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.

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?

Why its important to learn how to receive

I’ve never been comfortable with receiving praise, compliments, or acknowledgement from people. When someone has praised me I have either tried to praise them back or dismissed what was shared. It’s not even for a reason of false modesty. Rather its for the reason of being uncomfortable with praise. Recently, however I’ve been working on receiving compliments that other people share with me.

It’s a work in progress, but I realize that allowing myself to receive compliments from other people or something else they want to share with me is actually a form of confidence. When I can receive what someone shares without having to respond beyond a genuine thank you it shows that I am comfortable with accepting that someone has something to share with me.

I don’t know if this issue around receiving praise is universal for men, but I do think its important to learn how to receive from other people. If you find yourself deflecting or downplaying what someone else says to you, it might be time to look at what the real motive is. You also may want to consider how you might actually be hurting the person who has shared their praise with you.

In my case, my girlfriend shared that my downplaying of her praise makes it harder for her to offer that praise. When I heard that it helped me realize that I needed to spend more time listening to her, and less time trying to either praise her back or downplay her. However it also caused me to reflect on why I was resistant to praise.

I realized part of it was a resistance around being recognized for my efforts because in the past I had not been recognized for when I accomplished something. I was only recognized for what I had not done well. It felt odd to receive recognition from someone for something I was doing well and in a way I felt put on the spot. When I recognized this about myself it helped me also understand that I needed to change this particular limiting identity for a different one that recognizes and appreciates myself and allows other people to also recognize me.

If you find yourself encountering a similar difficulty around receiving praise from other people, you may want to look at the root of your resistance and consider how that could be undermining your confidence in general. I know that once I began to accept and acknowledge praise I also have begun to feel more confident in myself because I am recognizing I have worth in how I show up. Learning to receive is helping me learn to accept myself and what I have to offer. You can do the same in your own life by taking the time to hold space with what someone shares about you and accepting it as a genuine appreciative expression how you show up in their lives.

The Ethos of the Sacred Masculine part 3 - Know your shadows to know your wounds

We all have shadow aspects of ourselves. These shadow aspects of ourselves are informed by our trauma, by the pain we have internalized and carried from our earliest experiences to the present. We can continue to let our trauma define us, our pain to control us, or we can make the choice define us, transform our pain and discover our gold.

It takes work...a lot of work, but doing that work helps us become the kind of man someone else can feel safe around, because that man knows himself and is centered, balanced, and grounded. He is aware of his pain and trauma and although he has moments where he may struggle with it (like anyone else), he also knows himself well enough to recognize when he is struggling and do the work he needs to do to get back to balance while also taking care of himself.

 When you know your shadows, you also recognize your own toxic patterns. These toxic patterns are informed by the behaviors you learned in order to protect yourself in situations where you were helpless and didn't know what else to do. Nonetheless these behaviors can also cause pain and harm to yourself and other people. You may not intend to harm anyone, you may be doing the best with what you know, but once you recognize your shadow behaviors then you take on a significant responsibility to change those behaviors and change yourself.

It is the responsibility of any man, when they recognize their shadows, to do the work on themselves to change the behaviors, so they no longer perpetuate the cycle of toxic behavior, in their own lives or the lives of the people around them.

When you heal your shadows you heal your relationship with yourself and with the other people in your life because you start putting those relationships on your terms, instead of continuing to let them be dictated by the shadow aspects you live with. How you heal those relationships is up to you, but what's most important is that you do this work so you can also bring yourself genuine healing and release from your shadow.

How to inspire confidence in yourself

One of the challenges many men face is a lack of confidence and self-esteem. We end up looking for it in all the wrong places, hoping that if we please other people enough, if we make them more important than anything else we’ll get liked, but this has the opposite effect. We lose the respect of other people when we become people pleasers and in the process we lose respect for ourselves. In this video I share how to inspire confidence in yourself and stop relying on other people so much.