Trauma Expert: The NERVOUS SYSTEM Is The Key- Mastin Kipp

The body keeps the score, but the regulated nervous system is what makes the comeback, right? You can change the score and the way that we change the scores through the nervous system. Falling in love is experienced through your nervous system. Being abused is experienced through your nervous system. And based on our experiences, certain things get sort of frozen because states become traits. And our primary goal in healing trauma is to get all the body data that we haven't remembered or that we don't pay attention to. What I call the prefrontal cortex. Touchdown. From the back of the brain to the midbrain, where it's like, ah, I can't do this. To finally here, where the prefrontal cortex, we go, oh, that makes sense. But guess what? Your prefrontal cortex is a part of your nervous system, right? So we're trying to get all this information to the most advanced part of our brain and nervous system for reappraisal. To say it used to mean this. Now it means that.

All right, my good friend, Mr. Mastin. Kip. How you doing, buddy?

I'm so excited to be here, Connor. And this is going to be a conversation amongst friends. So I'm excited for today and excited for this. So thanks for having me.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I think. Well, first off, I just got to say I'm sad that we're not in person because our first conversation was in my apartment, which was awesome. And we had never met before. And I just opened the door and being like, oh, you're like six, five. I was like, holy shit, dude. I was like, okay, come on in. Like, come have a seat. And then we had a great conversation and totally hit it off. And I think you've been back on the show a couple times since. But we're going to dive deep into trauma nervous system. Whole bunch of juicy stuff. So let's begin with kind of a basic. Kind of a basic topic. Your book starts off with the problem with trauma. I kind of wanted to pose the question, what is the problem with the way that we approach trauma in today's society?

Such a great question. So the book is called Reclaim youm Nervous System. And the reason why it has a focus on the nervous system is because that's where we experience life through. We experience life through our nervous system. And that includes all the pleasures and joys of life and also all the pains and traumas of life. And, you know, being a pioneer in the. In the trauma informed coaching field, bringing trauma to the forefront many, many years ago, I think it was an important first step for me to really Help us have this conversation in this way. And now people are very trauma aware, but they don't really understand what trauma is. And also what I've also seen is because I focus a lot of high performers. I know you do too. High performers don't want to talk about trauma. They have this traumaphobia or they deny that they have it. So we can talk about overwhelming experiences, we can talk about stress, we can talk about anxiety, we can talk about things not going well in your life, relational problems that repeat themselves over and over and over again, things not going well in your knee, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These are all symptoms of things that happen in your nervous system that make it not function well or properly. And so we don't need to debate the word trauma if that word turns you off. But what we know is that we experience life through the nervous system. And that nervous system and other component parts of our body experiences wounding as a result of experiences that we've been through. And so we've had this focus on trauma these last few years, which has been a very important piece. However, what we don't have is we don't have an aspirational model for what's next. And so it's like if you know that you have a wound or if people are starting to get that I have some type of emotional wound or somatic physical body wound or some type of traumatic brain injury, understanding the wound is super important. But we don't want to worship it. We don't want to stay in it. We don't want to like, like, like put it on this pedestal, oh my God, look at this trauma and make it this big thing that we worship. It's important that we acknowledge it. But if you think about the analogy of like a sport, like someone, like a Tom Brady, who I've recently come to love the last few years previously, not so much. My friend Adam changed my mind on Tom Brady, so thank you, Adam Cobb. But you know, Tom brady with his CB12 process, literally, you know, he's on the. He's on the football field. He was 45, which is a crazy amount of time for someone who's a quarterback. He would literally produce what he positive trauma on the body, where he would help his body be in motion, experiencing basically physical wounding to create more pliability so he could take a hit without being taken out. And we don't really have a model for how to do that in the context of performance. And so what I'm passionate about. I know you're passionate about this too. Connor is not just healing, but how do we help People have amazing lives. And so we don't really have a model for, okay, we, we have this trauma conversation, but how do I step into greater abundance or greater joy or better relationships or perform better? It's sort of like we've had such a focus on healing, which has been necessary because of the pandemic and all the things, but we haven't had a focus on post traumatic growth or after I've gone through this wounding, what's my aspirational vision for what's next. And so I think that that's, for me, a big piece of where we start at the beginning of Reclaim. Your nervous system is really talking about. We need an aspirational model beyond just talking about the wound, which is important to do, but we got it. We have to know where we're going. We have to have a compelling future.

Yeah, I appreciate that because I think one of the challenges that I've had with this sort of therapeutic industry in the last couple of years is that it seems to be, you know, if you, if you look at your mental health on a spectrum of like negative 10 being terrible and you're in the deficit to zero, being just sort of stationary to plus 10 being exceptional, the therapeutic industry seems to focus very heavily on how do you incrementally move up from a negative space to zero. But you know, outside of stuff like positive psychology, there's not a lot of focus on, okay, well, how do you actually level up your baseline? And so I love that what you're talking about here is a model and a framework that says, wherever you are on that spectrum, how do we move you up into a space of thriving? Is that roughly what you're saying?

Yes, and in an integrated way. One of the things that I've noticed is that there's this therapeutic space which has a whole bunch of modalities. Right. We could cognitive behavioral therapy, positive psychology, somatic experiencing, ifs, emdr, like, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And then we have these coaching modalities, whether it's high performance coaching or it's neuro linguistic programming or health coaching, mindset coaching, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so what we have is we have spiritual modalities and energy modalities and mindfulness modalities. And they're all fragmented. Right. So all the therapy modalities are fragmented, all the coaching modalities are fragmented. And then now we have like these somatic modalities, which is That's a catchphrase. But it's a body based modalities like ice plunging or sauna ing. And so we meet people who are just hodgepodging all this stuff together, trying to make it work. And there is no aligned model on how to bring together the best of all these things so that we can talk about the past, the present and the future as one cohesive, integrated conversation. And even practitioners who are trained in multimodalities don't know how to put them together to be able to help themselves or their clients. It's just like, okay, I'll do breath work. Well, what kind of breath work are we doing? Is it activating breath work or is it calming breath work? Is it Wim Hof or is it more holotropic? Or is it Kundalini yoga? Is it yoga Nidra? There's so many different types of breath work that we could be doing. And then we talk about goal setting, we talk about trauma release. People feel overwhelmed with the amount of modalities that they have to manage. And then, don't even get me started with the catch up. The catch up is when you have one practitioner who knows everything about you, and then you go shift because you want to go do something other than what they're doing with you. And then you have to catch them up on the last however many years of your life, plus what happened in your childhood, plus everything the other person said, plus the other practitioner said. And so there's just, there's an inefficiency in the therapy spaces. The mindfulness spaces and the coaching spaces are fragmented and people are experiencing that fragmentation. And practitioners are also experiencing that fragmentation. And so this book, the whole purpose of this book is say, hey, it's in the nervous system. Everything that you're experiencing is in the nervous system. There are mechanisms through which we experience life through the nervous system that happen when we're healing, when we're present and when we're growing. And all modalities aligned to that biology. Because if a modality doesn't align to our biology of how we're built, we should throw it out, right? And so that's really what the focus is here, is being able to integrate all the things that people are doing into, oh, that's what's happening in my body when this happens.

