5 Love Experts Share Their Top Relationship Advice

As men, we are literally causing disorder in the nervous system of the person in front of us. And disorder leads to disease.

Mm-hmm.

Trauma bonds are formed through highs and lows, and that is not obviously love, but it's the most familiar thing.

The thing we fear experiencing from the trigger is the thing we create through the response to the trigger.

The real skill that men need to learn is to regulate under stress and duress and then respond regardless of the situation.

One of the most important thing for women to do is stop trying to get men to love you. Stop. They already love you.

What's interesting about trauma bonds is that they're this really intense attachment that are formed through highs and lows. So you're basically going on a roller coaster with somebody, and that's how you are bonding with them, right? And that is not obviously love, but it's the most familiar thing. And so for a lot of us, our original imprint of what we would maybe unconsciously deem love is uncertainty or chaotic or disorganized in some way. And so there is this imprint in the nervous system of anticipation or uncertainty or excitement or that high and low. And so you know, from a nervous system neurology standpoint, when we are engaging with people who bring that sensation to us, they activate that experience in us. It's not necessarily healthy or true love, but it is familiar. And so that's what most of us are working through when it comes to our relationship patterns in general, is a full rewire of the nervous system and the neurology of what it actually feels like to be in safe, healthy love without it feeling boring or, you know, too understimulating.

Many of my friends have said comments like, I really like this person, but there's no roller coaster, there's no charge. I'm sure this has come up in your circles, right? And I wanted to start here because this is a really interesting paradox when we look at what love actually is. Love, the way I've found it with my marriage, is this beautiful undulation where yes, there's highs and lows, but there's not extremes like these ups and downs and peaks and valleys. And I wonder from all your studies, a mutual friend of ours is Mark Wollin. When we look at the lens of intergenerational healing and essentially almost like, shay, a glass that has a hammer that's hit it and that lens becomes shattered. And then we look at all love through essentially a shattered lens until we figure out through work like yours how to, have a new lens. What's going on with the shattering in our body? What happens in the body during this confusion of intensity versus grounded true love?

Well, in a trauma bond or in these, you know, more chaotic dynamics, it's really a hormonal cocktail that's kind of anchoring it in, right? Because you get these really big dopamine spikes when you are engaging in the drama. And like dramas and even like that passionate romance, you know, the drama of like the intensity of this fantasy that you're building together. And then it moves into the conflict cycle, and that's the cortisol spike, right? And that's that fight or flight mode. And then you move through that cycle into repair. and then you get this flood of oxytocin. And so it's, you know, oxytocin is that love hormone. It's that happy chemical. It's the most powerful love hormone. When you have a child, your whole body is just flooded with it. I'm sure you're very familiar. And so, you know, imagine repeating that cycle over and over and over in a really dramatic relationship that really creates a sense of bonding. We've been through things together. We've been through so much. And really it's just this manufactured roller coaster, as you put it, of highs and lows that's happening in the brain. And yeah, you're right. That is not how a relationship is really meant to be. But for so many of us, that is what we recognize because that was our conditioning.

It's excellent that you said that. I think about what happened in 1776. I've mentioned this before, so my audience is going to be like, we already heard this, man. But I promise you, this relates to what Shay potentially will answer. We came over from England to America, and what did we do? We essentially took out an entire race of people because that's what was being done to us in England. In other words, the unconscious was not conscious. And now we see this at scale with the advent of technology rising and rising women like yourself. I think about the way that power can corrupt, but really more the neural tree can corrupt. We unconsciously enact the behaviors of our caregivers or our controllers, and I love my mother and father, and we all get to figure out that path. Do you find that these learned behaviors that get encoded essentially into our epigenome are really expressing themselves for healing. Don't you feel like this is really just a micro and a macro of our system, our electrical system, desiring homeostasis, desiring peace, yet we have to experience its opposite and its intensity to find the middle?

Yeah, I like that frame. I think our souls all come here on a journey of experience gathering and wisdom collection, and I do believe that that's, you know, unique to each of us. So we all have a slightly different soul path or a signature that we're here to go through. And leaving room for that is really important. And knowing that in any relationship, there's always work to be done and healing to happen. But the really, really chaotic and really, really dramatic ones where it's really painful and it feels like you're kind of banging your head against a wall, maybe you can work through that together, or maybe the lesson is actually just in walking away and choosing your peace. And, you know, to speak to your point of, you know, the mother-father imprint, what I have come to learn is that, you know, every single generation we're just doing a little bit better than, than what our parents did. And there is this natural, beautiful blooming of healing and evolution that occurs. And, you know, I think those of us who are parents who were born in, you know, '80s, '90s, 2000s— it's crazy to say that people born in the 2000s could be, be parents, but that's where we're at. So, you know, I think we have a unique advantage to healing and to evolution that the previous generations just really didn't have. They didn't have information at their fingertips. They didn't have the exposure, and they didn't even have the language or the openness or the intimacy, right? Like, people didn't talk openly and vulnerably about their challenges, about their fears, about love, any of it. So I really do feel that we are, you know, beyond blessed and fortunate at this time to even have the capacity to do the kind of work that we're doing as parents and as changemakers.

It's a luxury.

Yeah. I mean, I was talking to my, my mother-in-law. She's in her 70s, right? She's like nearing 80 now. And she's like, yeah, like if I wanted to know anything, I would have to go to the library and try to find something. And then the other piece to that is it would have to be innate in you to even know, to have something awaken in you where you're like, hey, this doesn't feel right. Every— everyone around me is doing this and everything around me is this way. So there would have to be this innate awakening in you to even signal that you should go out and seek something else, right? Whereas now we're just kind of bombarded with all of these different opinions and beliefs and lifestyles, which can be disorienting, but it also gives us an opportunity to check ourselves and be like, oh, maybe am I doing this the way that it— I feel is, is right and integral? You know, they just didn't have that. They didn't have that. And that the conditioning and the programming that they did have was like really negative.

