Modern WisdomA Man's Guide To Mastering Your Emotions - Connor Beaton
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,011 words- 0:00 – 5:22
Why Men Have a Bad Reputation With Emotions
- CWChris Williamson
Why do men have a bad reputation with emotions, do you think?
- CBConnor Beaton
(clicks tongue) Oh, man, uh, I mean, I think that we- I think that generally we feel emotions pretty intensely, and so when our emotions let loose, sometimes it's, uh, it can not be pretty. It can be loud, it can be big, it can be intense. Um, (clears throat) and so I think sometimes men have a bad rap because of that. I think that there's been a few generations of men that have been told not to feel, that their, their best emotional tool is suppression, is repression, is just like stuff it down, pour some whiskey over top, you know, light some weed up, and, and just keep soldiering on, right? Stiff upper lip, as I think they say in your country. Um, and so I think we've, we've gone through a few generations of men who used avoidance as their main tool with emotions, and because of that, cut themselves off from some pretty important data and information, and so a lot of men have just, you know, and older generations, haven't been able to speak the language of emotions, of what they're feeling, of what they're going through. Um, but I, I think having worked with men for over a decade, you know, tens of thousands of men from around the world, men feel very deeply. And I, I think it's not that men don't feel, I think it's that men feel very deeply, and we've, in some cultures, created a vacuum of being able to teach men what to do with their emotions, how to actually traverse through their emotions. So I, I think those are, are parts of it. Uh, I'm curious what, what your thought is on that though as well because even you talk to a lot of people in this space.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I think you're right. Um, we don't exactly have fantastic emotional role models as men, and...
- CBConnor Beaton
You mean Homer Simpson and, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah.
- CBConnor Beaton
... Peter Griffin are the, like the role models of emotional acuity? (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, exactly. Who's that, who's the guy that used to be like, "Ah!" and then would hit his wife, like pretend to hit his wife on like some sitcom? Who was that American guy? I'm not from this country, I don't follow.
- CBConnor Beaton
I don't, I don't think that's, I think that's before my time, I'm not sure.
- CWChris Williamson
Y- M- It very well may be, yeah.
- CBConnor Beaton
But-
- CWChris Williamson
You know, it was the '50s, it was a different time.
- CBConnor Beaton
That's right.
- CWChris Williamson
The hands were softer. Um, (laughs) so, yeah, I think the role model of the kind of bumbling, unfeeling c- largely useless, semi-useless kind of dedicated but emotionally out of touch man, uh, I think that's got a lot to play into it. I think as well, (clears throat) you know, it's, it doesn't speak to many of the ways that men like to think about being masculine. I think one of the most common, uh, contributing factors when you ask somebody, "What is a masculine man?" would be mastery over their emotions, or kind of a, a reliable and controlled emotional state, some version of that. And, uh, feeling feelings seems kind of at odds with that. So, um, it's not, it's not particularly well-portrayed archetypally in the culture. Uh, I don't think it is a (clears throat) particularly proud thing either internally or rewarded externally by society. You know, for all that the world says we need men to open up more and talk about their emotions, no one has any fucking idea how to deal with a man that's going through a very intense set of emotions because they're either very aggressive or, even worse than that, very soppy. And you go, I have no, most of the time, people have no idea how to deal with that. It's scary. Uh, and then if you try to do that and you see, as you're unable to regulate, somebody else disgusted at your lack of regulation, you think, "Okay, I'm never doing that again." So, uh, yeah, maybe some more elements there.
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah, I mean, I think, uh, um, yeah, I think a good way to put it, uh, is men are not incentivized to open up emotionally, uh, for a number of different reasons, right? I think oftentimes, I mean, I get comments on my YouTube videos all the time, stories from men who, uh, did open up to a past partner, to a girlfriend, to a wife, and, you know, were left shortly thereafter. Um, guys being ridiculed, whether it's in the locker room from other men or being ridiculed by a woman who then loses attraction or says that she doesn't like the way that he brought it forward. Um, so, so men just aren't generally incentivized to be emotionally expressive. Men are rewarded for being emotionally intelligent in the sense that they hold their shit together, right? That you kinda, uh, you're able to weather through really intense-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
... emotional situations-
- CWChris Williamson
It's emotional mastery.
- CBConnor Beaton
Correct, yeah. But the, but the way that most men get there is, is maybe not the best for their mental and physical wellbeing because... (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah, of course not, because it's denial.
- CBConnor Beaton
True. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It's denial because outwardly, the, the, the guy that has gone and worked through all of his shit and has completely transcended and included and integrated and alchemized all of the different things inside of him to the point where he can feel it but not let it out until it's the right time, and do it in a controlled manner and regulate and so on and so forth, and the guy that's just fucking suppressing it, like they appear as the same person. (laughs)
- CBConnor Beaton
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Um, I gotta, I gotta, uh, make a, a comment on what
- 5:22 – 15:28
Men’s Emotions in Dating
- CWChris Williamson
you said about, um, guys that open up to their partners. You know, this is a very common, it's like a trite talking point online about like, can you be vulnerable with your partner? So on and so forth. I wanna propose kind of a radical solution, um, that I, I was (clears throat) dating a good bit last year after a breakup, and, uh, I did this a couple of times with different pathways, kind of like an emotional shit test very early on during the dating process, because what you want to see is if this person, and this is the same for women too, like can this person handle a, outside of the sort of bound of what would be typically acceptable or typically, uh, expected, perhaps not acceptable, um-... can they handle that? So-
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... sending, uh, psychology articles or something, and seeing if they've got anything to say back. It's like, that's something that's important to me. And maybe you're, you're in the early days of the flirtation stage and whatever, whatever, like sending a side post article about the neurobiology of depression is, like, not that comp- but it's like, hey, this is probably gonna become important to me to be able to have a conversation about because it's shit that I'm interested in-
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... so let's see. And the same thing, at least for me, that worked really well was talking about emotions early on. Like, hey, I'm gonna open up. And i- it doesn't need to be, you know, like, your chronic athlete's foot and the trauma around that or whatever. But, um, my point being, if you're dating somebody, I think that over-indexing, if you're the sort of person that really wants to do the whole, like, emotional openness thing, I think over-indexing on that as soon as possible, o- once you've got past the very, very early stages just allows you to see, okay, is this person able to, like, sit with this? Are they able to hold the space? And if they can't, sweet, like, I've learned. I'm not now three, five, 10 years down the line opening up, uh, and as all of these different videos happen if a guy, like, once sheds a tear at the final scene of Interstellar or something, and the next day his wife leaves him for fucking the dude next door. Um, you kind of get this out of the way nice and early, and ultimately what you're saying is, like, it's the problem with your partner. If your partner can't fucking see you talk about emotions and open up, you, you... That relationship is go- is supposed to be the safest harbor that you're ever going to have. You should be able to deal with the darkest, most difficult things in your entire life. And for some guys, they don't, maybe don't have that much darkness, but if you're a person that does, I think that you need to try and find that out as soon as possible.