All right, team, this episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Now, if you are like me, if you're like most people, you really care about your relationship. And one of the most important relationships that we have is the one with ourselves, the way that we talk to ourselves, the way that we treat ourselves, the decisions that we make. And sometimes we need support with that relationship. I know I have been in that position countless times in my life where I've needed support. I've needed help navigating some of the challenges, not only of my own life and my relationship, but specifically the relationship with myself, the thoughts in my head, the way that I spoke to myself, the decisions that I've made. And, and I've certainly benefited from really good therapy. So if you are looking for support, if you could use some help with that relationship with yourself or with somebody else, then I would encourage you to check out betterhelp.com mantalks Again, it's BetterHelp H E L P Mantalks and you will get 10% off of your first month. I encourage you to go and check it out. That makes total sense. It's. Do you. In, in the scientific field, there's something called a toe. It's toe and it stands for Theory of Everything.

Yes.

And I love this note. I've always been curious about this notion because I love thinking in concepts and frameworks. And there's a podcast called Theories of Everything where they explore the different modalities of theories of everything in science, like string theory and, you know, unified. And I think they had Christopher Langemann, who he wrote, oh, what was the theory? I'm blanking on it right now. But he had his own model, this, like, conceptual model of, of existence. And I love that what you're describing is almost like a unified theory of therapeutic everything, you know, and it's like, how do we combine all these modalities into one path or tool that. That will support us on our journey? So, okay, well, so let's, let's just, let's just start with this notion of.

We'll.

We'll talk about the. The big bad wolf. We'll talk about trauma for a moment, and I think that will lead us into a good conversation. One of the things that I liked about in the book, you talk about the one true definition of trauma. And he says, spoiler alert, no one can agree on a single definition of trauma. And then you list off, like, developmental trauma and complex trauma, attachment trauma and medical trauma. And it's like, holy crap, there's so many different types of trauma. So with that, how do you define trauma? What creates it? And we'll go from there.

I love that. So I have it written in the book, and I don't remember the exact definition, but I'll give it to you. Like I'll sort of like spitball it because it's in the book. But basically I looked at all because whenever I use a word, I need to understand what it means. Like if I. And we. And especially today, like we, we have a problem today where we don't know what's true, right? Like, so we need to really focus on like meaning of what words mean and truth. So when I was looking up this word trauma, I was like, well, where do I look? I look into the American Psychiatric Association's DSM 5. You look at the IDC 11, you could look at Freud's definition, you could look at the Greek etymology, just literally wound, right? You could ask Bora Mate, you could ask Bessel, van der Kolk, Bruce Perry, you could ask the IFS Institute. And nobody is saying the same thing. But yet if we ask all those people, what's the sun? We're all going to say the same thing, right? We all know like what the sun is. So some people say it's about not being in the present moment, being alive in the present moment. Or it's a disconnection, it's a lack of connection. Or it could be. Freud talks about how excitations from the outside come on into the inside, right? So there's this like boundary violation. And basically if I look at all those definitions and then just 20,000 plus hours working with people, what I've observed is that trauma is any experience of disconnection, isolation or immobilization that dysregulates the optimal functioning of your immune system, your endocrine system, your cardiovascular system, your emotional body, your energy body, if any of that is dysregulated for the long term, like not optimal, not functioning at optimal level, then there's some type of trauma there. It could be blunt force trauma, it could be relational trauma, there could be all the different types of trauma. But basically, if you're not optimal, there's some type of wound or dysregulation there. And it's not just about experiences, like big dramatic things that we think about. You could be neglected, you could have a divorce. There's lots of different things that could happen to create a non optimal functioning in your immune system, endocrine system, your fascial system, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if you have chronic illness, if you have chronic stress, if you have these issues, there's some type of trauma there that we want to look at and understand. And it doesn't have to be dramatic. And so. And again, it's a biological approach. It's not like, well, you know, this experience is traumatic, but this other experience, big T, little T. We don't. Because everyone has big T trauma from their own lived experience. It's all big for them, right? Whether it was big for somebody else, it doesn't really matter. And so it's less about what happened, it's more about what happened inside your body because of what happened on all these different levels that could possibly happen. And so unless you're optimally functioning, there's something to look at. That's basically the way that I think about it.

Okay, so all of that is very, very useful information. I think where I want to go next is let's talk about the nervous system's role when it comes to trauma, how trauma affects or impacts the nervous system. And maybe just, you know, I think, I think you talked about how the nervous system is basically how we experience life. But I think from my experience, when people hear that, they kind of get it, but they don't understand the real depth of the impact of what you're saying. And so I would really love for you to unpack that more so that people fundamentally get. Because I'll just give a quick story about something I think will land this home. I was leading a men's weekend two, two weeks ago, and we were talking about this because I had supported somebody in processing some pretty beat deep trauma that they experienced in childhood. And somebody was talking about, like, oh, you know, the body keeps the score. And like, what does that actually really mean? And you know, what, like, what does it mean that our body source trauma? And you know, how. How can you tell? And what were you looking for there? And there's all these questions. I said, okay, you know how we collectively say communication is 80% non verbal? And he's like, yeah. I was like, okay, well what the does that actually mean? And he sat there thinking about it and he's like, your body communicates the other 80%. And I was like, yes, your body communicates the other 80%. So it's like your body is putting out and receiving information all the time that is largely unconscious that you are largely not aware of. And I was like, and that's a big part of it. And he was like, holy shit.

And so I would love for you.

To unpack both, like, the ramifications of how big of a role the nervous system plays, some examples of that, and then how trauma can effectively impact the nervous system.