Yes, very survival-based in many ways. I think about my lineage. And do you know, in work you've done with sacred tribes and just honestly your work over the past decade plus— 20 years you've been in this work, yes?

I mean, I, I would say more like 15. I haven't really done any like sacred tribe work, like I haven't like traveled and gone and stayed with sacred tribes or anything like that.

But you've connected to, I'm sure, in ceremonies and also in just work, many veins of work, to the generational lineage that created you. You know, we are a byproduct of, I think it's thousands and thousands of men and women that loved each other enough to birth life into the world. And I think about the way that we can honor them through my work in emotional epigenetics, your work in giving people this home where they can actually learn what it feels like and have their fingers on the tapestry of what it truly means to be the one. I'm, I'm curious if you've ever been asked this. You know, when we become the one, yeah, there's a certain felt sense, there's a somatic understanding. It's not just a mental thing where somebody can read your book or do your guided journal. There's this transformation that happens when we really embody the one. What does the one actually mean to you?

The one, for me, it's really a landing at home in yourself. It's really not that complex. You know, we think of it like this. You know, we are born connected to oneness. We are born in this infinite oneness, this energy of connection to the divine. And then we are brought back down to earth. And in many ways, we spend our early childhood projecting, you know, God and oneness onto our parents. And that's part of where the rupture occurs because of course humans can never live up to that. And so that's where the wound begins, right? Is this letdown of the human that was meant to be God for us. And so there is this endless searching then once we enter the stage of seeking romantic partnership to find that oneness again, and we're looking for it outside of ourselves, we're looking for it in another. And for me, becoming the one simply means you remember that you are innately whole and connected to the divine, and you're not seeking somebody to complete you or to save you or to rescue you. You're simply returning to the seat of your own soul. And then through that, you can call in a partner who you want to do life with in a way that is honoring of both of your soul's paths and also, uh, really honoring of both of you and your individuality. And then you can co-create something that is only born through the two of you sort of putting down your egos together and merging as a couple. But if, if we try to do that divine merging as a couple without that foundation of self-respect and self-love and self-trust then it looks a lot different. So there needs to be a sense of self and a real sense of self-awareness and understanding and trust before we move to that stage.

Misandry and misogyny sell. It's very intoxicating to get riled up and be caught in a moment where you know, you just had an argument with your boyfriend or your girlfriend and you go online and all of a sudden the algorithm's feeding you something about how women are this way and that's why relationships are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I've done it. I've done it.

Or the inverse of that. And all of a sudden you're in this echo chamber that's just pumping, you know, hate towards women or hate towards men into your psyche.

Yeah, I've been there.

And it keeps you on the platform, right? It's like the algorithm is designed to do that, right? So it's challenging.

But the wisdom that you're bringing forth, I heard you say this quote, "Where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be." If he's on Instagram, it's hard for his genius to express. Yes.

Yeah, well, and I think, you know, Jung talked about, Jung talked about the anima and the animus, right? That we all have this masculine and feminine archetype within our psyche. And because of the way that we as men operate, right? I've been talking lately about how men generally gain a sense of identity through hierarchical structuring, right? So like when men get together, there's always this like little bit of jostling, little bit of like figuring out where are you, where am I on the hierarchy. And a lot of that has to do around competency. A lot of it is like, some of it's around success and status, but a lot of it's around competency. It's like how competent are are you compared to me? And for women, it's the inverse. Women get a sense of identity and develop social structures not through hierarchies, but through the— through network. And so to admit that there's a hierarchy within female social circles is actually faux pas. To say that, you know, you, Janice, are more attractive than Becky, that's a no-no. You don't do that.

Right?

There is no— so it's a very antithetical to how men structure their social circles and how we go about developing a sense of identity. We're very in hierarchies, right? That's a big part of it. And I think this is what's caused a lot of trouble within social circles and work environments, because men are used to competing in hierarchical ways, which is, well, I'll just outwork you. I'll just get better and more competent than you. But in female circles, in work environments, in social circles, that's not the case. It's not about being better. It's sometimes about pretending that you're not. It's sometimes about something completely different, about maintaining relationship or being more emotionally intelligent and choosing, you know, some other way of doing it, of collaboration. Whatever it is. So, so men in workplaces are really struggling because women have figured out how to compete in hierarchical structures, but they also know how to compete in network structures. And men know how to compete in hierarchical structures but not in network structures. And so a lot of young men are struggling because they're like, well, women have figured out how to compete in both of those places, in both of those structures. I only know this one vein, and so fuck it, I'm just gonna, you know, I'm out.

Do you feel— that's so good. I, I— okay, there's two things. The first is Allison Armstrong sat where you sat maybe 6 months ago, and she said women are really good at placating and pretending, and that's how we, we even get what we want. And at first I couldn't grok it. I was like, what do you mean? Like, so you're full of shit? And she's like, kind of. It was really interesting.

She's hilarious.

I love her. Absolutely, absolutely love her. I'm going to read this quote from Scott Galloway, and I think it really is in alignment with what you're saying. So he said, I've never heard one of my male friends say, I'm depressed. I'm just super fucking lonely and depressed. You don't hear that from men that you don't hear. I'm struggling with anger. I have erectile dysfunction. You would never hear a male friend say that. But when their mom dies or they get divorced, we weigh in with a lot of empathy. But you'd never really hear a man open up because— and this is what you're talking about— Men are worried that if we display weakness, another man might kill us and take our shit from us, or the women aren't going to want to have sex with us.

Correct.

So there's a huge inability for men to proactively talk about the way they really feel. Yeah. I love Scott Galloway. What comes up for you when you hear that quote?