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah, I think that summary is really good, and I- I'll just reaffirm something that I said, I, I think, when we talked about attachment last time I was on, which is that, and this is my, this is my good friend, uh, Dewey Freeman, who's been a therapist for 40 plus years. He's got a saying that the foundation of attachment is going through a hard time and coming out the other side okay. So the foundation of relationship is being able to go through a hard time and come out the other side okay. And the truth about monogamy is that when you're in a relationship with somebody, y- you, you are inevitably going to go through some type of hardship that whether it's you individually or you as a couple that really tests who you are, who the relationship is, how your partner shows up. And how you go through that hardship, whether it's emotional or physical or whatever, is going to determine the quality of the relationship, and likely the longevity of the relationship because y- y... And, and I think the other thing I'll just say is people really underestimate how much they're going to change in the span of five, 10, 15 years. And one of the challenges that comes along with long-term relationships is often that people do evolve emotionally. I mean, you, I, I can't tell you how many men I've worked with whose wives are going through menopause-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
... and they're like, "This is a completely different human being. I, I feel like I don't know this woman." And she reports that too. She's like, "I don't feel like I know who I am anymore. I feel like I'm a completely different person." So emotionally, her landscape is entirely changing, and, and traditionally, when you look at some of the research that's out there, men generally, as they get older, will soften psychologically. So they become less harsh, less aggressive, less angry, and women go in the opposite direction.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
Generally speaking, women become harder as they get older emotionally, and I'm not really, I'm not-
- CWChris Williamson
Have you got any idea why that is?
- CBConnor Beaton
(inhales) (sighs) A, a big part of it is the, is the chemical, um, balances in your body. So as you get older-
- CWChris Williamson
There's less testosterone on the men's side.
- CBConnor Beaton
... there's less testosterone. And for women, it's the inverse, right? Is that, uh, from my understanding, estrogen actually decreases. They have more testosterone in the body, and so they become more, uh, more hard, I guess you could say, more harsh, more aggressive, more... um, you know, some women become a little bit more angry post-menopause. So, you know, I, we have to be able to ride the emotional waves that are naturally going to come along with everything, you know, losing a job, changing careers, having kids. Uh, all of that type of stuff is going to induce different emotional states within you as an individual, and it's whether or not you and your partner have the ability, uh, to, to sort of weather the emotional storm together, and you have the willingness to be transparent about what you're going through emotionally. I mean, I, I lost my mom last year. She passed away from cancer, and she had a, you know, pretty rough battle. She was dealing with addiction up until she got diagnosed with terminal cancer, and then got sober, uh, w- after she was diagnosed, which is a whole other conversation. Um, but, you know, it was, it was tough. It was really tough to watch her go through the chemo, and the treatments, and all of those diff- different types of pieces. And I think one of the things that my wife was very good at was checking in on me. You know, "How are you doing? Where are you at?" And my willingness to say, "Today sucks." You know, I don't, you know... And, and es- especially after she passed. I mean, the birth of my daughter happened after she passed. Uh, this was the first Christmas that, you know, since she passed. And my willingness to be transparent about this, this is joyful on the one hand, right? Bringing my daughter into the world and having an- having another kid, but also be very real and transparent about there's part of this that is brutal, and there's a lot of grief, and there's a lot of sadness. Instead of, "I'm fine. I'm okay. Uh, let me just have another Scotch and I'll, I'll feel better," which was, like, my old method. You know, it's like, don't talk about how I'm actually doing and just try and, you know, glaze over that with some type of substance, which I think is what most of us men do because we feel that...... for better or for worse, our intrinsic value comes from our ability to perform, and so we- we overindex our performance at all costs, and we oftentimes see our emotions as a hindrance-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
... to our performance.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
It's like, I won't be able to perform on whatever it is, right, on the trading floor, at work, in the office, uh, and provide for my family if I'm, you know, if I let myself be emotional, so.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, make the case for emotions for me. What use are they?
- CBConnor Beaton
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Why are they important?
- CBConnor Beaton
So, just like you have thoughts in your mind, your- those are sort of like, the language of your thinking process, your emotions are the data of the body, it's the information of your body. And so if you want any real, um, truth in your life, you need to acquire as much data as humanly possible. The way I put it to a guy that, he's- he's a project manager for a big hedge fund on Wall Street, and he kinda asked me this same question, like, "Why should I care about how I feel?" (laughs) You know, he's like, "I- my wife says I should. I don't really buy it. I don't really get it." And I said, "Okay, imagine that you are going to buy a stock," right? "You're- you're looking at buying Tesla." Uh, this is not financial advice. "You're looking at buying Tesla, and you don't look at the company's P&L statement. Like, you just don't look at their balance sheet. You- you just buy the stock, uh, you- just because you think it's a good idea. Um, that is what going through life without emotional information and emotional data is like." If you ignore your emotions, you're not looking at part of the balance sheet of your life, and you're trying to make decisions based purely on rationality and logic, which is already being informed by your emotions. So, the case for it is fullness, fulfillment, a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. If- if you wanna find a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in life, your emotions are going to be part of the data and the information that leads you towards that. If you want to have a fulfilling relationship, your emotions are going to be part of the data and the information that helps you choose the right partner. And sometimes we're choosing the wrong people because our emotions are all messed up and we don't know how to sift through them, we don't know how to process them, we don't know how to decipher what our emotions are saying. Or sometimes we choose really dysfunctional relationships over and over and over and over and over again because we're ignoring our emotions. Uh, so there's a number of different reasons, but I'll u- I'll use a Carl Jung quote to sort of close it off. He said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate." And for most of us, for all of us, our emotions are these oftentimes unconscious responses or reactions to things that are happening in our head or things that are happening outside in our world. And so until you start to become more deeply aware of and conscious to what you are experiencing emotionally, and you're able to regulate that, sift through it, process that, you are just- you're gonna be walking through life, love, business, largely blind to a big part of the information of what brings you a deeper sense of aliveness, fulfillment, joy, the whole- the whole kit.
- 15:28 – 19:37
How Do I Know If I Have Emotional Issues?
- CBConnor Beaton
- CWChris Williamson
Where should people get started with sifting through them, feeling their feel- should we- should we sift through them before we feel them? Do we need to think about them first? Like, w- w- where do we even begin on this- this journey? It's page one.
- CBConnor Beaton
I always- I always love this because the- the more that I've worked with men, the more that I've realized that we always try and come at emotions from a rational standpoint, you know? It's like, how do you-
- CWChris Williamson
There has to be some sort of blueprint, right? There's a- there's an optimization- there's a worksheet from Andrew Huberman for this as well.
- CBConnor Beaton
(laughs) That's right. That's right, Huberman's Feeling Your Feelings, uh, worksheet.
- CWChris Williamson
Document, yep.
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah, I was- I was gonna make a joke, uh, to you before we started about, like, how y- y- you've asked me to come on and talk about the topic that most men least want to talk about, you know, and it's like-
- CWChris Williamson
This is- this is- this is gonna be a wildly unpopular episode, yeah.
- CBConnor Beaton
(laughs) That's right.
- CWChris Williamson
Except for- except for perhaps amongst all of the girlfriends of- of-
- CBConnor Beaton
That's right.
- CWChris Williamson
... the women- the guys that need to hear it.