The body keeps the score. But the regulated nervous system is what makes the comeback. So let's just be very clear about that, okay? Just because the body keeps the score doesn't mean that has to be your score forever, right? You can change the score. And the way that we change the scores through the nervous system. Now, what does that mean? So if you just look at what we are in terms of like a living, breathing organism, we have skeleton, we have muscle, we have nerves, we have fascia and, you know, adipose tissue and stuff like that. But all of this information from the brain, well, the brain itself, and then from the brain down to the body and the body up to the brain, all the information is travels through the nervous system. So information about your muscles, information about your digestion, information about your absorption, all of the experiences that we experience, all of the ability for us to move and to breathe and to experience life is traveling through the nervous system. So it is the highway of information within our body that sends motor commands from the brain down to the body so that you can make something happen. And it sends reflexes from the body and other afferent data from the body up into the brain for it to interpret as well. So everything is coming in and out and being interpreted through our nervous system. And there's many different parts of the nervous system. There's the autonomic nervous system, which primarily runs up and down the spine. There's the peripheral nervous system, which breaks off at the bottom of the spine and goes down to the rest of the body. There's the somatic nervous system. There's so many different types of the different parts of the nervous system. And there's pathways that go to the body from the brain and from the brain to the body. So there's top down and bottom up information that's happening. And so, for example, there's a back part of the brain called the periaqueductal gray that is in the brain. And it's taking all the somatosensory data from the body up, but it's also taking all the visual information in. So it's combining body sensation with visual information and saying, do we have a problem? Right? And if we have a problem, it sends it forward to the amygdala in the brain and potentially if we're regulated to the prefrontal cortex, but if it's too overwhelming, the insula and the midbrain rejects it and stores it back near the visual cortex, that's called dissociation. So all of these things, dissociation, which fragments us into different parts of our psyche, visual information, all the nlp, vatovisual, auditory, kinesthetic, all that data is interpreted through our nervous system. And so if your interpretation is based on 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago, that's gonna cause a problem of being here in the present moment. And so all the good, all the bad, all the pleasure, all the pain, all the joy, falling in love is experienced through your nervous system. Being abused is experienced through your nervous system. And based on our experiences, certain things get sort of frozen because states become traits and then we can start to dissociate, which is a nervous system response through the brain. And so we experience all of this through our nervous system. And so trauma, yes, is stored in the body. And trauma is also interpreted. What does this mean through the nervous system? So you could be storing quote, unquote, somatic trauma in your fascia, which is separate from the nervous system. But the meaning of that trauma is made through the nervous system consciously and unconsciously. And our primary goal in healing trauma is to get all the body data that we haven't remembered or that we don't pay attention to. What I call the prefrontal cortex touchdown from the back of the brain to the midbrain, where it's like, ah, I can't do this. To finally hear where the prefrontal cortex we go, oh, that makes sense. And that's what like the best psychedelic therapies help with. That's what the best sort of trauma informed therapies help with, is we want to get the prefrontal cortex touchdown. But guess what? Your prefrontal cortex is a part of your nervous system. Right? So we're trying to get all this information to the most advanced part of our brain and nervous system for reappraisal. To say it used to mean this. Now it means that. And when we can have effective reappraisal over time, with effective experiences over time, our nervous system will then reinterpret sensation, feeling visual cues, relational cues differently. And if it's a reappraisal that's generally positive or healing, guess what? That creates a better life.

Right? So everything happens through our nervous system. And if we don't understand that, then we're missing, well, pretty much everything. And so when we look at coaching modalities or healing modalities, the history of psychotherapy and psychology is not that old, right? It's about 120, 130 years old. And what you had is you had William James at Harvard in the 1890s and Sigmund Freud they had all these theoretical models, and they hypothesized that there were things happening in the body that might be correlated to what they're observing, but they couldn't measure it. And then you had all these people create all these different therapeutic models based on behavioral observation. You get Wilhelm reich in the 1930s, who was a student of Freud's, going, hey, Sigmund, I think there might be a body component here too. And you kind of get the birth of somatics, at least in the Western context. And that led to Hakomi and now somatic experiencing and Pat Ogden's work in Sensory Motor. But the point is, is you have all these clinicians making observations about things they couldn't measure on the inside. And we're finally getting to a point where we can measure our nervous system with very basic biometrics, like, for example, heart rate variability. Right. Codified by Stephen Porges. And so we're able to now measure at a much better level what's happening inside the nervous system. And that will give us so much more information about what we can do. And now what my passion is, is making sure that our modalities are aligned with the neuroscience of how the nervous system works. Just like if you were trying to start, I don't know if you want to start a SpaceX competitor or you want to start any type of, like. If you want to start, like a Delta Airlines competitor, you better understand the laws of physics.

If you're going to try to make something fly. The same thing is true. We need to understand how our nervous system works, to heal, to be present and to grow. That's what I'm very passionate about. And what ends up happening is when people realize this, they go, oh, that's why blank happens. And it's like de shaming. And it's like revelatory, and it's calming, it's regulating. Because they realize that's what I'm designed to do without any help or interference. This is what my body nervous system is naturally going to do. And then they realize they can influence it, and that's where hope comes. So hopefully that was not too verbose.

No, no, that's good, man. I think what I would love for you to maybe just pull some strings on is, you know, this notion of the. That trauma stored in the body. Right. I think everybody hears that and they don't really understand what that means. Can you. Can you give some examples? Because, like, people are like, what do you mean it's stored in that? Like, like, is it in my Stomach, like, where does the trauma actually go? And, like, what the hell does that actually mean? And so I think for the average person, myself included, until I actually started studying trauma, I didn't actually get. I kind of conceptually got that, but I didn't actually get what it actually meant from a science perspective.

Well, great question. So. So let's understand something about trauma. So trauma is a multisensory experience, okay? So usually with trauma, there's a feeling, there's a visual component, there might be an auditory component, there could be a smell.

And then there's a reaction to what happens also. And so let's take a very simple thing to understand, which is like, an injury, okay? So let's just say that, like, when I was like, in like 15 years old, I sprayed my right ankle pretty robustly. It popped. It was awful, right? So now my ankle is rolled. Well, the fascia in my body is going to associate that motion with trauma moving forward. So it's going to do everything it can to make sure my ankle never goes back in that position. And that causes it starts to brace, it starts to hold tension there. The same thing can be true for any injury. Our body will try to prevent us from getting back into the position of injury through the fascia. And so that's a version of trauma being stored in the body where it's like, oh, I had a physical injury. Don't go back there. And then we get more and more brittle if we don't work that type of stuff through. Now, when we talk about, say, experiential trauma, that could be any of the intense experiences, whether it's wartime or sexual abuse or stuff like that. There's so much happening at a kinesthetic, somatic level. Body postures, positions. I might be bracing, I may not be able. Peter Levine's work is somatic. Experiencing helps us understand that we try to complete things, that desire to complete. Something is stored in our body. So the incompletion is also stored in our body. The visual elements of it, the auditory elements of it, and the felt sense of it is also stored in autobiographical memory in our hippocampus. And if it's too intense, gets pushed to the back of the brain, where that's where dissociation happens. And that's a big part of the periaqueductal gray and Insula's job is to be like, nope. And that's the difference between PTSD and the subtype of PTSD that's dissociative. If you get super dissociative, it just gets basically pushed to the back of the brain. Which by, by the way, in inside out too, is exactly what happens when Joy is like, I don't want these memories and she's throwing it to the back of the mind. That's exactly what happens with traumatic memory, which is pretty interesting. But what's also interesting is that that back part of the brain, the periaqueductal gray, is also what's interpreting body sensations. And if we have overwhelming body sensations that we can't feel or don't want to feel, it's like, I don't want that information. So it basically shuts off that communication from the sensory data that's coming up into the body through the periaqueductal gray and it doesn't make its way. So that's where alexithymia comes from. Because we may have this overwhelming experience of being violated or hurt or punished or something in our body. So there's fascial memory of that, there's muscular memory of that, and then, yes.