Well, I— again, I wrote about this in the book. I had a whole chapter called The Myth of Male Vulnerability, where I talked about the very real threats relationally, socially, hierarchically to men when it comes to opening up and being vulnerable, right? And it's the problem in, in modern culture is that it's kind of sold as this cure-all solution to men, right? It's just like, if you just opened up and were vulnerable, all of your problems would be solved. And for some men, that is somewhat true. But for a lot of men, it's not true. For a lot of men, it's not just about opening up and being vulnerable. It's also about developing competency in emotional expression and emotional mastery. And that's what men really are driving towards. But for the average guy, they all know, we all know that there's a price that's looming on the other side of us really being vulnerable. And I can't tell you how many stories I have heard from men of like, I was married and she wanted me to open up. I started to open up and it was the death of the marriage. You know, she left because I started crying and I started talking about how I had been depressed and it just wrecked everything and she was gone.

Yeah.

And you can make a case for like, maybe it was too little too late and da da da, but I've heard that in countless stories where men are dating a woman, they start to open up and they're very vulnerable and all of a sudden, you know, sexual attraction just goes off a cliff. So I think men see this, they know this, And again, when you're in a hierarchical structure and you show weakness and vulnerability, there is a fear that you're going to fall down the hierarchy, that you are going to find yourself lower down in the eyes of other men, that you are going to decrease your status, uh, in mate signaling with women, because The truth is that women do really, from what I've gathered, not to speak for women, but women do really want men who either can feign emotional mastery or actually have emotional mastery. And I think that that's what a lot of women are asking for. And one of the things that we as men have misinterpreted in modern dating advice is that a lot of women are saying, I want, I want an emotionally mature man. I want a man that can open up. I want a man that can be vulnerable. And I think that we as men have missed that emotional mastery is status. That is a status—

like a marker of status. It's a marker, right?

It's like if you're wearing a Rolex, it might signal that you have a certain level of financial status. If you have a certain amount of followers online, there's a certain status that comes along with that. But emotional mastery is also a good status marker. And we as men haven't realize that yet, that what a lot of women are saying is, hey, this marker is actually super freaking important. And for a lot of men, they go online and they hear the red pill content that's just like, make as much money as possible, buy the Bugatti, and that's all that really matters.

Yeah.

And I think if I put myself in my 20-year-old shoes, he would probably be like, that's going to be easier. Yeah, yeah, make the money, buy the Bugatti. That's a way easier path than dealing with my childhood trauma and my pain and my emotions, which is just like ambiguous and vague and seems brutal and hard. So I get why a lot of men move into this category of stuff it down, make more money, try and signal status in this other way.

There's a Goldilocks zone between the feminism and the red pill. Totally. I feel like you've done it. Really, it's a testament to your work, man. I mean, you wouldn't have a published book, you wouldn't have the following you have if you hadn't achieved some level of that Goldilocks zone. I wonder, like, from a recipe standpoint, like, what is this Goldilocks zone for, for men? And also, it's a double-sided question. There are many women that when they receive that vulnerability— I don't think vulnerability is weakness, but I think there can be toxic vulnerability where you're just spewing and dumping, or you're doing it to get something. Yeah, I'm gonna be vulnerable, but in exchange, the transaction is that give me what I want, which is not vulnerability. That's a transaction.

That's nice guys, people pleasers.

Yeah.

So like, and I know you've dealt with that too, and so have I. So the question is, there's this sweet spot, you know, the Goldilocks zone, where it's like not too hot, not too cold, of a man learning how to be a conduit for true vulnerability, which is like empathetic witness, compassionate presence. And the woman— let's just say it's a heteronormative relationship— and the woman is actually using her emotional skills to be able to take in and diffuse what the man is sharing. Can you describe both sides of this Goldilocks zone? I think this is missing the mark in this illusionary war on Instagram for sure.

Yeah. Well, I think part of that Goldilocks zone is that a man is able to very deeply understand what's happening inside of him, that he has a very robust relationship to his own emotions, and that he's able to not become them all the time, like that he's able to regulate and then respond versus experience, get something, and then react, which is how most of us men operate, right? It's like girlfriend says something, feel triggered by it, react, defensiveness, go on the attack, shut down, right? Whatever it is. And so the, the real skill that men need to learn is to regulate under stress and duress and then respond regardless of the situation. And to do that as often as can. You're not going to be perfect with it. I'm not perfect with it. There's still moments where my son or my wife, like, they just— I have my joke is that they have the access codes to the, like, nuclear launch button inside of me, right? It's just like they're the only two people. Everybody else, it's like, I'm like, "Good luck trying to trigger me. Like, it's pretty good." But like Ram Dass said, right? It's like, "When you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family." My mom was just here for a week.

They get it.

They get it. So I think for men, it's being able to have this level of masterful containment over your own intensity and the charge of your own emotionality without suppressing it, without numbing it out, but actually being in full contact and relationship with the reality of your own emotions, which is hard because for most men, again, like I said, they experience life in a very intense way. And I had this conversation with Chris Williamson on Monday where he was like, do you think that the majority of men just don't feel that much, or do you think that they feel that much and they've just learned to shut themselves off? And I was like, definitely that one. You know, the majority of men— there's very few men that are actually, you know, have alexithymia, where they don't actually feel any emotions. It's very rare. The majority of men have just been conditioned to over-index rationality, and they're trying to solve every problem in their life with logic and rationality, completely devoid of emotional data and information. And it'd be like trying to you know, choose a stock to buy on the stock market without looking at any of the information of the company. It's like you're missing the largest subset of data that you could to make this decision. And so that's, that's the part of men. And then I think being able to very clearly, very articulately bring forward, here's what's happening inside of me. And sometimes I think as men, we overcomplicate this. And there's this weird, awkward period. You know, it's like when you were a teenager and all of a sudden you're like, we're getting boners on the bus and you're like going through puberty and you're just like, I don't know how to be now. My voice is dropping. I feel a little bit more aggressive. Like I'm getting erections. Like, this is awkward. And there's this awkward phase when a man learns to interact with his emotions. Yeah. Where there's this big question inside of us as men because we're so focused on competency of Am I doing this right? And it's very helpful to have other men who have gone before you, who are more masterful in that field, to say, yes, you are, or try this. So I think for men, it's being able to say, you know, I didn't like that, babe. That wasn't okay with me. It's not all right with me when that happens. Or here's what I'd really love. Or here's how I really feel about you. Like, God, I love when you do this. I love this part of you. I love when you when you speak in this way or when you move in this way. You know, like with my wife, the immediate thing that comes to mind is she just like loves dancing. It's one of the things that just intoxicated me with her in the beginning. You know, she'd put music on in the kitchen while we were cooking food and she would dance. And I was just, I love that, you know? And so, and she does it with our kids every single day. And I'm always, I'm just like, I love this about you. And I'll always express that kind of adoration towards her. So I think that's our role as men. And then the other part for us as men is being able to bring that containment to our woman.