- CBConnor Beaton
This is one of those referral episodes, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- CBConnor Beaton
The- the opening's gonna be like, "Ladies, refer this to your men."
- CWChris Williamson
Exactly. The, uh, that would be a great point. If you are a guy that's listening to this right now and you didn't put it on in the car or around the house, and your girlfriend's put it on surreptitiously in a desperate attempt to try and get you to fucking listen to it, please comment below, 'cause I wanna know-
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... how many- how many of you are being slowly psyoped by your girlfriend into listening to this.
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah, slowly psyopped, or just- just directly told, you know?
- CWChris Williamson
Correct. "Hey, listen to this. You suck."
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah. Well, where do we begin? I think the- the, you know, the sort of like, admitting that you have a problem (laughs) is a good place to begin.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, that, actually, yeah, let's get back, go back from that one more. Let's, th- this is a better starting point. How do people know if they have a problem with their emotions?
- CBConnor Beaton
Okay, good. Um, couple good indicators, number one, you have high levels of reactivity. So, reactivity is just something happens in your external environment, there's a stimulus, right, your- your partner says something to you, your boss says something to you, et cetera, and you react. You react from defensiveness or judgment or hostility, uh, aggressiveness. You just, you have very little tolerance, so you have a pretty bad temper, and you react from that temper quite quickly. So that- that's a good indicator. Um, another one is, is that you are struggling or struggle quite often to just accomplish and- and- and do the things that you know you need to do. Emotions can really become a drag on us achieving or moving forward with the things that we want to do, right? So, uh, I- I think it was Jim Carrey said, like, "Depression is your body's way of saying fuck you."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- CBConnor Beaton
And- (laughs) and so that's, you know, that's another really good indicator that you're sort of tuned out from your emotions. You don't really know what you're feeling, but they are clawing for your attention. And w- how they're doing that is by preventing you from doing the things that you know you wanna be doing. So, a lot of times with guys is if they're...... cut off from their emotions. They are highly overindexed on their rational mind and, and everything is through the lens of rationality and logic, and there's no sense of like, "This is how I feel about this." If you ask like, "Well, how do you feel about your girlfriend or wife or partner? Like, do you think that you should get married?" there's a lot of rational explanation. They won't necessarily tell you at all how they feel. So, there's a disconnection from, um, uh, from oftentimes a physical sense of what's happening inside of them. So, when you say, "What do you think about this? And can you feel it anywhere in your body?" there's generally no sense of like, "Yeah, I feel anger here in my chest," or, "I can feel sadness in my gut," or, "I feel shame here."
- CWChris Williamson
It's like a- a n- nervous system decapitation.
- CBConnor Beaton
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. It's a complete disconnection from the body. (inhales deeply) And the... Ano- another good one is what I call emotional constipation, you know, where, where somebody really has a hard time expressing, um, experiencing, or even acknowledging that they are feeling something, whether that's because there's a, a threat to them or they've just been con- conditioned not to. So, emotional constipation is another really big sign that somebody's pretty cut off from their emotions.
- 19:37 – 24:17
Why Men Try to Think Their Way Through Emotions
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. It's, uh... It's funny, the desire, the masculine urge to, uh, try and reverse engineer emotions mentally, and be like, "W- we'd never, like, I must be able to think my way out of this." Um, is that, is that some... Is this a thinking problem? Like...
- CBConnor Beaton
Well, it, uh... So, (sighs) I'll give you Einstein for a second, then I'll answer your question directly. He said, "The rational mind is a faithful servant and the intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and we've created culture that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." And so in psychology, there's something called the, the rider and the elephant. And the rider is your rational mind, and in the West, in our, in our culture, we've largely overindexed that rider who's on top of the elephant. And the elephant is your intuitive mind, it's your emotional body, it's your physical body, which has a tremendous amount of power, a tremendous amount of information. There's actually more information being sent from your body up into your brain than from your brain down into your body, which is the work of Bessel, Bessel van der Kolk from The Body Keeps the Score. And, and, and so, you know, I think in some ways, we've been conditioned to really, uh, overindex that rational mind because there's safety in it, right? There's safety in not having to really understand what's happening in our body. And for a lot of men, what they feel internally is intense, right? When a guy feels anger, it feels intense. It feels like a threat.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
And so... And, and he's been told not to be dangerous. He's been told not to be a threat. He's been told not to... you know, not to scare people and not to raise his voice and, you know, be a good boy and comply and, you know, s- some of these things can really shut a man down from, uh, feeling his emotions. "Don't cry," et cetera. So, it's less of a thinking problem and it's more a, a lack of modeling what it looks like to feel your feelings. We've gone through generations of men where they just literally were not taught to feel their feelings or they were actively taught to suppress what they're experiencing. And I don't know if it was on your show or another show where I talked about, you know, going through World War II where all of these sayings came out of World War II like, "Man up," you know, was to go get into the tank, right? Uh, "Suck it up." Uh, the... I don't know if this is 100% true or not. There's like, different accounts of it, but "Suck it up" meant when you were in the plane and you puked into your air mask, you literally had to suck it back in and swallow it-
- CWChris Williamson
No way.
- CBConnor Beaton
... so you continue fighting. And so y- there's all of these outages where men have been put into horrendous situations that require them for survival purposes to deploy disassociation, to literally disassociate from what they are feeling in their body. You know, if you're having to go and kill the enemy, you in some way have to disconnect from your emotional body and become hardened. It's just a rational thing. It's like, "Either I kill them or they kill me." And so there's many, many different examples of social conditioning, environmental conditioning, um, just historical, you know, pieces that have led to us as men, uh, really having to shut down our emotions. But to, to get more directly to it on the individual level (laughs) and make, maybe make this more practical for the individual, um, I think that for a lot of men, it, it feels like a threat. It's like there's, there's a threat to their relationship if they open up and are emotional. There's a threat to their, their ability to perform, uh, if they open up and are relational. And there's just a lack, again, of being taught how to feel what's happening inside of them, and when that happens, you just go into your head. You just live in your thoughts, and you're constantly just in the, in the mode of perception, right? So, the way I like to look at this is that your, your senses are how you perceive reality and your emotions are how you experience reality. So, there's your perception of your partner, there's your perception of the ice cream, there's the perception of how your burger smells, and then there's the experience, the direct experience of that relationship, that experience that you, you're going through at the party with your friends, or eating the ham- (laughs) you know, the hamburger at the burger joint. There's the experience of that, and that's where emotions really come into play. And for a lot of men, we just sit in the seat of perception and explanation versus our direct experience because sometimes our direct experience is highly intense, uh, or it's very challenging, uh, or it's very threatening, and, and we've not really been taught what to do with that.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- 24:17 – 40:36
How to Start Feeling Your Feelings
- CWChris Williamson
Teach us what to do with that. How do people-
- CBConnor Beaton
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
... get started to feel their feelings?