There are emotions that we can store in our fascia and in our muscles as well. And so it happens in the body at a kinesthetic somatic level. Somatic just means the body. There's auditory components, there's visual components. And what happens is if it's too overwhelming, everything shuts down. Says we can't pay attention to this. And that's what dissociation is. But guess what? It's still there. That's what. So that's when we start getting chronic illness and all these other issues. And so a big piece of healing is. It's a multi sensory process of healing. You are traumatized. Multi sensory. I've never met someone who was just traumatized by visual information. It's usually visual and kinesthetic or it's like auditory and visual. There's like at least one or two, at least two or three. I could be wrong, but I haven't seen it. And so we also want to make sure that healing is also multi sensory as well. And so that's like, that's why we have to focus on the body. But not just the body. Memories can come back up. There's visual elements to that, there's felt sense to that, there's sounds or smells associated with that, there's body postures that are associated with that. And so we want to be able to get back into positions of injury safely and let the body know, hey, this position that I was in is now safe. This word is now safe. I can Complete by pushing something off of me. Or I can say something that gets stuck in my throat. I can actually say it now. And so when we talk about trauma being stored in the body, what they're talking about is a somatic information because like, we don't necessarily. Like, the hippocampus is what stores autobiographical information, memory. Right. And so it's, it's stored in lots of places and then we get fragmented because when we have overwhelming experiences, our body doesn't want us to pay attention to all this. Our brain doesn't want us to pay attention all this because we can't pay attention to all that and survive. And so that's where dissociation comes in. And depending on how long that goes on, that just gets wired in as a reflex. And so it can take time to kind of break that, break up all those misconnections, but it's absolutely possible. So hopefully that's at least a base level explanation of how it all works.

Yeah, no, 100%. I think I'll, I'll just wrap this up with my own personal experience to hopefully exemplify this for, for the people that are listening.

For a long time I had like a very sensitive abdomen, like my stomach. I had, I hated people seeing it, I hated people touching my abdomen and, and I didn't know why for a very long time until I started to have these memories of. I had a parental figure who was quite verbally and emotionally and physically abusive. And every once in a while when I had done something wrong or I was not listening and you know, being my normal young pain in the ass self who was very wild and, and did not listen at all.

This individual would call me names, put me down emotionally, get very loud and hostile and poke me right in the stomach. Would like use a finger or two and poke me right in the stomach.

And that got that whole experience, the shame, the belittlement, that all got stored right in my abdomen and in my diaphragm to the point where when I would date women in my 20s, they were not allowed to touch my stomach. It is just like, don't touch me there, right? Like, don't, don't touch my stomach. It irritate me. And so I had to do a good amount of work. And I, you know, when I once I started to like, re. Put all the pieces together, right? Like trauma stored in the body and blah, blah, blah, and like, oh, that's why I don't like that part of me being touched. And I have a lot of hostility that comes out when that part of me is touched. And then I did a good amount of somatic processing and emotional processing, ifs and yada, yada, all combined to release this energy, this trauma that was stored in this part. And it was amazing how much easier it was for me to breathe after because I had.

Yes.

I basically, like, my diaphragm was in knots, you know, and. And so that's, I think, hopefully that's tangible for people that are, you know, listening to the science and then having, like, a real example of, like, oh, that's what it can feel like and look like.

And there's that somatic component that possibly, if you had a memory come back, that's hippocampus.

Yes.

And then you're starting to connect those two things, like, oh, this somatic sensation and this memory connect. Let's take all this information to my prefrontal cortex to say, oh, I can do it differently now.

Yes.

And then everything will tend to release. And sometimes you need bodywork and whatever different things to actually have myofascial release and stuff like that. But those things weren't connected, and then they were connected. Does that make sense? There's a body component. There's a hippocampus component. And then before, it wasn't able to make its way to your prefrontal cortex. And now you got the PFC touchdown, which is high five on that. That's awesome. Right? And then you're able to make a new decision about it.

Yes. I love that PFC touchdown.

I am curious. Let's talk a little bit more specifically about men and trauma. I wonder if, in your experience, you have seen that men relate to their trauma differently. Men store trauma differently. Men's process of their trauma is a little bit different than women's. I'm just curious to get your take on this generally.

Yeah, well, so anything emotional is going to be different for men, generally speaking, as you know, because of our cultural programming, if you will. And I was just talking with somebody yesterday who is of the opinion that men are relatively like, don't have a lot of emotion, you know, and I was like, well, actually, you know, we have a lot of emotion. We just aren't able to share it very often because it's not really culturally accepted. And so I think what I've noticed with men specifically is that there's a lot of trauma, but there is a lot of relational danger associated with expressing it for a couple reasons, or one is, generally speaking, it's not safe for men to emote. In our culture, it's not like something that we do. But also, I can't tell you how many good men. I'm sure you see this too a lot, Connor, with your work. I can't tell you how many good men. When you think about the polyvagal ladder, you have, that's like an inverted stoplight. Green at the top, ventral yellow is sympathetic fight or flight. And then red, dorsal immobilization. Well, to get to ventral, we have to go through sympathetic or yellow if we're in dorsal. A lot of men will shut off anger, assertiveness, et cetera, because they have seen it be abusive or harmful to somebody, usually women, and don't know how to tap into that without them thinking it's going to hurt somebody, without realizing that the same assertiveness or anger that maybe you saw traumatize maybe a woman or somebody else in your life is the exact same energy that's going to protect somebody, too. And so it's a combination of what's culturally acceptable for men combined with, I don't want to embody a perpetrator, not realizing that protector and perpetrator both are sympathetic charges that require sympathetic fight or flight energy. But the intention is so different, right? The intention of a perpetrator is to cause harm. The intention of a protector is to prevent harm. And so I've seen it be so healing for men to be able to go, it's okay for me to get angry. It's okay for me to get pissed off or say something. And then to even learn, like, you don't have to be the Hulk to get angry. Like, you don't have to be go from Bruce Banner to the Hulk. You can just say, I'm angry. Like, that's all it has to be is something simple like that. And so I think that. But then what's interesting is once men get into their trauma and get into their emotion more and can start to accept their assertiveness and their anger as healthy expressions, not just perpetrator or abusive expressions. It actually frees them up to be more protectors than they were before. And then all of a sudden, they're like, wait a minute, like, I'm not an asshole. I'm actually confident now.

And.