This is so good, man. You know, I was having this visual and in my research for emotional epigenetics, I learned that the afferent/efferent messages from our cranium and our neural tree, we have double the neurons that come back to the brain than we do that come to the body. Yeah. So how is that a perfect code to use your son's name like that if men are so intellectualized when it comes to what to do, how to feel, all these things, the perfect intellectual question is, why would somatic intelligence have double the messages going to the brain from the body unless we are supposed to pay attention to the body?

Correct.

That's a really big one that I think is super missed in a lot of the somatic experienced and somatically trained people.

Well, it's a funny thing that Everybody knows, you know, communication is 80% nonverbal.

Yeah.

But then most people miss what that actually fucking means. It means that 80% of your communication is not this. It's not your brain logically figuring out what I'm saying. It's 80% of our bodies interacting with one another. And for the majority of men, because they're disconnected, like a lot of men will literally walk through life as this floating head. They're just floating heads. And it's not to— I'm not shitting on men or shaming men. I was that man for so long. I was just this floating head that every once in a while would drop down in my dick, you know, and then that part would lead me, and that part got me in a lot of trouble. But that's the case for a lot of men. We sort of oscillate between these two heads, and everything in between is missing. And so when you start to get into this— in psychology, it's called the elephant and the rider. And so the elephant and the rider is exactly what you're talking about, that the elephant is the body, it's the soma, it's the energy of your emotions, and that's an extremely powerful force. And then your psyche is the little rider sitting on top of the elephant, telling it where to go. But at any given moment, the elephant can say, I don't care what you want. I'm gonna go in that direction. I'm gonna move in this direction. I'm gonna have, you know, depression because you're not listening to me. I'm going to start to experience rage because I feel helpless. I'm going to start to have massive levels of anxiety because you've repressed your sadness for 20 fucking years. And so what happens for a lot of men is they've been the rider on the elephant for so long with no relationship to the rider. And then all of a sudden the rider goes haywire or causes havoc, and then they have to— so the elephant causes havoc. And they have to build a relationship with this elephant that's been carrying them around for so long. And that's what it was like for me. And to bring this into relationships, that's where— and it's not that it's a man's job to do this, what I'm about to say, but that's when women feel safe, is when you have a relationship with your body, when you have a relationship with the elephant, because every woman knows that there's a very real intensity and capability for violence, capability for danger, capability for sexual intensity that lives inside of every man. So if you're disconnected with it, how am I as a woman supposed to feel safe with, with and around you when you have no relationship with this very powerful energetic force? Of course, that's terrifying.

As long as I took men's power, I would never know my own. That's what I saw the moment before I said, "Okay, I'll stop." And then I thought once when I stopped antagonizing men, that men would become neutral. And I was hoping I would learn something that would bring out the best in men. Shocked, completely shocked. Y'all did not become neutral. Pretty sure you don't have a neutral. You have reverse and gears going forward.

That sounds about right.

There is no neutral. And so when I stopped attacking men, which I really did and had to learn how I had been, men became so proactively caring for me, looking out for me, taking care of me, warning me against That's a bad man. Being the sheepdog, showing up as sheepdog so early on, it was shocking. It was like—

Why was it so shocking?

Because I didn't know that's who you are. I didn't know. Like, one of the most important things for women to do is Stop trying to get men to love you. Stop. They already love you. And I mean, I recorded a program a couple years ago called Causing Those Loving Feelings. And I just realized a week ago that people who buy it probably think it's how to get a man to love you. No, it's how to cause yourself to love others, and how to cause yourself to love yourself. And I was trying to think, have I ever tried to get a man to love me? Your weird shit you're doing is just getting in the way.

It's so good, Alison. Thank you. We're so different as men and women, and it deserves so much respect. The physical, hormonal, emotional differences between men and women, but really something right now that I see woke society attempting to delete is our differences, and it's very sad. What's at the corner of disconnection with men and women, in your opinion?

You have to go way back.

It seems like that's a trend on this podcast.

Yeah, I mean, literally, you have to go back to the beginning, because in the beginning being the 21st day of gestation, when the ex chromosomes kick in or don't. And the effects of the rush of testosterone that comes in on day 21 in utero, or estrogen, the effects of that on the configuration of the brain, the bones, the muscles, it, it's astounding. We, in that moment, become different. And the raw material, like the ovaries— ovaries are undescended testicles. It's all the same material. It either stays or it drops. The most sensitive part of a man's body, same stuff the most sensitive part of a woman's body is made out of. It's all just formed in these different ways. And the brain, we start out with the same brain material, but testosterone compartmentalizes. Testosterone creates single focus. Testosterone creates track vision, where you can track a moving object so much better than a woman can. But estrogen creates scan vision. That's why you guys ask us, where are my keys? Oh, they're on the piano.

This is the diffuse awareness.