- CBConnor Beaton
Okay. First place, 100% is awareness. So, you need to start to develop body-oriented awareness. I call it your DFE, your direct felt experience. So-...with every single emotion. You can think of any, every single emotion as a specific charge, like an electrical charge. And (clears throat) every charge has a dir- uh, a very specific experience somatically or physiologically in your body. So for example, if you get angry, you might have some heat start to build up in your chest, or you can feel your hands start to get a little agitated. Maybe your feet start to tap, right? Some people like bob their feet up and down. Uh, your face might start to get flushed. Your breathing might start to get tense. But every emotional charge has a very specific somatic or physiological response. Shame, grief, sadness, et cetera. So if you're wanting to develop emotional mastery, where you need to begin is just asking yourself the question, what somatic experience or what physical experience accompanies each emotion? And as, as men, this might start with just having some awareness of saying, "I feel angry right now," or, "I feel sad right now," or, "I feel happy right now." And just beginning to have some awareness that you are feeling what you're feeling. 'Cause again, depending on how, um, you know, uh, nervous system ge- decapitated you are, I like that expression, or how emotionally constipated you are, how backed up you are, just developing that first awareness of being able to acknowledge, "Ah, I am feeling something," is a really, really important step for the majority of men, so we need to start there. Do you wanna add anything in or ask anything before we keep going?
- CWChris Williamson
You're on a roll. Let's keep rolling.
- CBConnor Beaton
Cool. So once you've developed that awareness, then you need to be able to learn what to do with each emotion. And every emotion's a little bit different. I think one of the main emotions that men contend with often is anger. And for, for men, anger is usually the emotion that we deploy. It's the emotion that we reject the hardest 'cause maybe we've been told, you know, "Don't feel that. Don't experience that." And so, what you wanna start to do is to use your breath because your breath is the, the modulation dial of your nervous system, of your autonomic nervous system, specifically. And your emotions are largely being produced in your autonomic nervous system between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. You're oscillating back and forth between those two, and it's sending data and information up into the brain to your hypothalamus and amygdala, and they're determining threat response and all those types of things. But what you wanna start to do is to bring awareness into your body by using the breath. And so, getting more and more attention on your inhales, on your exhales, and beginning to locate, where do I actually experience that emotion in the body? So, and being able to, being able to, uh, really detail it, right? So when you feel anger, what does anger feel like in your body, right? So for me, I kind of feel like the Iron Man, uh, power core in my chest, like light up, and then the angrier that I get, the more it just starts to pulse out through my chest, into my arms, down in my legs. And if it reaches up into my head, then I know I'm screwed. That's when it's just like, there's definitely a cause for a pause there, uh, because your emotions can hijack your brain, right? Your, your emotions can hijack your communication and how you're interacting. So begin to very, as much as you can, with as much detail as you can, describe the physical experience of your emotions. Describe what it's like when you feel anger. Describe what it's like when you feel sadness, or grief, or joy, uh, or frustration. Whatever it is. Embarrassment. Really begin to describe what happens. Does your breath start to slow? Does it become constricted in your throat? Does, uh, you know, do you start to feel like you're, you're closing down in your chest and you're collapsing? Do you feel<|a|><|agent|><|en|> And then once you have that emotional awareness, you can move into beginning to understand if or what that emotion is trying to tell you. So every emotion, again, can have some important data and information that it's trying to relay, right? Maybe a boundary has been crossed in your relationship, and this is what happens all the time, uh, so I'll give a, a good example that maybe is gonna help guys. (clears throat) Anger is necessary for setting boundaries, just as an example. So if you're disconnected from your anger and you think that your anger is a problem, very likely, you have piss-poor boundaries. You get walked all over. You do not have any, like, real sense of no, or, "I'm not okay with this," because your anger is an alarm system sometimes that a boundary has been crossed.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
So being able to identify, "Oh, I feel heat in my chest. I feel heat in my face. I can feel like I'm angry," then we can create a little bit of space from the anger, so it's not, "I am angry," because that's usually where we're acting and responding from that place, but we create a little bit of a pause from awareness of the emotion, the sense of the emotion, a little bit of space, and then is there something that we wanna communicate or express? Not from that emotion, but, but maybe that something was, you know, crossed, or somebody overstepped a boundary, or that you felt embarrassed about something, or whatever it is that the emotion is trying to, uh, trying to alert you to. So that's a good sort of breakdown of what you can begin to do with your emotions. There's, there's more that we can get into for, for all of those, but that's a kind of a good, like, four-step, uh, what you do. But the key to it is building awareness, and then the last step that I'll give you is to build some tolerance. So for a lot of men, there's a very low tolerance of threshold, and so grief starts to come up, or sadness starts to come up, and there's zero room for it, and so they shut it down immediately. And, uh, anger starts to come up, and they have zero resilience to it, and so they just explode externally. And so part of what we need to do is we need to actually sit...... with our emotions. We actually need to sit with them, in them if you want, not wallowing in them, not feeling sorry for ourselves, but we actually need to give ourselves time to feel into what it's like in our body. Because for a lot of guys it's like, "I don't like how I'm feeling and so I wanna get away from this as quickly as humanly possible. I don't like my anger, I don't like this sadness, I don't like this grief, I don't like this frustration. I wanna shut it down as quickly as humanly possible." Men... I'll give another example with anger. Men that struggle with anger, one of the best things that they can begin to do is to sit in the anger when it arises. So, I give guys that have maybe not, like, rage issues, but anger problems, low temper, what we'll start to do is, okay, when you feel angry and you feel that anger at like a, a two, 'cause again, every emotion has a charge and then it also has an intensity. So, a good way that I like to think about this is label the charge and label the intensity. Okay, I'm feeling the charge of anger. How intense is it? It's a two. Okay, I'm feeling the charge of anger. It's a, it's an eight. Okay, well, if it's above a seven, it's probably cause for a pause, because that means that your prefrontal co- cortex, your, your, uh, cognitive functions are starting to become impaired and you are likely not going to respond properly. So, that would be a good cause for a pause. And then you go sit, and with anger specifically I call it the fire meditation, you sit in that anger and you just breathe and you just notice what's happening in your body. Because for a lot of guys, anger hasn't really been a safe thing. Maybe you grew up around a parent who was angry and abusive or violent or hostile, and so anger feels like a visceral threat in your body. So you have to begin to condition your body to have a, uh, a higher tolerance for feeling some of these emotions. And what that will do is it will slowly over time train your brain to know, "I can be angry and that can be safe." Or, "I can feel grief and that can be okay." Uh, whatever the emotion is. So, charge and intensity and then sitting with the emotion to actually build some level of tolerance around it.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Can you just take us through that process, those four steps again?
- CBConnor Beaton
Yep. So number one, develop awareness. Have some awareness around the charge that's in your body. And that charge is just your, whatever the emotion is, right? Whatever, whether it's anger or grief or sadness, et cetera. Number two, after you have the basic awareness, is label the experience of the emotion of the charge in your body. So I feel the charge of anger in my chest, and label the intensity of it. So I feel the, the charge of anger in my chest and it's, uh, it's a five, right? And then step number three is try and describe it as much as humanly possible. Grab a journal, grab the notes app on your phone, whatever works for you, and just try and write it out as much as humanly possible. And then number four is try and identify what the emotion is wanting to express. So, a good prompt for that is, you know, "If, if my anger had a voice, what it would say is..." Or, "If my sadness had a voice, what it would say is..." And give that emotion some level of expression. That doesn't mean, just very important caveat, that you are going to launch whatever the anger says out at somebody else. It means that you're going to write that down, you're gonna reflect on it, and you're going to, and this is what a lot of therapists say, process what is maybe relevant or important about what that emotion is saying. Most people just throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to emotions. It's like, "Well, my emotion is saying this and so I'm either gonna vomit it all over somebody," which is not emotional intelligence, or, "I'm going to ignore it entirely." That's not emotional intelligence. We wanna feel it, we wanna be able to identify it, we wanna feel it in our body, we wanna be able to sit with it, and then we want to be able to parse through if there's relevant information and data that our emotions are actually bringing up to us.
