In this talk, Connor Beaton argues that modern men have lost sight of what truly matters in life, substituting authentic purpose with political identity and other distractions. Drawing on his experience sitting with grieving fathers and a poignant letter from Dostoevsky about his infant daughter's death, he illustrates how deep love inevitably brings the risk of loss, which many men fear and thus avoid. Beaton describes a pervasive problem: men often suppress grief, which then surfaces as anger, numbness, overwork, substance use, or other self‑destructive behaviors. He presents grief as a necessary emotional technology that must be integrated rather than avoided. To help men process grief, he offers concrete practices: (1) give grief form through instrumental actions (building, planting, creating tributes); (2) employ the dual‑process model, oscillating between confronting loss and resting; (3) allow grief to reshape identity and values; (4) engage in daily grief journaling; (5) grieve in community with witnesses and rituals; and (6) use somatic work—movement, breath, physical labor—to release stored grief. He emphasizes that unprocessed grief shrinks a man's life, while fully feeling it can expand and transform him. Finally, he invites listeners to seek support through the Man Talks Alliance or a trusted coach/therapist, offering his contact information for further help.
Chapters
I'm largely convinced that people have forgotten what matters in life and how to actually live a meaningful life, because life requires the risk of losing the things that matter most to you. And in past years, I've sat with many men, fathers, grieving the loss of their sons and daughters. I've held their hands. As they sob. I have allowed their heads to rest on my shoulder, holding them, embracing them as they break. And I've held some of them as a child as they collapse because their son was killed in a car accident, or their daughter at the age of 2 died of cancer. These things are both incredibly hard to face, but also the sign that you are living. And I think that in today's world, I see so many people afraid of moving towards the things that actually matter, the things that they love, the things that they are passionate about, the things that they, they deeply crave in their souls and in their hearts. And we have replaced the practical soul orientation, what the heart longs for, with things like activism and the political. That this is the sort of greatest psyop of our time, that if you make the entirety of your identity about politics, that somehow you will be doing something meaningful in the world. And yet it's in these moments where I sit with men who Who have just lost everything. Maybe a divorce has just happened. Maybe their father has died or passed. It's in these moments of deep grief where I'm reminded of what really matters in life, and then all the rest of this nonsense fades away. And I stumbled across a letter that Dostoevsky wrote to a friend of his after his daughter passed. And I'm gonna read you a part of this letter because I think in it is a sort of hinting towards the very real humanity that we all face, the threat on the other side of loving fully that exists, that prevents so many people from entering into the type of life that they really want. So Dovzhyevsky said, my Sonya is dead. We buried her. The day before yesterday. I did not know 2 hours before her death that she was to die. 3 hours before, the doctor told us that she was better and that she would live. She was ill only a week and died of inflammation of the lungs. My love for my first child was probably comical. I dare say I expressed it most comically in my letters to all who congratulated me. I have doubtless been ridiculous in everybody's eyes, but to you, to you, I am not ashamed to say anything. That poor little darling creature, scarcely 3 months old, was already an individual and a person for me. She was just beginning to know me and love me and smiled when I went near. When I sang to her in my ridiculous voice, She liked to listen. She did not cry or frown when I kissed her. She stopped crying when I went to her. And now people say to comfort me that I shall have other children. But where is Sonya? Where is the little creature for whom I would, believe me, gladly have suffered death upon the cross if she could have remained alive? But enough of this. My wife is crying. Your friend, F. Dostoevsky. So for me, this letter is not only, of course, beautifully written, but it is the epitome, I think, of what men fear that stops them from living life. I think that I come into contact with so many men that are terrified of opening their hearts to life, to a love, to their children, to a vocation, to a sacred nature or sacred calling for fear of having it break them. I see this all the time. And maybe you've seen this too in your life with friends, maybe in your own life where we hedge, we hedge, right? We play half in and half out. We don't love in the way that you actually want to. You don't create the adventures and the experiences with your kids that you really want to. You don't allow yourself to date your wife or your girlfriend in the way that you know you're capable of. You don't show up with the zest and the joy and the vitality of life, the potency of existence that you know exists inside of you because you are terrified of a moment like this. And I'm reminded of this because of the amount of men that I've worked with who have experienced this type of wide-open love for life, for a son, for a daughter, for a wife or a partner, who then is taken from them because of a drunk driver, because of a car accident, because of cancer, because of a heart issue, because of some unknown complication or some circumstance that they could have never predicted. comes along and blindsides them and breaks them wide open. And what's left is grief. And the challenge is that for many men, they never grieve. And one of the challenges that I see so many men— and maybe you are experiencing this or you have seen this in men— that they are walking around with grief inside of them that they do not know what to do. They do not know what to do with the grief. It just lives inside of them. They don't know how to move through it. And the reality is that grief isn't something to get over, right? It's something to integrate. It's something to allow to shape you. And for you as a man in particular, the challenge is usually less about too much grief, right? And more about grief that never gets expressed and never comes out. And so it comes out sideways as anger, as numbness, as overwork, as drinking, as drugs, as womanizing and prostitution and gambling. and pornography use. So many of the men that I encounter, they are where they are, they are who they are. You are stuck where you are because you are refusing to grieve the truth of your existence. You are refusing to grieve the loss of the parent, the divorce, the end of the relationship. There's a hoax that happens inside of you psychologically where you pretend to be okay. You pretend to be fine at the abortion, or you pretend to be fine at the stillbirth, or you pretend to be fine when the miscarriage happens, or you pretend to be fine when the relationship ends, or you pretend to be fine when the business