Creating Emotional Safety by Confronting the Past (in Brief)

All right, my friend, welcome to the ManTalks show. How are you feeling today?

A little nervous but good. Happy to be here.

What questions do you have? What struggles you're dealing with or what you'd specifically like to address or get out of this, this conversation that we'll have today?

I would say maybe finding safety and connection and how to kind of work on that from a place of being single.

So is that Could we frame that as I don't necessarily feel safe in relationships? How would you frame that?

It doesn't feel organic, I guess, would be a good way of putting it. Whenever I do kind of connect and share to a little bit of a deeper level, it comes from a place of trying to ease something or trying to, I guess, relate to somebody from a place of like being in service to them.

Yeah. So I mean, I'm in this relationship to try and figure out what you need versus expressing what I want and need to ease their, I guess, anxiety of kind of opening up themselves to me.

So that's usually when I would share just something that may be relatable or something to just kind of ease that tension.

Do you have a sense of where that came from? Or maybe I'll ask this a different way. Who did you have to take care of or feel like you had to attune to growing up?

Definitely my dad. And what— well, I guess in a sense it was attune. Um, I would say that I kind of had to curb whatever I was experiencing, um, and just kind of, yeah, figure out what he needed or ways to avoid eggshells as best as possible.

Why was that? Why did you have to attune to what he was going through and, and try and sort of tailor your behavior to him?

He wasn't equipped with the tools to be able to process his own experience and attune with mine as well and hold space for that.

Tell me about his volatility. What was his volatility like? Let's just start with that one.

Loud, big, angry. Just kind of— that's where he found his power. If you will, to kind of get the outcome that he may have been looking for.

What was that like for you?

Scary, frustrating, created a disconnect, and we still have it to this day.

This sounds like there's a lot of charge there. It feels like there's a lot of charge there just talking about it. So take a nice deep inhale, just slow down the breathing a little bit, and when you're ready, tell me what's happening internally as you talk about as you talk about that?

I would say it feels like my throat's closing.

Okay, so breathe into that. So stay with it for a moment and just breathe into that energy in the neck trying to close off, creating a little bit of a bottleneck in the body, and just see if you can let it stay open a little bit. We don't have to force it open. You don't have to completely close off. But as you notice that happening, to the best of your ability, say what that's protecting you from.

A flood.

Yeah, flood of what?

Emotion, experience, frustration, anger. And obviously that's kind of top level. There's a lot more to that. It's kind of the gateway, if you will, the inner child, the boy that shut down and his experience.

Just let yourself stay in contact with that energy. In the neck and everything that's underneath it. It sounds like there's a lot underneath it, lots of emotions, lots of energy. So maybe if you want, you can just let the eyes stay closed for a second and just try and stay with some of those emotions. We don't need to move away from them. Now I'll just say it to you directly right now, which is, though all those emotions are welcome here, I get that they didn't have a place with Dad, but they can have a place here and you can be safe in expressing those emotions. So, just let that hit you. It's okay to feel what I'm feeling right now. I'll break down 2 or 3 things and I'll give you a very specific practice, which is what I was actually walking you through in the piece of work. So, one of the things that can happen when we grow up around a parent who is very volatile and hostile and we feel like we have to walk on eggshells constantly, is that it's hard to— it becomes hard to remember things because your system is in a state of fight or flight on a regular basis. Sometimes it's almost always in this state of fight or flight when that parent is around. And so, that physiological somatic nervous system state becomes the dominant force. It becomes the dominant experience that then imprints itself on us. And sometimes we don't remember things as clearly as we could because what we do remember is just this sort of chronic state of, am I okay? What are some of the somatic experiences I know I had growing up? What are some of the somatic or physiological memories that I have from growing up. And you can explore that, right? It's like, I remember what it felt like to go to grandma's house. This is how it felt being at grandma's house. You might not have visual memories of what people said or what you did. It's just, here's how it felt and here's what I experienced at grandma's house or at grandpa's house or with that aunt and uncle. And what I would encourage you to do is to go through a lot of your family system growing up, well, whatever feels reasonable for you, but at least 3 times a day for the next month. I'd like for you to do the exercise that I walked you through. So, hand on the chest, hand on the belly, and you're going to take a nice long deep inhale in through the nose and you're going to sigh out through the mouth. Okay? And an audible sigh. And you're just going to let some sound move through the body. So, it's almost like you're— and you can play around with it, right? You can find one note, just, "Ahh," and you just let that sound out or you can move the sound around or you can go down, "Ahh." But, what I want you to start to do is this is going to help you do two things. I want you to focus on a couple of things. Number one, you're focusing on a very easy, relaxed breath in through the nose and then a long exhale out the mouth with some tone. And this is going to help your nervous system to what's called downregulate. Makes sense?

No, absolutely. Everything that I do that gets me into my body is always tense, whether it's, you know, riding the motorcycle, going to the gym. Yeah, no, that's— yeah. Wow. Thank you.

Yeah, you got it, man. Thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate you just trusting me and diving in so deep with me considering that, you know, it's your first time having this conversation with me. So, I appreciate you. And yeah, I mean, for anybody that was tuning into this, don't forget to man it forward because there's likely many, many, many men who experienced something very, very similar to this that could use this insight. So thanks so much for joining me.