That's the diffuse awareness. And we're scanning for danger. Anything out of place is a potential danger. Who moved it? Did a bear move a tree in the meadow? Is the bear still here? Right? So, and it also creates the muscles that you have and the muscles I don't have. And your strength as a man, you have no idea. The weakest man is probably stronger than the strongest woman. It's why I give men the exercise in the Understanding Women sample, right? Like, take your hand, squeeze it as hard as you can, but don't break anything. Make it hurt, but don't break your own bones, 'cause you could. Now give your hand to a woman. Ladies, squeeze it as hard as you can. And you can see the men waiting for her to start squeezing it as hard as she can. And she's doing it as hard as she can. And the realization, like when we can't lift something, we're not faking it to make you feel better. We are giving it all we've got. And you guys, right, all your strength, like not all, but the majority of your strength is in this part of your body. That's why when you pick up something heavy, you immediately gonna get it above your chest. We pick up something heavy, we snuggle it into our pelvis, 'cause that's where all our strength is. So literally, you know, drag us by the hair, knock us down, drag us by the hair. We are that weak. We can be overcome by you so easily. And it's terrifying.

It's honestly something that I don't think about ever. And I really appreciate you reminding me and all of us of this super important fact of brain and body differences that exist in men and women.

In different cultures, the regard for women and the intent and the purpose of women can be anything from you don't deserve a name You're not smart enough to be taught to type, which is what was thought in the US in the early 1900s when typewriters are invented. No, women aren't smart enough to learn to type, right? And then we were not smart enough to be more than secretaries. The actual physical experience and then the cultural view and the thing that happens where for as long as survival depends on physical strength, men are the go-to. We go to the strength of men. Culture has changed so much since the 1950s, when now in so many first worlds, the strength is perceived as one's ability to function in relationship, one's ability to connect, one's ability to smooth things over. One's like— these things that naturally go with estrogen have become sources of success, right? But the adversarial relationship between men and women, it's the same as adversarial relationship between any two human beings. When you believe in scarcity, it's you or me with temporary alliances, not real partnership. I mean, that, that's the source of all of the nonsense. But one of the things in particular that happens to women is When we perceive your strength, that's the source of chemistry for women, is the perception of strength. When we see a strength, whether it's in your size, it's in your way of being, like confidence is perceived as strength, it's in your integrity. Like when you guys say no to us when we're full of shit, it is so hot. You don't get sucked into whatever kind of, thing we have going on.

Yes.

It's so hot.

The vortex is real.

It's so hot. We needed to protect ourselves from ourselves. And it just— so it's— but what happens, and this is the thing that's becoming clear in The King's Code, is that both men and women scan for strength. Most men, most of the time, are filling a team. Even if they're not team-oriented, they're filling a team. They're filling a hunting tribe. Filling, you know, the defense of the castle, right? And so men are scanning for strength, but you're scanning for complementary strength.

So when you try and fix your wife, you turn her into a project, not a person. You immediately start objectifying her. And I know that this word objectification makes people uncomfortable. But when you fix a person, you are literally saying they're a project. The second thing I would do is build process around it. It's like, okay, well, she's mad about this thing, so I'm going to make it so that thing never shows up again in our life, which is so impossible that I would drive myself crazy building structure and process and routine.

Yeah.

And then the third thing is like best case scenario, I would withdraw. But I think what we have to admit as men is that often we react with emotions as well.

I think, I think we're just as emotional as women. I think we feel the depth of that emotion. We may not emote it the same way, but the felt sense of energy in motion— emotion. I think there are times in my life where I feel things even deeper than my wife at times. Maybe that's my experience, anecdotally.

Yeah, it could be. I mean, it could be that we do, but I think we feel it in a totally different way, for sure. You know, I think for us, emotions come through, they're out in the open, we process, we come back to baseline. But women don't, like, especially if they're not given an opportunity to actually work through those emotions and be seen in those emotions. And I think it's, it's true for both of us that, yeah, we, we have like a deep well of emotions. But when you look at the power imbalance in a male-female relationship, if we're doing any one of the 4 things that I just mentioned, again, we're, we're teaching her nervous system that we're unsafe. And so every time that we would have one of those conflicts, no matter how I resolved it, even if it was peaceful and all I did was say Well, Katie, there's another way to look at this. And why don't you, you know, think about it this way? And you don't have to think that. Like, I thought I was helping, but what I was doing was coaching. I wasn't validating. I wasn't understanding.

This is so good. Okay, on the screen right now, guys, is this drama triangle that I learned through you, by the way, the Cartman drama triangle. And then you turn me on to Kylie Ryan. She's going to be on the show. So thank you for this. Yeah, I think about the opposite of the victim, the opposite of the villain. And if you're watching on Spotify or YouTube, by the way, you get to be subscribed because this conversation is so good and there's more like this coming. The reason that I brought this up is because the opposite of being a hero, which you talked about— a hero wants to fix his wife. He wants to come in there and be like, I know what's better than you, dude. The price that's paid that's so painful for me being the son of a bipolar mother that I've gotten through my conditioning over is that every single time any woman in my life ever is bringing forth a problem that I see as a problem, which is just her having a moment of like fear, anger, resentment, whatever, anything other than happy, anything other than content, I would go into— I'd put on a construction hat, 100%, and I'd be like, I'm a bulletproof vest, let's be real. Yeah. And I'd be like, let me fix this in any way possible, because I hate the way that I feel.

Yeah.

I hate—

I would, I would hate it. I would hate the feeling of not knowing what to do because I had been in an environment as a child and even as an adolescent with my father, both mother and father, my emotions were never safe to be expressed. And if I did express them, look the fuck out. Yeah, I would just cause more drama. So I taught myself to mash it down, to repress and suppress my emotions unconsciously and consciously that I paid the price for with every relationship and that I am still learning how to not pay the price for in my marriage. Yeah. Can you speak to this one aspect? Because this is what every man feels, and this is what all the women feel too from their men. What, you know, whatever is being felt and not said is still being felt.

100%.

It's still in the space.

Yeah.

So we, we could try to mentalize this stuff and be like, let me give my woman a spa date. It's not going to work. There's multiple billionaires I'm sure that you've even coached that buy their women trips to Miami and yachts, yet their wife doesn't want to fuck them. There's a reason for all this. Can you speak to what I'm describing in my paradigm of the construction hat and the bulletproof vest? What is this all about for us as men?

