I entered a fraternity of way back when and got involved in skateboarding when there were no parents involved, no girls or women involved.
There was like one or two, but it was like just a bunch of guys.
It was all guys.
And the interesting thing about skateboarding is it's to this day.
You can be 13 and you're hanging out with people that are in their 30s and 40s, right.
So that was my first, I used to say non-biological family, but it was a fraternity of sorts.
You sort of like I want to be in, and then there's a bunch of tests or not tests and you're part of it.
And then eventually, I joined the fraternity of science and research, which is its own very interesting, different podcast topic.
Fraternity with its own great aspects and its own complete bullshit, and you know, et cetera.
It's like any fraternity.
Right.
When you talk about the crisis of loneliness, especially among men, but even for people who are perhaps happily, or at least amicably, in relationship, I feel like what's missing are these quote-unquote fraternities that you know they're harder to access now.
And people have gone online.
I actually think part of the success of podcasts, certain podcasts in particular, has been because you know if you didn't – go to the military or something.
You watch a Jocko Willink podcast.
And I mean, Jocko Willink looks like the modern General Patton.
And he's a very nice guy, but he's a no-nonsense guy.
I mean, he's a very kind, amazing father, amazing husband to his wife and great friend.
But he's a warrior.
He's a legitimate warrior.
And so- young men and old men now go online to feel like part of a fraternity, to access these different fraternities, so to speak.
But I think there's real value in the in-person work and collaboration.
And to some extent what I described before about the excessive drinking at the end of the day in the beach room and Tolman Hall at Berkeley that took place in the 40s, 50s and 60s.
That was a fraternity.
I had it in family therapy.
Yeah, but it was an important part of learning Not just the conventions of the job you're in, but where you sit in.
This you know it's a very touchy word.
It's like a third rail word nowadays, the hierarchy, right?
But the way I see hierarchy among men is very different.
I feel like within a fraternity, you figure out not where you sit on a kind of staircase.
You figure out what you're good at, what you're less good at, what you might get better at and what you'll never get good at.
And then you kind of arrange yourselves in a group that you go, this is great.
I'm really good at certain things, terrible at others.
And so, so at others.
Fortunately, there's complementarity here.
They're really good at other things.
And so you can learn and you feel empowered in the best sense of the word, because you're like yeah, we're kind of a force because there's no, There's no major gaps here, but not because everyone's validating each other and you're interested in going out and doing bad things.
I actually think this is why people go into gangs.
Gangs are- It's a fraternity.
Gangs are a family.
It's a fraternity.
And the home was never the place where you were supposed to feel fraternity.
And I think this is a difficult one for men end women to understand and hear, but especially men nowadays, where young guys will come to me and they'll be like I don't know what to do.
What should I study?
What should I do?
This is not the Stanford students.
These are some failure to launch or potential failure to launch kids.
Parents now call me, text me, they get ahold of me.
My kid is... And I'm like, they have no fraternity.
Their fraternity is video games.
That's not a fraternity.
They don't have a group that they can go to to figure out what they're good at, what they suck at and what they could get better at.
And so they walk around and forgive me for going long, but I think that because online you can see all the fraternities.
What I also hear is they're overwhelmed.
They're like, wait, I'm supposed to work out.
I'm supposed to also eat right.
I'm supposed to be empathically attuned.
I'm supposed to be a provider and protector.
I'm supposed to, you know, and they're like, holy shit, like this is really tough.
I was fortunate that and you were fortunate that.
We grew up in a time where the models were whatever we were interacting with.
Like when I decided to go into the fraternity of science.
Sure, I kept exercising and stuff, but what I was like okay, how do I get good at this thing?
Who are the good mentors?
Who are the pieces of shit mentors?
We all talked and you're in this fraternity and you learn.
Now that fraternity included women, because academia, at least in biology at that time, was about 50-50.
At the faculty level, it's a steep shift.
That's changed somewhat now.
But the point being, it was never about getting everything from your romantic relationship.
The learning, the indoctrination, the learning of self and the kind of self-esteem and acceptance.
A lot of that happened in this context and i understand there's not a carryover of skills to the home necessarily, but it filled a good, good fraction of the vessel of feeling like yeah, like i, far from perfectly, i'm replete with flaws to this day i say it over and over again uh, and it's true, but where are the fraternities that young men and older men can go to if they don't have one?
That's tough.
I'm a big fan of doing men's group.
I love men's groups.
You don't need a therapist to lead it.
Get together with four other guys and just start talking about your lives.
Do a bowling league.
The only thing—I want to say two things.
One is I want the fraternity to support your relationality, not your individual empowerment and entitlement.
Yeah, I see fraternity as only being relational.
Anything that you could do on your own is not really relational.
Okay.
Yeah.
In my mind it's sort of like – Well, to get together with four other guys and bitch about what a rotten life this is and how women are being incel.
No.
That's happening online.
It might be happening in person.
But, no, I totally agree.
I mean, obviously, it would be to cultivate oneself.
Yeah.
Not to – because there's something – I mean –
We all do it.
We all complain from time to time, although I have friends who don't have the circuits.
It's really impressive.
But I think that complaining is a form of self-abuse.
I do.
I think there's a threshold beyond which complaining becomes a form of self-abuse.
Well, going back to having friends and training friends and cultivating friends, one of the things I teach guys is you want to train your friends to support your relationship, not your individual empowerment.
So, oh, my God, I had such a hard time with Belinda, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I don't want to hear you talk to me about what a bitch she is.
Maybe you can start that way.
But pretty quickly what I want to hear is, okay, Terry –
What did you do to contribute to that?
And what might you do differently?
I want you to support the mature part of me and the relational part of me, not my individual empowerment.
And we have to train people to do that, because our culture will gravitate toward individual empowerment.
I wouldn't put up with that if I was you.
That's not the support I want.
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Recently I've been approached again.
Parents will reach out and I have a real soft spot for doing this.
And and they'll say their son, it's their, it's always their son, right?
They're no one's reaching out about their daughter.
Um, to me, uh, they're saying, you know, my son is, it's a real problem, right?
Like he either graduated college and he's going nowhere.
These are smart kids or they didn't graduate and, and it's like getting scary now.
Yeah.
And we had them checked out for the ADHD, the depression thing.
And nowadays there's all this information.
People try a bunch of things.
It's just very clear.
They're on not a good path.
When I talk to these guys, 100 of the time, what they are asking for is not to figure out how to be in relationship.
In fact, in more than a few cases they're already in relationship and they have the really caring, wonderful partner.
And sadly, a lot of these women have gotten used to the fact that a lot of guys are kind of failure to launch and she's taken off and he's at home.
And we don't know how that's going to play out, but can't be good. not in the long term.
But the questions are always to me are about do i do how?
How can i find a group, how can i find work, how can i be part of something?
They want to be part of something and they're smart and their parents are smart.
They're realizing that just podcasts are great.
But ultimately, you know, i mean this isn't going to happen, but maybe, maybe you watch one podcast a week and you get together with friends and you watch it and then you talk about it.
Okay, that's not going to happen, that's not really how it works, but they're alone.
They don't have male friends.
They don't have the golf buddies.
And this is, you know, this is a new thing to me.
Like guys, these are guys in their twenties, sometimes in their thirties.
And very often they've no knock against antidepressants, where sometimes they have their use.
But very often there's a story about they've been on you know four different medications for the high school and also for college.
They've got sexual health issues.
Maybe it's neurotic, maybe it's biological related to the medications, who knows?
And they're stressed about their hair falling out.
They're stressed about all this stuff and they're completely overwhelmed.
Yeah.
And my advice is always, like you know, to listen and it's not, but I always think, like the first thing is like Again, I have to be careful not to project what I did.
It's like, you have a driver's license?
