Mature Masculinity Podcast: How to recognize your entitlement

In this episode I share how to recognize your entitlement, i.e. the covert contracts that have transactive expectations built into them.

We all have them. All of us, at one time or another, having entitlement and that entitlement can poison your relationship with yourself and with the people who are important to you..

By learning how to recognize your entitlement, you can also learn how to share what you truly need, want, or long for in a real and genuine way. Watch it below or listen on spotify.

Mature Masculinity Podcast: Learn how to say yes to yourself

One of the challenges that “nice guys” have is around saying yes to themselves and being in a place of integrity and honesty about what they are saying yes to.

In this episode I share my own challenges around saying yes to myself, and talk about the cost of codependent people pleasing behaviors, both to myself and the relationships I’ve been in. When we aren’t honest with ourselves about our needs and wants and longings, we can’t be honest with anyone else and the result are broken relationships because we haven’t learned how to say yes to ourselves.

Mature Masculinity Podcast: How to love your body

A lot of men hold themselves to an impossible standard when it comes to their body image. They think they need to be chiseled and lean and many struggle with the self-image they have.

In this episode of the mature masculinity podcast I talk about my relationship with my body, share my experiences around being anorexic in my twenties and talk about how I learned to love and accept body, while also taking better care of myself. I talk about why men need to take better care of their bodies in general and share a few ideas on how they can do that.

How to unlock the door to your own cage

One of the ways men are socialized is to lock their emotions and thoughts in a cage, the cage they construct to protect themselves from the world. The problem with this cage is that it keeps everyone out, and the man locked in. It creates an isolating experience that can numb a man because he doesn’t know who to let in or trust, and he doesn’t feel like he can let anyone in.

I remember feeling that way in my own life. I had put walls up around myself and I would only let someone in so far, before I shut them out. I couldn’t share my emotions or have uncomfortable conversations. I shied away from getting into conflict, because I just wanted everything to be harmonious, but at the same time, within myself there was a tempest of emotions and thoughts I wasn’t being honest with myself or anyone else about.

In that kind of situation, it can feel like you are inside a cage. That cage is partially of your own making and partially a consequence of patriarchal indoctrination which convinces boys and men that in order to fit in they have to lock their emotions down. It’s hard to live in that cage, because it makes us small and traps us in a place where we can’t relate to other people around us. It’s a cage that can ultimately kill a man, because it locks the man down from the full expression of his being.

Even though we are in the cage, we have the power to do something about it. We can let ourselves out of the cage we’ve locked ourselves in. That’s sounds simple enough, but actually getting ourselves out of that cage can take some work.

I remember the first time I really allowed myself out of my cage. It was when I was attending a men’s circle for the first time. I had never attended a men’s circle before and I was nervous. If I shared what I was going through and what I was feeling, would the other men make fun of me and put me down? Still I made myself go. I wasn’t the first man to speak that night or even the second or third, but as I heard each man share their emotions and what they were going through I felt like the door to my cage swung open. I wasn’t alone.

I knew I could step out of that cage. I knew all I had to do was speak up and share what was going for me and I could take my first step out of that cage. So I did it. I spoke up and shared some feelings and experiences and even though it was scary in the moment, it was also liberating. I took my first step out of that cage that I had built around myself.

I didn’t share everything in my heart that night. It took me a few months before I got to that point, but when I finally, fully opened up in a men’s circle I felt supported by the men that were there. None of them judged me for my mistakes, my emotions, my thoughts or everything else I had been keeping buried within me. They just listened and heard and witnessed me. It was freeing.

If you’re feeling locked up in a cage within your own life and you don’t feel like you can let anyone in, I want to encourage you to join a men’s circle. There is something really empowering about sharing your space with other men and letting them bear witness to your truth. Men need each other to unlock the doors of the cages we’ve constructed about ourselves. We need to know we’re not alone and know that we can share who we are without having to filter it. We’ve been taught to filter who we are, but being part of a men’s circle can help you stop filtering yourself. It can help you rediscover the genuine person within.

Mature Masculinity Podcast: How I'm changing my relationship with anger

What is your relationship with anger?

Men grow up learning that anger is often the only emotion they can express. But in my case, I learned that I wasn’t allowed to express anger toward other people. In this episode, I share how I’m transforming my relationship with anger by learning how to be more assertive. I also discuss why holding your anger in just makes you angrier and unhappier, while expressing your anger in the moment releases the anger you’ve been holding onto.

How I'm learning to love being single

I recently became single again, and just as with the last time, I wisely committed myself to being single for at least 6 months, if not longer, because I knew I needed to make space to grieve for the relationship, process anything else that came up, and also rediscover myself outside of being in relationship with someone else.