And I think that, for me at least, I think it takes a real man to do that type of emotional work. Because I think, you know, if you look at, like, where does this, like, we don't talk about it. We don't feel it come from. It's really World War II because, you know, General Patton, who's famous for, you know, helping us defeat the Nazis and win World War II, who passed away during the war. But like, he would call it shell shocked and he would blame soldiers for not being strong enough to handle D Day and stuff like that, which is, if you think about now, is crazy. And so like that whole generation, the greatest generation, which like, God bless them for what they did for us and our freedom, but they didn't have any way to process what happened to them other than to not talk about it. And a lot of the research that came out of World War II informed a lot of. Like John Bowlby, for example, who created Taskbit Theory, was studying orphans that were orphaned in World War II. So a lot of the information and knowledge that we have around trauma started because of World War II. And we can now go back and say, hey, you know what? Like, you know, like shell shocked isn't the thing. It's ptsd. We have a treatment for that. And it's important to be able to talk about your feelings. But like our grandparents or, or great grandparents, depending on your generation, that's not how we were trained and to be able to handle things. Certainly not men. And that just kind of gets passed down. I think we're kind of getting to a place now where it's becoming a little bit more acceptable. And I'm sort of seeing this like, fourth wave of feminism that's for women, but also not against men, but pro men also. And pro men being emotive also, where being masculine doesn't mean that you don't. Can't have emotions. But that's going to take some time for us to sort out all of that. But I think that men have a harder time processing emotion, feeling emotion. Our brain is not wired for emotion like the female brain is, and it's not culturally acceptable for us to express emotion. So you stack all that on top of it and you wonder why you have all this repression going on with guys.

Yeah, I think I've, I've noticed that men. I think there was research done that, that. And I'm.

I mean, this is gonna be a bit vague because I don't remember the exact piece of research, but I think there was research that was done that showed that men feel emotions more intensely when they feel them. And in my experience, that's relatively true, which is why so many men have a hard time regulating. Yes, it was just like when their emotions do come online and they do start to get intense anger, grief, etc, it's very intense. And I think that, you know, the Same is true.

I think, I think the other thing also that is interesting is that men, I, I believe are more prone to use external substances to deal with their trauma. Porn, booze, weed, you know, prostitutes, like whatever it is. I think that there's, that's like a little bit more socially acceptable for guys to just like, you know, just go get shit faced, right? Go smoke a joint. So I think that those things are.

Better than taking out on somebody else too.

Right? Exactly, exactly.

And I heard a woman, Dr. Pat Allen, who's an old Jungian analyst, old school, and she studied the mass and the feminine and she's from a different generation, she's probably 90 now or something like that. But she said, and this is heteronormative, but gets the point across. Men have yin, sorry, yang bodies and yin souls, where women have yin bodies and yang souls. And when you look at the neuroscience to your point earlier, Connor, the female brain has something like 30% more capacity for emotion than the male brain. So what that means is when we feel something, it's harder for us to process it, right? So just like generally speaking, men are physically stronger than women just because of our biology, right? Generally speaking, women are emotionally stronger because of their biology. And so that kind of lines up with what Pat Allen observed in her practice and Carl Jung animus and all that type of stuff realizes that the female brain has greater capacity for emotion. So where a guy might be able to be a little taller and get something that a woman can't. In general, our capacity to process emotion is nothing compared to women. And so that's one reason why I think it's more intense is because we don't have as much wiring. You know, we're kind of going on like a 288 modem back in the day. And women have like a, like a fiber cable, you know what I mean? In terms of their capacity to process.

It too, which is like the eternal challenge and problem relationally, right. That women are always wanting men to be more emotionally aware and emotionally intelligent and emotionally tuned in. And, and guys are like, well, I don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah, exactly.

And we're like, well, I'm trying. Like I, I am, I don't know, you know, but so. Okay, well, let's, let's just come back to. I want to, I want to start to move us towards, like, what do we do when we started to identify that we have some of the symptoms of trauma? What do we do when we start to identify, like. And even if it's not like you've labeled yourself as having trauma. Because I think I've worked with so many men who are like, I don't identify as having trauma, but I definitely have a shit ton of anxiety or a stress disorder or I'm fucking depressed or like, I can't stop, you know, jerking off and watching porn. So there's clearly something there. Where do we begin?

Yeah, I'll tell you where. I'm going to say something a little cheeky, but. But it's funny. And then I'll tell you the actual answer. Here's where we don't begin, okay? And so many people are doing this today, and it's like, it drives me nuts. Okay, here's what you're not going to do. You're not going to start doing trauma work, somatic work and parts work. Discover the most traumatized parts of your psyche and put them in charge of your life. You're not going to do that, okay? So many people are doing parts work and they're like, I found this exile that holds this trauma. I found a procrastinating part. I found an overwhelmed part. Here, be the CEO of my life, right? Like, no, like, we are not doing that. That is not the point. And the purpose of understanding what happened to you, okay? The point and purpose of understanding what happened to you is to create corrective emotional experiences, which is basically give yourself the nutrition that you never got when it originally happened. And that could be both for yourself and for others relationally as well. But the purpose, just like with physical therapy, right, if, if I'm a. If I'm a elite athlete, I get injured, I'm going to go get surgery, which is, you can think of that as like a, you know, kind of like deep trauma work. Then I have to do rehab, which is mobility based, to get that thing working stronger again, strengthening it, and eventually start to perform again. And eventually I can start to optimize again. But even if I'm performing and optimizing after an injury, I'm going to keep the injury in mind when I do any movement. I'm keeping my right ankle in mind. That's the ankle that I rolled to this day. That was decades ago, but I'm still doing pliability work and physical therapy on it because I want to maintain its capacity for motion and not re injure it. And so the same thing is true. We want to understand what happened to you. We want to understand how it impacted you at different levels and how that's playing out in your life right now. But Then we want to create corrective emotional experiences, which is basically the exact opposite of what happened to you. And then we want to remember, you know what, every time I go to expand my life, I'm probably going to run into some version of this. So, example, I have a part of me that feels like no matter what happens, he's going to be abandoned and neglected and left alone. Because the first three or four days of my life, I was put into, like, one of those, like, little things, like an incubator or whatever for three or four days. So for my whole life at that point, I was alone and nobody was there. And so that part, like, whenever I level up is like, see, no one's going to show up. And instead of trying to get rid of that part or breathe that part away, I go, your name is little guy. And little guy, I love you. And of course you're here. And I'm going to take care of you and I'm going to nurture you. I'm going to help us level up. I'm not going to kick you out. I'm going to put you in the passenger seat. And I know that you're here to let me know that you want someone to be here as we're doing this. And so I can work with the injury rather than trying to suppress it. Because if you suppress it, you'll recreate it unconsciously. And we also don't want it to run the show. And that's a big problem with coaching. A lot of coaches will just tell you, just change your thoughts, change your life, change your story, change your life. It's not that simple, right? We don't want to change the story about your life. We just want to continue it in a new way. So the beginning has a different context. Your story is your story. What your parts are holding, they're holding. It happened. But the next chapter can be written differently to recontextualize what happened to you in a different way. But we would never want to change the story of the part itself. That's too much of a burden for it. And that's not victimization. That's just saying, this happened to this part of me that's holding this. Thank you. And you're not driving. And we want to be able to move forward, back into performance, back into optimization through the process of intentionally creating corrective emotional experiences that help us level up versus help us repeat our past.