- CWChris Williamson
How, uh, where do people get stuck the most and how do they get stuck the most during this process?
- CBConnor Beaton
Uh, (sighs) so for men, where they get stuck is usually in the permission stage. It's, it's actually giving themselves permission to feel their feelings, because there's a whole slew of what ifs that usually come along for, for, for them. And just giving themselves permission to say, "Okay, I don't know how I feel most of the time," or, "I am emotionally constipated. I am disconnected from my emotions." 'Cause for a lot of guys what they say is, "Yeah, well, so what? Like, I, I don't feel my feelings. What's the big deal?" It's like, well, if you don't feel your feelings, then no one else around you can feel you. They can't interact with you relationally. They, they don't know whether you're really happy or sad. Uh, and most of the time, what people get from men when they're around them is, "You're angry," or, "You're just not there." So, the permission stage is a big place where guys get angry. Um, the, the second stage is the tolerance stage. Um, it can be really challenging for you to build up any level of tolerance, especially because the majority of men are carrying around an intensity inside of them that is very hard for them to manage. So, some men, the intensity that they're feeling is s- s- way too much energy, and that's, you know, we label that as anxiety in today's culture. So for some men, they're carrying around so much energy in their body, whether it's because of trauma or it's because of life circumstances or it's just their natural state, they just naturally have a tremendous amount of energy internally that they don't know how to deal with that energy. For other men, it's a lot of anger. For other men, they have a lot of grief and sadness. And when they really start to try and build tolerance around it, their natural mechanism of, "I don't wanna fucking deal with this, so let me just have another drink."... you know, open up the web browser and watch porn and jerk off and get rid of this feeling is so intense, and that's what most of us have been conditioned to do. Most men have been conditioned to deal with their emotions by jerking off and watching porn, smoking weed, uh, you know, drinking alcohol. All of those things are wonderful for hitting the reset button or numbing out what you're feeling. So developing tolerance is a really, really big challenge for a lot of men, because when you start, you feel like you suck. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- CBConnor Beaton
There's just no, it's like, you know, it's like, I took my son skiing for the very first time, and he's never been on skis, so he, he sucks. You know, I mean, he did pretty good, all things considering-
- CWChris Williamson
He's probably about as good as me on skis-
- CBConnor Beaton
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... I feel.
- CBConnor Beaton
I mean, he's th- he's three and a half, so he's, he's figuring it out. But you're starting at a place of lacking competence, and we as men hate lacking competence. We hate lacking competence. And so you have to be willing to be in a place for a little while where you are almost frustrated with the process, because, you know, if you're somebody that is dealing with anger, and you're angry, and you keep losing your temper at your, your girlfriend or your wife or whatever, and you're trying to develop some tolerance for it so that you have a higher threshold of not losing your temper, it can be very frustrating at first, because for a while, you're going to sit with your anger, and you c- you know, you sit down, you're angry, you set a timer for two, three, four, five minutes, just something manageable at the beginning, and you're gonna feel... Well, per- probably at first you're gonna curse me, uh, for giving you this exercise, (laughs) which is what inevitably happens, uh, but then you're going to feel like it's impossible, because for the majority of men, that intense emotion that they're carrying around inside of them has overpowered them constantly throughout their life, their depression, their anxiety, their anger, their rage, um, their embarrassment, their shame. It's, it's dominated them to some degree. And what you're really trying to do is sit with the enemy. For most men, their, their intense emotion that they're carrying, they've perceived it as the enemy. It's the thing that they do battle with, again, whether it's-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
... depression, anxiety, et cetera.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
And so there's this inner civil war that's constantly happening with that anxiousness, that they're like, "Fuck you, I hate you. I don't want to feel you," or, "God, this anger is ruining my fucking life. It's ruined my marriage. It ruined my career. I hate this part of me." But by sitting with it, you, over time, are starting to build a relationship of acceptance, of acknowledgement, of understanding. You can even start to sit with, like, well, where did this emotion, where did the intensity of this emotion come in the first place? So that inflection point of st- starting to try and build tolerance is really hard for a lot of men. Um, f- for me as an example, I'll just use myself, I have a tremendous amount of energy, like Energizer Bunny level energy. And so beginning this process was really hard because I had a lot of anger, and I had a lot of intensity and a l- just a, just a boatload of energy. And so sitting down with my anger when it would pop up, and it would come up, and it would usually show up in, you know, my intimate relationship or close friendships, it was really hard at first because that's where, you know, my inner critic would start to spin up, and I'd be shit-talking myself, and, "This is ridiculous. I don't want to do this." Um, but that's really the place where you start to reconcile with this intensity that's living inside of you that's oftentimes keeping you away from the people that you love, creating distance from the goals that you wanna achieve, et cetera. So those are the places where guys really get hung up.
- 40:36 – 51:07
How Men Can Deal With Anger & Anxiety
- CWChris Williamson
Talking about maybe the other side of the fence, energetically, from an emotion standpoint, stuff like sadness, anxiety, shame, depression, um, is there a different way that guys should think about trying to feel those?
- CBConnor Beaton
Energetically, y- you know, things like anger and anxiety and panic and fear, they're, they're often very externally pushing, where things like grief and sadness and depression, they're very, um... It's like an anvil on the chest, right? So one's more-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, let's talk about the anvil one then.
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah, one's more implosive, one's more explosive. I, I, I like this quote, um, that says that grief is praise. Grief is praise because it is the natural way that love honors what it misses, and that's Martin Prechtel. I, I like this notion because for many of us, uh, for many guys, and I won't, well, I won't speak for guys 'cause we hate that, but for many guys, (laughs) um, we've been taught you're weaker for grieving, you're weaker for being sad. You are... You're weaker, uh, if you, if you deal with depression, and that compounds it. The, the hiding of your depression and your grief will compound your grief and your depression, for sure. It's the surest way to have more grief and more depression. So what we need to do is start to express, right? So for the explosive emotions, we need to begin to slow. We need to begin to slow our breath. We need to begin to sit with them. We need to be able to understand that we can trust ourselves when that really intense emotion starts to come up, and sometimes that means that you are labeling it, right? So I, in, uh, with every man that I ever work with, I say, "You have to determine what a cause for a pause is for you," if, if you're dealing with those explosive emotions, and that cause for a pause might be that you have a physical response or that you say something in your relationship, and then you say, "You know what? This is cause for pause. I, I need to pause because I'm getting so," whatever you want to say, angry or dysregulated or unable to communicate.... with the heavier emotions, it's the inverse. Those heavier emotions almost want to cause you to be inebriated. You know, they, they want to slow down your movement to such a degree where it feels like you can't do anything. And with grief specifically, I'm gonna speak to grief first-
- CWChris Williamson
Just on a p- on a point there, I think a lot of people will think, "Well, no one's died, why would I be grieving?" How does grief show up in ways that we might not realize yet?