I’m finding that I’m really enjoying being single. In my twenties and thirties I was filled with a sense of desperation. I had to find my person, or people, because being single meant having to be with me, and that wasn’t something I wanted. It wasn’t the healthiest attitude to have toward myself, but I think a lot of people filled with self loathing operate in a similar way. We try to find a panacea for the condition of our lives, little realizing that the true panacea is only found within.

This isn’t to say that relationship doesn’t have its purpose. It surely does and it can be transformative, nurturing and healing to be with someone else. It can also be a lot of work. Relationships have their place in our lives and hopefully we find that person or people who we can joyfully engage with and learn from, conflict with and grow wiser in the process.

But there is something joyful about being in relationship with myself as well. This latest iteration of singlehood has become an adventure for me, especially as I’ve reached out to my different communities and connected with them even more deeply.

So often if a person is single, its treated as if being single is a state of being that ought to be avoided, because you’ll be lonely. But being single doesn’t have to be that way. I am single, but I don’t feel lonely. I can pick up the phone and talk with someone or text and know that someone is around. I can go to events around town and see someone I know or meet new people and enjoy the experience. Or I can take myself on a date and appreciate the opportunity to do something fun with me.

Embrace being single. It can be an adventure. It can be an opportunity to fall deeply in love with the one person who will never be out of your life: Yourself!

Mature Masculinity Podcast: Are you living your life for the right person?

Nice Guys don’t know how to live their lives for themselves. They make their partners the center of their lives and orient all of their actions around trying to make their partner happy. I share why this doesn’t work and how this nice guy behavior kills the relationship.

Nice guys need to learn how to live their lives for themselves and how to live in integrity with the values, mission and purpose that bring them to life. This won’t always make your partner happy, but you can’t live an authentic life where you put your partner and their happiness on a pedestal and sacrifice your needs and wants. I explain why in depth in this frank episode of Mature Masculinity Podcast.

Why men struggle with being wrong and what we can do about it

One of the books I’m reading is Man Enough by Justin Baldoni (Affiliate link) and in the book he talks about the social dynamics around men and how men put on a performance around being right, because of the pressure they feel around being right. What really fascinated me is that he shared an insight that men often put on this performance, not so much because of women, but because they feel like they have to be right in front of other men. He also shared another point, which is that men also are hard on themselves when they don’t seem to have a direction they are going in with their lives.

I considered both points that he made and I found myself agreeing with him. I have no problem admitted I’m wrong about a given topic and in fact I’m more careful about what I say now because over the years I’ve learned how little I know and how much I hope to learn. And I’ll acknowledge that the performance a man puts on can still be done with all people in mind, but there is this tendency that we men have to measure ourselves against each other while simultaneously seeking reassurance that we’re enough from each other.

It’s a game that doesn’t serve anyone.

And I see it as well with the tendency to need a direction. At the job I’m leaving the manager I’ve worked with his has pushed his vision onto all of his workers and tried to get us to conform to his direction. He tells us he always want us to be growing, without considering that constant growth leads to cancer and that sometimes what we really need is to just be in the role we’re in and take measurement of what its getting us. The constant grind of needing to have a direction, when its provided by someone else, is exhausting.

We men can be and often are wrong and that doesn’t make us flawed. It makes us human and allows us to step down from the pedestal we’ve been put on that says we have to be right, successful and have everything figured out. We don’t have to have anything figured out and when we let go of the performance and step out of the shell game, we might just listen better and connect more meaningfully with everyone around us because we no longer have to take up space and show that we’ve got it all figured out.

Right now I have a sense of purpose and meaning and its providing a few directions to go in, but I can also stop and take in the sights and let go of direction, of the push to be somewhere doing something. I can just be with myself and consider what that really means for me. And instead of saying something about a topic I don’t know much about, I can listen and take in what others are sharing. I can learn and let go of the need to appear a certain way.

I can be a man without all the answers or solutions, or anything else. I can be.

How being clingy kills your chemistry

Nice guys are needy men. One of the ways they are needy comes in the form of clinginess. In this episode I break down what clinginess can look like and how you can recognize it in yourself. I also share some ideas on how to work on addressing your clinginess and letting go of your neediness.

How to turn your fragility into agility

Recently on my substack, I wrote an article on my Substack on how to recognize and work with Male Fragility. This article was prompted by reading a book called Grappling: From Fragile to Agile, where the author explores how fragility shows up in men and discusses ways we can become more agile instead of fragile. I’ve been reading this book while exploring my own areas of fragility so that I can become agile when I encounter them.

So what does fragility work look like?

Becoming agile with fragility involves recognizing the blind spots you have in your life that occur because of the way you’ve been socialized. Our socialization creates a bubble around our lives that can keep us from recognizing the experiences of other people, because all we can see is our own frame of reference. When you recognize the socialization and the bubble it creates, you necessarily will get really uncomfortable with what you see, because of how it may make you uncomfortable with yourself.