Yeah.
All right.
Do you know one person who's able-bodied who you trust?
Yeah.
All right.
Go to Yosemite and hike.
Like, that's my advice.
It's not... super sophisticated, go.
Like your phone won't work.
Go to Tuolumne Meadows.
Don't freeze to death.
Like bring water.
Don't be an idiot.
Don't get giardia.
Like read a book or two online or like read a few things and just go to Yosemite and hike.
Like make a friend by going and doing something.
That's cool.
And like, Because that's, to be honest, I know what they want.
They want a job.
They want to come work at the podcast.
But they don't actually want that.
Because you come here and we're working, right?
And we hang out.
But I'm hearing this so often.
My phone, I've got a list this long of guys.
Some of them have tried to harm themselves.
I had a colleague kill himself recently.
I'm sorry.
Married two kids, kill himself.
And I realized I didn't help him the right way.
He reached out about some things.
I should have said, get your stuff.
We're going to Yosemite.
Like, you know, like we're taking a weekend and we're going hiking.
Yeah.
And it's really wild, because I feel like there are certain things that you just can't do on your own.
Yeah.
And all the stuff you're talking about, which is incredible, about relating to a romantic partner.
These guys have romantic partners, but they're collapsing independent of that.
That's not the only relationship you need to have.
You need to have a place in the world and you need to have good work and you need to have a purpose and you need to have community and you need to have other buddies.
And you can also have buddies who are women, too.
I mean, I don't want to get so narrow in the idea of fraternity.
I'm going to say I want community, because you know why.
Everybody's turning to you is like well, you be a good dad.
You be a mentor.
Here, take my kid and they need you.
Of course, they do.
And you're right.
Go be with somebody.
And you don't have to have a heart-to-heart relationship.
I don't want you to have nobody that you can have a heart-to-heart with, but let's start somewhere and just go be with someone.
That's community.
And yes, men with men, but also just community in general.
It doesn't have to be a man.
And I do want to say this.
Men don't exclusively need men to teach them how to be men.
Lesbian parents can teach boys how to be men.
Single moms can teach boys how to be men.
We get obsessed with this idea that only a man can raise a boy.
And the research is clear.
That's just not true.
I talk about we need grown-ups to teach children how to be grown-ups.
And yeah, if you're a boy, you want to have a few men who you can look up to, who you can go.
Oh yeah, I want to be like him.
Of course we need that.
And let's not get so obsessed about it that we disempower other people to be.
Some of my greatest mentors were women.
Likewise.
My graduate mentor was a woman.
I learned more about life from her and science than I could have ever imagined, right?
And actually moms of friends of mine when I was growing up were awesome examples, and those weren't extensive, rich conversations.
But you know i've got eyes and i got ears and you know i could observe.
Oh, that's a different way of relating or being a.
You know, i totally agree, but there is something wonderful about guys going off and being got.
You know uh, peggy pap was a great family therapist, married to uh arthur um, i mean, peggy uh pin married to arthur pin, the guy who did uh bonnie and clive, And she told a wonderful story about her husband.
Every Sunday he would go out with the same guys and play golf.
And he would come home and Peggy would say what she talked about.
You know, the lay of the green, what we're going to drink at the bar.
And one day Peggy said, she said to her husband, look, Arthur, I'm a gender expert.
I go around the world talking about you know, Next time you go off with your guys, I want you to come home and I want you to talk to me about feelings, about depth, about you know something more than the goddamn lay of the grain.
For Christ's sake.
She comes home a week later.
Yeah, I play golf.
What did you guys talk about?
Oh, honey.
Bill was incested by his nanny when he was four, and Harry lost his dog when he was three and he never got over it.
And Steve thinks he's got a really small penis.
And Peggy looked at him and go you're full of shit, right.
We play golf.
Yeah, I mean, great story.
Yeah, I think that there's a—I'm a big fan of the movie Stand By Me.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, sadly—
You know, Reiner was murdered the other day, so it just, but that was brilliant movie.
It's actually an important movie, despite it being a real time piece, because it's that age right before boys they're either hitting puberty or they haven't hit puberty.
And there's this interesting thing that happens where their self-concept is still in childhood.
Like they're talking about superheroes and cartoons.
They have this argument about whether or not Mighty Mouse or Superman would win a fight.
And one of them goes, well, that's ridiculous.
Like Superman's a real person.
Right.
You know, it's awesome.
And then one of them, the late River Phoenix, is just.
He's so clearly ahead of all the other kids because of the rough environment.
But also he's just developmentally more ahead of the game.
So it's an interesting thing about getting out and moving through space with people I think is good, whether or not it's golf, which I consider a very slow movement, or it's hiking, or
Um also, the nice thing about walking and hiking is that it doesn't require any significant athleticism.
Um so, as long as you bring water and some food and uh, you know, and if you're camping, you can camp, you can sleep in your car.
Like it's just, it's just like our day hike.
It's just so simple.
I will say, um, because I do want to talk about, um, substance use and abuse.
Um, anytime I hear, um, I always ask like, are you smoking weed?
Okay.
I?
I'm not someone who judges anyone if they're into it, but young guys who are doing a lot of high THC cannabis seems, from my experience my data set very highly correlated with significant problems, apathy being one of them and a bunch of other new regulation issues.
Same thing with drinking.
If they're drinking too much, I'm like, listen, go to a 12-step meeting.
You can't be drinking, smoking weed and not have a job because like, it's just very clear how someone once put how that take plays out, so that i mean there are other things there.
I feel like i i have a responsibility to say that there are other points of suggestion.
You usually it starts however with like, what supplement should i take?
Should i be taking creatine?
I'm like you know how's your life?
Oh, it's a like, it's a mess.
Well, you're in a relationship.
Yeah, i got a girlfriend.
Is it great?
Yeah, she's super sweet.
Are you working?
No, She's working.
She's at school.
And then you start getting the picture.
You're like, okay, creatine ain't going to fix this.
You know, in fact, getting in shape can be empowering, but you're just spending all your time at the gym scrolling on social media taking pictures of your abs, and then you don't have any friends.
That's a disaster waiting to happen.
And a place in the world.
You know, our economy is not great and AI is going to come in.
These kids are having a hard time finding a career and a job and meaning in the world.
And you do get a dichotomy a lot of times, where you have a man, a young man, who is relationally skilled.
But not powerful.
No place in the world.
That goes back to what I was talking about.
You can have feelings and be a big baby about it.
It's both.
You have to be relationally skilled and you have to be assertive and have meaning and have a spot in the world and a career.
I love to tell stories.
Can I tell you a story?
This is my quintessential... what it means to be a man story.
True story.
So I had the privilege of going to Maasai land in Tanzania.
We had to drive 10 hours to this very remote village which friends of mine were building a school with them.
So they knew them and loved them.
So I had a men's group with the elders of this tribe for four nights.
And we talked about everything, God, women, death, whatever.
And at one point I said to them so there's a big debate in my country about what makes a good Marani.
Marani, warrior, man, one word.
Warrior, man, that's what it is.
Some people in America believe that a good Marani is strong, tough, don't mess with them.
Other people believe that a good marani is sensitive and sweet and kind.
What do you guys think?
What makes a good marani?
And it's absolutely true, Andrew.
This little guy must have been 300 years old, had about four foot two, sticks his finger out and went from English to Swahili, to Maasai, to Swahili to English.
And he sounded pissed.
And he said, I have no interest in talking to you about what makes a good marani.
Couldn't care less.
But I will talk to you about what makes a great marani.
He said, now listen.
When the moment calls for fierceness, a good marani is a killer.
And they are.
They have swords and shields, and they're warriors.
They'll kill you.
Don't cross them.
When the moment calls for tenderness, a good marani will lay down his sword and shield and be sweet like a baby.