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah. Oh, man. I mean, there's so, there's so much that you can grieve. Um, I like to say that we walk through life with grief and gratitude hand-in-hand all the time. I mean, grief can be about... (sighs) Grief can be about the, the, not just the loss of a person or the death. It can be a transition. You know, you might be transitioning in a career. You may have, you may have gotten a promotion, and you're not working with the same people anymore, and you're grieving the loss of the team that you were working with. I mean, uh, i- i- grief, grief really is tied to transition, so any type of transition that you experience, there's likely going to be a grief that comes along with it. And, you know, it can e- it can even be, I mean, I'll give you an example. This might sound strange, but I, I reached a point in my life five or six years ago where, uh, this was before my son was born, where my, I, you know, I was married to this wonderful woman. My career was going really well. And I had this very unique type of grief, which was, "Holy shit, I made it. Holy shit, I didn't die. I didn't kill myself. I didn't get dragged underneath the weeds of alcoholism or drug addiction or, you know, some of the heavy shit that I was dealing with."
- CWChris Williamson
I reached escape velocity.
- CBConnor Beaton
I reached escape velocity. And there was a really unique type of... It wasn't elation, it wasn't happiness. It was a type of grief that I had been carrying in me of like, "Holy crap, I didn't know if I would actually reach this point."
- CWChris Williamson
It's fascinating.
- CBConnor Beaton
And I think that people experience that a lot. And so grief isn't just about loss. Sometimes grief is about achievement, you know? I mean, I've, I've worked with NFL athletes and NHL players and rappers, heavy metal artists, and sometimes their greatest grief comes when they win the award, when they win the Stanley Cup or the, you know, the, uh... I'm like blanking on the NFL one. Clearly I'm Canadian, right? I'm like... (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Whatever the fuck.
- CBConnor Beaton
All hockey references.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- CBConnor Beaton
Um, but sometimes the grief comes in those moments where you achieve the thing, and the, the effort that you've been carrying around and everything is, you know, comes out. So, so grief is a very specific one where it needs expression and it needs witness. Um, there's, there's almost no way ar- around it. I like to say that grief that's not witnessed is not processed. So if you have grief of a former relationship, a marriage that's ended, a relationship that's ended, and you will not let anybody see that grief, you cannot fully process the ending of the relationship, and this is why people stay in this space. "Why can't I let them go? How come I can't move on from the relationship?" Well, you haven't actually let anybody see you grieve, and we've, in our culture, made it very strange to deal with grief because it... I mean, we have all these sayings now, right? It's like, oh, he, you know, his friend got diagnosed with cancer and he gave me the ick. You know, he was crying about his friend getting diag- I saw this meme the other day that was exactly this. Um, and, and so I think we have this, we have this social stigma around people grieving, and we want it to be over quite quickly. And so usually for people, they, they hide their grief instead of express it and expose it, and it needs that, you know? In, in this-
- CWChris Williamson
It needs to be done, uh, relationally with somebody else?
- CBConnor Beaton
Relationally, yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh.
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah, whether that's, you know, that, whether that's with... You could do it with a therapist or a psychologist or a coach, counselor, but ideally you're doing it with people who love you and who know you and who can, can witness you through that. You know, there's again, it's this notion that grief is the natural way that we honor what love misses, and that's a very important part of human nature. Oftentimes what we, what we end up doing is, we, we defer grief. We try and push it down the road, um, and it, you know, turns into a slow depression. So grief needs to be witnessed and it, and it needs to be expressed. You need to be able to say, "I, I'm grieving the loss of X, Y, and Z," or, "I'm grieving the, you know, the, the movement and the space in my life. I'm grieving the transition into this place." And to have somebody that can witness it and, and actually reflect back like, "Yeah, I get that. That's, that's terrible." Um, and so having people in our lives that can do that is important. I think with things like depression, um, expression is important. Being witnessed is important. But there's also a kind of, um, pressing out that's required. Like, you actually have to begin to move outside of the confines, 'cause depression is this thing that kinda closes in on your heart, on your mind, on your emotions, on your thinking, and it really becomes the, this, like, weighted blanket that you can't get out from underneath of. And so sometimes you need the expression of, "I'm feeling this way." You need to be witnessed, but you also need people who are, maybe, are going to say, "Let me help you up." So sometimes part of depression is saying, "I, I actually need help. I need you to help me get out of this funk 'cause I don't know what to do." You know? It's like being caught in, um, in quicksand. It's like you, you probably need somebody to help get you out of the quicksand. That's really what depression is, emotionally. So part of depression is asking for help, asking for support without falling into the trap of obfuscating the responsibility to the other person-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- CBConnor Beaton
... because oftentimes what happens with depression is this victim mindset sets in of, "I'm worthless. I can't do anything. I'm not able to get out of this." And then there's this, "I need a savior to come and get me out of it," so we can ask for help without actually, uh, you know-... causing somebody else to do that, uh, to, to pull us out. And I think with something like depression, there's just no way around it, working out. Like, go to the gym, go to the gym and work out, and work out ruthlessly. You know, at first, it might feel like just getting your ass to the gym once or twice a week is, like, everything that you can do, uh, but with something like depression, that's really gonna help you. Doing breath work, that is very, very helpful for things like grief and depression and sadness. Uh, a lot of the times, our emotions, we have all of these psychological barriers to getting into our emotions, and sometimes things like breath work and psychedelics can shut down what's called the default mode network, which is our thinking mind, and it can access our deeper feeling body, uh, much quicker. So you can do breath work to, uh, you know, like, the intense Wim Hof or holotropic breathing, those types of breath works, if you do them long enough, can really help you to access a lot of that emotion and get it out. Um, with things like-
- CWChris Williamson
It's so bizarre if you're, uh, sort of deep in a breath work practice like that, and there's just-
- CBConnor Beaton
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... this thing starts bubbling up and you're like, "What the fuck are you? Like, why are you, what are you doing that you're here? Like, I'm just breathing. I'm, I do this all the time. I literally have done this since I was born. And, uh, uh, this very wei- particular pattern of it has caused this reaction to happen."
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah. Yeah, well-
- CWChris Williamson
So on.
- CBConnor Beaton
... that's the, your body keeps the score, but, you know, I mean, that's why I say that emotions are the language of the body, right? Is that they're trying to express something, they're trying to speak something. And, uh, sometimes, it's- it's from a time in your life, it's non-verbal, you know? You might be going through something that has no memory attached to it, uh, from when you were one or two or three. Uh, or you're, you know, you're expressing grief that you never dealt with or processed from a breakup, um, or that you never worked through properly, and you go into breath work, and all of a sudden, you know, like you said, it bubbles up and- and goes. So- so those are some- those are some helpful ways to- to move through things like grief, sadness, um, and, uh, and depression. But l- we could get more granular with them, but those are some high-level ways.
- CWChris Williamson
I think,
- 51:07 – 1:05:41
Should Men Mask Their Emotions at All?