So I had a woman describe this. She said, you know, I feel physically and financially safe and emotionally threatened.

Ah.

And the reason is that If you're in a place of stability in your life, that's one thing. But if you're in a place— for a woman where she can't express emotions, where she's constantly suppressing, where she is not expressing what's going on for her in order to protect you, she's suppressing and holding back and closing down and shutting her body down and shutting her abilities down. Because women are intuitive like you wouldn't believe. I mean, I watched it when I was a kid. I could feel it. And I knew they were different than me. They saw and felt things that I didn't see. And women are so extraordinary at sensing the environment around them and the level of safety. Like, I can't tell you how many times in my marriage with Katie, we would be in a decision-making point with a person, like hiring or bringing them into our lives. And she would— and I would say, like, I really think this is the right thing. I'm logic-ing it. I've got a resume, I've got interviews, like I've got all the evidence this person should be here. And she would say, something doesn't feel right. And Josh, when I look back, every time I overruled something doesn't feel right, it was a train wreck.

Yeah.

And she didn't need logic. She just felt it. And so as men, when we don't slow down enough to actually see that and hear that, and instead we try and provide financial safety or things, or, you know, what happens is those all start to, like, become part of the judgment. It's like, hey, why, why are you giving me all this stuff? I just want you, you know, and I want to feel safe and I want to feel seen. I think every one of us as human beings has partial wounding or complete wounding or some type of childhood wounding around not being seen and heard. And when we're in a relationship or even when we're in a conversation, oftentimes the woman in front of us becomes the composite of every woman we've ever encountered and all of the wounding we have. And on the flip side, it's the same thing. We become the composite of all the masculine wounding that woman has.

This is why we were— I was sharing with you yesterday, John Weiland on the show. I said, do we really pay for the sins of our ancestry? Do we really pay for the sins of our fathers and grandfathers? And he said, yes. Yeah, full stop. Yes.

I have a different take.

Well, I had a lot of resentment around that because, you know, the words we use are interesting. Again, I'm trying to describe something ineffable. Right? There's a felt sense that when a man's done his work and he continues to do his work— and let's just say, let's just say hypothetically that I was in a place, which I'm not now, I'm able to say that I was in a place where I was holding 90 days of not perfect, not perfect containment, but really great containment. And whether it's in my marriage or not, the woman is still vibrationally at a place of fear, then it inherently isn't just the man in that moment. There is a, I guess you could say, a debt allocation from lineage, from men that have trespassed against this woman. And whether it's my marriage or not, I'm just bringing forth this question because this is something that I know is on like the edge of every man's heart is like, well, how do I know it's me versus how do I know it's not her stuff?

Yeah.

So I appreciate what you said about John Wineland, and a lot of his stuff lands for me. But honestly, a lot of it misses the mark. I think it's because he hasn't been in a long-term relationship.

Yeah.

And when we hear something like we're paying for the sins of the father and paying for the sins of every man in her life, we start to make a judgment on what's going on. And what it really is, is we have an opportunity that's been presented to us. By all of her past trauma, to sit down with her and understand it and understand the feminine. You said at the beginning of the podcast, you know, you had a hard time understanding feminine energy. Well, when we step into a place of curiosity rather than reaction, when we respond rather than immediately flying off the handle, when we say like, I really want to understand this and I want to understand where you're coming from and I want to understand what's happened to you, we have the opportunity to actually see that there's this other half of the world that is so different than we are. And when you start to see this different— difference everywhere, Josh, you know, I've had women tell me that when they're on an elevator or in a stairwell in a public place or a long hallway or a parking garage, that they're panicked. When's the last time you panicked on an elevator?

I don't think I ever have.

I never have, right? And when's the last time you panicked on a stairwell?

I, I don't—

you can't remember it, right? You ask a woman and they'll say, last week it was Tuesday and I was walking up the stairwell and I heard feet, footsteps above me, so I started going down. Like, that's how challenging it is for women. And when you see that there's this other half of the world that has been objectified and owned and traded and trespassed on and taken advantage of. Every woman, not just— not like sometimes people say, well, most women have trauma around the masculine. That is such a misunderstanding of what a lived experience is for a woman, because objectification, whether they, they know it's happening or not, they're feeling it. And if you ask women what it's like to be a woman, they'll tell you that there's a level of vulnerability and fear. And what's interesting is not every woman will tell you But I can't tell you how many messages I've gotten from women that say, I read this post of yours about objectification, and I first disagreed with it and thought like, I don't feel that way. And I've sat with it for 2 days, and now I'm like so clear at how often I feel unsafe, and I've been suppressing those feelings of unsafety because it's the only way I can get through my day. And when they finally recognize it, it's like an awareness of, man, I'm really not allowing myself to feel what's really going on. And that's why so many women end up with autoimmune and challenges, and, and like their bodies are all spun up, you know. Nervous system dysregulation is where illness comes from. And as men, we are literally causing disorder in the nervous system of the person in front of us, and disorder leads to disease.

You can never be the best ever and perfect at relationship. It's fucking impossible. But it's true of your fitness, it's true of your health. It's not about the search for perfection. It's about the maintaining of exceptionalism. And not from a place of like, "I need you to know I'm exceptional," because when I eat well and when I relate well, I'm proud of myself. And that's healthy pride. Healthy pride is regulating. Now, I know a lot of people, when guilt was leveraged on them as children, what happens is they have a hard time holding pride. They actually feel like it's, they fear narcissism in it because what was exploited from them was guilt. And so for anyone who that relates to, that you fear being selfish if you prioritize yourself or love yourself or say, "I'm so proud of myself." Like, what a beautiful thing it is to hear a kid say, "I'm so proud of myself." But when we hear an adult say that, we're like, "Check your ego." Oh yes.

Wow.

But we would never do that with a child.