What makes a great marani is knowing which moment is which.
That's what I want.
I want adaptability, flexibility, and wholeness.
Strong vulnerable, related firm.
All of our human qualities kicked out in the moment that calls for them, with flexibility.
That's a man.
It's clear that within romantic relationship and other family type relationships, that the softness, the kindness, but also what you referred to before as being skilled, not hard, not soft skilled.
That's what you're looking for in a point of friction.
That's right.
Think skill, think, be skilled.
Don't think, be hard.
Don't think, be soft, be skilled.
Yeah.
And it's in your interest to be skilled.
You're not giving in.
You're being smart.
The warrior piece um.
You know, here in the United States and other Western cultures, you know what's happening right now.
It is kind of scary right.
People are very concerned.
Men are very concerned about how to make a living.
Yeah.
Probably to an extent that, at least in my lifetime, I've never observed.
Because like computers came along and you know, there was the whole obnoxious like learn to code thing.
And you know, and it was like that was you know, but very quickly people realized okay, you don't have to be a computer programmer to still make a living.
Factories have closed, but You know, there are other things, but that was a rough transition.
We forget, right?
But now, with AI, there's this feeling that it's like a tidal wave of work opportunity is going to be taken away from men.
So in the context of your story, is work the warrior piece in the United States?
Okay.
I would call it a place in the world.
I would call it purpose.
So what happens when... there isn't work to do.
I think that this is a big crisis for young men, younger men, millennials.
I don't even have all the alphabet.
They're nervous that there is no opening for them to step into the world and have a meaningful place.
Well, for a long time, the discussion was about finding work that you really love, as opposed to just doing something because you make a good living.
Now I think the conversation actually is switching to, like, what can I do to just make a living?
I need to put bread on the table.
I'm floundering.
And also, women are in the workforce.
You know, men are feeling their position eroding, in part because of changing economic circumstances, but in part because, You know, back in the 40s and 50s I slayed dragons, came home and my wife met me with a martini and slippers.
Nowadays, I slave dragons.
I come home, and my wife comes home from slaying dragons, too.
One of the nice things about young men is that they understand that it's going to be a two-career family and they're more egalitarian than we were.
I have to help with it.
It's not fair for me to not help with the dishes.
She's as tired as I am.
And her paycheck is as big.
As You know, there was research.
There's a direct correlation between how much housework a man does and how big his wife's paycheck is.
The bigger her paycheck, the more housework he does.
But that's not, you know, being whipped.
That's like...
Yeah, she's tired too.
We both have to – we're a team.
So there is some of that with men.
On the other hand, you know this whipped up kind of hysteria about the crisis with men and boys are doing poorly in school and boys aren't doing this and boys – a lot of that is comparative right.
Boys are doing worse than women.
Boys are not achieving the same grades as girls.
And I haven't looked at this, but I'm wondering if some of this hyped up.
Oh, what's going on with boys?
Boys aren't that much worse.
It's that girls and women are doing so much better.
And in comparison, it looks like we're standing still and being passed.
That is the feeling.
There is a feeling in all aspects of privilege, white privilege, male privilege.
Look, these other people are getting let in and they're going to eat my lunch.
And I'm nervous about that.
You know I observed in the 80s and 90s and 2000s a lot of guys, mostly guys, become addicts and not all of them came from traumatic homes, not of the whatever the big t type trauma, at least not that i'm aware of.
Some did.
Mostly it was um absent fathers tended to kind of predict addiction or That is trauma.
Or addict dads.
That is trauma.
Yeah, it is trauma, right.
I was just sort of big T, little T, like I'm not aware of any, then they could exist, I don't know.
I want to be clear about this because it's endemic to our culture.
Absent dads, you know, is the norm for many people in this culture.
And absence can do more damage than violent presence can.
And we tend to not think about it that way.
But neglect can be as wounding.
You know, back to Bly, he's a beautiful poet.
He said every time a young man walks down the corridor and says hello to an older, more successful man and that man does not say hello back, that's a wound in the soul of the young man.
I love that.
And absences speak as woundingly as violent presences do.
And many men not being relational are absent.
And people suffer.
The children suffer and the partners suffer.
And then I talk about the unholy triad of patriarchy.
You've got absent or irresponsible dad.
You've got unhappy but accommodating mom.
And then you have a sweet, smart, sensitive little boy.
And that boy feels his mother's pain.
She doesn't have to do anything to, quote, enmesh him.
He feels that.
And he moves into caretaking her.
And then his template for relationship is I'm a caretaker.
It's not mutual.
And then he has a very ambivalent relationship to being close to somebody, because close means nobody cares about me.
I'm taking care of them.
That is endemic in our culture.
Very common.
And I appreciate the— what is the the redirect to this i'll come back to what i was the addiction piece but what you're describing is is everywhere everywhere everywhere this is often why the the gun i get the text from the mom of a kid and my kid you know he's he's got these issues right and we talked about them um It's the phenotype you're describing.
It's a scenario you're describing.
There was a message in the early 90s that I think was very toxic, frankly.
I'll take some heat for this because it's politically leaning, but I don't.
I'm going to be very clear in my politics.
I don't like... political groups.
I don't like groups that relate to politics.
Frankly, I just don't like them.
I'm sometimes a double hater.
But I'm just, there's certain things on, you know, through the middle and both sides.
Yes, yes, no, no, definitely no, definitely no.
Okay, that's me.
I'll just put it on the table.
In the 90s, there were two messages that came about during the Clinton administration.
One was very useful.
One was highly toxic, in my opinion.
The first one that was very useful was Hillary Clinton took data from.
Was talking about data from my colleague, Carla Schatz at Stanford, who talked about fire together, wire together.
She said that, not Donald Hebb for the record.
She said that, not Donald Hebb.
And it had to do with brain plasticity.
And they talked about this first six years.
Okay, like Hillary Clinton or Hayter, the first six years is a real thing.
And it attuned parents to the idea that the first six years of life are not the only important part of life.
But there's a lot of brain plasticity happening there.
And she talked to the right scientist, Carla, my colleague and friend, phenomenal neuroscientist about the fact that Playing your kid classical music isn't going to help.
What they need is a certain amount of nurturing and stuff to really wire those circuits up.
And then certain windows close and you can go back and do the work.
But those first six years are absolutely critical.
It should have been the first 50 years, but six was good.
That was a great message.
One that still, I think, carries forward today.
And we should acknowledge that.
The other message and it was the Bill Clinton story was because he had a single mom and And at least by Democrats, he was highly revered was this idea and you can find this online that as long as there's one person that cares about you, that you're going to be just fine?
And I understand that it had benevolent motives.
It was like look, if you have no one, clearly you're screwed or life's going to be much, much harder.
If you have multiple people that care about you and are nurturing you as a young person, becoming a young adult, et cetera, even better.
But the notion was that if you just had one person, you're good.
And I think that seeded this idea that, sure, sometimes divorce saves families.
Sometimes it destroys families.
There's all sorts of ideas.
But that idea, I think, was highly toxic because it runs counter-current to everything we understand about what it takes to be nurtured properly.
Doesn't mean you need two parents.
As you pointed out, you can get nurturing from men or from women, et cetera.
But this idea that you just need one person who cares about you, that's what you just described.
It's the mom who cares about the kid, the kid who sees the mom's pain, the absent dad.
Sometimes it's the reverse.
Usually it's the scenario you described.
And I've just seen thousands of examples. where that leads to very bad things.
There should have been an ellipse on that.
That said, in the case where it's just one person or parent, there need to be other people to fill the roles that person can't fill.
Yes, of course.
There's also a difference between I'm a single mom raising my son.
We'll keep it to boys.
So I have a community of people around that boy to love him, and it's not all me.