So hopefully that answers your question.

I think it does.

Can you expand on what a corrective emotional experience is just for the Listener out there, maybe give us some examples of what that means because it sounds pretty integral.

Yeah. So a corrective emotional experience or disconfirming experience is giving someone something that was missing at the time of the injury, basically. So, example, in pop culture, most guys probably haven't watched this movie, but if you know a woman in your life, they probably have. There's a movie called Bridget Jones Diary. Most of my clients are female, so those are gonna be some of my examples. Right? But in Bridget Jones Diary, Bridget Jones, the main character is cheated on, she's betrayed, she's like abandoned. She has abandoned wounds coming into the film. And then she meets this nice guy, Darcy, who she wants to be with, right? And at the very end of the movie, Darcy is like reading her diary and sees her diary. She's off screen, he sees the diary and he leaves. She comes back on screen. Renee Zellweger is, who plays her Bridget Jones. And she thinks, oh, my God, he's left, he's abandoned me like everybody else. But she goes chasing after him dramatically at the end of this romantic comedy, right? And it's like London streets and it's snowing and stuff like that. And she finds him and she's like, where did you go? And he looks down, he has a new diary. He goes, well, I realized your diary was full. You're going to need another one. So she thought she was being abandoned, but he wasn't abandoning her. He was going to get her a new diary. Now, if he knew that and they were maybe married for a few years, maybe he could have left her a note and said, hey, hon, I'll be right back. Because I know you have abandonment issues, right? But it's a way of getting what we didn't get previously. And the only way for that to happen is to know what happened to you and then to be able to share that with people who you trust and who are safe to help them create corrective experiences. I'll give you one more example. We had a client at a retreat once in Maui who was abused by a lifeguard when they were doing. Or sorry, a swim instructor when they were doing swim lessons when they were four years old, deathly afraid of water. Our retreat center happened to have a pool. We happened to find a trauma informed lifeguard on Maui, which, that tracks. Actually makes a lot of sense that exists. And we were able to help this person with her own decision get back into the pool. And she was shivering and shaking, all this type of stuff. Be in the arms of this lifeguard who was a woman instead of a man, get back into the exact same position that she was in when she was being abused and be like, stop. And to be able to complete that and like she cried and she released it. But she was able to actually set the boundary that she was never able to set before. The next day, she was doing cannonballs into the pool. She hadn't been in a pool in decades. Right. And so there's lots of different versions of corrective emotional experiences. And sometimes it's a one time thing and sometimes it's like a living amends. Like in 12 Step, right? There's like this idea of amends. Sometimes corrective emotional experiences is a living. I need to have it be this way moving forward. Right? So for example, like, I don't want to be with someone who cheats on me, makes amends, says I'm sorry, and then doesn't do it, but then cheats on me again. Like that would be a very good example of like, we don't want to be like having a one time experience of healing betrayal, trauma. That would just have to be the state of the relationship, basically. And so we can look at what happened to somebody and then be able to design personalized corrective emotional experiences based on what happened to them. And if we can bring that into relationship, it's even more powerful so that we can basically partner with someone who is intentionally trying to help us be better and to give us corrective experiences and vice versa. Which is not the same thing as being your therapist. This is super clear. It's called be a good partner.

That's a, that's an important. That is a very important distinction. I'm glad you threw it out. Okay? I would be remiss if I didn't ask the question that so many analytical and very linear men have when it comes to just life and personal development in general, but trauma as well, which is. Is there a sequential process that we have to go there? Is there like a step by step process or is it really dependent on the, you know, the, the impasses and the shit that you've gone through?

Love this question. And the answer is unequivocally, yes, there's a sequence. Absolutely there is a sequence. And guess what? Our nervous system is predictable. Okay? So I'll give it to you simple, okay? Bruce Perry. It's literally called neuro nervous system sequential sequence, neurosequential sequencing. That's what it's called. Okay? And it's basically this. The three Rs in this order, Regulate, relate, reason, in that order, right? You can't reason with someone who's in a shitty relationship. And you're probably in a shitty relationship because you're dysregulated on some level. And so that's the order. Regulate, relate, reason. And if you just remember that, you're like, oh, that's why none of our fights work, because we're both dysregulated when we're having them, we're not going to get to reasoning, right? So. And then also, when we look at the nervous system through polyvagal lens, it's a hierarchy from ventral to dorsal. I'm sorry, from ventral to sympathetic to dorsal, based on how much challenge we're experiencing. So if you're shut down and immobilized and not able to move, stuck, dissociated, et cetera, that is a sign that you are taking on too much. That is a sign that some part of your system is completely overwhelmed. You have too much stress, and something is being interpreted as a life threat in your life. If you're in stress, go mode, but without good thinking or without creativity, that is a sign that you're not quite dead, but you're fending off impending death by fighting or fleeing, which is appropriate for short periods of time, but not as a baseline. So if you're in fight or flight or anxiety, that's a sign that something is also not safe because you're not able to slow down and be safe. Usually the high performers I work with, male or female, are kind of frozen in yellow. They're like, go mode. Let's make it happen. We're going to do this. And they despise red people, dorsal people. It's kind of like Tigger Eeyore kind of energy, right? They're like, I don't. I can't stop. I can't get sad. I don't have time for this, right? Usually because yellow people who are stuck in yellow, sympathetic, had some type of red or dorsal experience when they were younger that they never want to relive. And they have so much fear of going back and being powerless or frozen again that they're frozen in yellow. And they don't know how to make friends with their sort of red or dorsal parts, if you will. And so it's predictable that if you don't make friends with your red or dorsal parts, you'll be stuck in yellow. And then what will happen? What's predictable is you'll have an accident, chronic illness. Something will happen where you'll burn out. Something will happen where you'll be forced to deal with that stuff at some point. And so the goal is to be able to slow down, to be able to bring the parts of you that are holding those red immobilized experiences to the prefrontal cortex and recognize that you're not stuck like you were. A lot of times people will say, but, master, if I go back, I'll feel like I'll be stuck forever. To which I say, of course you think that, because when you were younger, it was forever at that point. That was your whole life at that time, but that's not your whole life now. And in the book, I talk about this idea of emotion or affect phobia, which is like this fear of emotion. And there are seven primary emotions that we're afraid of, typically. And if we can just reduce our fear of these emotions and bring them into the prefrontal cortex to be redecided so that we can move forward, everything shifts and changes. But yes, we regulate, we relate, and we reason. If you're stuck in yellow and you don't have a calm, regulated life or life that has good relationships, it's predictable that you're gonna have to pause, revisit some red states, and then bring them to green. All of those things are super predictable because that's how our nervous system works.