doesn't work out, or you get fired, or the divorce happens, or your child moves away and goes to college, and you pretend. You pretend to be okay when what actually exists inside of you is a deep grief. Which is reminding you, reminding you that you are alive, that you are here, that you are hurting, that you have loved, that something actually mattered to you enough that in its absence you feel something so profound that it cannot help but carve into you, into your psyche, and into your heart, and into your soul, that you're really alive. So grief isn't just something that you're meant to feel. It's a kind of emotional and psychological technology that is designed to mature you, not in the way that you want, never in the way that you want. No one wants to mature in that way that grief teaches us. So I wanted to leave you with a few things because one of the pieces that I've noticed is that men do not know what to do with grief. And so they drink and they numb and they use porn and all these external mechanisms. And I'm sure that there's much more on this that I could go into, but I'm gonna just give you a few pieces. The first is to give it form, not just a feeling. Many men grieve best through action, not just talking. And Terry Martin and Kenneth Doka, who are psychologists, they call this instrumental grieving. Build something in that person's memory or in the memory of that career. When my mom died, I built a stand-up garden, a raised garden bed in our yard that still lives there. And it was a sort of homage to her. It was my way of grieving. And I remember building it and sometimes just being— living through her memories and being so excited and remembering her. And other times I was crying. because she would never be there to see the garden bed that I had built in her honor, but something that she loved. So you can build something in her honor, you can plant something, you can write a letter, you can restore their old car, you can carve a headstone, you can run a race that they always talked about, you can journey to a place that they always wanted to visit, right? Grief can be an action that calls to you. An action that's connected to the loss that you're experiencing, whether it's the career, whether it's the relationship, whether it's a parent or a child or whatever it is. This is grief work. It's not avoidance. This is grief work. The next piece is to swing between really facing it and letting yourself rest, letting yourself take a break. This is the dual process model. From the researchers Margaret Stroeb and Henk Schut. And it shows that healthy grievers move back and forth between leaning into the loss, leaning into the abyss, crying, remembering, looking at photos, remembering memories, and leaning into just living, right? Work routine, laughter, having fun. You don't have to be in it all the time, but you can't be avoidant of it. indefinitely either, and expect it to move through you. The third thing is allowing it to alter you. Grief is going to change you at your core. It can't keep you the same. And so allow it to move you, to work you. Allow it to shift you and change you. Maybe there is a, a different orientation, a slowness that comes out of the grief that wasn't there before. Maybe there's a groundedness or a solidity to your nature, to your mind and your heart and your soul that didn't exist before. Let grief work you, let it change you, and notice, track, pay attention to how is the grief that I am experiencing altering me and changing me. Next is write it out, right? This is one of the most challenging things for people, but you can sit, you know, in nature and for 15 to 20 minutes every single day, write from this place of grief. What is my grief wanting to say today? What am I sad about in this moment? Write about what you lost, write about what you didn't say, write about what you didn't get to experience, write about what you wish had been different, write about all of the things that were left unexpressed. And finally, the last piece is to grieve in the company of others. To grieve in the company of others. For throughout the course of human history, throughout everything, single culture and religion, grief was communal. We had rituals, we had wakes, we had keenings and gatherings. Modern men often try and grieve alone. One of the greatest things that I did after my mother passed, and it was a complicated passing for many years, was to be in the space of other men who could witness that which I was going through. And modern men often try and do this part alone, which makes it harder. Grief unwitnessed is often a grief that cannot move through us. It cannot shape us. It cannot alter us because grief wants a witness, right? Grief wants a witness. This part of your psyche, this part of your heart and your soul wishes to be known by somebody else. It doesn't have to be everybody. I'm not saying cry on camera and post it on Instagram or TikTok. I'm saying let a few people who are meaningful to you witness it, whether it's a men's group like the ManTalks Alliance, a trusted friend, a ritual that you create, an individual that's in your life, a family member. And lastly, let the body move it, right? Grief lives in the nervous system as much as it lives in the mind. And so this tightness in the chest, the lump in the throat, the exhaustion, sometimes things like walking and breathwork and physical labor allow the grief to move, letting the tears come when they rise up, and to allow that instead of continuing to push it in and push it down. So I hope that this supports you in grieving, because I can't help but feeling And I'll just reiterate this, this last piece. I can't help but feeling that the truth of so many men's lives, and you probably know these men, and maybe you've been one of these men, is that your life becomes smaller, inexorably smaller, when we hold grief in. And even though grief can feel like it's breaking us, it opens us in a way that we can't know, predict, or even understand when it's happening. And so allow yourself to grieve, even if it's been sitting inside of you for a decade. I've worked with men who lost children 15, 20 years ago and never grieved it, and their life has been a prison. They've been constrained since those— since that moment, because the grief becomes this kind of container in this prison that they are locked inside of. And so grief has the ability to To open you in a way that you cannot predict. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm not saying it's even enjoyable, but it has the ability and the capacity to move you, to shape you, to alter you, to alter your trajectory in your life. So send this to a man who is grieving, send this to a man who is holding grief in. Allow yourself to be shaped by this. And if you don't know where to start, it's likely because you are trying to grieve alone. And so you need to find a space, a place, a community, an individual, a friend, a coach, a therapist where you can do that grief work with them. And if that's something that you need help finding, check out the Man Talks Alliance, send me a DM on Instagram. I'm happy to support. I am happy to hear what you have been holding in your life. Man It Forward. Thank you so much for tuning in. Till next week, Connor Beaton signing off. Man It Forward.