That doesn't necessarily mean I need a surrogate father to bring him in to teach me how to be a man.
This is good, but not just one person.
Agreed.
The other thing I want to say is there's a difference between I'm being raised by a single parent and I'm being raised by two parents, one of whom doesn't pay any attention to me.
There's a difference between somebody who's really gone and someone who's physically there and emotionally gone.
And that is a wound.
And unfortunately, because so many men are so unrelational, we're going to change that.
That's what you get.
And if dad is distant from me, dad's also distant from mom.
And mom is brokenhearted.
And traditionally, mom's brokenhearted and not doing much about it, just resenting it and suffering it.
Downloading a lot of that feeling to me, whether she means to or not, I just pick it up.
And then I move into some skewed relationship where I'm parenting her instead of being parented by her.
She doesn't have to do a thing.
She can be the world's greatest mom explicitly, but I'm feeling her distress and stepping in to that.
And then I have a hard time with relationships as an adult.
Man, we call this being a love avoidant.
It's like my template for relationships is I'm caretaking you.
You don't really care about me.
So I'll be in the relationship, but I don't want to get swallowed up by you.
So I'll be in the relationship, but I'll also be very distant.
In that way, the distance gets replicated generation by generation by generation.
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I think I know the answer to the question I'm about to ask, but I'll ask it anyway.
In your experience, are women just better at being relational than men?
They're better.
They ain't no angels.
Women have to learn a few things too.
They have to learn to be subjective.
It's really tempting because I do know more about relationships than my guy to start feeling like I'm his coach.
I'm going to teach him what he needs to do.
That's an arrogant position.
That's a grandiose position.
Stay humble.
I can teach you what I need.
I'm not your relational coach.
That's a trap.
Women have to learn how to speak relationally also.
So, story.
I love to tell stories.
This is a true story.
And this is the example I give about stepping out of our usual cultural framework and learning how to think relationally.
How many of people listening can relate to this one?
She to him, you're a reckless driver.
Him to her, you're overly nervous.
How many of us have sat through that one?
And they get into what I call an objectivity battle.
You marshal your evidence.
You argue your case.
Well, you do this.
You do that.
You're reckless.
Well, you're overly nervous about this.
Harry thinks you're nervous too.
It's what I call an objectivity battle.
It can go on literally for decades.
This is absolutely true, Andrew.
One session with me.
Heard a hymn.
Honey, I know you love me.
Let's start with that.
Hold the phone there.
Change the energy.
Remember the biosphere.
Remember that we're a team.
I know you love me.
When you drive on your own, I mean, I worry about you, but it's your life.
Do what you do.
When I'm in the car with you and you're tailgating and speeding and changing lanes, I don't know.
Maybe I'm nervous.
She takes the whole objectivity battle off the table.
Maybe I am overly nervous.
I don't know.
But nevertheless, when I'm sitting next to you and you're driving, I get crazy.
I'm scared.
You love me.
You don't really want me to be scared out of my mind every time I'm sitting next to you when we're driving, as a favor to me.
When I'm in the car.
Could you please slow down and drive more conservatively, so I don't have to be so nervous.
True story, Andrew.
Him to her.
Sure, honey.
And he did.
And what might have been a fight that lasted 40 years was done in 15 minutes.
Why?
Not objective.
You're a reckless driver.
Subjective.
I get nervous.
The beauty about speaking subjectively is nobody can argue with you.
Well, you shouldn't get nervous.
I know, but I do.
It's nice it also started with, I know you love me.
I know you love me.
What a nice thing to hear right before a request.
I know you love me.
Assuming it's true.
Well, of course.
And also a request, not a complaint.
I know you love me.
This is what's happening to me.
We're a team.
As a favor to me.
Would you please?
Humble, subjective, negotiating.
Not, I'm God's gift, I know how to drive, you're an idiot.
Take all that energy away.
And then, right, I do love you.
Right, you do get nervous.
You're a fool for getting nervous, but you get nervous.
You're my wife.
Sure, I'll do this for you.
And I use this as an example of learning to speak relationally.
It's not about who's right and who's – I say, the relational answer to who's right and who's wrong is who cares?
How are we as a team going to make this work?
And that's a whole new world.
Are women better at this than men?
Not a lot.
They're better at a lot of other things than men.
But I have to teach women how to be more relational too.
Women are more relational than men, but they need to learn a few skills as well.
Let's talk about addiction or compulsion.
I mean, we could have a two-hour discussion about where the line is.
I have a one-sentence thing to say about addiction.
What we self-medicate, when we self-medicate, is the pain of disconnection.
And the cure for addiction is intimacy.
I'm a big 12-step fan.
I know you are too.
One of my great mentors was P.M.
Melody, a great light in 12-step.
The book about codependency.
Yeah, and I'm saturated with 12-step and 12-step wisdom.
There are things you can do to get sober.
Intimacy will keep you sober.
And I believe that what the pain is, Yes, trauma, but trauma is disconnection too.
All trauma is is the lack of relationality in, you know, whenever it happened.
What we find intolerable is how lonely we And we turn to what I call a misery stabilizer to make our loneliness tolerable to ourselves.
I said in my first book, I don't want to talk about it.
Taking a substance for loneliness is like drinking salt water for thirst.
It makes you worse than you started.
But that's what we do.
So when I treat addictions, there are levels.
Level A, the addiction itself, I'm a big fan of 12-step, gets over.
Level B, let's look at the immaturities of your personality that you have to sort out.
Level C, let's look at the early trauma that may be at the root of this.
Let's deal with all three of those.
And it's all wrapped in the circle of learning how to be connected and relational.
That's the ouch that you're trying to get out of.
And let's restore that.
And that's all of that work.
Trauma work.
You have to make a connection with that little boy or girl that was so hurt.
Personality work.
You have to learn how to be mature.
Work on your grandiosity or self-medication.
Do that per se.
And then as you do all of those layers...
The king of recovery is learning how to be connected to yourself, first and foremost, and to the people around you.
That's the cure for addiction.
The 12-step piece is interesting as it relates to the relational piece too, because for people who have never been to a meeting, maybe we just put a little bit of contour on it.
12-step meetings are fellowship.
Yes, it's fellowship, and it's also a place where you, At a very basic level, you learn to listen and to be quiet.
And I'll just mention this because I think a lot of people hear 12-step.
They have different ideas about it.
But if anyone's ever curious about it, it's a very welcoming community.
Even non-addicts can go to what are called open AA meetings.
And even though there are lots of different – divisions of 12-step that AA has been around the longest and those meetings tend to have the most structure.
And so if you ever want to see what 12-step is about, it's perfectly welcome.
It's encouraged, in fact, to go to.
You can look it up online they're in person or online and you can go to a.
It has to be an open 12-step meeting.
Check to see if it's men only or women only or mixed.
And you can go and the format, very briefly, is someone will read something out and then people will go around the room and typically people will say their name and they'll say they're an alcoholic or an addict, because sometimes it's mixed addiction.
And if people are there just to observe, they'll just say I'm – it's always first names only, will say, I'm so-and-so and I'm just here to learn.
And it goes right past you.
So if you think that like, the microscope's gonna be on you, and then typically, typically Somebody who's had a lot of time sober will speak for anywhere from five to 15 minutes, sometimes a little longer.
And then there'll be a kind of round robin where people can or cannot – they can elect to share for one to three minutes.
And then there's some discussion about the traditions.
And it's – the reason –
I think it's so powerful for a number of reasons.
It helps so many people get sober.
It costs nothing.
It's all over the world every day and all night and online and in person.
But I think that at a minimum, it teaches you to just listen.
If you want to share, you can share.
And What it also teaches you.
And this is kind of a more subtle layer, but it's a really important layer.