Dude, just last week, I was pressure washing the deck I finished pressure washing the deck and Nova screams from the pool. He goes, "Good job, Daddy." He's like, "Hell yeah." And like, my— it almost made me cry because I was like, wow, I tell him that all the time. But, but the way in which you're describing how we literally rob ourselves from feeling one of the Hawkins scale emotions, which is pride, which leads to self-empowerment and love and actualization, um, based on what you said, that this really crucial rung in the ladder can be removed. Our inability actually to feel shame is a big one, and pride or anger. It's like the deafening and the dumbing down of our own emotional intelligence because of our unconscious incompetence from our parents. It's like literally just the same thing that all the contemporary and ancient masters are saying. They're all saying the same thing with different words, right?

Right.

And that is, if you train your child unconscious ways of being that you yourself inherited from your parents. I mean, this is the core of your work. I feel like the core of your work is about this one concept. And I'm really like, this is juicy, dude. I really want to know what you feel about this. It seems like whoever I talk to, it's like 700 episodes now we've done, and everyone is saying the same thing with different words. It's this concept of, can I zoom up and be aware? Can I watch what's happening with the way that I'm regulated or not, with my behavior, with my children, with my life, with my man or my woman? And can I actually, in that moment of, of pause, can I just— can I have the courage or the knowledge or something? This is what I want to know from you. In that space between being aware of behaving differently with those that we love, or even behaving differently with us, the words that we tell ourselves, the narrative that we have. Gosh, dude, how do we build that little moment, that little moment of pause in between the stimulus and the response. There's a really famous author who went through concentration camps, and I'm forgetting his name right now.

Viktor Frankl.

Viktor Frankl. And he talked about like this space between the paws, how there were people in the concentration camps that were starving, emaciated, and they took joy in giving a slice of bread to their neighbor. Like that power is within us. Like it— I mean, the hair on my arms is standing up. Like, dude, it's so real. It's so palpable. That power of choice is so within us at all times. But there's something, and this is what I really want to know, there's something that deadens that or pushes that down in us, that literally extinguishes our power of choice in that stimulus and response. Grand Canyon, it feels like sometimes. What is that? What is that that builds that agency or that power of choice in between the stimulus and the response?

I mean, there's so many pathways you could come to that because the first one is from a neurological perspective, right?

Yeah.

Wires together— what fires together wires together. So this idea that the familiarity is— I follow— like, if we're just speaking specifically about a trigger in a relationship, I follow the trigger, the trigger leads me to get defensive, and then I end up with the same relational outcomes. I'm not sure where I fit in the relationship, so then I over-pursue and over-communicate because I'm afraid that I'll be rejected and they won't choose me, and then they leave me because I over-pursued and over-communicated. So the thing we fear experiencing from the trigger is the thing we create through the response to the trigger. So it's like, how do I create more space? Because as I said earlier, you don't want the trigger to go anywhere. It's actually important because, like, in those cases, it's sensing an insecurity or a lack of safety or security, and it's desiring communication. Hey, what's— I would like to get more clarity and create more clarity on what's going on between us. And so what happens is, is that I start to insert behavior between the trigger and the response. So if my natural response is defensiveness or stonewalling, shutting down, then the antidote to defensiveness is starting with something like, and we've talked about this before, saying, "I can see some truth in what you're saying." So now I've actually ended up in a different conversation than the one I've ever been, because all the other ones, if I never communicate and create clarity, not ask for clarity, 'cause that's still putting someone else in authority, create clarity. So when I create, Clarity. Now I'm having a different conversation than I've ever been. And the younger part of me who feared if I was too much, too whatever, and asked for what I needed, people would leave. I asked for what I needed and I stayed with myself, and they might have left, but what I'm starting to experience is deposits in my self-worth because boundaries are symbiotic with self-worth. If I lay a boundary, I send the message that I'm worthy of a boundary, and then the boundary itself feeds self-worth. So then self-worth feeds more boundaries. And so we start to expand and we take up more space. And so the way to get to create more space between stimulus and response is things like meditation. It's things like nourishment, because if you're not well nourished, like if you're in a high sugar diet, you're eating high fructose corn syrup, you're eating, you know, high seed oil diet, you're eating, if you're gluten intolerant, you're eating lots of gluten. If, you know, if those are all ways that your nutrition is, you're going to have a real hard time because you still haven't developed between the desire for sugar and the choice of what you eat, you haven't developed the choice there. So that's why it can start with, "Oh, my A1c is high and I need to get that down. I need to eat less sugar and I need to prioritize protein." So it just seems like you're changing your diet for your A1c, but what you're really doing is saying, "There's something that matters more to me now," which is the development of, let's say, insulin resistance, that I'm actually going to engage in choice, but that choice actually will build the muscle for when you're in trigger. Meditation, cold plunging, cold water exposure might seem like bro-y and like all over the place and everyone seems to need to tell each other about when they do it, but the good thing about cold water exposure is your body is saying you're gonna die and you're not. And so what you're learning is how to increase your window of tolerance. You're learning a skillset that's translatable. And there's a saying that the opposite of trauma is choice, because usually where there's trauma or a rough initiation, there was not choice. So then what it does is it builds the unconscious thought that I don't have choice when it comes to intimacy, when it comes to connection, when it comes to relationship. And when you're 3 and your father is an alcoholic, eruptive human, there is no choice. You can't leave. So then what happens when you're in an adult relationship with someone who's dysfunctional and eruptive, and you probably thought, "I never wanna date anyone like my dad, and here I became like my dad, or I date someone like my dad." And you, as an adult, there's an unconscious belief that I don't have choice. So that's why, as simply as, and people I know have many opinions on Jordan Peterson, but one of his principles is make your bed.

Clean your room.