- CWChris Williamson
you know, one of the common or most likely criticisms, uh, that I'm anticipating is that men have this desire to be consistent and reliable-
- CBConnor Beaton
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... and there is an expectation of mastery of your emotional state among men, from other men, from your partner. Uh, how do you think about balancing that desire for mastery with a desire to not suppress emotions? You know, people don't want to feel ashamed about the things that they feel, and what you've said. There's this great story about, uh, Tiger Woods, where he had a- a bunch of inefficiencies in his swing, and he was good, but he was never going to be great. And one of the problems was that he had, I think it was too much movement on his back swing, and he needed to, from the ground up, rebuild his entire swing.
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
But the problem is, he wasn't even starting playing golf from ... e- e- well-
- CBConnor Beaton
Scratch.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. He had-
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... to get rid of all of the habits that he had brought in-
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... and make himself purposefully worse before he was then able to reach the next level that he was going to go to, while also having all of the expectation on him and all of the comparison internally and externally of his previous performance and, "Oh my God, he's fallen off. He's gotten worse," et cetera, et cetera. Um, yeah, I imagine that it's a tough sell to get guys-
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... to think, okay, so you're saying that I'm gonna actively make myself worse for an undetermined, as yet undetermined, per- perhaps sort of infinite amount of time, uh, and it's gonna suck.
- CBConnor Beaton
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And I- I'm not gonna be rewarded for it, uh, m- until y- who knows how far down. It's like- it's like ordering an Uber and having no idea when it's gonna arrive. Um, (laughs) you know what I mean? Right?
- CBConnor Beaton
What an ana- I, so yes, that- that is what I'm saying, for better or for worse, that is what I'm saying. And I'm very clear when men come in to work with me, 'cause e- I seem to attract a lot of, like, finance guys that are hyperlinear, they're very good at what they do, hedge fund owners, you know, guys that are Wall Street traders. And they've lived in their brain for very, a very, very long time, and they- they inevitably say, "But I don't- I don't want anything to suffer. (laughs) I don't wanna"-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
"... slide back in any way, shape, or form." It's like, well then, y- y- you just, you are going to no matter what. Like, the consequence of not feeling your feelings is that you will inevitably sabotage in one way or another. So either you take the reins and you actively move into a position of potency by saying, "I'm going to try and address this," or those emotions will inevitably be a downfall for you in some way, shape, or form. They, you just, they just can't not. But-
- CWChris Williamson
Guys have a fear of the loss of power, right?
- CBConnor Beaton
Yes. Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, "I'm- I'm powerful. I'm competent. I'm in control."
- CBConnor Beaton
Right. Right.
- CWChris Williamson
"And this thing stops all of those from happening."
- CBConnor Beaton
Correct. S- well, y- what, you mean emotions stop you from having power?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, stops you from feeling powerful, at least in the first instance-
- CBConnor Beaton
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
... as you start-
- CBConnor Beaton
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
... to go through things. I'm aware that, you know, the gold standard is to get to the stage where you use your emotions to inform you so that you're significantly-
- CBConnor Beaton
Yes.
- 1:05:41 – 1:12:34
How to Stop Explaining Away Emotions
- CWChris Williamson
What are some of the ways that people can notice or protect themselves from slipping back into the cerebral world? Like, if, if you've spent your entire life intellectualizing, reflecting your way through... You know, there's a, a four-step human process for me to, et cetera, et cetera. Um...
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
How, how can we stop our brain coming in and sort of clamping that down or explaining it away or coming up with some nice theory about it?
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah. So ask yourself if you're explaining or expressing. Start there. Start with that as number one. Am I explaining what happened or what I think is going on, or am I expressing what I'm actually experiencing? Am I expressing what I'm actually feeling about the divorce, about the shit at work, about the stuff that's happening with the kids? Am I actually expressing what's going on? So just start to notice the difference becui- because when you're explaining something, there's no emotional connection. There's, there's almost none. Like you're, there's no feeling sense in your body. When you're expressing something, how I've, how I feel it, how most people describe it, is that you actually feel as though you are communicating with your body involved in some way, shape, or form. You can actually feel your body as you're communicating. You can feel joy or, you know, a little bit of nervousness or whatever it is that you're experiencing as you're expressing. So just begin to ask yourself because what you wanna do is you wanna catch the pattern of falling back into just explaining your way into oblivion. Uh (laughs) so that's number one, is ask yourself, am I explaining or expressing? And move towards expression, correct. Number two is create as much time as you can, ideally 30 to 60 minutes a day, of...... untasked cognitive time. So this might be- uh, sorry, unstructured cognitive time. It might be stream of consciousness. Journaling, um, where you just write out whatever is happening inside of you. This is such a incredible exercise, I give it to all my clients, doesn't matter how much money they have, how successful they are, I give it to every single client, or how, or how not successful they are, you know, et cetera. Um, you can do... You can go for a walk for 30 to 60 minutes with no music, no audiobook. We clutter ourselves so heavily. Uh, most of the men that I work with have very little unstructured cognitive time, and so at the very end of the day, they're laying in bed, scrolling through social media, trying to drown out the emotional information and data that's rising up to their mind, right? Instead of replaying that embarrassing conversation where you approached that girl and she was like, "No, I'm not gonna give you my phone number," uh, you try and drown it out by doom-scrolling through whatever your social media platform is. So have 30 to 60 minutes of unstructured cognitive time. Stream of consciousness journaling, going for a walk, lay in bed for 30 to 60 minutes. Give yourself an extra 30 minutes, go in bed, assume that it's gonna take 30 to 60 minutes, and maybe just write down some of the things that, that you're experiencing. Uh, the last thing I would say is involve people in your life. If you're in a relationship, one of the best ways, uh, and even if you're not, you can, you know, get your buddies on board with this, is to have other people point out when you've moved into explaining versus expression. Now this isn't to say that explaining isn't... Just wanna put this caveat in there. Doesn't mean that explaining isn't relevant or important for your life, there are some things that you absolutely need to explain at work and in board meetings. Uh, so make sure that, ye- ye- you know, you're not diminishing it entirely, but have other people who are gonna support you, like, you know, "I asked you how you were doing today and you started to explain to me what happened, you know, h- how are you actually feeling about that?"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
So have other people that are in your corner, they're gonna help you move towards that expression and communicating emotionally versus staying stuck in this rigid space. Um, I found that to be really helpful, especially with Army guys, I've worked with a lot of, like, former Navy SEALs and military, and sometimes that accountability can be very, very helpful, uh, especially for guys that they're, they're trying to break a mold that they have been conditioned to move against, right? 'Cause if you're in the military, you're really, uh, meant to shut off.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. How much can men do all of this stuff by themselves?
- CBConnor Beaton
Some of it. You know, some of it you can do by yourself. Um, I really, uh, am a strong advocate for, whether it's a men's group or a community of men that are doing some type of work like this, because you, you can rapidly... I mean, it's like, the trading bros on Reddit, right? It's like, I don't know if you've ever been into, like, the trading forums on Reddit, have you ever gone down that rabbit hole?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, does WallStreetBets count?