Someone said to me just yesterday even if you don't think that you need to go to a meeting, if you've had some time sober and you go and you share, or even if you're struggling, you go.
Almost certainly there's someone there that's benefiting from what you're saying.
You may never know it, but that's part of the fellowship service piece, is it's?
It's sometimes people come up and say Hey, what you said really resonated.
Always what other people share.
There's a, there's a a grain or more of relational stuff there.
So it's a very interesting form of relating.
It's not unlike the way Quakers get together and will just sit.
And then sometimes someone will speak.
It's different.
But anyway, I think that we want to pull back the veil a little bit on what happens at these meetings.
And you'll also be very surprised.
Sometimes people are really dejected and in a real life crisis.
More often than not you walk in and you're like wow, these people are like very empowered because they're there and they've been going.
It's not like this dungeon of a place.
There's a cheerfulness to it often, not always, but there's a cheerfulness to it.
And so anyway, I encourage anyone that's curious about it, if they think they're an addict, but also if they also just want to become more relational.
These OpenAA meetings are a real gift to Again zero cost.
They pass the hat, but nobody cares if you donate or not.
And you don't have to talk and just go on and be.
You know, my dear Pia, we've been talking about relationship.
Pia said intimacy, which is healing and spiritual, is the conjunction of truth and love, the meeting of truth and love.
And she said 12-step meetings were her model for that.
And I'll tell you two stories.
My friend Alan used to go to Al-Anon.
I said, why do you go to Al-Anon?
He said, well, I had a great-grandfather, but he got no one.
He said, you know what?
Every other week, Friday night, I go to an Al-Anon meeting.
And people will say things that are absolutely horrible.
And not one person will lift a finger to make it better.
We'll just be with each other.
And I find that spiritually refreshing.
And I remember being in a men's group that I you know.
After a conference I created a little one, a 12-step men's group.
And I was sitting next to an older guy.
And he looked at us.
I'll remember this forever.
And he said, I've never been intimate with anybody in my life. and I expect I'll die alone.
And not one of us either pulled away from him or tried to make it better for him.
We were just with him.
That is intimate.
And 12 Step has a lot of wisdom that goes beyond our general culture.
It's not perfect, but it's a step up from the mores of our culture.
Yeah, it's definitely not perfect.
There are meetings that people don't resonate with and they're occasionally.
You'll go to a meeting and you can tell the storytelling can get a little bit people getting a little high on other people's stories about getting high.
But a good meeting, which is 98 of meetings.
The person leading the meeting will keep things in check.
And gosh, there's so much wisdom there.
And I think especially in this time where people are struggling more than ever to make connection, And online is clearly a very different form of connection or even leads to disconnection.
The in-person meetings have a real value to them.
And, of course, I also believe that many, many people are dealing with addiction now and they don't realize it.
The numbing out or the rage baiting that you can experience watching.
You know what is essentially 300 little short movies in the course of 20, 30 minutes.
You know when you could just think about like what's actually going on internally around you.
Well, or look at porn.
I mean-
You know, our young men, I mean, my wife Belinda is a certified sex addiction therapist.
And a boy, by the time he's 12 or 13.
Has seen thousands of vaginas.
Has seen thousands of sex scenes.
That's average for America right now.
That's so crazy.
When I was growing up, it was so different.
So different.
So one of the things I say is that we talked about this earlier.
It's the difference between gratification and relational joy.
And a lot of us substitute intensity for intimacy.
And boy, the internet, that's what they sell.
That's the algorithm.
And intensity itself becomes like a drug.
And it makes us feel alive and it's gratifying and it pulls us out of whatever depression we're feeling.
But it's very short-lived.
There's an example of intensity that comes to mind whenever we're talking about boys and men and addiction, but also just languishing and just the idea that You know people can course correct, but it's hard when you know people have been in a current of numbing out or going for intensity.
Here I am drinking yerba mate.
I love caffeine, but I see it at every level, because I'm about to slam on energy drinks for a second.
But just the idea that you're trying to pack more and more intensity into less and less space.
You know, that was one of the things I was nervous about coming on this podcast with you.
That we're all slamming energy drinks?
No, no, not that, but this idea of optimizing every experience.
Yeah, that's a misconception, unfortunately, about this podcast.
I think maybe we used the word optimize early on without explaining that.
Optimization is really about making the best of each day.
So, but that includes sit still.
Totally.
I started today with 10 minutes of meditation.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean I unfortunately this podcast for some people.
They think about supplements optimization, working out and morning sunlight.
Morning sunlight thing's pretty important, especially on overcast days.
But for everyone, we are circadian creatures.
I'll go for that.
You want to get mentally ill, you can help yourself be mildly or severely mentally depressed or ill.
You can damage your relationships by being in dim or dark environments in the early hours of the day.
This is just, there's so much data, right?
Bright days, dark nights.
That's the idea.
But that's the healthy approach.
But No, this podcast was always about psychology and biology and understanding some mechanism and practical tools.
And the optimization thing is, I think, I do think taking a healthy stock of oneself and saying you know, some people need to move more.
Some people need to move less and read more, frankly, you know.
I know some really fit people that are getting dumb.
They'll tell you everything about sets and reps.
But I'm like, listen, you got four PhDs.
These aren't the exercise physiologists I'm referring to.
But you got four PhDs in kettlebells and nutrition that you've given yourself through YouTube.
Like read a hard book.
Read a fiction book.
Read a kid's book for God's sake.
Like you got to balance yourself out.
So I do believe in that.
But I think when it comes to like the relational piece, the –
The reason I keep coming back to 12-step is I think it's just a beautiful template for how to listen.
How to listen and be.
You know, a friend of mine brought up, I didn't read the book, but the title is hilarious.
The title of the book is Death, the End of Self-Improvement.
And it's like, you know what?
Who knows what happens next?
Sit down, have a cup of tea, and look at the trees.
As a family therapist...
I love hanging out.
Families operate in the interstices.
I hate quality time.
I hate it.
It's a yuppie invention.
I can work 80 hours but then I'll sit at a table with my kid and really stare at them and really give them attention.
Now, families operate.
You want your kid to talk to you?
They're in the backseat while you're driving them to hockey practice.
Then they'll open up and talk to you.
You're cooking together, and all of a sudden they start burbling.
You don't focus the laser beam of your attention on them.
They'll clam up.
One of the things that families can teach us about relationality relational joy is hanging out being
It doesn't have to be so focused.
Be a little less perfect and be a little more human, and just let yourself be nurtured in different modes than the ones we're used to.
I love that.
My parents split when I was 14 and we went from a family that was – pretty cohesive.
I mean, my dad worked a lot and sure it had issues, but we were very cohesive to just very different picture.
My sister was off at school.
My dad was elsewhere.
It was just me and my mom.
And those were really really difficult years like very, very difficult for reasons that are important to get into in detail now.
But I was thinking the other day.
I have very, very fond memories of kind of evenings where May or may not have been doing my homework.
Probably should have been.
But I would watch TV or do homework in the living room while my mom would cook.
Sometimes she was on the phone with a friend.
And there was music on.
Occasionally we'd watch.
We'd watch The Wonder Years.
And then there was like a dating show that she liked to watch.
But then she'd get really upset if the couples didn't like each other.
And like those are some of the best memories.
That's right.
I have.
Me and my mom.
And it wasn't the trips that we took or any of that stuff.
And this graduate advisor that I had, her name was Barbara Chapman.
She's a phenomenal scientist.
Like a real pure scientist.
Taught me so much about how to really think about doing really solid science.
Brilliant woman, trained at all the top places.
Didn't give a shit about the accoutrements that go with She just loved doing experiments.
In any case, she had two daughters while I was in the lab, and her husband's a scientist too, so I got to know their family very well.