So you're saying we can't get around dealing with our past?

I'm saying that you can't hustle your trauma. I've tried. Trust me.

I mean, it's interesting because, like, you know, I've worked with guys on Wall street, guys in hedge funds, famous athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians, like, you name it. And it's very interesting how many of them have been hedging. You know, it's like, I don't want to deal with that because I'm worried that it will inhibit my ability to perform. I'm worried that it will destroy my capacity to get results. And so can you just speak to the process for the. For the guys that are out there that are like, I know I have some shit that I need to deal with, but I'm really actually worried that I won't be able to be a partner, a dad, you know, an employer, an employee.

Yeah. I mean, that in and of itself is such a beautiful trauma response. It's like. Like, why are you holding everything for everybody? You know what I mean? Like. Like, what happens if you aren't able to be a dad? What does that mean? What happens if you aren't able to be a partner? What does that mean? Right. So that to me screams that that person is probably doing the most of, or at least thinks they have to do most of the emotional labor in their relationship. And they probably believe that exposing their vulnerability will lead to negative consequences. And that's true. Probably because it was true. Right? One of the famous Byron Katie quotes is like, is that true? And I hate that question because it's so gaslighty. Because the real question is, when was that true? Right? When was that true? Because we have beliefs. Because at some point it was true. And so that would be the beginning of the work. And the truth is you're not necessarily going to be the same dad, the same hedge fund person, the same performer that you were. But that's a good thing because again, if we go back to Tom Brady, you can't mess with his results. Okay? Connor, think about how much more his crazy routines that he did. Right? Crazy routines, all the crazy shit he did, okay? But he extended his career by probably a decade now. What is that worth financially? Okay, just take out anything else, right? But like an extra 10 years in NFL to go a little slower might be worth it. So it might mess up your capacity to be a great dad or to be a great Wall street hedge fund person for the short term, but it will keep you in the game longer also, right? So you may have to give up, be a good dad for a few months so that you can be an amazing granddad also so you can still be around and still be here and still be present. Right? You want to. If you have a brand new child, maybe you take some time off to work on yourself. Well, when they graduate at 18, how are they going to look back and think about how you raised them? Your state will influence their state far more than your words. And I know you know that more than I do because I don't have children. Right. And so you have to be willing to take a short term hit sometimes for a long term payoff. And that's scary. But the truth is, here's the hard truth, if you don't do it, your body will do it for you at some point.

And when it does, it'll be worse than if you had done it before. That's just, that's what's true. And I'm not trying to be negative, it's just what happens.

Yeah, yeah, I, I agree wholeheartedly. And usually what I say to guys is like.

You are, it's not that you are going to take a long term hit in your ability to do any of those things. It's that you're just going to do them differently and. And for longer and for longer and you'll likely enjoy it more. And. And so, you know, I think I. I think that I just appreciate you saying that. And just a side note, have you seen the. The Roast of Tom Brady?

Oh, twice. Yeah. I love this. So wild. It is so, so Kevin Hart, like, he was like, did you Tom.

Yeah, the entire time. It was, it was so. And Tony Hitchcliffe. Oh, my God. Not even. I didn't really know who he. I mean, I'd heard of him, but he lit people up. It was so damn good. Okay, so regulate. Regulate our body. Relate. Relate to what? Relate to somebody else. Relate to the shit that's coming up, the anxiety. Like, say a little bit more about this. Regulate, Relate and reason.

Yeah, so regulate is just, you know, like calm it down, Go for a walk, eat some food, don't be hangry. Like, whatever it is, right? You're hungover, like, not right now. You know, all that stuff, right? Drink some water, get some electrolytes, all that stuff. Relate is both internal and external. So we want to have a good relationship and enough internal space for all of your parts to be there so that at some point you're able to experience. The nervous system regulation doesn't mean you feel uncomfortable feelings or that you're calm. Nervous system regulation means you can experience all your emotions without being taken out by them. So you can experience the full spectrum of emotion without having it hijack your system. And so we want to eventually build enough internal space and capacity for that to happen. But we also want to have a shared context with somebody. Right? So for example, like, relating would be. I'm aware of this part of me that's acting a certain way. I'm also going to bring it to the person that's here with me. It could be a friend, it could be whoever my primary attachment figure is. Mom, it could be partner, wife, husband, et cetera, girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever. But to be able to not be alone in what you're experiencing so that you can self disclose. This is what's happening now. We don't always. That's not always nice and tidy like that. A lot of times we have to sit down with somebody and say, I need to share right now. And sometimes when you self disclose, you don't even know what you're gonna say. So you and the other person are learning at the same time. And ideally, if you're gonna share like that, like in a kind of like active listening type session with a partner. Yeah. Don't switch roles. So if one person is sharing something, you don't stop listening and then start to share because you're triggered. Like, you got to take turns, you got to slow it down. But most of the time with relating, it's not about. And I'm sure you and Vienna have your own languaging around this. It's never about agreeing with each other. It's about understanding each other, which are two totally different things. If we have to agree on everything to be in a relationship, we're never going to be in a relationship. But if I can at minimum understand where you're coming from and why and really help you get that, I get it. That's everything. Because now that person is going to feel heard and seen and understood, which is so much better than agreement anyway. And so relating is about, can I be my full self with you without any negative consequences? Can I be self aware of what's happening in my system to take responsibility for my reactions also? So I'm not placing it on you, but can I also share with you the impact of your behavior on me without you needing to make it about you? Is that possible? And can we take turns doing that? And a lot of problems can be solved just by understanding where someone's coming from. And listening is about the person who's listening helping the person who's sharing feel heard, not about the person who's listening comprehending what's being said. It's a big misnomer that people don't recognize. And by the way, when someone feels heard, they're not defensive. They feel calmer, they feel safer. When someone has safety in their nervous system, they can be influenced and reasoned with at that point. And also, the same thing is true for parts on the inside. If you could understand your parts without agreeing with them, it's the same thing. They'll calm down because they just want to be heard, too. And so that's an internal and external way of relating.

Awesome. Okay, let's take it home. Let's close the show with how do we improve our baseline? Because I think one of the things that I've heard you talk about is like, there's limitless possibilities. It's not. This isn't just everything we're talking about. This isn't just about healing trauma. This is about how do we reduce stress? How do we improve our life? How do we move our baseline up into a place of really thriving? So tell me about what that looks like for you.