We have to lean into that discomfort. This is not easy to do, but it is necessary, if we want to grow as people and as men. For example, if I am looking at my fragility around being a heterosexual male, I necessarily need to get real with how my socialization as a heterosexual male causes me to ignore the realities of the experience that other people have faced where their sexuality and identity around sexuality hasn’t been accepted and welcomed because of how society at large is oriented toward that particular sexual expression. This is slowly changing, but this change is expedited when people who have fragility are willing to confront their own fragility and become agile because they can accept their discomfort.

Accepting our discomfort also means getting curious about other peoples’ experience, without expecting those people to educate us. We need to educate ourselves, which means we make the effort to learn about other peoples’ experience, listen to what other people are saying, and otherwise discover for ourselves what we don’t know.

If you’re a man reading this article, you likely have areas of your life where you are fragile. Maybe it’s around race or sexuality or spiritual beliefs or whatever else, but it behooves you to examine the areas of your life that you feel fragile around. Otherwise you are keeping yourself in a place that feels comfortable, but comes at the cost of awareness of other people. You can’t solve their problems and they aren’t looking for you to solve their problems. What is desired is awareness and ownership and a willingness to face what’s underneath our fragility, which is often the fears that we aren’t acknowledging around our fragility. Those fears come in the form of awareness that other people often make accommodations to keep some people happy or feeling safe at their own expense because of how we are socialized.

We become agile when we confront the aspects of ourselves that don’t want to see outside the bubble of our lives. If I never look outside that bubble, I might be in a for a rude awakening that I need to have so I can be fully present with the realities of what other people experience. Agility is acceptance of our own discomfort around the realities of life and our willingness to grow, learn and acknowledge the experiences other people have that are different from our own experience.

What is integrity?

What is integrity?

Is it telling the truth or doing an action regardless of who does or doesn’t see it?

What does it mean to live a life with integrity?

I answer these questions and share my own work around integrity, the struggles I’ve encountered and what I’m continuing to do to get myself into a place of integrity.

What is Safety?

What is safety? What does it mean to be safe? With yourself, another person, or in general? I answer these questions as I explore what it means to be safe to me, as a man, and I examine the assumptions that men make about a sense of safety and why that can be so problematic. I share some personal example of own work around safety.

How to be present with your Anger

Anger is an emotion that has been labeled as a negative emotion that is to be avoided or repressed. But pushing down anger doesn’t help you avoid it. If anything it causes you to compartmentalize anger and then you don’t know how to be present with it or express it healthy. I get frank about handling anger and discuss my own challenges around my anger and what I am continuing to learn as a result.

How to be present with someone else's anger

The emotion of anger can be frightening to experience, especially when someone else is angry at you! How do you handle someone else’s anger? What don’t you want to do? I share some of my own experiences around another person’s anger and how to identify healthy anger versus abusive anger.

3 tips for becoming present with your emotions instead of stuffing them down

One of the challenges that many men face is around becoming present with their emotions. I can relate to this challenge because for a long time I stuffed my own emotions down and even when I began to experience and express my emotions, I still struggled with being fully present with them and expressing them in an appropriate and mature way. I think this is really a human challenge, but men struggle with emotions because we’ve been systemically taught to repress our emotions and not express them.

It is possible for anyone to learn how to express their emotions with sensitivity and awareness of the emotion and of the other people who are involved, but it requires some practice and work. The following three tips can be helpful for anyone who is working on becoming more present with their emotions.

Tip 1: Your emotions are not your identity - When you’re feeling an emotion it can seem overwhelming, especially when it seems to take up the entirety of your being. It’s important to remember that your emotions are not your identity. They are responses to experiences you are having and they are important to acknowledge but they are not who you are. When you recognize that an emotion is not the entirety of your being, it can help you be present with it and also accept that it is just one facet of the experience you are having in the moment.

Tip 2: Take deep breathes and go slow with what you express - It’s really easy to get flooded with emotions. When that happens it makes it harder for you to be present with the person you’re with because you’re feeling those emotions so intensely. A practice that I have found helpful is to take deep breaths and to also make sure my feet are planted on the ground so I’m fully present with what I’m feeling in the moment, and at the same time paying attention to what the other person is saying. Another practice I’ve sometimes found helpful is to actually do a physical activity such as pushups because the physical exercise is giving me an outlet for my own emotions while allowing me to take in what the other person is saying.

Tip 3: Taking breaks can be helpful in both the short term and long term - When you are feeling emotions, sometimes the best choice you could make would be to go for a walk and take a break from the immediate experience. This doesn’t mean you’re running away, but it does mean you need to communicate that you need a break so that you can separate out your emotions in the moment from the overall experience. You still want to acknowledge those emotions and one of the most important ways you can do that is to be honest about what you are feeling.

What tips would you share around becoming present with your emotions? How has becoming present with your emotions helped you communicate and show up better?