- CBConnor Beaton
Yes (laughs) . Sure, yeah, why not? But like, that's a community of men that have a mission, and they can, th- you know, you can go sideways sometimes, but they can really support one another, and so if you find a community of guys that are supporting one another in this endeavor, it's going to help you, you know, exponentially when it comes to this, because you're gonna have other guys that are speaking this language, that are supporting you with this, um, that are, you know, that are, that are witnessing you in the, in the challenge, in the process that you're going through. So I think for, for a lot of guys, they'll benefit from being in some type of community or group, um, because our tendency is to do it solo, right? We want, like, we want to lone wolf all of this. And what I've found is that most men, uh, they try and, like, "I'm gonna take myself away from society and away from relationship, and I'm gonna go work on myself, I'm gonna go into monk mode for-"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- CBConnor Beaton
"... 12 months, and I'm gonna come back this perfect, pristine human being," uh, w- when that's not the case. You know, you need interaction with other people. And the point of doing this work, oftentimes with other men, is to work through some of the volatility that can come up. It's like, you're gonna get into a men's group, and inevitably one of the guys is gonna piss you off, right? I mean, he- he's, he's g- you're gonna get frustrated, he's like, he's talking about the same shit, you know, every single week, he's complaining about the same stuff, and the point of it is to voice and to express, "I don't like this about you." Right? Or to confront that part of you that would normally just keep quiet and sit back or would check out and tune out. So a big part of it is about doing that work amongst other men. I mean, you could go down the iron sharpens iron path, but (laughs) it's, ack, it's just too cliché for me.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Uh, sadly, I am in a couple of group chats called Iron Sharpens Iron-
- CBConnor Beaton
Beautiful.
- CWChris Williamson
... which shows just how fucking basic me and the other guys that I'm with are.
- CBConnor Beaton
No, it's beautiful. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, anything else
- 1:12:34 – 1:24:36
Having Emotions Doesn’t Make You Less of a Man
- CWChris Williamson
to say? Anything that we haven't included here that's mandatory listening?
- CBConnor Beaton
I mean, I, I think there's just the, the, the statement, I almost wanna say the cliché thing, which is like, having emotions doesn't make you less of a man. Feeling your feelings doesn't make you less of a man. Being able to feel your feelings and articulate them properly actually makes you more of a man. And that's the standard now, that's the gold standard, and it- and I would say it always has been. If you look at the Stoics, they were just men who learned to be logical, to be hyper-logical, but to also express emotionally. Um, most of them were poets and playwrights and musicians, and they figured out how to express, and so if you want to find a deeper sense of purpose, I- I'm really trying to make a case for it, because I, I get messages from men every day, I sent you one the other day, who feel...... broken, who feel like they can't articulate what they're feeling, who are on the verge of taking their own lives, who have suppressed their own emotions from the people in their life for years, and are in really bad places. And my mission is to really support men like that. And it- and you don't have to be in a bad place to start to feel your feelings. You don't have to be fucked up or broken to start feeling your feelings. You will unequivocally be better off for doing so. Um, but man, I just wish that... (pauses) Yeah. I mean, I just wish that this was more normal, because I- I get emails and- and messages every day from men who have cut themselves off from their emotions and find themselves right at the brink, you know? And, uh... Yeah. It's heartbreaking, 'cause I- I see so many men. I can't not look in men's eyes and not see their pain. And so, I- you know, I- I just wish that more men would share what's actually going on with them so they didn't feel so bloody alone in the world (laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, man. I mean, I don't know. I feel like there is a corner being turned. It- it- it's so hard, because the thing that you're working on is the most important thing in the world while you're working on it. Uh, so I'm seeing this everywhere. You know? I'm seeing the Cbum meme, th- reels of him talking about how he's embraced this thing and it made him a better champion and better father and a stronger man, and all the rest of the stuff. And, you know, a- Alain de Botton's fucking following me around the internet at the moment. We're all emotionally... And the same with your stuff and... But I don't know. I- I- I don't care. Frankly, I don't care. I think that it's an optimal way for a particular subset, perhaps a majority, perhaps all men. I'm not gonna say that it is, but I certainly know that for somebody that has a constitution that's like mine, and that I'm not that much of an outlier. There must be a, you know, non-insignificant cohort of people that also do it. That it's better, that life's better when I'm trying-
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... to do that, when I'm trying to work with emotions as opposed to against them, when I'm trying to actually feel my feelings as opposed to deny them, uh, when I feel connected to the things that I do, because there's a sense of resonance between me and it-
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, when I'm not trying to explain away what's going on in life. Because I can come up with some clever sequence of letters and sounds that come out of my face hole, uh-
- CBConnor Beaton
(laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
... and then you leave the conversation thinking, "Well, I- at no point in that conversation was I there."
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
I wasn't there in that conversation. I did this really cool dance or whatever, and everybody there was really impressed by the dance, I'm sure, but there was no part of me that actually got seen during that.
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
And, um, yeah. The full breadth of human experience is there for us to- to go through, and, uh, I'm interested in finding out what's on the other side of it. So I- I think-
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... that this is a, maybe an important redress, uh, maybe a massive fucking error, and we're going to look back and realize that, uh, y- you know, the suppression thing was right all along. But you can't- you can't look at the state of the way that guys feel in the world and say that whatever is happening is optimal. Like, the one thing that you can't do is defend the current system. Now, I'm aware that this system has an awful lot of different inputs, to do with socioeconomic status and their- their meaning in work and what- what's happening to sperm counts and testosterone levels and dating and online porn and video games and social media, and like... Yep, yep. All of those things are in there too, but everything should be on the fucking table. Like, if stuff's not going well, everything should be on the table, including the psychological and emotional landscape that these guys are inhabiting. And, um, yeah. For me, it's, uh, it's what I'm working on. It's what-
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... I'm interested in. I think it's... (pauses) I like the- I like the group that I'm a part of. I like being a part of people like yourself and like Chris, who... I don't know. Like, fucking for the people that have got a massive problem with it or for the people that don't think that it's sufficiently masculine, it's like, pick any vector of masculinity that you want, and somebody from my friend group will beat you in it.
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
So if you want to play that game, if you want-
- CBConnor Beaton
(laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
... to play the shallow, like, my dick's bigger than your dick game, it's like, I've got a fucking army of dicks behind me. And (laughs) I'm-
- CBConnor Beaton
They're both...
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- CBConnor Beaton
I've got the biggest emotional dicks on the planet (laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
Honestly. Precisely correct.
- CBConnor Beaton
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And, um, yeah. I- I don't know. It just seems- it seems petty and juvenile and immature, looking at kind of previous versions of what guys are supposed to be. Uh, and I understand the whole- like, I keep seeing these fucking atrocious videos of- or- or memes or whatever of like, "My husband did X and I got the ick," and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the rest of the stuff. I'm like... To be honest, I feel like the more that this happens, women should be fucking ashamed for that.
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
In the same way as guys who abandon their partner because, you know, something happens on their side, some common, uh, error or challenge that women come up against, something like that. It's like, you suck as a fucking partner and you don't deserve to have a guy in your life, and I can't wait for him to find someone that-
- CBConnor Beaton
Mm.
Episode duration: 1:25:12
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