Yeah, yeah, clean your room. And the reason something like that is so powerful to the rest of your life is because when you say you're going to do something and you do it, that actually increases the space between the trigger because now you've actually built the evidence when you thought you were just cleaning your room, but you actually built the evidence that you're someone who shows up for yourself. And that's why it's so important And like, if you take that and even extend it further, when you're in relationship to someone, because that skillset, now you have access to choice. You thought you were just changing your relationship to sugar, but you're actually accessing choice and you're building equity, you're building evidence. And so what happens is, is now when you're dating someone who's unavailable or you need to express a need and you do it and you say no to someone who's not aligned, you now have a true yes. Because if you're saying yes to someone who's unsure about you, to do full circle, then what you're saying is you don't have access to a no. So I was working with this woman who was like entertaining, chasing, her pattern was to chase dudes who were unavailable. They didn't wanna choose her. She's like beautiful, kind, all the things. And she would chase these men and she would then end up with, friendships with them, but they— she wanted more and they didn't. So I was like, wait, every time you stay in connection with these men, that if they said they wanted a relationship with you, would you want one? And she was like, oh yeah. I was like, so you leave your psyche and your body in relationship to people that every time you engage with them, they remind you that you long for them. A relationship with father, there's a lot of patterns in there. But what's fascinating is till she can say no to what is perceivably just a friendship, it's not a big deal, they didn't want what she wanted, till she can say no to that and actually honor that they're not a match, then when the guy shows up who is a match, she won't be able to choose him because her yes is still not trustworthy in her own being. Does that make sense?

Crystal clear, dude. I mean, there's so much goodness there. Y'all rewind that and play that and share that and absorb that again. Because, wow, the, the power of choice in between— what I heard from you at least was this power of choice in between stimulus and response is actually a musculature that we build. And so in a linear way, probably from my linear mind, I'm like, okay, well then how do we develop the courage to do that? It's like we can't just mentally fabricate solutions all the time. Like, I've heard this before and I don't know who said it, but you can't solve an issue or a malady of the spirit with the mind. You can't solve a spiritual issue using the construct of mental faculty. It just doesn't work, right?

You can't use the mind to understand what it's created within. Beautiful, right?

So, so if that's true, and I believe that that is true, then really what we're talking about is this self— not just soothing, but self-promises that are kept over the course of time. And then you extrapolate that from like 3 years, 5 years, 10 years. Like, that's how you— you ever come in contact with somebody you haven't seen for a long time Yeah. And you're like, wow, dude, you are so different. Like, I'm so— I, I love this person that you are. I love the other person too, but this person that you are, you've grown so much. It's like they inspire you just by their own promises that they've kept to themselves, right? They wear on their body and in their being the promises that they continue to keep to themselves. That's honestly a big part of our friendship. Like, I feel like you keep your promises to yourself. I know you ain't perfect. There's probably some moments where you ain't keeping promises.

Of course.

But on the regular, on the regular, what I get from you— and you even gave me a beautiful compliment too. You were like, dude, I really, I really celebrate your abundance you're receiving. I really celebrate that for you. And it feels good to be in friendship like that because then we're actually always on the celebration of our friend's improvement instead of the other way where there's this slippery slope where you can become friends with people and you actually validate each other's stuckness. And you, and you, you don't celebrate anything good that's happening for them. That's a muscle too. That's what I got from you, that there's this stimulus and response, and in the middle there's a muscle. And there's all these different ways, like cold exposure for sure, dude. I mean, the cold plunge is not easy. It's not what I want to do in the morning when I'm freezing.

No, but that like at all builds so much. But like shower, cold, whatever.

But like you said, and then take this thread and run with it, when we do something that makes us feel like we're gonna die It's the same way for someone like myself that at times is hypervigilant. It feels like I'm going to die in my body when I'm having an extreme moment with Carrie Michelle, or I'm having a $10,000, $20,000 loss in business. It feels the same way in my nervous system as if I was in a cold plunge. I really think that's important for you to unpack a little bit more because it's this space between stimulus and response. If my woman yells at me, if my business is demanding, If I'm having a thought that I'm entertaining that makes me feel like shit, these all bring us to that space. But in the middle of that space, there's a practice. There's like this— fuck, it's like a sacred practice. So sacred, this moment between the second, even between stimulus and response. So the way in which cold plunge is a tool for that, there's got to be something else besides cold plunge that really made an impact for you, because you don't get to the level you're at that without some hard fucking hits and that really force you to practice, to really practice that space between stimulus and response.

Well, I'd say initiation is what— because that's an adult behavior. So like when we're the slave to our trigger, we're a child. And you can ask a lot of people like when they're triggered, how old do you feel? And they'll give you an age right away.

Yeah.

And so we're still not at mature— the maturation process hasn't happened. And so, like, initiation moves us into maturation. Initiation also moves us out of the self and into community. So it's like, if I go through an initiation, let's say like a divorce, and my community is there to walk with me through the process of that, and my community doesn't exile me for that, but rather says, "I see you suffering, teach us about what led to the relationship outcome you have," that you become a teacher through the experience, not shamed and exiled from the experience, which is very rare in a community because most people are afraid of divorce, so they can't see value of divorce. But when you start to see the value of any relational ending, then you won't try to shame people out of their endings, because it's really your own fear that you're trying to prevent. And so the— if you surround yourself with mature people who have been through initiation and walked through it, and we're going to get many initiations, but the specifically have already done that, then the way they relate to what you're going through is from a place of curiosity. And that allows us to walk the maturation path to be like, oh, it's not about self, it's about other. Like, I'm changing this. And what can create the courage? Because the thing that goes before a boundary that's never been laid is the courage to lay a boundary for the first time. So if I've been boundaryless, the first time I have a boundary, that's like the greatest leap of faith I've ever had in my entire life.

Fucking liberating though, right?

Yeah, because what precedes— what is the old self that needs to die in the action of the new behavior, and it's going to feel like a death because you're going to— when you lay your first boundary, you'll be able to see all of your life without boundaries because now you've experienced what a boundary life feels like. So when you have access to a no, now you can see where you didn't have access to no. So you're going to grieve that. You're probably going to be angry about it. You might be angry about where you were first taught that, and usually the age that you feel when you're triggered is when that really was embedded as a reaction response. And that's why usually our response to things is really predictive of where did we developmentally get stuck.