And sadly, she passed away in 2014, cancer, and it was super devastating to all of us.
So a lot of memorials for her, but I went to the memorial at the House of Flowers in San Francisco, which is also where she and her husband had been married, and her two daughters were there.
It was heavy.
Like all the colleagues, all the friends, she was an amazing person.
I'm like crying buckets.
I'm a mess.
I always have to speak at her memorials.
It's like the eighth memorial.
I'm like, I'm not going to cry.
I'm not going to, of course I get up there.
I was just in front of all my colleagues, you know, all of that.
I mean, it actually taught me a few things about how to deal with people in profession, you know, because you can't walk away from that and be like you're.
You're just like snot out, you know.
Anyway, her daughters get up and um, everyone's bracing themselves like this is going to be hard.
Yeah, they get up there and basically what i recall and i think is accurate is they were like we love our mom, we miss our mom.
All that stuff, everyone's melting and they just go.
But the thing we remember best and that we loved about her the most was all the unstructured time.
She would just hang out with us.
And I was like I don't want to break down now, but it was because it'd be out tears of joy, but it was just so incredible.
I was like, that's so cool.
Like of all the things they did, the world series, the trips they took to France.
They did that the scientific means that the girls can do.
It's like the unstructured time.
And I was just like, that is so cool.
And I'm actually in touch with them now.
One actually is in graduate school doing neuroscience, which is warming, but could have done anything.
And it's so wild because of all that.
Their mom has been gone probably long, almost as long as they had her, you know?
And it's like the unstructured time, that was it.
That's the thing they held on to more than anything.
That's connection.
I'll tell you a story.
So I was dealing with a rock star, not Bruce Springsteen, who wrote the intro.
Everybody thinks I'm always talking about him, but it wasn't him.
Anyway, I was dealing with a rock star.
And this is how he described himself.
So when I'm on stage in front of 60,000 people, I'm alive.
When I come home and I'm with my wife and four kids, I'm like a computer on sleep mode.
I'm just half shut down and depressed.
I used to sleep 10 hours a day.
Okay.
So I talked to him about gratification and relational joy, about hanging out about, And I said look, your kids keep daddy daddy, daddy.
You go, no, no, no, no, no.
I want you to start saying yes, yes, yes.
And dad, let's go for a walk.
Oh, okay.
Get yourself up out of the chair and go be.
And he did.
And about six months into this absolute true story, he comes to me, big smile on his face.
He says, I got it.
I said, okay, tell me, there's a story.
He goes, this Sunday, I had the best day of my life.
I said, go on.
He said, my wife, me, my four kids, we didn't get out of our PJs all day.
We sat around and played Monopoly from seven in the morning till seven at night.
I had no idea where the time went.
I had no idea what we were doing.
And it was the best day of my goddamn life.
And I said, welcome to relational joy.
That's what I want.
And that's what we're born for.
I deal with really tough couples, really tough guys.
The ace in my pocket is relational connection is what we're born for.
And people move very quickly in the therapy I do, not just me, but all the therapists we've trained.
And the reason is that our whole art as RLT therapists is moving somebody out of disconnection into the jet stream of connection and relational joy.
And once somebody is in that jet stream, oh man, it's just so much better than the disconnection that the jet stream takes them and they move very quickly and transformationally, because this is what makes us happy.
This is what fulfills us.
Yeah, it's almost like the best stuff is the stuff that you would never post on social media because it's so boring for the internet and so awesome in real life.
Yeah, well said.
That's what I want.
I think I'm starting to catch your vibe.
You're a pretty relational dude, I got to tell you.
For better or worse.
I have work to do.
I'm fortunate now to be in the landscape of what I think is like a real education in peace and simplicity, despite my professional life being less about peace and simplicity, more about it's all good.
I love it.
I love my job.
Love, love my job.
But in the rest of my life, it's really like peace and simplicity.
I had a hike with a friend recently.
It was awesome.
Just awesome.
Like it was just, we got together for a hike. talked about some things, hung out.
That was great.
I've taken a lot of hikes with a lot of friends and that one was definitely in the a winner for whatever reason.
Just the relational piece.
And then also now I think, um, She may be getting bored.
I don't know.
I should probably ask her.
But like my girlfriend and I these days, like we just hang out and listen to music.
Yeah.
That's like a lot of our time is hanging out and listening to music.
Yeah.
She's got great musical taste.
I like music and I'm trying to learn more about other music.
And I know pretty quickly if I like something or not.
And she's got like a treasure trove of music.
But even when we don't like something, like, yeah, so we just hang out and listen to music.
Like most, I'm realizing we spent a lot of time just hanging out listening to music, but it's a totally different landscape because the intensity is there, in certain aspects certainly.
But the peace piece is like this whole other landscape that I'm less familiar with.
And I should say, I take the blame for that.
I've been a bit of an intensity junkie in my life.
For sure, Adrenaline and I are like close buddies.
We hang out, we like each other, we get high off each other.
But nowadays that doesn't really appeal.
No, intimacy is better.
Gratification is fine, but intimacy is better.
It's a deeper satisfaction.
You know, one of the things I say is relational—I talk about relational recovery.
Addictions can be part of it, but recovering the state of relationality we're born for, that's what I'm looking for.
And one of the things I say is operating with maturity skill health integrity, learning how to do this well, your life is simple.
Being fucked up—
That's complicated.
Totally.
Fighting for a day and a half, that's complicated.
Totally.
When your wife comes at you and says I'm really mad you go.
I'm sorry, honey.
What can I do to help you?
And she's chilled out in 10 minutes.
That's simple.
So relationality is actually simple.
Not being relational is full of complications.
This is easy. the scientist in me has to run the experiment here.
A lot of the examples you've given, I acknowledge probably, they certainly apply.
You're the clinician, you would know, and you have your own life experience.
We've got this model out on the table of like, the guy who doesn't really know how to listen as well as he could still needs to learn to ask for help and ask what do you need right now, in this moment, to take breaks when things get ratcheted up?
She's got things that she needs and wants from him.
He's like I don't know this, like you know emotionally, you know semi-embryonic, semi-adult thing.
Let's turn the table.
Not because we have to, but because like, Once again, it's rarely just one person.
Is there ever a time when like a guy has a complaint that's valid?
Oh my God.
Because I just think it's important for us to do this.
We have male and female audience, but I just think part of the male crisis is that it seems like the seesaw is always tilted the same way.
And that message, while probably valid in a lot of circumstances probably more than half, if I'm honest it's.
I think sometimes men have things that requests and things that they want and have valid complaints, maybe invalid complaints.
Let's talk about how to voice concern, request, dare I say, criticism in a way that's healthy and that serves both people, serves relationally.
Yeah.
I'm not a big fan of criticism.
If you go online and you do my course, we give you a format for criticism.
It's called the feedback wheel.
Constructive criticism.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But even so, one of the skills I teach people is...
We're evolutionary wired, you know, the negative bias of the brain.
We notice what's wrong.
That's survival.
Hey, that leaf shouldn't be turning.
Well, there's a saber-toothed tiger on the other side.
We notice what's wrong, and that's part of our evolution.
That's what comes to us first.
So complaint comes to us first.
But one of the disciplines I teach people, literally sit down, write down the complaint.
Okay, now flip it over.
Flip the page over.
Inside of every complaint is a request.
Think about that.
Every complaint has an implicit request in it.
Unless you absolutely have to, nine out of ten times, skip the complaint and just go for the request.
And particularly women to men.
Men are criticism phobic because we base our self-esteem on our performance.
Don't tell your guy what he's doing wrong.
Tell him what he could be doing a little better.
Hey, you're doing a great job.
This would work better.
In our culture, we try and get more of what we want from each other by criticizing each other.