How you get off on situation you don't like

I talk about existential kink and how you can use it to identify patterns in your life that you don’t like and yet nonetheless give you something. I also share how you can break those patterns by learning how to get off on your own discomfort and unhappiness.

Are you Abandoning Yourself?

Are you abandoning yourself to please someone else? I share how to identify if you are, and why this actually hurts your relationship with yourself and the other person.

The price of patriarchy

I just finished reading Bell Hooks book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (affiliate link) and it was thought and emotion provoking read. What it made me really consider was the price of patriarchy on men, and how this has shown up in my life.

Even though I’ve never considered myself an advocate for patriarchy, I see how much it, in some ways benefits me, and other ways disempowers me. As a man, it benefits me because patriarchy prioritizes men and the way men take up space in the world around them. On the other hand patriarchy also disempowers men because of how it isolates us from expressing ourselves. I have spent much of my life walled up when it has come to emotions such as loneliness, anger, fear and depression. It has caused me a lot of grief and pain because I haven’t been able to open up to other people around me in a real and authentic way up until recently.

And then there’s sex. When I read the author’s thoughts on sex, it caused me to reflect on my own male entitlement around sex and where that entitlement came from. I see how this entitlement has actually caused me to focus on a very narrow perspective and experience around sex, while missing out on some of the more subtle nuances and experiences around sex. I also see how it can exclude love from sex because the emphasis on sex is fixated around performance and how sex reinforces a man’s image of himself.

I look at how patriarchy has played a role in my experiences. It’s something I’ve often not even thought about for much of my life (an example of male privilege) and my realization has really come about because of getting involved in the men’s movement and through conversations I’ve had around the impact of patriarchy with other people in my life. I see how patriarchy has damaged my relationships with lovers, and I also see how it has isolated for most of my life. I have only recently, in the scale of my life, developed healthy relationships with other men and I am in the same process of figuring out how to have healthy relationships with women.

I feel sad about the impact patriarchy has had on my life. It has shaped me in ways that has kept me from being fully present in the relationships I have been in. It has limited me in ways that I am only now realizing because of how it has conditioned me to look at the world through a very specific filter. Yet I also know that this is part of men’s work: We become aware of the programming and packaging that effects our lives and we fully accept how it has benefitted and harmed us, so that we can make changes.

Am I Good Enough?

There’s a Type O Negative song which asks the question, “Am I good enough, for you?” It’s a question that sums up my experience as a co-dependent person, but it also sums up my experience as a man. I’ve asked myself this question, “Am I good enough?” for most of my life and it represents the pressure that I have felt around being a man. I don’t know if other men ask that question of themselves, but I know I’ve asked it and so often it has really represented a pang for acceptance in my life, but acceptance from what?

Acceptance from my dad or my mom? Acceptance from my family, friends, lovers, or society at large? At times those answers might fit that question, for a given moment, but when I dig deeper into it, I find that none of those answers are really satisfactory. And invariably with these people I find myself ask performative questions. Am I good enough son? Am I good enough lover? Am I good enough friend? In a given moment, looking for the answer becomes a quest for validation from other people, and regardless of the answer, whether its in the affirmative or negative, the validation falls into a void.

Am I good enough for myself? It’s another question I ask and on the one hand it has a performative element based around how busy I am. Am I doing enough, am I justifying my existence to myself (and any/everyone else)? It’s a question that has driven me to DO so much. And yet it has never produced a satisfactory answer.

Yet this question, when asked of myself, doesn’t have to have a performative answer. It doesn’t even have to have an answer. It can simply be a question I ask. The answer, the only real answer, has to be found in my own validation of my self. While someone else might be able to affirm I am good enough, the person who really needs to know it is myself and who else can provide that answer? I

The not good enough wound is a deep one for me. It brings with it a lot of pressure to perform, and its linked to a shadow around recognition that I’ve battled with a lot in my life. When I find myself asking this question I have to get real with what’s behind the question. What’s real is that I’m carrying a wound from my early childhood where no matter what I did or how I did it, I learned I wasn’t good enough. I would strive to find get value from other people because I felt empty inside.

I eventually learned there is only one way to answer this question. You fill yourself up with the love and validation that no one else can give you. This doesn’t mean that you don’t value other peoples’ expressions of love and care for you…if anything you’ll value them more because you won’t be craving them from a place of neediness and codependence. Instead you’ll be valuing them from a place of grounded awareness and be able to genuinely receive that love.

Self love isn’t a cure all, but it can help with this question of am I good enough. It’s helped me answer that question and sometimes I have to come back to it, when that question rears up again, but its the only answer I know that truly addresses the emptiness within that prompts that question.

How to Value Yourself

I discuss the importance of valuing yourself and how it builds up your confidence as a person. I share some processes around how you can value yourself better and how to recognize when you aren’t valuing yourself.