Such a good question. So the analogy in the book is I look at nervous system fitness and emotional fitness the same way you would look at hypertrophy or muscular fitness. So how do we do it? Well, we have to put some stress on the body, but we get stronger. Not by putting stress on the body through training. We get stronger through recovery with proper nutrition. So when you hear the term anabolic or anabolic steroids, that's helping the recovery process. Anabolism, anabolic is the process of recovery after stress. Being catabolic is the stress itself. So when you're working out, you're lifting weights, whatever, all of that is a catabolic process of creating micro trauma to tear down the muscle. And then we recover with anabolic processes where we get stronger. So we actually get stronger in recovery. Well, we take the same idea as it relates to emotions, meaning we want to slowly expose ourselves to emotions that are hard to feel and then have a recovery process. That could be like having a very short, assertive conversation. If you're conflict avoidant, where, like, you talk about something that's hard to talk about for two minutes and you stop and you have a safe outcome and you come back later, and then maybe you can tolerate 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Next thing you know, you could resolve a really hard conversation in an hour with someone that used to make you dissociate and check out and be avoidant for a year. And so we want to take the same process to be able to build more capacity. Because here's the thing, okay? People will say, I did the trauma work, it didn't work, or I'm still being triggered, or these things are still happening. In personal development, I've never, ever. Connor heard someone say, bro, I went to the gym today and I still got exhausted. I still was gassed. Like, my muscles still hit failure. We don't have that same expectation because we know we go to the gym to train to exhaustion, then we have proper nutrition to recover, to get stronger. The same thing is true emotionally. And here's why you're ambitious. If you're ambitious, what you have won't satisfy you for very long, which means you want more, which means you want something you've never had before, which means you have to build more capacity. And so you're always trying to. Your ambition is like a PR personal record, right? I don't want to just bench 400. I want to bench 425. Well, guess what? That's going to be hard, right? I get the 430, 450, right? However much I want to bench every PR is harder and harder and harder. And you're putting more and more stress on the body. So you want to take more and more care of yourself and build more and more capacity and reduce what's called allostatic load, which is the accumulation of stress over time. And so if we had the same expectations for goal achievement and expanding your capacity for what you want in your life as you did for training the physical body for physical health and performance, we have no problems, right? Yes. You're going to keep getting triggered because once you hit a certain level and a certain threshold, you're going to resolve Jumanji level one trigger. Well, now you want more Jumanji level two, level three, level four. It just keeps going because you're going into uncertainty. That's the very nature of who we are, is to want more, to have more, do more, be more, achieve more. And triggers are not going to go away, just like being gassed is not going to go away. Just like if you're in a calorie deficit, hunger is not going to go away. Right. Like, these are things that come with the territory. So we want to build more emotional capacity. And basically you're only limited by your nervous system's capacity to handle emotional stress and then to set boundaries and recover. If you can handle those two things really well, then you can have pretty much anything you want. Just like you could have anything you want if you know how to train to exhaustion and do progressive overload and recover. Not one bodybuilder is going to tell you to not recover and eat proper nutrition. They're not going to tell you to do that. Right, Right. So the same thing is true as it relates to emotional fitness. And so if you just take that same mindset, you transfer it over to like, instead of like, okay, I'm going to do my whatever. Like, I'm going to max out on my bench this time. I'm gonna have a 45 minute conversation where I confront somebody on something hard that's like the emotional equivalent of burpees.

Hey, I love burpees. Don't just burpees, right?

No, but they're hard though. But they're hard, right? They're hard. Right. So. But it's like, I've really figured this out. I think recently, Connor, I asked myself, like, why will people put themselves through the most insane physical challenges, but then like, can't have one tiny conversation about, like, resolving a conflict?

Yeah.

And what I realized is that when it comes to physical challenges and physical challenges, there's usually no negative relational outcome when you confront a physical challenge. But when you confront an emotional challenge, we have a programmed response that this will be. Create a negative relational outcome by speaking up, by setting a boundary, by studying ourselves. And so we want to be able to create more safety. Because imagine if you went to go train. Every time to go train, you thought you're going to injure yourself and you couldn't move for six months, we probably would stop training, right? So we want to have that same expectation that, like, hey, I can assert myself, speak up, create more emotional capacity, and have safe outcomes in my relationships rather than dangerous ones, rather than traumatizing ones. And I'll caveat. Safe enough because there's no such thing as perfect safety, right? Yeah, that's the goal.

Yeah. I love the. The framework because normally what I'll say to guys is like, this is about developing resiliency. This is about expanding your capacity and your capability as a man when it comes to hard things, hard conversations, you know, tough interactions, things that aren't working well. Right. Being able to. It's literally about. For me, it's like, how can I deepen and develop and expand my capacity to have a much wider threshold for stressful situations so that people can rely on me? So that when my son is who's, you know, three years and three months throwing, like, off the second floor onto the, you know, onto the floor below, below, and like, breaking toys and stuff like that, that I'm not, you know, yelling and losing my mind and freaking out at him, but I'm actually calm and grounded and I'm able to regulate with him. Or when he's throwing a tantrum, I'm able to regulate with him. My chair is, like, slowly descending as.

I'm having this conversation.

Or those toys. Those toys.

When my chair is slowly. Right. So if there's one thing that I've learned about men, and I can't speak for every single man, but I can speak for the majority of men that I've ever worked with, which is a lot of dudes, we love feeling capable. Love it.

Yes, I love it.

And I think that there is a undeniable and inextricable connection between feeling capable and being confident. And I think where most men break down in their own lives, their relationships, their work environments, their relationship with themselves, it's like, I just don't feel capable. And I love what you're talking about because what you're saying is, well, if you develop a more robust, strong nervous system, you're going to be a lot more fucking capable. In pretty much every area of your life. And it's going to take some reps, you know, it's going to take time. It's going to take reps, so. Oh, Mr. Maston, I love you, buddy. I feel like we could chat forever. I feel like one of these days you and I should just have an open dialogue about just everything, you know, just like a catch up. But we record the catch up because I feel like you and I have super interesting conversations. Would you be down for that?

Yes, I'm here for it. Yes, here for it.

Awesome, man. Where can people go to learn more about your work and grab a copy of your book because it's an exceptional book and people need to read it.

Thanks, man. Yeah, so the book is called reclaim your nervous system. It's available wherever books are sold or Amazon or Barnes and Noble. That's usually super easy for people. And then for me, I'm just at mastankip m a s t I n k I p p on Instagram, TikTok website. All the. All the places is Facebook. All the places.

Awesome. Awesome. And for everybody that's out there listening, don't forget to man it forward. Share this episode with somebody that you know will enjoy it. This might be something that you listen to with your men's group. It might be something that you listen to with your partner and you discuss. And it might be a book that you dive into with your men's group and your partner and you discuss. So we'll have the links for all that in the show notes. Until next time, this is Connor Bean signing off.

Sa.