If you have to, I'll teach you how to do it.
But better, skip the criticism and go right for what you want.
Empower your partner. to give you what you want.
Don't beat them down by sharing your feelings about how... That's therapy.
Therapy has been the worst on this.
Sharing your misery at what your partner's done wrong is not going to motivate them to do it better for you.
Help them do it better.
We're a team.
This is what I want from you.
Honey, what could I give you to help you give it to me?
Who sounds like that?
We have to learn how to sound like that.
So criticism.
I learned criticism from Janet Hurley, PM Melody's 12-step sponsor.
It's called the Feedback Reel.
I'll do it real briefly.
You can go online.
Four parts.
This is what happened, as I recollected.
It's still subjective.
This is the story I told myself about it.
This is what I felt.
And the all-important part, this is what would make me feel better.
So Belinda to Terry.
You said you were going to be home at 7.
You didn't call or text.
You showed up at 7.45.
The kids and I were waiting for you.
Done.
The story I told myself was you can be selfish.
And as long as you own it, this is the story, you can say the nasty things you're thinking.
You got caught up.
You forgot about us.
Your work was more important.
And you blew it.
What I feel about it.
This is a big tip for your listeners.
Take the feeling that comes easiest to you and put that last.
Reach for the feelings that are less common.
So if you're used to big, you know, I'm pissed off, go for the vulnerability.
I was hurt.
If you're used to being hurt, go for your strength.
That was really not a good way.
So whatever you're used to, flip it.
And then...
What we never add, this would help me feel better.
This would be repair.
So you're leading your partner into repair.
Now, here's a funny story.
So Janet said, you get four sentences, one sentence for each part.
We have no attention span for being criticized, so four sentences is enough.
I said to Janet, hey, look, You're a West Coast Christian.
I'm an East Coast Jew.
I've never said anything in four sentences.
I need more.
Okay, I'll give you a cultural dispensation.
You can have eight sentences.
And that was 40 years ago.
Now I tell all my clients to get eight sentences.
Two sentences each.
This is what happened.
This is what I told myself, this is what I felt, and this would help if you'd be willing.
That's how you complain.
But for every complaint, I want 99 requests instead.
Love it.
For the record, I don't have any specific critiques that I want to wage right now.
Is that a problem?
A problem?
I don't.
I don't have any critiques, i'm only in gratitude.
These days it's really weird.
It's really wild, like something happened right around my 50th birthday, a bunch of things that led into it, but like i, i just am uh, i mean i, i just feel constantly grateful.
I don't know what happened so i'm not gonna worry about it.
Um, but has some something hit and i like to think it has to do something with age.
I do too.
You know, it's like something's.
There a buddy of mine who's also professor at stanford.
He once told me he goes.
You know, 50 is really different.
I don't know how different can it be?
It's like.
You'll see, i was like is it like pain in the body?
He's like no, he takes really good care of himself, he's.
He's not into lifting and running, he's into some other stuff, kind of rock climbing, yoga dude.
Um, amazing scientist too, where he goes.
50 is different.
He goes, your brain is different at 50.
And I was like, maybe it was because I was anticipating it, but 50 hit and I'm like, I'm still here.
I live longer than a lot of my heroes.
And I wasn't impressed by the 27 Club.
I mean impressive artists, but like a lot of people I knew and looked up to and who mentored me dead,
I'm like, this is awesome.
I'm on the second half.
And I just, I wake up that way.
It's wild.
Well, you know, it's a small stuff.
There's some wisdom in being an elder.
And like you had your fight with your girlfriends 353 times, you know?
You asked about me and Belinda.
I'll tell you.
Belinda's a fighter, and I'm a fighter.
We both grew up in very violent families, and our adopted children are fighters.
Fuck you, fuck me.
I'm standing up for myself.
I'm going to bop you right in the nose.
And I'm a New Yorker, too, so don't mess with me.
That's my adopted child.
That's my instinct.
And 30 years ago, we would fight for weeks, Belinda and I. I mean, yelling, screaming, raging.
Go to bed at 3 in the morning, wake up at 7, start all over again.
Tell other people how to live their lives all day and then come back and fight again.
This is true.
99%, 1% we look ugly just like everybody else.
But 99%, we start to fight.
We take a break.
We both know what that's about.
15, 20 minutes.
And it's not one or the other.
It's kind of even.
One of us will go to the other and say, it sounds something like this, Andrew.
I don't want to fight.
Do you really want to fight?
I mean, we could, but I don't really want to, honey.
What do you need?
And Balloon will say to me, well, you really were an asshole about dot, dot, dot.
And I'll go.
Yeah, I was.
You're right.
I'm sorry.
I'll work on that.
And she'll go, what do you need?
And I'll go, well, you can really apologize about one, two, three.
And she'll go, I'll apologize about one.
20 years ago, what about two and three?
Now, good, one, fine, we'll take it.
Good, good, great.
What's on TV?
Let's cuddle up on the couch and have an evening.
And what I'm really thinking in that moment is this, and this is what I teach people.
How do I want to spend my evening?
How do I want to spend my time?
Is it really worth it to me to prove my point and nail her into the ground?
Or can we make peace efficiently and skillfully and move the hell on?
We behave with skill because it's in our interest to do so.
I'm not making peace with Belinda for her.
I'm making peace with Belinda for me.
I love love, love this word, this language around being skilled in relating, especially when things potentially get tense.
It encapsulates everything. all the things around asking for help, asking what one needs.
That's so powerful.
I've said it like four times, so forgive me, but I think people need to hear it again.
Like just asking, what do you need?
I mean if we could somehow program ourselves to turn the.
We all know that feeling when our limbic system is activated and you start feeling your body, whatever activation state you get into.
That's the limbic system.
We all know it when it happens.
And just, if that could just translate to the words, like, what do you need?
And as you pointed out, that's best for both people.
It's prepare.
All relationships are an endless dance of harmony, disharmony, and repair.
I got this from Ed Tronick, infant observational researcher.
Ed and Barry Breseldon were the first of a generation to stop thinking about mothers and infants, reconstructed from adults and actually stuck cameras in front of mothers and infants, and then fathers and infants, and looked at what happened.
And I borrowed from Ed that all relationships are an endless rhythm of closeness, disruption and a return.
And in our culture we don't learn the skills of moving from disillusionment, distance disruption back into repair and return.
And what makes life even more dicey is when we're in that disruptive state.
We lose our prefrontal quarterwise adult and move into the adaptive child.
So the first skill is getting back in your right mind and then, okay, honey, what do you need?
Let's fix this together.
What's the work that men boys men, you know can do to understand and work on their self-esteem, dare I say, in a vacuum?
I know it's all relational.
You have to do it, but there are people whose time is spent taking care of their job, their school scrolling, spending some time doing it.
I see an opportunity in the work that you do for and the fact that you're here for young guys to start earlier.
You know, I mean, I got lucky with, someone taught me how to work out properly a long time ago.
He was the guy everyone said was an idiot about how to work out.
Turns out it worked and you didn't have to do it, spend your whole life in a gym.
I got lucky by having great mentors.
I got lucky.
I also fired some mentors and got new ones.
So I played an active role, but You're incredibly skilled in this domain.
It's your profession.
And there are guys in their teens 20s 30s, all the way up to, you know 80s, 90s.
Surely they can learn.
But like there's a special opportunity in starting to cultivate these skills in one's teens and 20s and 30s.
And perhaps even having them when one shows up to a relationship in much better form than certainly I had.
You know for sure.
So what does that work look like?
Like is it journaling?
Is it like how does it work?
I have two pieces of advice.
And you have sons, I should point out.
Like, you have some experience teaching people how to do this.
Yeah, we've taught them this.
My doc son, I was driving to school, and he's giving me shit.
And I'm trying to stop.
He gives me shit.
And I look at him, and I go, do you think this is appropriate for our relationship?
And he falls on the floor.
And he says, Dad, there are dads driving their sons to school all over America.
They're talking about the game.
They're talking about friends.
How many dads are saying to their son, do you think this is appropriate for our relationship?
Anyway, he does a whole routine about being the son of two sons.
But they bitch about it, but we taught them.
And my Alexander, my high-achieving doctor researcher, to this day, he'll call and go.
I really blew that presentation.
I know I'm enough when I matter, even though I blew the presentation, but I just want you to know it.
We can teach our kids healthier mores as part of our job as parents.
I have a little course online Raising Relational Boys and Girls, and we can insist on more relationality.
We can create, like a pick in basketball.
We can create a relationally cherishing subculture around our children friends family, teach them go into school and do an anti-bullying campaign.
We can consciously download this to our kids and be explicit about it.
In terms of the young person themselves, I have two pieces of advice.
One, find older people who are good at this and let them be your mentor.
Go to them and be explicit and let them teach you.
But find people who are happy. teach our kids how to be relational.
Stand up for it and create a culture around them that supports that, because the playground won't, the school won't, your colleagues won't.
So create a little counterculture of relationality and surround your family with them.
For the young person find mentors who are happy and let them teach you about how to be happy.
And the other thing I want to teach, which is true for all of us, and I would not be able to forgive myself if I didn't say this one thing in our podcast
We have a lot of people listening.
This is what I want to say.
If you get one thing from our conversation today and you only get this this one thing will be enough to change your life.
I mean it.
Here's what it is.
There is no redeeming value in harshness.
Let me say it again.
There is nothing that harshness does that loving firmness doesn't do better.
Be firm, but with love, not harshness.
And that's you treating others.
That's the way you allow others to treat you.
And very much, that's the way you treat you.
I am on an anti-harshness campaign.
And what I say to friends, family, students, and it's true, at 75, I have a deal with the universe.
If it isn't kind, I'm not interested.
And that adaptive child that lives inside me can be very harsh to my own imperfection.
And I will say to that, or to Belinda, or to a colleague You may have something to say to me and it may be in my interest to learn and listen to you, but you have to say it like you're on my side.
If you can't say it like you're on my side, I'm not going to listen.
So a hallmark of relationality is that it's loving and not harsh.
Let that be your bellwether.
I love that, especially the part about the voice inside of us, because I think we internalize the judge of the judgmental voice of the parent or the dismissive voice of the parent.
All that stuff gets in our heads and it drives so much of our misery.
And what you just described offers a tremendous amount of agency.
Yes, in terms of what we will accept or won't accept from others, what we request from others, unless I'd be positive here.
But at least equally importantly is what I heard is how harsh we are with our inner dialogue and that we should cultivate a kindness internally.
Because I do believe, I'm certain that cultivates an external kindness.
Yes.
Start with you.
Be kind to you.
Okay, so I'll tell a story if you're not bored.
No, please.
Absolutely true story.
So I was off at a conference, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And I was signing books.
And it was late, and one of my handlers said, Terry, you're going to miss your plane.
Okay, I got it.
I'm on the plane.
I'm on the plane.
I'm not drinking now, but I was drinking then.
I had a little glass of short.
I had my feet off.
And I'm feeling great.
And I feel this coldness on my chest.
And I look down, and there's this big black splotch. on my shirt.
And I realized I was signing books with like a Sharpie.
And in my haste, I didn't put the cap on.
I put the shirt, and it was like permanent ink.
And I got to tell you, Andrew, this was like, this is one of my, I hope I go on Oprah's shirt.
This is an expensive goddamn shirt.
And I'm ADD.
I'm always breaking things, bumping.
So that adaptive child part of me was going to town.
You're such a loser.
You can't even look at you.
And I'm depressive.
I wrote about it.
That shirt and the harshness that I would level against myself could have turned into a five-day depression when I was younger.
And having learned these techniques, I mean, it's just a boy, just a young boy in me.
And I leaned to that adaptor and I said, listen, sweetheart, Let me tell you something.
The same ADD brain that ruined this shirt is the brain that wrote the books that were being autographed.
So how about you cut me some slack?
You know, I'm a therapist.
I have very little cost.
Kleenex, you know, an office.
This shirt, cost of doing business.
Sit down and let me enjoy my wine.
And he did.
We don't have to be passive about these things.
We can shape what goes on in our relationships, include our relationships to ourselves.
Stand up for health, but with finesse and love, not with a blunt instrument.
And we get better at it.
You love the gym.
You go to the gym and you work out the first time, you feel like you're going to throw up.
You go to the gym the 300th time, you got it nailed.
Same thing with this.
That harsh voice turns on you and you say, honey, stop.
The first time you do it, they'll laugh at you.
The 300th time you do it, they'll stop.
That's called liberation.
That's freedom.
That's our birthright.
Fantastic.
This was a true education in relational understanding.
That's the word I'm looking for in relational understanding, because I think men especially I will say men especially we think about ourselves and the landscape and how we're going to deal with the landscape.
Maybe now, just with your permission, I'll just say I have this wild, somewhat facetious story about the Y chromosome.
May I?
Oh, yeah, go ahead.
May I?
So I have a theory that long ago, some primordial version of us, a homo sapiens with a Y chromosome, picked up a rock and was like oh interesting.
And then just like hit his head with it and was like, ow, that hurts.
And then hit the guy next to him and they were like, oh, that hurts.
And then they got together and like, what would happen if we threw this over that tree?
Let's see what and I sort of half joking, because I think there's something about the Y chromosome that you observe in, like if you go to a wedding and there's boys there and everyone has their jackets and their ties, and like within no time the boys are combining all the drinks and they're like what would happen if?
And who's going to drink it?
And then at some point it turns into this idea of having action at a distance.
There's something about the wide chromosome.
We want to see that sometimes it's a remote control car.
Like the first time you play with a remote control car you're like, oh wow, I can control something at a distance.
Sounds very diabolical, but it's just cool.
You're over here.
It's over there, right?
And likewise with a video game.
There's something about this like action at a distance, and let's see what would happen if.
And I look at a lot of my adult male friends, some who are very, very successful phenoms, and they're still playing this game of what would happen if an action at a distance to get this feedback about whether or not they're doing well in life.
Yeah. all awesome features to being male.
I love being male.
I think the Y chromosome should be celebrated just as the X chromosome should be celebrated.
And at the same time, none of that addresses what you were talking about today.
And so there are a few people, only a few, and I know you're among them now, having spoken to you and heard from you, more importantly, who can understand the first piece about what would happen if, and the action at a distance, and the second piece, the relational piece.
And all too often, these are separated.
It's like, oh, let's talk about evolutionary theory, about what men need and provide or protect her.
And then it's like no, let's actually feel our feelings and dissolve into a puddle of our own tears.
And then we're going to resurrect in a new form that's like, you know, in light.
Like, no, these things have to be whole.
I want wholeness.
That's the word I'm looking for.
You are speaking to how men and boys can be whole people.
And I love it.
And you give very practical, very actionable advice.
And it's going to help a lot of people.
So I'm very grateful that you've written your books.
We'll put links to your books, to your courses.
It sounds like people can sign up for these courses and take these courses.
And for coming here today and for being a public educator and teaching people men and women, but today mostly men how to love themselves more, love other people more, love life more and learn to relate.
So thank you so much for coming here.
You're doing beautiful work.
There's so much bullshit and darkness in this world right now.
And I want to tell you it's a blessing to be taken seriously by you and to be offered this opportunity.
And it's fun hanging out with you.
Right back at you.
I feel very honored and blessed to have you here, and this was a lot of fun.
To be continued.
To be continued.
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